Shooting Down Pictures

“A Revolution on Screen” is a two-part video essay coinciding with the 2009 New York Film Festival Masterworks series “(Re)Inventing China: A New Cinema for a New Society, 1949–1966.” This series is the first major U.S. retrospective of the films made during the “Seventeen Years” period between the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the Cultural Revolution.

PART ONE: MOVIES FOR THE MASSES (AND A SMUGGLING OF ART)

PART TWO: THE FLOWERING BEFORE THE FALL

View main entry

It’s a real pleasure to unveil this latest video essay for several reasons. First, because it marks the first of what I hope will be an ongoing series of videos produced in conjunction with the Greencine Daily, highlighting notable DVD releases. This initial video just happens to be on a TSPDT 1000 film that I blogged about towards the beginning of this online project: Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun.  Interestingly, the three video clips I posted to accompany my blog entry have more views than just about anything else I’ve posted on YouTube. I think it has something to do with a) the film not being available for many years, even though it’s based on a book that’s still widely taught in schools; b) the film being referenced in Metallica’s video for their song “One.”  At one point I even put an open call asking if anyone knew of how to get the film released on DVD, since I was receiving dozens of similar inquiries through my YouTube account. At long last, the film is available on Shout Factory DVD.  And I must say, it’s a gorgeous transfer, miles better than the out of print VHS I used for my initial viewing. It even includes the Metallica video!

Here’s my video essay, which you can also watch on GreenCine Daily and on YouTube. Enjoy!

Visit the original entry for the film

It’s been 30 years since Susan Sontag published her essay that instantly became the definitive analysis of one of her all-time favorite films. I’ve taken choice excerpts from her essay, as found in A Susan Sontag Reader (published by Farrar/Strauss/Giroux) to produce the following video.

Thanks to Margaret Donabedian for giving voice to Sontag’s words, and Cindi Rowell for her invaluable assistance in editing the video.

screened Thursday March 11 2009 on DVD via fileshare in Weehawken NJ

TSPDT rank #511  IMDb Wiki

While the link between experimental and horror filmmaking remains largely under-examined, there’s no question that some of the great works of experimental cinema could double as outstanding horror films: Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (which commits unspeakable acts on footage from the 80s horror flick The Entity), numerous titles by Stan Brakhage (i.e. The Art of Vision; The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes), even Michael Snow’s Wavelength exudes an existential nausea in stillness that anticipates Kiyoshi Kurosawa by a few decades. While horror films typically depict violence in cinema, these avant-garde works, especially Jack Chamber’s deeply disturbing 1970 film, commit violence on cinema, doing things to the celluloid medium that can leave both the viewer and the art form traumatically transformed. In The Hart of London, the horror erupts from the clash of human civilization and the great unknown that envelops it: an endless, brutal battle waged on multiple fronts: past vs. present, man vs. animal, wilderness vs. domesticity, surfaces vs. essences.

The film kicks off with a beautiful slow-mo shot of a hart deer leaping out of a forest into the town of London, Ontario, where most of the film’s footage was shot. It’s capture and killing at the hands of the locals sets off a snowstorm of archival photos and film footage, a cinematic blizzard superimposed double exposures, horizontal flips and negative inversions. Chambers’ achievement here is in making the most innocuous footage of small town Canada seem foreign and menacing, a frontier past whose contentious relationship with its environs belie the civic aspirations of its archival imagery. This maelstrom is set to a relentless soundtrack of crashing waves whose initial aural violence gradually settles the viewer into its steady rhythm.

The surf sounds eventually give way to the gentler but no less incessant gurgle of tidepools, introducing the film’s singularly most disturbing passage, where images of  children alternate with footage of sheep being slaughtered, a stunning juxtaposition of humankind’s aspiring mastery over life and death. Chambers orchestrates these dual modes into a flow made possible by the tidepool soundtrack and liquid superimpositions of body parts, vegetation and bodily fluids. A recurring theme of cutting recurs through footage of an infant circumcision, shrubbery being trimmed by giant scissors and a slaughterhouse worker sticking his blade through the necks of sheep, which segues to more brutal, bloody footage of an infant child yanked from a womb. Children frolicking in a too-blue swimming pool interspersed with blood red footage of aborted sheep fetuses (some indiscernible from human counterparts) and a heap of freshly-disemboweled sheep intestines still writhing in digestive activity.

The film’s last movement seems satirically vicious with its leering portrayals of domestic life: Canadians engaged in idiotic lawn games like barrel boxing; posing with their gardens or with a trespassing wolf they’ve killed; pointing at family photos and showing off caged canaries. Despite all the brutality that Chambers has envisioned up to this point, he seems to find these images of safe human home life just as horrifying in their own, somewhat lobotomized way, and in no way reassuring from what lurks beyond their papered walls. The final images of Chambers’ own children approaching wild deer at the edge of a park, as their mother repeatedly hisses “You have to be very careful,” leaves the viewer hanging in a tense, perpetual stalemate between mankind and the world around him.

THE HART OF LONDON is viewable in its entirety on YouTube

THE HART OF LONDON PART ONE (scroll down for other parts)

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

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In arguing for the right to produce critical video essays as those featured on this site, I don’t think it takes much to see their potential as educational resources. But one doesn’t fully appreciate this point until one starts to learn how they are being used as educational tools.

Based on a couple of comments to some of the video essays on YouTube, I’ve learned that there are students who refer to these videos for their papers or class work. I only hope that they are properly citing the source; lest there be any confusion on the matter, copying soundbites from a video to one’s own scholarship without citing the source amounts to plagiarism just as much as if one were cribbing from a written text.

But just recently I have learned of an instance where a teacher actually used one of my video essays in a classroom, and the way they did so is quite illuminating. I received this message from Misa Oyama, a former lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley (Go Bears!):

I just taught a senior seminar called “Modern Horror” (19 students) for UC Berkeley’s English Department, and we spent one week on “Zodiac.” I asked a student to hook her laptop to the classroom projector (Berkeley classrooms have wireless access), so that we could watch your YouTube video essay on “The Vanishing”/”Zodiac”. It was probably the most effective illustration of film criticism the students saw all semester, because students could see the shots and scenes simultaneously with your commentary, rather than just reading descriptions of the scenes like they do with conventional film criticism. I used your essay in conjunction with Manohla Dargis’s review of Zodiac, to show how different viewers could do close readings of scenes from the same film to support their own interpretations. What I think students really liked about your video essay was its accessibility; it’s a rich, complex reading of Fincher’s work but presented in a personal, sometimes informal (the line “fuck-it-all” for Fight Club got a big laugh) way. After reading lots of academic film essays, the students seemed to find this refreshing. One of my students said it inspired her to want to make her own short video essays about her own reactions to films. I think it also made some students want to see “The Vanishing,” because they asked me about it afterwards (and I made sure to tell them to see the original, not the remake).

Before showing the video in class, I put the YouTube link in my bSpace website for this class, so that students could comment on it. However, not all the students have high-speeed internet access at home, so I got the feeling that most students were seeing it for the first time in the classroom.

It’s weird that Big Corporate Media would have a problem with your work, because you’re obviously not trying to pass these films off as your own, and you’re encouraging people to look deeper at films they might not know about. I’m not sure if it was because of your video, but one student got so obsessed with the Zodiac story that she bought the Zodiac DVD.

I hope you continue making these kinds of films, because there is definitely an audience for them.

It’s exciting to think that the use of this video essay in class was a valuable supplement (not a replacement) to more traditional forms of classroom “texts,” and furthermore, that it may inspire students to try out this form of scholarship on their own. I’m still fairly surprised that this form still isn’t as prevalent as it could be.

Here’s the video essay on The Vanishing and Zodiac:

An interview with the legendary SOUMITRA CHATTERJEE about working with SATYAJIT RAY, his career and their masterpiece Days and Nights in the Forest. The phone interview was conducted by me and filmmaker Preston Miller in August of 2008. Here’s a link to the main entry on the film, and two previous video essays that Preston and I produced.

Thanks to Preston for editing the interview to clips from the film!

Thanks to the Copyright Team at YouTube for getting into the spirit of Martin Luther King Day, and agreeing to temporarily reinstate my account while my counterclaim against INA over the fair use of “…And God Created Woman” is under review.  And thank you EVERYONE for your emails and messages of support, and for those who wrote about my ordeal on their respective websites. The publicity surrounding this mess had everything to do with YouTube contacting me last Friday and offering guidance on what steps I needed to take to get my account back online (at the time I didn’t know how I could still file a counterclaim despite that I was shut out of my account).

This has been a very educational experience and I hope to blog about it after I catch up on jet-lag recovery sleep. In the meantime, here is the video that got me into trouble, now viewable courtesy of Veoh. Happy MLK Day, and Happy Inaguration Day, and Happy Brigitte Bardot!

Watch Shooting Down Pictures #932: And God Created Woman in Entertainment Videos |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

This is the thid (and my personal favorite) of the video series I produced based on a roundtable conversation with several film critics on the films of Clint Eastwood. 

We generally recognize Eastwood as a director of great films – but is there a distinctive Eastwood aesthetic, a look or a shot that distinguishes him and gives definition to his world? This video attempts to answer that question:

WARNING - possible spoilers contained within video.

The second installment of the video series I produced based on a roundtable conversation with several film critics on the films of Clint Eastwood. Today’s is on <i>Gran Torino</i>.  Unfortunately YouTube and Warner Brothers have blocked embedding on this video – so you’ll have to click here to view it. In that case you’d might as well rate it or leave a comment on the clip’s YouTube page, or leave a comment here.

I’d also like to include some comments to the video that someone left me on Facebook, which I haven’t had the opportunity respond to yet until now:

“While I appreciate the critical take on Gran Torino as *racist*, I do think that overlooks a level of complexity built into the film.  Perhaps it is yet further playing into stereotypes of Asians as model minorities, etc., and the minority that it is still safe to mock, but I do think that misses the mark.  There’s likely a reason that Eastwood/screenwriter chose the Hmong community, as opposed to say a Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese community, given that the Hmong in Americans have faced greater levels of poverty and have not fit so neatly into the model minority category.

It also seems to me that this film cannot simply be dismissed as racist and focused entirely on a white, authoritarian savior.  This is the only major American film I’ve seen this year that gives a complex treatment to the lives of relatively poor Asian-Americans.  The final scene, in my opinion, with Thao driving the Gran Torino with Daisy by his side. is one of the most compelling visions of what it might mean to “become American” that I’ve seen in years.  Thao takes his place behind the old American vehicle, with an American dog at his side, driving into the sunset.

Walt comes to play a part in Thao’s family reluctantly, and perhaps, in a perfect world, we wouldn’t need the white central character to draw mainstream audiences into this kind of story.  (I guess we could refer to Slumdog at this point.)  But it strikes me as moving, and extraordinary — and not in a condescending or racist way — that Eastwood decided to take on this story, about this community, at this late, perhaps final stage in his career.  The entire film seemed to me to be trying to show how America is changing today, in the way it has always changed (as Kowalski became American, as his Irish and Italian friends became American).  The message of the film seemed to present a bracing, generous, and inclusive view of what it means to be American – a view that seemed fresh and welcome in a mainstream Hollywood movie.

I agree that the ending was somewhat fairy tale and pat, but I didn’t find it off-putting.  I agree that it was Eastwood playing through characters he’s played before, and the archetypes those characters built on, but there was an interesting renunciation of violence (in the film’s own martyred vision) by Walt after a lifetime of being haunted by his own violence in Korea.  (The parallels to Eastwood’s own film career and the roles he’s played in the past are unavoidable.)

The greatest weaknesses of the movie were probably its reliance on Walt’s spoken commentary to tell us what he was thinking, and the somewhat uneven performances from the largely amateur cast.

In any event, I did feel that this was a great American movie, and, as many have said, the first movie of the Obama generation. By that I mean that this is a film that changes the mainstream Hollywood view, and mainstream America’s view, of what it means to be American.”

I certainly appreciate – and agree in part – with this response, and I’ve taken into consideration to what extent the film is not racist but about racism, depicting racism as a sort of rite of passage for how American men come to estabish a unique, somewhat perverse rapport with each other, a tradition into which the Hmong kid gets initiated. This certainly speaks true of my own life experience, especially when I was a kid doing blue collar summer jobs.  I agree that the film’s meditations on violence – and the Eastwood character’s ultimate act – makes for a poetic rebuttal against how Eastwood’s screen persona has traded in violence for most of his career, and if you consider that this may be Eastwood’s final film, the effect is incredibly moving. 

It’s interesting that the Asian American community, from what I’ve been able to gather at least among friends, has for the most part embraced this film as a fair and honest depiction of racism towards Asians in America, and one that gives sufficient prominence to its Asian characters and culture.  All the same, I stand by my complaint that the film ultimately disempowers the Asian characters for the sake of emphasizing the Eastwood character’s melodramatic sacrifice. It’s a post-colonial trope that is already looking stale in the 21st century.  In that sense, I don’t think it’s so much the first movie of the Obama generation as the last movie of the McCain generation – it’s told more from a McCain than an Obama point of view.  A truly Obama movie would tell the story from the Hmong kids’ point of view, not from the creaky old racist man on his last legs. Hopefully the last shot of the Hmong kids riding Eastwood’s car has a symbolic resonance to it – that minorities will have more opportunities to drive Hollywood movies in the near future.

And even if Gran Torino is ultimately more of a McCain movie than an Obama movie, I still prefer its wacky, brutal but unexpectedly self-deprecating honesty over the square seriousness we’re seeing in decidedly Obama-era cinema: Rachel Getting Married, Wendy and Lucy and Milk, films that, while well-meaning and competently executed, have almost nothing in them that challenges their own safe liberal worldview.

WARNING – possible spoilers contained within video.

Some time ago I had the pleasure of sitting among some of my respected colleagues to discuss the films of Clint Eastwood, who had another remarkable year in 2008 with the release of both Changeling and Gran Torino.  The round table was hosted by Evan Davis of Film Comment and included:

• Ed Gonzalez, Film editor, Slant Magazine
• Akiva Gottlieb, Contributor, The Nation & Slant
• Kent Jones, Editor-at-large, Film Comment
• Karina Longworth, Editor, SpoutBlog

To listen to the entire audio podcast, visit the Filmlinc blog.

I took choice segments of the commentary to produce three short videos on Clint Eastwood. Today I present the first of them, on Changeling.  Have a look and listen, and if you like it well enough, please rate it. also, see if you can figure out which of these critics picked Changeling as their worst film of 2008: