films

A couple from Network Awesome:

New Order playing live in a New York club in 1981. Wasn't a fan of this band - until now. The set and the music lacks a center in the best way: instruments are picked up, played for a few very tight bars, and put down again. The songs change slots from guitar rock to synth pop with no fanfare. The bass is as close as we get to an anchor - but even that is played in the higher registers, like a guitar. Simon Reynolds had a great phrase for the rhythm: "drumming around the edge of a crater." The performance is intense but deadpan and anonymous.

Jerry Lewis, The Ladies Man. Filmed on an enormous dollhouse set by... the American Jacques Tati? Here we have similar klutzy physical comedy (on meth) in a highly artificial environment, without the contintental poise or taste. Confirmed bachelor Herbert H. Heebert takes a job as a "houseboy" in a ladies' residential mansion populated by va va voomy females. Many exquisite glass objects and antique vases are broken. Terrific, often surrealistic dance numbers with Jer twitching around in saddle shoes. This is the one where the butterfly collection flies out of the frame and then flies back again.

Above is a fairly typical example of "cinemagraphs," or what Paddy Johnson has called "hair GIFs," due to their ubiquitous strands of blowing hair. A fashion model with tens of thousands of tumblr followrs and an Atlantic article last year brought this uber-kitschy style to a large Web audience, giving the lie to claims by Ryder Ripps, Brad Troemel and others that democratic "liking" has anything to do with art. People also "like" Thomas Kinkade and McDonald's hamburgers.

We're talking about this now because PBS uncritically promoted this trend, actually just a couple of designer teams working in the fashion world, in a recent documentary short.* One of the teams, Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg (who made the image above), make loud claims for their work as some kind of new art form, or advanced or enhanced photography. It's not new if you've ever seen a stereogram, hologram, or lenticular postcard, and in terms of art theory it's pretty retrograde.

A famous essay from the '70s by Laura Mulvey explained how the masculine gaze drives moviemaking: the story is about a man and some dilemma he solves, the woman is there to give his plight added sympathy, but the problem is, when she is on camera for any length of time, the action stops dead because we just want to stare at her.

Laura Mulvey, from "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 1975 [PDF]

The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative.

This problem was solved, Mulvey suggests, by having the woman be a dancer or showgirl so you're supposed to be staring at her. Or to make a "buddy film" where another man provides the sympathy factor.

Hair GIFs reverse the problem described by Mulvey but don't do much in the way of anti-objectifying. Instead of a gaze magnet (icon) interrupting the flow of cinema we have a cinematic element disrupting the icon. The result isn't so much subversive as unintentionally comedic. The mood is blown with every robotic swing of a forelock.

*Update: PBS or PBS contractor.

It was almost worth watching the entire 80 minutes of the 1980 low-budget stinker The Psychotronic Man (namesake of psychotronic films and GIFs) just to read this IMDb review:

Peter Spelson's "The Psychotronic Man" is a tour de force of naive post-intelligentsia film noir. Jack M. Sell directs seemingly endless, artlessly blocked scenes that draw the audience into a twilight mood of almost painful ennui. Truly, even before the opening title graphics crawled across the screen some seven minutes (significant?) into the first reel this reviewer craved the blissful relief of an untimely death before the next zoom-in close-up of Peter Spelson's heavily lidded psychotronic stare! Spelson turns in an idiosyncratic performance as Rocky Foscoe, the barber who prefers his hair tonic to Seagrams Seven. Spelson's Rocky is a tortured soul who has trouble putting together a simple sentence, much unlike the real-life erstwhile insurance agent turned one-time film actor who frankly has never been known to shut up! "The Psychotronic Man" can be favorably compared to the seminal works of Kurasawa or a young Hitchcock only if one suspends all rational thought and gives over to a delusional view of a world where a film such as this can be considered anything more than bong water worthy.

and

Featuring an insurance agent-turned-actor, a guerrilla film making style, authentic retro '70's soundtrack and a back-story that just won't die, the experience of "The Psychotronic Man" is truly a total greater than the sum of its parts.

In 1991, stop-motion animation whiz Henry Selick (Coraline, Nightmare Before Christmas) made a pilot TV short called "Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions," combining animation and live action. It has now turned up on YouTube (for the moment).

Conjoined twin sisters wake up in the dead of night and tiptoe upstairs to observe a man who lives in their attic in a strange state of time suspension named Bob. He clings to the upper corner of a wall like a spider, sleeping, and then a lizard feeds him wake-up juice from a soft drink can. He jumps down from the wall and sees an actual spider webspinning the word "EMERGENCY!" He coils into the fetal position and lizards surround him in a magic circle and begin spraying him with electricity. He teleports to the lower (2D?) dimensions where people who live in hovering black and white photographs are being chased and sliced apart by flying pairs of scissors. Bob, who is now a flat, Terry Gilliam-like puppet, hatches a scheme to destroy the scissors. A regal photo-woman gives him the gift of a watch, in gratitude, and Bob returns to his attic in a cloud of electricity. Just then, the conjoined twin girls burst into the attic and begin painting Bob with yellow paint and laughing demonically. In his slowed-down state he suffers their humiliation; we don't know why they are hostile to him. In the final shot, he wipes yellow paint off his watch face and and sees the photo-queen giving him words of advice and counsel. End. Music by The Residents.

Selick's 2001 film Monkeybone, with a script by Sam Hamm, is similarly bizarre--and I would say brilliant--but widely considered a flop (20% on the tomato-meter and all that). It was based on a graphic novel Dark Town, which sounds intriguing from the Wikipedia description:

A man, Jacques De Bergerac, is in a coma after being in a car accident. He finds himself in Dark Town, where the land is dominated by strange living, breathing puppets and marionettes with button eyes.

The Lords of Dark Town are trying to kill Jacques, and use his body in the real world as a vessel for an agent of Dark Town. There's only one problem, Jacques' imagination. He carries it with him always, in a red suitcase. It protects him from the horrors of Dark Town.

Meanwhile, In the real world, Jacques' wife decides to take him off life support. Jacques now only has 12 hours to live. Back in dark town, Jacques encounters Death, Who informs him of his time limit, and tells him how to escape Dark Town. The book ends on a cliff-hanger, as Jacques is captured by a knight after wandering onto a chessboard.

...

Dark Town was originally intended to be a miniseries. However, only the first part of the story was ever published.

In the film version the suitcase is replaced by an oversexed cartoon monkey, who conspires against the comatose cartoonist for a shot at inhabiting the mortal body of Brendan Fraser. The role was originally intended for Jim Carrey and Fraser wasn't up to antics at that level; nevertheless he is a more sympathetic actor and his romance with the sublime Bridget Fonda, playing his sleep therapist, makes you really care about whether he escapes Dark Town.