Uncategorized – ¿Qué Onda?

Where do we go from here?

onda — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 20:14:12 +0000

After finishing Yojimbo for the third time I wondered to myself what is the addictive nature of this movie. I found myself not solely thinking of Yojimbo but wondering about other movies that have recently had a similar almost “obsessive” effect. There are some films that truly do revolutionize movies. Be it through innovative techniques, or the artful use of existing ones, some movies are constructed in such a way that makes them timeless. Recently I have been drawn to foreign cinema, first as a way to improve my Spanish and as I later as a source of great interest. After watching Yojimbo and continuing to watch more foreign films I have decided that the single most driving force in the cinematic world today is the cultural exchange between film-making countries. Often we describe globalization in a purely economical sense, or as a culturally domineering sense, but recently I have seen a different trend. Many more foreign films are available today than were in my childhood.

And why is this important? I can equate foreign films to speaking in another language. We have often described how interesting it is that humans are able to recognize words and equate them to ideas, but even more interestingly are the subtle differences in different languages. The fact is that some languages, like different foreign cultures lend themselves to discuss different subject matter, or to shed new light on similar subject matter. It is fun to see Hollywood recognizing the talent of foreign directors and bringing their talents/style into American Cinema. The best example of cross-cultural exchange that we have seen in our class was the Glass Key – Yojimbo – Fistful of Dollars relationship. Kurosawa’s treatment of Hard-boiled material resulted in an Italian’s (Sergio Leone) Western, and this western in turn revolutionized the American Western. It is usual not until we have seen what our (American) cinema isn’t, that we can truly identify it for what it is.

Portrait of Jennie

onda — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:02:31 +0000

I have to say I am not surprised that I was underwhelmed with the movie Portrait of Jennie. While I was reading the book I couldn’t help but think to myself: “this was not a book that should be made into a movie”. Sure at the very basic level the story was put onto screen, but the choice make the reality of Jennie more questionable really took away from the meaning of the book. Most of all the movie lacked a lot of the central ideas in the book about art, and the purpose of art. It was interesting to hear that selznick went bankrupt while producing the movie, because this does not seem like the kind of movie that you would choose to make if you were close to bankruptcy. This movie was most definitely not a sure thing. I’d like to hear if anyone else felt differently about the movie please try and convince me otherwise, because for me it was a shame to see such an interesting little novel ruined by being adapted to film.

Gender Roles

onda — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:00:13 +0000

In our last class we noted that there are very few female-character-driven films. In fact there are very few films that strive to portray the broad-spectrum of roles that both genders play in relationships. The writer/director who I find does the best job of presenting an interesting spectrum of relationships and gender roles is Pedro Almodóvar. This is good timing for our discussion of this because 9 of his films are being re-released into theaters over the fall. His films are serious yet comical, and always interesting. If you don’t mind the subtitles I highly recommend them. I also recommend his most recent release “Volver” which stars Penelope Cruz and is entirely centered around female characters and artfully balances dark comedy around serious and thought provoking situations. I mention these films because I have come to find that we often become so entranced in the mainstream films of our country that it is hard to pick up on the biases/ cultural influences in them. When I started watching Spanish films I became much more aware of not only what Hollywood was not accurately representing in movies, but also how different subjects and topics could be approached. ¡Viva Pedro!

The Purpose of Art

onda — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:39:17 +0000

While Reading Portrait of Jennie I came across a quote which immediately struck me: “Art should belong to the masses.”…”Art can have meaning only to the creative spirit itself.”(50) I am concurrently doing a study of Pablo Nerudas Odas Elementales which in their very nature seem to coincide with the “Art should belong to the masses” idea. They are a collection of Odes to every day things, but through metaphor they transcend the very things they are describing. It is fascinating to see Arne Kunstler seemingly contradict himself in the same way that Morris’ interviewees do in Gates of Heaven. Personally I believe that art is both personal and for the masses. It is hard to imagine that anyone will ever react the same way from, or draw the same emotion from a piece of art. Our experiences are too different. As we can see with Morris’ playing with metaphor and symbol in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, it is hard to imagine that anyone will draw the exact same relationships from watching a film. As we watch films, we all correlate them to our lives, whether it be rejecting its contents as being outside our realm, or empathizing with the characters or attributes of the film. In this way only the original creator of the art will feel it in its intended form, everyone else will feel shades of this, but we will add and subtract to this drawing from our own experience. In our relationship with works of art they become alive. Just like we were wondering what makes Little Women so powerful and current across generations, and how Nathan wondered about why Jennie, which he did not consider to be his best work, was so highly regarded. Sometimes a work of art achieves a status beyond the capabilities of the artist. “If you analyze it to much, life can become meaningless” but in the same token you need to analyze life to a degree to give it meaning… art is the same way.

Truth in the Advent of Digital editing

onda — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 17:00:12 +0000

It is interesting in Morris’ films that he shows how we all create our own “truths” to give meaning to our lives, but the essays we read approach truth in a different manner. Through our ingenuity we have taken film which in many ways, as kracauer would have said, is unrivaled in its ability to portray scientific truth and made it capable of presenting complete fabrications as truth. As we have discussed the ethical implications of this, we must also wonder does this change how we see film. It is interesting for us because we have grown up in one of the last generations to know films before they could be edited digitally. Will future generations be inherently skeptical of film as a media that can portray truth? I believe that as we experience further and further the capability of film to create and decieve people will become more skeptical of it as a medium of truth. You can see this in earlier films with digital effects that were once thought to be incredible, which are now thought as cheesy and unbelievable. Are we going to become more acutely aware of what is edited digitally and manufactured to be percieved as truth? It will be interesting to see how future generations who have never known a world without digital editing will react to its advances, and if their reaction will be any different from ours.

Advantages of Films

onda — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:21:28 +0000

We have discussed how most of the time people say: “I liked the movie but the book was better.” We also need to look at films and recognize that there are many beautiful films that could never be written as a book, or not succesfully. Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven is one example of the power of film, and he captures the essence of how a film can tell a different story than a novel. There are so many subtle meanings that can be drawn from both the characters, how he juxtaposes them, and their settings, that even though they can be described in a book it would be hard for them to have the same weight that they have in the film. A book could describe the manner in which neutered was said but the finality of the edit changes the viewers response completely. This led me to think of other directors who instead of limiting themselves to adapting writing to film, have tried to use film to tell stories in unique ways that were previously unimaginable. The director that immediately jumps to mind for me is Alejandro González iñárritu. Like Morris his films deal more with themes, than a tightly drawn narrative, and while it does have elements of novels, it combines them in ways that are only available in film. I recommend Amores Perros to anyone who wants to see the difference in his style to that of a traditional writer. He also has directed Babel, which does have a plot but like Gates of Heaven the movie is not about its plot.

Differences in Media

onda — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:55:06 +0000

When we were discussing the difficulty of portraying the inner thoughts of a character on film, without using the crutch of a voice over I began to think of what artistically do film-makers do to solve this problem. Early Cinema is full of this problem and gradually film-makers have developed “answers” to this problem. For me the most effective way of portraying feeling and emotion across film without using a voice over goes beyond what can be seen or acted, it lies in the music. Over time film-makers and composers have gotten better and better at creating music that not only allows us to identify with a character, but allow us to sense how they are feeling in each moment. The earliest film that I can truly see this working in the way that it does in most good movies today is in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. The plot in the movie involves many main characters and by using themes for each main character and intertwining them as well as slightly modifying them, Ennio Morricone creates a fluidity and a sense of emotion unlike any other film before it. While some may argue that this is more limited than the voice over and not as precise, I believe if it is done properly the soundtrack of a movie can portray emotion better than words on a page. The limits of this technique, I believe, are only constrained by the imagination of the composer. Long before we had words on a page and written narrative, humans had sound and music. Sergio Leone is noted as saying that sound is 40% of a film. At the very least it is 40% and his approach can be seen in Star Wars, and has been continued up to our very day. There is an instinctual connection between sound and emotion, and the great musical artists can tap into this and transfer the emotion that is written explicitly in text, to emotion felt by an audience watching a movie. Below is an example of the power of music to display emotion in film from Once Upon a Time in the West. Pay close attention to when the music comes in and how it makes you feel compared to how you think the characters would feel/ how that might have been written if this had been a text narrative. Remember that all sound is music and has a purpose in movies, every sound in Leone’s movies was added after the fact, and therefore has a purpose. Sorry there are portugese subtitles but this is the only version of this scene on Youtube. Enjoy.

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Adapting Books to Film

onda — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 23:23:10 +0000

As we all know many movies are made from books, but what makes film adaptations of books a success? For me it is important that the film portray the feeling of the book, and to a great degree it does need to follow the plot of the book otherwise it may only be “inspired” by the book and not an adaptation. This is what I found to be the great difference between the two versions of Little Women we have watched so far: The Hepburn version does the best job of following the spirit of the book, and the June Allyson version does not. The main difference between the two for me is that the earlier version has the same energy as Alcott’s prose due to the direction of George Cukor, while the second seems satisfied by simply playing out the scenes in color, and not using the symbolic power of color and mise en scene. Overall it just feels stale. But this is merely my opinion, and along those lines I would like to propose what I think is the greatest adaptation of a book to film: The Godfather. To be completely true to the book I would have to include The Godfather II because the back story of Don Corleone stems from the book. The beauty of these movies is that while they portray the book accurately and faithfully, they capture the spirit of the book and more importantly the times. Movies truly succeed when they honor their source material, but at the same time become their own piece of artwork. I would be interested to hear about other great adaptations of books.

The Significance of the Hat in Miller’s Crossing

onda — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:21:19 +0000

While there are many possible symbolic meanings of the hat in Miller’s Crossing, I saw the hat as an homage to the Glass Key. Through Tom’s dream about the hat the Coen brother’s are showing Tom’s attitude’s similarity to the attitude of Ned in the Glass Key. Throughout the beginning of the movie Tom is looking to recover his hat, and ends up getting it from Verna, so in some ways she can be seen as the one possible meaning of the hat. Using Verna as the hat we can correlate Tom’s eventual killing of Bernie as his letting the hat go. Until the moment he actually kills Bernie it is still possible for Tom to be with Verna. In the end Tom gives up everything and this defeatist attitude is exemplified in his refusal to go after the hat in his dream. He thinks it is foolish for a man to chase after a hat but throughout the movie the talk about the “high hat”, and how the hat can be seen as a status symbol. In a way Tom is saying that it is foolish for a man to try to better himself, or even retain what he has earned.

Camera Focus in Miller’s Crossing

onda — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:12:11 +0000

The use of Camera Focus in Miller’s crossing got me focusing on it much more when I was watching movies over the Fourth. I have always enjoyed photography and the powerful nature of carefully framed and thought out images, and a lot of the trouble I have with film is that it is hard to truly appreciate the individual frame, because of the speed of change in scenes. Watching an Inconvenient Truth I noticed that the director played with focus in an interesting way: he chose to focus at times on Al Gore’s computer leaving Gore, the protaganist, unfocused in the background. This had an interesting way of distancing the political, and personally held beliefs of Al Gore, and focusing on the scientific evidence, as symbolized by the computer. For me camera focus, and more importantly unexpected use of focus, can be one of the best ways to evoke an emotional response from the viewer. For me the best directors are able to use focus in such a way that even if you are not actively looking for it you will feel its effects and the movie experience is transformed by it. When we were talking about the difference between literature and film, the immediate thing that jumped to my mind is the ability of film to layer images and choose very rapidly what we should focus our attention on through camera focus, and it is in this instrument that much of the subtext of film can be found.