Saturday, April 23, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Fred Astaire & Elanor Powell - "Begin to beguine"
original score- begin the beguine adn also somewhat better quality
Fred Astaire Hip Hop
this is actually a case where this really works, though the quality is terrible -
this is eleanor powell
dressmakers for danny - the dance
as a farewell to dan the costume guy, we're going to do a dance on the dummies, and actually they can end up where the dancers take off their clothes and put them on the dressmaker dummies! is one option - but what i really want to do is to put cameras on their heads, and the're on wheels and we'll whell them around. this is the plan, anyway.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
70s class - a blog about cassavetes from this recording's molly lambert
Emotionally I Am In Deep Trouble
by MOLLY LAMBERT
Husbands (1970)
dir. John Cassavetes
You never felt the camera. You didn't know where the camera was. Only when he picked up the handheld camera, and then you knew you were being taken care of. He really made love to you. He really knew how to use a handheld.
- Ben Gazzara
In real life the screaming monologue is unusual, but it's the centerpiece of an actor's repertoire. Most interactions are less obvious. People generally put on more of a big dumb show the less they actually care, and less of a show when they care the most. Genuine reaction flares in the eyes but then most people try to cap it, because feelings like jealousy, anger and sadness are associated with embarrassment and weakness.
John Cassavetes' movies are so good because they don't point at themselves. That's how they go so deep without tipping into pretentiousness or kitsch. The emotional moments feel real because they are subtle, and most emotional moments are subtle.
Husbands explores the conflict between personal selfishness and the desire to connect. The blocking is clumsy and realistic. Watching the three characters continually reassemble themselves in the frame is fascinating. The action always feels like it just occurs. All of the sequences feel like they are in real time, and it is as excruciating to watch uncomfortable events unfold as it is pleasant to watch the long bits of improvised physical nonsense. Cassavetes goes especially extra hard on himself.
Most of the movie is closeups, a dialogue of glances between the three best friends. It's a love story about male friendships and the ways men display affection for each other. Some critics argue that male romantic friendship is the founding trope of American literature, back to Huck and Tom (Gatsby and Nick, Ishmael and Queequeg).
Male friendship fascinates me because it's not a thing I can observe firsthand without changing the dynamic. Although god knows I try. What I love about ensemble casts is that they replicate how romantic a whole friend group can be. I am so fucking bored of bromances. How hard is it to write a conversation between a man and a woman that resembles anything that happens in real life? I have conversations with men every day.
Black Swan's shortcut around writing realistic female characters was surrealistic female characters. What do women talk about alone together? What does anyone talk about? Stupid bullshit trying to make each other laugh. Songs we've been listening to a lot. Sometimes we gossip, but if I've learned anything in life it's that men gossip the most.
Husbands is so great, so rueful. It reminds me of my other favorite 1970s borderline misogynist depending on your personal feelings about whether it's a critique (I think they both definitely are) film Carnal Knowledge. I'd throw Shampoo in there. They romanticize masculinity from a standpoint of extreme cynicism. Can you romanticize a subject and critique it simultaneously? I'm not sure there's any other way to do either.
I don't believe that men are naturally worse than women. I worry a little that men might think that. They underestimate their goodness and our badness. Women are definitely not more moral or responsible at all. The most moralistic responsible people I know are all men. Men have more opportunities to abuse power, but I don't believe that women wouldn't abuse it in exactly the same ways. Ask Madonna's twenty year old boyfriend what he thinks. People with power use it to subjugate those without.
Obviously I wish there were more media depictions of how romantic female friendships are (we're working on it). I don't mean romantic like Black Swan, I mean romantic in the road-trip sense. Sismance is still a pretty small genre. Things depicting women are usually about female rivalry. Female rivalry as a media trope is way overrepresented andfemale friendship is super fucking underrepresented.
That is what women really love about Sex And The City. Did they ever even want to fuck the same guy once? Isn't it crazy that they maybe didn't do that plotline during the whole run of the show? When they fought, it was always over something regarding the friendship, usually Carrie semi-accidentally being an insensitive jerk. Definitely those kinds of conflicts are more common in real life than cut a bitch catfights.
I really like Mary McCarthy's novel The Group about a group of female friends from college, because I have a tight-knit group of female friends from college that I love more than anything, and I am totally curious about how people fucked in the thirties.
I can't really put into words how much I love my friends. I wouldn't even know where to start. Husbands goes without dialogue for long stretches and just relies on the characters interacting with each other, demonstrating their deep devotion to one another in the most indirect ways. It is frustrating and occasionally transcendent.
I realize this post isn't really very much about Husbands, but I can't possibly improve on Husbands. I never have too much to say about things I just love, and I am always seeking things that will make me want to stop talking. I guess my articles are never really about the thing they're supposed to be about, and I improvise. There is a four and a half hour version I would like to see that Ben Gazzara says is his favorite cut.
Cassavetes initially cut Husbands around Ben Gazzara, then made other cuts where he and Peter Falk were the principal lead, before ending up with the final cut where they are all represented equally. Thinking about your own life from the point of view of your closest friends will make you go blind. It's hard enough just being yourself.
Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She's on twitter and runs GIF PARTY, JPG CLUB, and Google Image Search. You're sensitive? You can't even vomit.
"Ohio" - The Black Keys (mp3)
"Act Nice and Gentle (Kinks cover)" - The Black Keys (mp3)
"Tighten Up" - The Black Keys (mp3)
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
decasia
At 67 minutes Decasia is Morrison’s found footage/’ruined’ cinema magnus opus. And while barely feature length, the overall experience is of such great intensity –with Michael Gordon’s incredibly loud, throbbing symphonic soundtrack threatening to melt the imagery- that one loses the sense of any objective time. As the film’s credits begin we hear what sounds like whirring Steenbeck plates. The film moves from a shot of a dervish dancer to a film lab, reflexively suggesting the birth and creation of the ‘film within a film.’ The film’s circular structure begins and ends on the same image of a dancing dervish, which links up the many recurring motifs of birth, death, and the apocalypse. In between there are images that range from ominous beauty (falling bomb-like parachutes) to painterly beauty (panoramic silhouette long shots of men on camels walking across a desert landscape).
light is falling - bill morrison - destruction of the image
http://www.vimeo.com/1
017110
3
http://www.offscreen.com/index.php/pages/essays/postmortem_evolution/
0171103http://www.offscreen.com/index.php/pages/essays/postmortem_evolution/In The Light is Calling all that we can make out from the extreme deterioration are shots of officers on horseback riding through the woods, and a young woman with long braids who is found and aided by the officers at the end of the film. An interesting observation I had while watching the three ‘deteriorated’ films is that no matter how great or advanced the distortion and deterioration, there is one inevitable constant: the distortion is always in the foreground of the image. This leads to an equally interesting ‘formal’ and stylistic quality, because regardless of how flat the original footage may have been, the distortion introduces an element of ‘depth’ and ‘texture’ to the frame. This is especially noticeable in The Light is Calling, where the characters (the horseback officers and the woman) always appear to be ‘behind’ something. For example, in one scene we see the woman in long shot and, because of the formation of the deterioration, she appears to be peering through what looks like a fire or a cloud formation.
 “Depth” in Light is Calling | “Depth” in Light is Calling |
The greatly deteriorated passages where the film stock seems cindered and scorched, at times appearing like a moving Rorschach chart or Mandelbrot set, recalls Stan Brakhage’s hand painted films as well as his theory of “closed eye” vision. The visceral nature of the imagery also reminded me of a live performance piece by two German multi-media artists (Alchemie) during the 1997 FCMM, where they literally poured chemicals and compounds onto a film loop before it passed by the projector lens, throwing an unpredictable and volatile series of light and color patterns onto a wall, and culminating with the projector catching fire.
Hand-painted or deteriorated? Light is Calling |  “Depth” in The Mesmerist |
The extremely different music which accompanies these two films is representative of both the aesthetic range and importance of music in Morrison’s films. For The Mesmerist Morrison uses two existing Bill Frisell songs (“Tell you ma, tell your pa” and “Again”); and for The Light is Calling he uses a composition written exclusively for the film by Michael Gordon. What these two choices broadly represent are scores which have an organic relationship to the image track (The Light is Calling, Trinity, Ghost Trip, City Walk) and scores which interact with or against the image track (The Mesmerist, The Film of Her, with Decasia operating on both levels). Bill Frisell is a contemporary guitarist-composer who is no stranger to film music, having written several interpretative scores for Buster Keaton films. His musical style is an intellectual blend of jazz, blues, folk, country, and rockabilly, a postmodern eclecticism which, on the one hand, can be seen as a parallel to Morrison’s own re-appropriation of film history. But the clearly modern, contemporary feel of his music makes it feel as if it is playing to the film rather than alongside the film, and emanating from without the film rather thanwithin the film. On the other hand, the pitch and rhythm of Gordon’s haunting combination of an undulating electronic loop and high pitched violin is a perfect harmony to the The Light is Calling’s overall sense of a spiritual or transcendental rise.
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Not just greatest dancer, Cole Porter said he was the best singer, he could act, play many musical instruments, he choreographed his routines, he personified "Rhythm", he was a nice guy and very very modest. No one today even comes close.
@goshnessmaggy talent, class, elegance, professionalism, just plain god given talent!
@Arjetube
i guess u better say Mj got some Fred moves , MJ was a great Fred Astaire fan...
he got some mj moves. espescially from "dangerous" and "smooth criminal"!
Eleganza e la classe innate.
I never knew that Fred was such a great pianist! Is there no end to this man's talents?!
who isnt tapping feet? he can play drums with his feet - literally has more talent in his big toe than me
The best dancers of 2day would agree with you.Check out the dance/choreograpy on USHER LIVE IN ATLANTA>YOU MAKE WANNA. a good example of "post/present" stunning dance routines..LOL id still consider this stuff as a NO COMPARISON in a strange kinda way.Good stuff inomus