So, is Tolkien’s own luxurious study of Norse retroactively financially validated by box office and sales of Gandalf action figures with the face of Sir Ian McKellen, or was it worth doing anyway because a civilised country values knowledge in and of itself? And would these McKellen-faced toys fall foul of Thatcher’s Clause 28 legislation anyway, by virtue of promoting homosexuality, or at least a magical homosexual, to impressionable children?

via Will Cameron’s call for popular films mean more silent comedies? | Comment is free | The Observer.

hi,
i’ll keep this brief.
this portion of moby.com, ‘film music’, is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short.
to use the site you log in(or on?) and are then given a password.
you can then listen to the available music and download whatever you want to use in your film or video or short.

film music | mobygratis.com.

Fantastic! (Pleasedon’tbeblockedinschool,pleasedon’tbeblocedinschool,pleasedon’tbeblockedinschool)

Image via Wikipedia

Here is an essay to accompany my Vertigo slideshow (below)

The first thing you have to say about Vertigo is that it’s a very boring film. It’s clear by the end that it’s a great film, a cinema masterpiece, all that, but to a modern sensibility, it’s very slow-moving.

After all, James Stewart spends an awful long time following Kim Novak in his car. They drive through the streets of San Francisco, left turn, right turn, straight on. We see Stewart’s face, watching, back-projected. Again, to modern sensibilities, back projection looks odd these days. Even TV productions tow the car a long on a low trailer and film on real streets. The ghost of Hitchcock asks why you would go to all the trouble just to film some dialogue in a car, but they do.

Vertigo seems old-fashioned, slow-paced, clunky in some of its details, but (I’ll say it again) by the time we get to the end, we all appreciate that it’s a brilliant piece of work. Boring, but brilliant. What’s going on?

I want to confront that boredom face-on, because I think it’s important. I think it was possible to find a film, even in 1958, that didn’t move at such a glacial pace. Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis appeared in The Defiant Ones, for example. Kirk Douglas and, er, Tony Curtis appeared in The Vikings. High School Confidential was one of the top films of the year, and that started with Jerry Lee Lewis singing the title song.

Vertigo didn’t win any awards that year, so much is certain, but we don’t tend to show Leslie Caron in Gigi to our film studies students. Vertigo has attained the status of a classic, a set text, a classroom resource.

Why did that happen?

The short answer is that Vertigo is itself about film. It has metatextuality. That means it’s a film text that interrogates its own status as a film text, and questions the audience.

Show a teenager a picture of Hitchcock and tell them that he was an innovator, an experimenter, and an avant gardiste, and they’d probably question your sanity. But Hitchcock was an envelope-pusher. He made a film set on a lifeboat (Lifeboat, 1944), for god’s sake. He made a film which appears to take place in real time (Rope, 1948). In 1954, Hitchcock put James Stewart in a cast and confined him to a bath chair with a view over a courtyard. Rear Window is another Technicolor classic with a limited setting. It’s slow-moving, gripping, suspenseful, and also asks questions about why we watch.

Vertigo, then, is one of a series of experimental films, in which Hitchcock played with our ideas of what film is, how it works, how it relates to reality, and why we watch.

James Stewart plays John Ferguson (“Scottie”), an ex-cop with a crippling fear of heights, who is hired by a shipping magnate to follow his wife, who appears to be suffering from some kind of mental illness. The magnate, Gavin Estler, is an old friend. At first, Scottie is reluctant, but Estler manipulates him into agreeing to at least follow the wife, Maddie, played by Kim Novak. We see the moment Scottie changes his mind on screen, when he crosses an invisible line we didn’t even notice was there: he’s played the whole scene on the left of the screen, and now he crosses to the right. He’s hooked.

Scottie is single, though he has a female friend in Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) who wishes it wasn’t so. They were engaged once but now they aren’t. She broke it off. She doesn’t say why, but we know. He doesn’t love her, and never will. Their relationship is curiously sexless. Scottie and Midge: Tom and Jerry, theirs is a cartoon-like relationship. She sublimates her sexual desires by drawing women in lingerie, in which Scottie displays no interest. A pink bra she has apparently designed is suspended between them in her studio. Here is sexuality as a construction, a made thing, and here is an emasculated man, who has been unmanned by his weakness.

We last saw him dangling from a rooftop, a colleague lost to the alleyway below. Cops in movies are always running across rooftops. Dekard in Blade Runner does a little bit of that. He’s rescued by a replicant. Nobody knows how Scottie got off the roof. One minute, he’s hanging from a drainpipe, the next, he’s in Midge’s studio with a walking stick and a bad back.

A dream? So some would argue. Hitchcock just isn’t interested in how Scottie gets down from the roof. Because (and here’s the clever part), psychologically, he never does get down. He’s a lock-in, trapped in his own head, obsessed by his own failure, never the same again.

Ah, Freud. Hitchcock’s use of Freudian psychology is fascinating. Agree with Freud or not, his ideas gained a certain currency in the Hollywood of the 1950s. By 1962, Cary Grant and Doris Day are making light of our unconscious desires. In 1956, Forbidden Planet had “monsters from the id” attacking the crew of a space ship. Hitchcock is interested in repressed desires. He likes to use James Stewart in this kind of role. In Rear Window, Stewart is curiously uninterested in settling down with Grace Kelly, who forces him to notice her by putting herself in danger. Danger is sexy.

Here, Stewart plays out the Groucho Marx joke referenced by Woody Allen at the beginning of Annie Hall: he would never want to belong to a club that would have him as a member. In other words, Midge is too eager, too available. Stewart needs to find someone who is out of his reach, taboo, so he can become obsessed with her.

So he starts to follow Maddie Elster. She’s buttoned up, tightly wound, not a hair out of place. She’s an image, and he watches her through a frame: his car window. He first sees her in the restaurant Elster suggested, Ernie’s. She stands up, and is framed by something in the background, framed by a doorway, framed by the movie screen. Frames within frames, images within images. We’re watching Stewart watching her.

Later, in The Birds, Hitchcock would play with the audience’s need to find meaning in events. Why does it happen, what does it mean? In Rear Window, he was interested in our voyeuristic tendencies: our prurient interest in Miss Torso, the newly weds, our willingness to watch a marriage disintegrate, or Miss Lonelyhearts contemplating suicide. We like to watch, but we like to watch in the dark. The cinema is the place where you can watch in the dark.

Vertigo is brightly lit, high-key Hollywood lighting, and there is no hiding in darkness, though Scottie tries. Hitchcock wants all this out in the open, and Maddie knows he’s watching. The whole thing is a frame: a frame-up, a put up job, a show, a piece of theatre. She shows him her profile, over and over, trains him to recognise her. She was with Elster, ergo, she is Mrs Elster. Scottie follows her to a flower shop, which she enters via a back alley. Why is that? Why lead him into a back street?

He questions none of this, the poor sap. He watches from the doorway, and we’re convinced along with him that this is all from his point of view. For long stretches of the film, Hitchcock over-privileges his point of view, giving the illusion that he’s somehow in control. He is the watcher, looking at the world through a frame, making meaning as he goes. But she is watching him. She watches him from her reality, and leads him to believe she’s suicidal. Hers is the only other point of view in the film. We see the flowers she’s throwing into the water, we follow her eyes as he drives her down the road, we see into her memories when she meets him again as Judy.

She jumps into the bay, he rescues her. She “wakes up”, naked, in his bed.

Hold on: we learn, later on, that this was all a frame-up, that she could swim quite well and counted on the rescue. So she’s allowed him to carry her to his car, take her to his apartment, undress her, put her in his bed, all the while pretending to be unconscious, in some kind of dissociative Freudian fugue state, in which she takes on the identity of the long-dead Carlotta, a good-time girl who was a rich man’s plaything, until he got bored with her. Pretending to be unconscious while someone strips you naked? This is all a little bit deviant, isn’t it? Fetishistic.

A rich man’s play thing, Maddie-who-is-not-Maddie, wakes up naked in a man’s bed and immediately takes control of the scene. She looks her best with a little bit of hair out of place, in his red gown. We’re suddenly aware that she’s naked underneath her clothes. She sits and puts her hair back into place, remakes the image in front of his eyes, and then slips away when his back is turned.

He’s in love with an image, a woman in a frame. Midge tries to paint herself as Carlotta, but she’s missing the point. The woman in the frame isn’t real, can’t be real, and can never be available. That’s the only thing that Scotty wants: the just-out-of-reach, the rescue from the ledge from which he dangles, endlessly.

Eventually not-Maddie leads him all the way to a catholic mission South of San Francisco, where she blows hot and cold with passionate desire, then makes him promise to remember she loves him. She runs off, towards the church with its unreal matt-painted tower. The musical score hits a discordant note. The audience is waking up: finally, something will happen. We’ve been waiting a long time, and we’re primed. Scottie is a little slow. He needs another orchestral hit, needs to shot-reverse-shot look at the tower before the penny finally drops. He runs after her. Earlier, she’d led him through a church, walked down the aisle ahead of him. Now he goes to follow her in the same direction, but this time she’s heading up the stairs. Scotty seems slow, stupid, in these scenes.

Scottie’s still stuck on that ledge, in his mind, and can’t get up the stairs. The real Mrs Estler’s body flies past the window, and he’s undone all over again, a broken man.

The film doesn’t say how much later, but he emerges from his hospital room eventually, still obsessed. Now he sees doubles of Maddie everywhere. Hitchcock cleverly swaps actresses around, uses doubles of scenes, doubled locations, show us image after image that we recognise from the slow, earlier build-up.

See, it’s slow because it’s not about what’s happening on the screen, it’s about what’s happening to us, in our heads. We’re being framed as much as Scottie is, tricked into seeing one thing, realising its another. You watch Vertigo for a second time and you already know the twist, but the film is still capable of jerking you around: why are you watching? There’s always a frame around your reality, no such thing as an authentic experience.

Judy appears. She slows on the street and shows us her profile. A portion of the audience needs to whisper in the dark: is she the same woman? Kim Novak has changed her hair, wears looser clothes, appears to have ditched the bra. She’s now a long way from that cantilevered floating object in Midge’s studio. Novak’s body sways and moves in a sensual way.

Scottie treats her like a Barbie doll, dresses her up. Again, his interest is fetishistic. He’s not focusing on her swaying breasts, he’s thinking about that face, that image in the mirror, or in the frame. She knows what’s happening, is jealous of the woman she was pretending to be. But, victim that she is, she lets him do it. That scene in Pretty Woman, when Richard Gere gets the shop assistants running around after Julia Roberts, the hooker he’s hired for the weekend: here is that scene revealed in all its sickness, as Scottie dresses Judy as Maddie.

She emerges from the bathroom, where she has fixed that hair again, in a dreamlike wash of sick green light. Before, she sat in front of the fire and put the hair up in front of him. Now, she’s ashamed of it, does it behind closed doors. And, like a dream, there’s an inevitability about what follows. The necklace she kept as a souvenir. The drive to the Mission, the climb up the tower, the confrontation at the top. The nun interrupts the scene, and Judy jumps (or is she pushed?) to her death, taking the fall that all les femmes fatales in all les films noirs just had to take.

Freud might say that Scottie pushed her, playing out his unconscious needs. Now that Judy has thrown herself on his mercy and confessed, she’s as much use to him as Midge: she’s the club that would have him as a member. So it ends, with him up on that ledge, refusing to ever come down.

As well as practical film-making skills such as how to operate a camera and edit footage, you will have developed skills which will make you attractive to employers in a wide variety of fields. These include good research and communication skills, critical thinking, project management and the ability to organise your time effectively and work to deadlines.

via What to do with a degree in film studies | Money | The Guardian.

In this slideshow, I look at the use of Rembrandt lighting and the influence of the American realist painter Edward Hopper.

Both artists painted scenes where the light comes from a source. Rembrandt lighting is the standard two or three light set-up for illuminating a subject within a scene, creating a characteristic triangle of light on the shadowed side of the face (this is caused by the shadow of the subject’s nose). Rembrandt himself painted dimly lit rooms, where the light source would be a window or a lamp or candle. His lighting is soft and natural, his interiors shadowy with intense contrasts.

Hopper also paints with intense contrasts, but his lights are sharply delineated against the shadows, and often sharply angled too. Hopper paints modernity, whether in an urban landscape or a more isolated rural scene. Hopper’s people are lonely, isolated, and his scenes often contrast civilisation with the wilderness that presses in upon it. Even in crowds, people are often isolated. We also see people through windows at night, as one might from a passing train, and this sense of voyeurism above all is what makes Hopper’s paintings so cinematic.

The genius of photography is the frame that it puts around reality. Even the most mundane domestic scene can be made dramatic with the use of careful framing. This is what film does, and it’s what Hopper does: The house by the railroad looks imposing and isolated, cut off from the landscape around it. This metaphorical framing is then used by Hitchcock when he creates the Bates Motel in Psycho: the isolated, forgotten motel is a menacing presence, and the lone women who stay there are prey.

Hopper often painted women alone in scenes: in hotel lobbies, on trains, in rooms, in a restaurant, or standing in a cinema. They’re often reading, or thinking. Even the women who are with other people seem locked inside themselves. These women of mystery become the femmes fatales of film noir: isolated, lonely women who are making their way in the world in the only way they know how.

Related Articles

• Subtleties that shine through the shadows (search.japantimes.co.jp)
• Hyper-Realistic Street Scenes (mymodernmet.com)
• A Painterly Vision: Embrace Light and Shadow (photofocus.com)
• Cinematography Techniques (mrmovietimes.com)

With reference to the previous post about Joseph Cornell and his boxes and his experimental films, I think the title sequence to To Kill a Mockingbird (by Stephen Frankfurt) is a great example of how the slightly “out there” ideas you get from the art world can be used in the mainstream.

The film dates from 1962, and the opening sequence features a “memory box” which represents the plot of the film/book with objects. Unfortunately the only YouTube clip of it I can find has embedding disabled, so you’ll have to view it on YouTube.

Title Design Project also has the video.

Read more about it on Art of the Title. Art of the title also has an audio excerpt of the director’s commentary from the DVD of TKAM.

The last link will also provide you with another, to view the opening title of Cameron Crowe‘s film Almost Famous, which pays homage to Frankfurt’s To Kill a Mockingbird title and is also very reminiscent of a Cornell Box (though in this case, it’s a desk drawer).

Related Articles

• The Art Of The Title Sequence (VIDEO) (blippitt.com)