Some GIFs of mine (along with a cast of thousands) are in a film screening Sunday, October 5, at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Arts in Brooklyn. The film (actually a projected video) is twohundredfiftysixcolors, directed by Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus, with curatorial assistant Theodore Darst, released last year, with a run time of 97 minutes. This is the New York premiere.
The directors have compiled some 3000 animated GIFs and arranged them sequentially. From the trailer and press release, it appears the GIFs have runs or riffs of similarity and dissimilarity: "categories" punctuated by non-sequiturs and jokes. It's not a documentary in the sense of having a voiceover explanation, captions, or interviews, but more a mega- or meta-artwork that happens to document a particular scene, or collection of scenes.
I'm otherwise committed on the day of the screening but am curious about audience reaction. That many GIFs for that long sounds like an experiment in human attention and endurance. It's also a test of the translation powers of media. Does a GIF retain its "GIFness" as a snippet of video? As a consumer of GIFs you, the viewer, have the option to watch, and allow to loop, for as long as you like. Here the directors have made decisions regarding the duration and "surroundings" of the GIFs. From the trailer it looks like GIFs were left at their original sizes relative to other GIFs. Was there any compression or anti-aliasing? Haven't studied closely to notice if differences in frame rates are respected or if that's even an issue as long as x number of GIF frames equals a proportional number of video frames. The "two hundred fifty six colors" refers to the number of colors available in the GIF format. Does the video have more colors, and again, does it make any difference? These kinds of questions are nerdy but matter if you're going to put a particular computer file format at the front and center of your project.
films
"the last man": a screenplay
Screenplay for short film. No dialogue, just images and music.
JODY is male, late 20s, reasonably good-looking. He walks down an urban sidewalk.
A series of cuts establishes that he is observing his surroundings as he walks.
He looks at architectural details, birds, clouds in the sky. Close-ups show a twinkle of appreciation in his eye -- that he is enjoying the walk and what he sees.
He passes ordinary people on the sidewalk, all of different ages. They are either standing or moving, but all are looking down, engrossed in smartphones. Soon it becomes clear that not a single person is like JODY, that is, just a person walking along, looking at nothing in particular.
About the sixth person JODY passes suddenly looks up, and does a quick once-over of JODY. He ends the brief examination by looking at JODY's hands, which are swinging and not holding a phone.
JODY passes several more people, all looking down at phones, standing at random intervals along the sidewalk -- cars are passing back and forth on the street, it is a normal day in the city -- and the same inspection occurs. This is beginning to seem ominous. The fourth person he passes, a young woman, ends her perusal of him by returning to her phone keypad, where she is seen urgently typing as he passes.
The next man JODY passes looks up from his phone as if expecting to see JODY, and immediately begins typing. Closeups of JODY's face show bemusement, scorn, then worry.
Halfway down the block, JODY sees a group of four "yuppies" standing together, all looking at phones but also talking to each other. As he approaches, they disperse into a line that will block his passage on the sidewalk. Their body postures are menacing.
The four start moving towards him in tight formation, hate in their eyes, and...
END
around the web
Idaho Transfer [YouTube] (hat tip Network Awesome)
An obscure 1973 film directed by Peter Fonda, with a script by Thomas Mathiessen (whoever that may be), gives us low-key, post-apocalyptic science fiction, filmed on a minuscule budget, beautifully shot and scored. I was hooked by the serious amateurishness, or amateurish seriousness, of the young, unknown cast and its response to a looming "eco-crisis" as vague and threatening as the one we still face, and watched straight to the end. Seeing it in the what-is-this-i've-never-heard-of-it way is recommended: some astute IMDb commenters can help unravel the film's mysteries afterward.
The actors with long period hair mostly never made any movies after this, except for Keith Carradine, who appears in a small role. The film's end-of-the-'60s nostalgic hallucination of childless young people "having a beautiful time," or trying to, after the worst has happened, has dated, but in interesting ways. Especially knowing this generation, in reality, would become Reagan-era bourgeoisie, driving gas-guzzlers and competing to get their brats into threshold schools (or whatever they were called). :{
At the other end of the generational periscope lies "Pancake Spring," a short story by Miracle Jones (hat tip orlandobloom). I like fiction where authors who I suspect are younger than me make fun of phones and corporate social media. If hating that shite is not just a case of age maladaption, maybe there is something actually wrong with our cultural direction. ("Download the app" is the new "go to something-something dotcom" but only if you accept what Jerry Seinfeld jokingly calls the "hard rectangle in your pocket" as your universal center. I don't, and neither does Mandy in this story.) Ranting aside, check out this well-written tale with its very funny take on un-funny things such as torture ("French Modern") and promoted tweets.
town bloody non-dudecentric hall
D. A. Pennebaker's film Town Bloody Hall has surfaced on YouTube -- catch it while it's up, you never know when someone's going to demand a takedown.
The film captures a raucous 1971 panel discussion with three writers (Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Diana Trilling), an activist (N.O.W.'s Jacqueline Ceballos), and moderator Norman Mailer (!).
The packed auditorium has heckling, cheering, booing, walkouts, and celebrity questioners (including Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag, and Elizabeth Hardwick). The event, with its boisterous spirit never quite leaving the zone of collegiality, makes today's professionalized and "surveilled" world of arts discussion seem very, very, very dull. (The film came to mind during the awful, Paddy Johnson-moderated "are there too many dudecentric net art shows" thread.)
Mailer is funny and slightly clowning throughout, yet the takeaway moment is Greer's stirring speech questioning the value of capital-A art, both for its cult of male genius and disproportionate valuation in society. Rather than the professional ego-strivers who cause all this imbalance, she concludes, we should perhaps aspire to be the faceless artisans who built the cathedrals.
This speech inspired me back in the day and it's still very moving even though feminism in the arts never lives up to its aspirations.
The feminist art critic's answer to the question "how do you avoid making icky Greenbergian critical judgments?" is "show everything" but they rarely do.
The curator's cutoff between "good artist/in the show" and "bad artist/not in the show" may have been raised from 10 to 30 under feminism but it's seldom if ever increased to "all applicants" -- where would be the fun in that? Quotas are even worse -- that's phallocentrism writ large and throbbing. The only thing that changes is the nature of the "other."
i hated that part of the interview
Earlier we complained when Salon staff writer Daniel D'Addario, as the saying goes, "made shit up" about Harvey Weinstein and P.T. Anderson.
Now let's slap a Salon headline writer for fact-mangling.
From Jon Weiner's 2000 interview with the late, great Elmore Leonard:
JW: Three terrific movies have been made based on your work: Get Shorty in 1995, which I read made 200 million dollars; Jackie Brown in 1996 and Out of Sight with George Clooney in 1998. What was your role — did you write the screenplays?
EL: No. They would ask me what actors I saw in the roles. I would tell them, and they’d say “Oh that’s interesting.” And that would be the end of it. Writing screenplays is not my business. I’ve written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You’re an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue.
JW: And you didn’t like this? They were just trying to help.
EL: Those movies were terrible. They put in the obvious things you had thrown out right away when you were writing.
It's pretty clear Leonard is saying he didn't like the movies made from his three or so screenplays.*
Salon's headline, of course, is Elmore Leonard: I hated the film adaptations of my books.
Sure grabs the attention, though.
When the interview first appeared in the LA Review of Books the headline was "Elmore Leonard’s Secret: 'Clean Living, and a Fast Outfield.'"
*Per IMDb: 52 Pickup, Cat Chaser, Stick, Mr. Majestyk and The Moonshine War had Leonard-written scripts. Plus a made-for-TV movie or two. Mr. Majestyk is majestic despite what Leonard might have thought. Charles Bronson really, really wants to get in that melon crop.