Filmaking today

Film making today is in danger of becoming boring. there are to many idea that are being uses over and over again. There needs to be some new innovations in film making. Filmmakers have to develop a new way of thinking when it comes to stories and writing techniques. Directors need to be more imaginative. Studios need to be understanding of this and allow filmmakers more time to develop new and better ideas. We just need a bit of time and then something new and exciting will appear. It's that simple.

New Article from Cinema Scope

As I was searching through cinema-scope.com one day, I came across a very interesting article. It was called “The Art of Not Seeing: On Blindness and blindness by Jason Anderson.” The article started off by talking about a recent book by Alberto Manguel, a man who spent several years being a reader and a viewer for Borges. Borges was a film critic for an Argentinean magazine in the late forties and early fifties, until he went blind. A few years after going completely blind, Borges met Manguel in a bookstore in Buenos Aries. However, the two occasionally attended films and Manguel would describe the images to Borges. The author of this article states, “ Nevertheless, the writer—a film critic for the Argentinian literary magazine Sur from 1931 to 1944—remained an enthusiastic moviegoer, especially when it came to gangster pictures and musicals.” Alexander writes about how it was absolutely incredible for Manguel to sit and hear what Borges reaction was to the films. He states, “ He comments on the epic quality of the rivalry between the gangs, on the role of the women, on the use of the colour red.” There is an irony to that though, Borges always stated that the first colors that were robbed of him were red and black. I think its extremely interesting that he comments on the use of red when that is the color he was robbed of first. I think that there was something in his mind that from the moment he lost it, made him understand the color better. He developed a fondness to it and felt he knew more about the intimacy of the color and how it was represented and what it stood for. Alexander then goes into describing, for a sighted person, what Borges viewing of films must have looked like. He then uses that idea to begin to review that latest adaptation of José Saramago’s novel, by Fernando Mereilles, about a city’s collapse after all the people in the city go blind except one. Alexander goes about reviewing this movie in a strange way, he compares elements of it to other films. He goes on to state that “Blindness may also belong to a category of literary adaptations—including Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), and Alan Rudolph’s Breakfast of Champions (1999)—whose dogged faithfulness to their sources inadvertently prove just how unfilmable the books were in the first place.” I chose to read about this article for this reason actually, I was completely entranced by the comparisons that Alexander was making. I have really seen anybody review like this before, I’m more used to critics commenting on how a film is like another, on the whole. It was fascinating to read how elements were similar to elements of other films and not just to hear how a film is going to be film this other film that has already been compared to other films. It gets confusing, like my last statement, but confused is usually how I feel after reading a review and I wasn’t confused after reading this. I understood what Alexander was and saying and how he said it. I believe that Alexander was not only trying to say how he felt about “Blindness,” which I believe he didn’t like the film, but he was trying to get across another point using Borges as a reference. Borges began to see a rather dull and strange nighttime after he lost the ability to see the color black. It went into a bluish-green color, that was rather drab. Alexander states that “maybe what he saw was more like the milky, slightly blue-tinted whiteness that continually swallows up the frame in Fernando Mereilles’ new adaptation of Blindness.” Films are becoming a bit drab in there design and execution as well and I believe that is what Alexander is trying to communicate. Films are in danger of losing their appeal because so many things are like so many other things that have already been done in the movies. Which I believe is true, most of the movies that come out now aren’t very good. They’re just trying to something that another film has already done. In some cases, new films come out and try to copy the idea of a film before it and completely ruin what was special about the idea behind the film. Whether that be humor, drama, action, romance, etc. The article felt very natural to me and I thought it was very clever of Alexander to use the failing sight of a film critic as the basis to write his review of a film.

Aaron Ximm

A few weeks ago, I attended a performance by Aaron Ximm. Ximm is a sound artist who goes out into the world and records the sounds of the world. Anything, he will record it. He then takes these sounds that he has gathered, into his studio and turns them into sound art. He jumbles them up, adds effects, and mixes them and then presents them to the public. When I went in, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from his pieces. I thought that they might get a little weird and try to be overly ‘artsy,’ and by that I mean he would come across as trying to hard to prove something instead of working from the heart. However, Ximm’s evening of sound was nothing short of amazing. The room was completely pitch black and Ximm even encouraged us to close our eyes. The sounds came rolling out at me and I sat back and closed my eyes and I began to wonder what these sounds were. I couldn’t stop listening, I needed to listen closely and try to identify what I was hearing. Ximm’s sound were incredible to listen to. The clarity and volume of the sounds just pulverized you and you could move. You needed to listen, you wanted to listen and see where this man was going to go with this. To me, his pieces were like a mini-operetta, and were broken up into separate movements. I also began to notice that there were some incredible rhythms Ximm created in the piece. One example comes to mind in Ximm’s first piece. What sounded like a thousand different voices saying different things began to morph and become a phrase we could hear. Then it would split off again into some madness but eventually return to another phrase we could understand. I believe I was tapping my foot along with the piece at that point. I picked out a beat and felt it, which I’m sure Ximm felt as well. In fact, that I point that Bach brought up in our lecture about hearing music when you least suspect it. Ximm accomplished that well here. They had an incredible flow to them as well, each piece felt right in it’s placement, it didn’t feel awkward. It was just an environment of relaxation and you just need to sit and listen. It’s in our nature to try and to identify sounds, the funny thing about that is I didn’t force myself to imagine the images, it happened completely on it’s own. I wanted a visual compliment to these sound naturally. Which is very similar but also different than Sutton’s work with “At Sea.” Both pieces were designed to get the audience involved in the work. They wanted us to help them out. They were asking for our help, they wanted us to complete the work. In the privacy of our own minds. However, both in different way. Hutton by picture with no sound and Ximm with sound but no visual. When I was watching “At Sea,” I was a bit on edge and was trying a bit to hard to hear what the images would sound like. I think that took away from the experience, looking back on it now. The silence in the theater also took away from the experience due to the fact that you can hear every movement that everyone in the theater makes. I was just a bit into creating the sounds and maybe should have paid more attention to the film. With Ximm, I felt very relaxed, it was easier to imagine what sound looked like rather than making sounds for a picture. At least for me.

Peter Hutton's "At Sea"

I recently attended a screening of Peter Hutton’s “At Sea,” which is a film that he made documenting the birth, life and death, of a huge sea vessel. The scale of the film is immense. It is mostly made up of these wide shots, covering massive ship and cranes need to construct the ship. There are very few close up shots of people in the film, for the most part they are these little dots moving through out the frame. What is so unique about this film however is that it’s silent. There is absolutely no sound what so ever throughout the entire film. Hutton offers us these amazing images to look at with no sound compliment to it. You have to sit there in complete silence, and it’s a bit distracting. You can hear the people around you breathing and coughing. It gets a bit eerie. However, above all that, you can’t look away from the screen. The images hold your attention extremely well, and you begin to image what these scenes would sound like. This is the only film that I have ever seen that was completely silent. All other silent films I’ve seen have had at least a music track to accompany it. This was up to me to decide what it sounded like. Looking at all the great big machines as they are putting the ship together, I began to imagine how loud it must be in this setting. All the cranes, pumps and people yelling on top of all those sounds to give instructions to other workers. An entire new world began to develop in my head and I was trying to keep up with the changes on the screen, in my head. I was attempting to make, what could be the soundtrack and sound of this film, as realistic as possible in my head. With the changing frames, I wanted to change the sound in my head as quickly as a I could and really try to put myself in the setting. This became very true once the ship was launched and was out at sea. This offered a completely new set of sounds to be imagined. You know have the water crashing up against the ship in the background and all the various sea noises. Birds, other ships, the wind, whistles, these were all sounds that I was trying to place in their proper context of the frame I was seeing in my head. I was just so entranced by the clarity and colors on the screen, that I wanted the soundtrack to put me there. It became almost like music to me when the ship was out at sea and it was a bit surprising to me that it was taking a musically form in my head. Of course, I am musician and often think of things in a musical way, but these were sounds that I was imagining, and now they were taking a musical form. That is a point that Glenn Bach brought up during his lecture to our class as well. He stated that, “If I’ve made you hear music in something that really isn’t music, I’ve done my job.” And I believe that Sutton had a very similar view on sound. He wanted the viewers to have to imagine the sounds, but he knew himself that there was a great rhythm to the images he was showing. The sounds accompanying the film, if there was to be sounds, would have to have rhythm to them as well, otherwise it would be a bit awkward, seeing as how there are so many different sounds represented in the images. It was an event to see this film, each viewer had the opportunity create their own soundtrack to the film. You had to bay attention, you had to be on your toes. And I can’t imagine that I was the only one in that theater you was trying to come up with what it might sound like.