- Walt Braugher, Normal (2007)
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
The Steadicam: An evolution in film language, p.t 2
Ryerson film student Andrew Lounsbury penned this essay in the spring of 2008 for an advanced film theory course. In it, he uses various theories of camera movement to illustrate and expand on the claim that the steadicam has been a significant advancement in the evolution of film language. Please find selected paragraphs from this work in two parts.
Van Sant argues, “in life a story [like those told by the cinema] usually consists just of the highlights, but in your experience the rest of the day actually happens, and that has a profound impact on your experience” (qtd. in Thomson 65). In Elephant, Van Sant introduces us to a trio of girls, in one of the most elaborate and profound shots of the film, which contains only one cut (38:58).
At first, the camera movement in this scene may seem to be frivolous and unmotivated but upon closer inspection, we can see that it is far more complex than it first appears. Here, Van Sant encompasses Rahtz’s process and Johnson’s wandering camera, while adding his own style to the scene, using the camera as a narrating device. Van Sant could have cut the scene together from several shots, but made the choice (consistent throughout the entire film) to use the process as a dramatic tool. Vans Sant’s wandering camera is used for a different purpose than Kubrick and Scorsese’s, as Van Sant is not trying to suggest the presence of another entity. What he is doing is foreshadowing, in both a subtle and explicit fashion.
In the article, Seeing with the Camera, Irving Pichel discusses how directors express their vision and personal style with the power of the camera. In order for this to occur, writes Pichel, we must first think of the camera as a projection of the narrator’s viewpoint, rather than the spectator’s. “In this use of the camera a complete personality is created who, though not appearing before the audience’s eyes, is yet real and definite and as highly personalized as the real storyteller…who employs it” (Pichel 141). It is in this way that a director can achieve a type of personal and visual style that is acutely expressive.
Unlike Bazin, who claimed that it was less a technical evolution than the infusion of new blood and new subject matter, I believe that the language developed post-steadicam was of a technical nature. That is not to say that its invention instilled an expressiveness within the minds of directors, for that is simply not the case. What it did was provide the technical means for directors who had long envisioned the ability to move through space in a dolly-handheld hybrid fashion. As Geuens suggests, the power of the steadicam has effectively allowed directors to push their imaginations to the limit, resulting in a new film language that fuses Bazinian realism with complete camera expressiveness and style. Van Sant states, “since 1915, when people started to use editing to tell a story, we’ve had the convention of the reaction shot…but life is a continuous thing with a rhythm of its own, and when you cut to adjust that rhythm to suit the dramatic impact you create a new, false rhythm. Whereas if you’re shooting with one camera, you have to create a rhythm in the scene” (qtd. in Said 17). Could there be a better exemplification of Bazin’s theory? And moreover, can anyone deny that what Kubrick, Scorsese and Van Sant have accomplished with the steadicam is anything less than pure cinematic art?
~~
Bazin, André. “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 6th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 41-53.
Geuens, Jean-Pierre. “Visuality and Power: The Work of the Steadicam.” Film Quarterly Winter 1993-94: 8-17.
Pichell, Irving. “Seeing with the Camera.” Hollywood Quarterly (1947): 138-145. JSTOR. Ryerson Library. 30 January 2008.
Rahtz, Robert. “The Travelling Camera.” Hollywood Quarterly (1947): 297-299. JSTOR. Ryerson Library. 29 January 2008.
Said, S. F. “Shock Corridors.” Sight & Sound 14.2 (2004): 16-18. Wilson Web. 20 March 2008
Thomson, Patricia. “Walking the Halls of Fate.” American Cinematographer. October 2003: 60-71.
Girl on a path in Taylor Creek Park, Toronto
I couldn't find the photographer's full name, however the flickr link is below:
Thursday, July 17, 2008
lost rivers & the glen cedar bridge
i have been visiting this bridge since before my father moved into the neighbourhood, when i was eleven or so. west end elementary schools hold cross country meets in the ravine, which is how i first came upon it.
i went back tonight, as i often do when visiting my dad. he took the dog down into the valley while i explored the bridge itself. i lay face down on the walkway and peered between two planks into the ravine below. a perfectly rolled and completely dry spliff was caught on an iron beam under the face of the bridge.
maybe the cops showed up and the owner panicked, dropping it between the cracks?
http://www.lostrivers.ca/
http://www.lostrivers.ca/points/GlenCedarB.htm
"Toronto's Ravines, Walking The Hidden Country," Murray Seymour, The Boston MillsPress, 2000
"City of York: a Local History," E.C. Millar & others, The Board of Education for The City of York, 1987
"Don Valley Legacy, a Pioneer History" by Ann Guthrie, The Boston Mills Press 1986
"Exploring Toronto" Annabel Slaight, & Ontario Association of Architects, Grey dePencier Pub., 1972, the chapter "Along the Escarpment" by Colin Vaughan and AnnabelSlaight.
"Over The Don" by Ron Fletcher, Publisher Ron Fletcher. 2002.
Special Places; The Changing Ecosystems of the Toronto Region," Betty I. Roots, etal.Royal Canadian Institute and UBC Press, 1999
"St. Clair West in Pictures, a history of the communities of Carlton, Davenport, Earlscourt, & Oakwood" 2nd Edition, Nancy Byers & Barbara Myrvold,. Toronto Public Libray, 1999
i went back tonight, as i often do when visiting my dad. he took the dog down into the valley while i explored the bridge itself. i lay face down on the walkway and peered between two planks into the ravine below. a perfectly rolled and completely dry spliff was caught on an iron beam under the face of the bridge.
maybe the cops showed up and the owner panicked, dropping it between the cracks?
http://www.lostrivers.ca/
http://www.lostrivers.ca/points/GlenCedarB.htm
"Toronto's Ravines, Walking The Hidden Country," Murray Seymour, The Boston MillsPress, 2000
"City of York: a Local History," E.C. Millar & others, The Board of Education for The City of York, 1987
"Don Valley Legacy, a Pioneer History" by Ann Guthrie, The Boston Mills Press 1986
"Exploring Toronto" Annabel Slaight, & Ontario Association of Architects, Grey dePencier Pub., 1972, the chapter "Along the Escarpment" by Colin Vaughan and AnnabelSlaight.
"Over The Don" by Ron Fletcher, Publisher Ron Fletcher. 2002.
Special Places; The Changing Ecosystems of the Toronto Region," Betty I. Roots, etal.Royal Canadian Institute and UBC Press, 1999
"St. Clair West in Pictures, a history of the communities of Carlton, Davenport, Earlscourt, & Oakwood" 2nd Edition, Nancy Byers & Barbara Myrvold,. Toronto Public Libray, 1999
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
The Steadicam: An evolution in film language, pt. 1
Ryerson film student Andrew Lounsbury penned this essay in the spring of 2008 for an advanced film theory course. In it, he uses various theories of camera movement to illustrate and expand on the claim that the steadicam has been a significant advancement in the evolution of film language. Please find selected paragraphs from this work in two parts.
Film language is similar to human language in the sense that it is something that can be read and interpreted based on a pre-established syntactical structure. For instance, in film there are many different shots that, when edited in such a way, allow us to ‘read’ the progression of the narrative or story. Similar to human language, there are certain shots that are more expressive than others, and shots can be used in such a way that force us to interpret their meaning. “It was montage that gave birth to film as an art,” claims André Malraux, “setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language” (qtd. in Bazin 42), and it has evolved along the conventions of continuity editing and parallel editing. In his essay, The Evolution of the Language of Cinema, André Bazin challenges this notion, claiming that editing is a vehicle used to create meaning which does not exist in the individual images, but arises from their collocation (42). Furthermore, the silent cinema would have been a complete art had its essence been all that plasticity and editing could add to a given reality (44). This, of course, is not the case, for since the inception of sound, films have grown fuller in their ability to represent experience, making use of both visual and aural techniques to evoke and signify their ideas. According to Bazin, all of the necessary conditions for creating film art existed by 1930, and therefore it was not so much the introduction of sound technology, but rather, the introduction of new talent, subject matter and the styles necessary to express it, that drastically influenced film language (46).
~~
…the use of moving camera can achieve things that would be impossible to achieve through editing (Rahtz 299). Although neither shot would be impossible without the steadicam, it is the use of the steadicam that makes them stand out, for to cut these sequences together would simply not be as effective. Rahtz argues that it is the process of moving with the characters, to get into their space and to eventually reveal their destinations, that is dramatically important (298).
~~
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
L'Ennui
She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'Alright,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.'
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
a part of the city where i never go
my dentist works up the street from where i went to high school. every nine months i come back for a cleaning. i take the 41 from keele station, up old weston road to eglinton, and step into a throng of northbound commuters outside the coffee time on the corner. i have only a vague idea of where they might be going; york university, for some, the old hospital on keele street. there is a plaza at lawrence with a walmart, and a few government offices further north at the 401, near the centre where i keep failing my driver's test.
the murals we painted on the side of a portuguese sports bar are still here. in the first, a ttc bus - one with parallelogram windows - speeds around a corner into a blue abyss of sky. in the second, a figure on horseback rides across a yellow-brick-road bridge. this one is on the side of another building, formerly occupied by a furniture liquidation centre. now its called "image beauty supply products."
the sidewalks have been repaved, but they're mottled with flattened wads of gum again and don't look much different. the school still hasn't managed to grow a lawn. it stands on the northwest corner like an aging monolith or a gravestone, and gives the impression of being seen in perpetual timelapse, clouds zooming by overhead.
the same jamaican papas sit outside their apartments, outside doorways tucked between the shops. their plastic lawn chairs bend, gleaming in the sun, slanting on the eglinton hill. on this hill we are closer to the sun, they are, and their dark skin is slick in the heat. from the top you can see forever, to what seem like the city's outskirts but must only be the beginnings of another city: mississauga, brampton. traffic moves at ten kilometres over the speed limit, like the buried water through the valley, past the panzerotto pizza and the jitz bar, the arena, the remains of the kodak plant.
i remember standing at all of these bus stops, and how different the buses smell here - like burnt, bleached paper. i remember the pride we had pulling into the rear parking lot in tyler's parents' bmw. the smoking pit, whose excavated earth reveals decades of cigarette stubs and fossilized potato wedge boxes. lunch at the court house, ketchup and mayonnaise, the sticky smell of chlorine from the centennial pool, and how all of the streets are named after world war II battlegrounds. the one girl who went to yale, and how everyone pretended they knew who she was.
the in-between, where no one is ever poorest but they've got no money to speak of. where no one seems to stay for long, except for the dentist, i guess. where the sky is bigger, and the houses and trees aren't new or old, but somewhere in the middle. where it was never as bad as it could get, and never good enough to stay for.
the murals we painted on the side of a portuguese sports bar are still here. in the first, a ttc bus - one with parallelogram windows - speeds around a corner into a blue abyss of sky. in the second, a figure on horseback rides across a yellow-brick-road bridge. this one is on the side of another building, formerly occupied by a furniture liquidation centre. now its called "image beauty supply products."
the sidewalks have been repaved, but they're mottled with flattened wads of gum again and don't look much different. the school still hasn't managed to grow a lawn. it stands on the northwest corner like an aging monolith or a gravestone, and gives the impression of being seen in perpetual timelapse, clouds zooming by overhead.
the same jamaican papas sit outside their apartments, outside doorways tucked between the shops. their plastic lawn chairs bend, gleaming in the sun, slanting on the eglinton hill. on this hill we are closer to the sun, they are, and their dark skin is slick in the heat. from the top you can see forever, to what seem like the city's outskirts but must only be the beginnings of another city: mississauga, brampton. traffic moves at ten kilometres over the speed limit, like the buried water through the valley, past the panzerotto pizza and the jitz bar, the arena, the remains of the kodak plant.
i remember standing at all of these bus stops, and how different the buses smell here - like burnt, bleached paper. i remember the pride we had pulling into the rear parking lot in tyler's parents' bmw. the smoking pit, whose excavated earth reveals decades of cigarette stubs and fossilized potato wedge boxes. lunch at the court house, ketchup and mayonnaise, the sticky smell of chlorine from the centennial pool, and how all of the streets are named after world war II battlegrounds. the one girl who went to yale, and how everyone pretended they knew who she was.
the in-between, where no one is ever poorest but they've got no money to speak of. where no one seems to stay for long, except for the dentist, i guess. where the sky is bigger, and the houses and trees aren't new or old, but somewhere in the middle. where it was never as bad as it could get, and never good enough to stay for.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Robin Swicord on Writing-Directing
If you are a writer-director, choose as your collaborators (director of photography and editor especially) people with strong opinions. As a writer, your vision is already amply represented via the script. Your direction of your own work will be stronger if your choices are sometimes interrogated by an opposing view. A compliant collaborator merely leaves you stranded with your first idea--the work gets better when you are challenged to re-examine your ideas.
Go into prep and production as physically fit as possible. Prepping, shooting and editing are all ridiculously exhausting, in different ways. As your mother, let me stress this: Eat only healthy energy foods on set; catch up on sleep on weekends; exercise whenever you can on your days off. A film crew is a traveling Petri dish of viruses and colds. Take simple measures not to catch what is going around. Otherwise you will be sick for months, because you’ll never catch enough sleep to get well.
Wear comfortable shoes.
Express gratitude constantly. Your crew deserves it.
Rehearse with a sense of play, not with a goal of having the actors deliver a performance during rehearsal. Actors are astute emotionally. They delve into the text with the skill of detectives. A director can be their sounding board, but ideally you want the actors to invest in their roles with a sense of ownership, and then to relax and be at play with each other. The director’s job is mostly to remove obstacles so that the actors can be released into play. Actors are not different from writers in this respect--they most love to inhabit what they have discovered for themselves. When that happens, it’s great for your movie.
When possible, bake cookies in the editing room. The aroma brings in random people who are happy to hang out and munch cookies while they look at a scene or two. Having “uninvested” people occasionally coming in and out of the editing room keeps you from getting so close to the work that you can’t see the effect of the changes you are making. Embrace the outside eye.
If you hear the same comment more than twice, pay attention. And remember that people almost always tend to identify symptoms rather than problems. “I was confused by that last scene” is a comment that may have nothing to do with the last scene--it may well be merely the symptom of a problem most likely lurking earlier in the film.
Good or bad, don’t read reviews. Good reviews or bad, they only make it harder to give yourself freely to the next movie you want to make.
It’s only a movie. Reconnect with your friends and family. Lie on the grass and look up at the sky.
Go into prep and production as physically fit as possible. Prepping, shooting and editing are all ridiculously exhausting, in different ways. As your mother, let me stress this: Eat only healthy energy foods on set; catch up on sleep on weekends; exercise whenever you can on your days off. A film crew is a traveling Petri dish of viruses and colds. Take simple measures not to catch what is going around. Otherwise you will be sick for months, because you’ll never catch enough sleep to get well.
Wear comfortable shoes.
Express gratitude constantly. Your crew deserves it.
Rehearse with a sense of play, not with a goal of having the actors deliver a performance during rehearsal. Actors are astute emotionally. They delve into the text with the skill of detectives. A director can be their sounding board, but ideally you want the actors to invest in their roles with a sense of ownership, and then to relax and be at play with each other. The director’s job is mostly to remove obstacles so that the actors can be released into play. Actors are not different from writers in this respect--they most love to inhabit what they have discovered for themselves. When that happens, it’s great for your movie.
When possible, bake cookies in the editing room. The aroma brings in random people who are happy to hang out and munch cookies while they look at a scene or two. Having “uninvested” people occasionally coming in and out of the editing room keeps you from getting so close to the work that you can’t see the effect of the changes you are making. Embrace the outside eye.
If you hear the same comment more than twice, pay attention. And remember that people almost always tend to identify symptoms rather than problems. “I was confused by that last scene” is a comment that may have nothing to do with the last scene--it may well be merely the symptom of a problem most likely lurking earlier in the film.
Good or bad, don’t read reviews. Good reviews or bad, they only make it harder to give yourself freely to the next movie you want to make.
It’s only a movie. Reconnect with your friends and family. Lie on the grass and look up at the sky.
DGG on Snow Angels
http://www.ifc.com/film/film-news/2008/03/david-gordon-green-on-snow-ang.php
http://www.moviemaker.com/acting/article/david_gordon_green_snow_angels_kate_beckinsale_20080307/
Annie's Appearance
Annie's House
Things That Make Annie Laugh
Annie's Likes/Dislikes
Annie's History
Things About Annie
http://www.moviemaker.com/acting/article/david_gordon_green_snow_angels_kate_beckinsale_20080307/
Annie's Appearance
Annie's House
Things That Make Annie Laugh
Annie's Likes/Dislikes
Annie's History
Things About Annie
Monday, June 23, 2008
http://www.cbc.ca/radiosummer/alien/
Alien Nation features dozens of teens from a wide range of backgrounds, speaking frankly and often surprisingly about spirituality, family, technology, friendship, love, sex and altered states.
Alien Nation features dozens of teens from a wide range of backgrounds, speaking frankly and often surprisingly about spirituality, family, technology, friendship, love, sex and altered states.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Kathy H.
"... I'll have to admit I'll welcome the chance to rest- to stop and think and remember. I'm sure it's at least partly to do with that, to do with preparing for the change of pace, that I've been getting this urge to order all these old memories. What I really wanted, I suppose, was to get straight all the things that happened between me and Tommy and Ruth after we grew up and left Hailsham. But I realise now just how much of what occurred later came out of our time at Hailsham, and that's why I want first to go over these earlier memories quite carefully. Take all this curiosity... for instance. At one level, it was just us kids larking about. But at another, as you'll see, it was the start of a process that kept growing and growing over the years and it came to dominate our lives."
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Monday, June 9, 2008
august 2003 (age 14)
I want to be like Robinson Caruso
words blunt and
little boy little tom-girl (all girls are Toms)
adventurer.
I want to be about apples and
skinned knees.
Blowing bubbles and pulling
sling-shots at the trees.
I want to be Swiss Family Robinson, making
houses out of air
swinging pails and weaving ropes
feeling mud between the creases of my
skin.
I want to be about hunting for food and
accomplishment with knives.
I want to be the Boy within.
I want to be like Mark Twain solitude with
Rabbits and
pulling weeds.
That's it. (That must be it)
I want to be about growing
and pulling
weeds.
This little adventure girl within wants to be
all she was told she couldn't be, she wants to
eat the worms and mark the skin.
She wants to be fighting Lord of the Flies
straps holding wooden swords on
wild cries and
bloody arms.
I want to find Tom and claim her as my name.
I want to make sure that my daughter knows
her name is Tom; her second name will always
be Tom.
words blunt and
little boy little tom-girl (all girls are Toms)
adventurer.
I want to be about apples and
skinned knees.
Blowing bubbles and pulling
sling-shots at the trees.
I want to be Swiss Family Robinson, making
houses out of air
swinging pails and weaving ropes
feeling mud between the creases of my
skin.
I want to be about hunting for food and
accomplishment with knives.
I want to be the Boy within.
I want to be like Mark Twain solitude with
Rabbits and
pulling weeds.
That's it. (That must be it)
I want to be about growing
and pulling
weeds.
This little adventure girl within wants to be
all she was told she couldn't be, she wants to
eat the worms and mark the skin.
She wants to be fighting Lord of the Flies
straps holding wooden swords on
wild cries and
bloody arms.
I want to find Tom and claim her as my name.
I want to make sure that my daughter knows
her name is Tom; her second name will always
be Tom.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
" [Laura's death in The Blind Assassin] also takes place only a few blocks west and south of the street on the edge of Leaside where Margaret Atwood herself discovered the power of ravines. In 1948, when she was nine, her family settled near the southeastern corner of Mount Pleasant Cemetery. At the end of the street behind her house, a footbridge led toward a patch of the peculiar ravine wildness that defines Toronto, especially for children. As Rosemary Sullivan says in her book The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, "Margaret could climb down through dense underbrush into the Moore Park Ravine, which snaked through the east side of the city" -- and connected directly with what may now become famous as the setting of Laura's death. Sullivan quotes Atwood's note on the ravines, written years later: "To go down into them is to go down into sleep, away from the conscious electrified life of the houses. The ravines are darker, even in the day."
- robert fulford
http://www.robertfulford.com/Ravines.html
- robert fulford
http://www.robertfulford.com/Ravines.html
that peculiar quality...
Gus Van Sant's recent Paranoid Park is an impressive example of using non-professional actors to capture the essence of childhood/naivete. Formal elements: speed ramping, longshot, steadicam, exposure fluctuation, timelapse, super8/35mm.
He also does a great job at painting this clouded, almost mystical portrait of Portland. I feel as thought it speaks to the reverence we have for our childhoods - the places we went, things we did become etchings. This isn't to say our memory isn't true to reality but rather that we colour things in, distort, edit.
"Like many of Van Sant’s films, Paranoid Park throbs with the underlying threat of violence, yet it is, undeniably, an exploration of innocence. Alex possesses that peculiar quality of childhood which distances him from his own mortality; it’s what makes him able to appreciate the scandent ascent and careening descent of the skateboard. In some ways, the film is a celebration of that freedom, and perhaps a glance back for Van Sant to his own youth, the days of his first Super-8 forays into the art form. It is also a movie about boyhood disillusionment. Even at the celebrated Paranoid Park, a sloping cement landscape appropriated from beneath a highway overpass, Alex is unable to skateboard. He tells people he isn’t good enough, but actually Alex is too burdened to be weightless."
http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/reviews/article_display.jsp
He also does a great job at painting this clouded, almost mystical portrait of Portland. I feel as thought it speaks to the reverence we have for our childhoods - the places we went, things we did become etchings. This isn't to say our memory isn't true to reality but rather that we colour things in, distort, edit.
"Like many of Van Sant’s films, Paranoid Park throbs with the underlying threat of violence, yet it is, undeniably, an exploration of innocence. Alex possesses that peculiar quality of childhood which distances him from his own mortality; it’s what makes him able to appreciate the scandent ascent and careening descent of the skateboard. In some ways, the film is a celebration of that freedom, and perhaps a glance back for Van Sant to his own youth, the days of his first Super-8 forays into the art form. It is also a movie about boyhood disillusionment. Even at the celebrated Paranoid Park, a sloping cement landscape appropriated from beneath a highway overpass, Alex is unable to skateboard. He tells people he isn’t good enough, but actually Alex is too burdened to be weightless."
http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/reviews/article_display.jsp
Toronto's Ravines: Walking the Hidden Country
By Murray Seymour. Boston Mills Press, 2000.
http://www.toronto.ca/trees/ravines.htm
City of Toronto: ravine history and use, bylaws, photography
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/series/outsiders/
A series of articles and photos exploring Toronto's hidden ravine-dwellers
http://spacing.ca/ravines.htm
By Murray Seymour. Boston Mills Press, 2000.
http://www.toronto.ca/trees/ravines.htm
City of Toronto: ravine history and use, bylaws, photography
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/series/outsiders/
A series of articles and photos exploring Toronto's hidden ravine-dwellers
http://spacing.ca/ravines.htm
minus time
"A few faint lights and voices drifted out of other houses. Why did inviting someone to trust you necessarily mean you had to reveal everything, give up the power to re-create yourself? Why did people act as if revelation always equaled honesty...?" / PG 150
"She told us, whenever she went away, to a conference or on a camping trip in Algonquin Park by herself, how much she enjoyed missing us: It was a kind of love, she savoured it like a taste. If we listened, couldn't we feel it, like a pulse, our missing her, her missing us? She said it was important for everyone to know how to go off by themselves, to stretch the edges of their own skin, to test themselves in solitude or darkness." / PG 184
- catherine bush
"She told us, whenever she went away, to a conference or on a camping trip in Algonquin Park by herself, how much she enjoyed missing us: It was a kind of love, she savoured it like a taste. If we listened, couldn't we feel it, like a pulse, our missing her, her missing us? She said it was important for everyone to know how to go off by themselves, to stretch the edges of their own skin, to test themselves in solitude or darkness." / PG 184
- catherine bush
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