Back to School Special

With everyone, it seems, getting ready for the start of the new semester, I'd like to share a position, an attitude really, concerning (film or art) criticism or aesthetics that can be summed up in one adjective: "received."
For the first year and a half studying art history (in the late 70's) at SUNY-Binghamton, we, the graduate students soaked up the following message from our professors: "You missed it. The golden age of art history followed World War II. The humanistic greats like Panofsky and Gombrich drew the broad outlines of the art historical discipline and the most we little guys can do is fill in some details."
But by dipping into current scholarly journals - no Internet, remember - a few of us realised that in places like Princeton and Yale a wave of new stuff - mostly labelled semiotics - was washing through the art history departments of the better universities and we were missing that wave.
Then a new professor arrived who had written a doctoral dissertation on Minoan Art using semiotic techniques. He basically spread the new gospel, and luckily, we were able to graduate without looking like complete idiots with useless degrees from upstate New York.
And here's one of the things he said: "Everything you read, everything you study, and everything those old professors told you is received art history." In other words, it's old, it's done, it's finished. And by implication, our job was to make a new art history.
So that's what I want you to remember when you go to class: take with you the attitude that everything is "received" and you have an obligation to move forward.
PS- And the moral of the story is: send your kids to the best college they can get into, because the quality of the faculty determines which side you're on, the wasting-your-time side, or the moving-forward side.

Tarentino and Mannerism

I've described Quentin Tarantino as a Mannerist and I'd like to explain myself.

Here's my proposal: if I define a Mannerist as an artist who creates from his knowledge of art, not nature (or real life), then the label fits Tarantino, with his famous knowledge of not-famous movies, from his years working at a video rental shop.

Here's the history: the original Mannerists worked in Italy from about 1520 - 1580. Michelangelo, a High Renaissance painter, didn't die until 1564. So if you were a young painter and this great artist was still working, what did you do? You copied. And that's how people learned to paint in those days: they moved away from painting from real life, and began to practice, practice, practice, by copying all the great Renaissance art around them. And this was not a bad thing. Many great painters came out of this tradition: Parmagianino, Pontormo, and Bronzino in Italy. And El Greco ("The Greek") working mostly in Spain. Sculptors and architects did the same thing.

Just so this does not sound like a minor chapter in art history, let me digress and describe something that happened at the same time: the Italians called it "Desegno" (which translates as "drawing", but which really refers to the intellectual component of art, the part that is the ideas, and the rest is just "coloring") The Italians realised that artists could design all the new things of the world and make it beautiful. And what was new? Books, not just Bibles, but books for everybody. And in those books were words made up of letters and those letters could be designed, and what did you get: Typefaces. And a great age in typeface design began. And so today we use Bodoni, and, you guessed it, Giambattista Bodoni was an Italian artist who came out of this tradition.

So Quentin is not a Rossellini, who lives through the German occupation of Italy, then makes a movie about it ("Open City"). He's a guy who watches "The Great Escape" and "The Guns of Navarone" and "The Dirty Dozen" and then he makes "Incorrigible Basterds" using all he's learned. And that's not bad at all, but it's what makes him an American Mannerist.

Umberto D

I saw "Umberto D" again (Vittorio de Sica, 1952) last night. I must have first seen it about 30 years ago.


I'm not sure why it's commonly lumped together with the other great Italian Neo-Realist Films, because it certainly looked very smooth and polished to me. The other films (I'm thinking of "Open City" again, and even "Battle of Algiers" 1966, are a lot rougher around the edges in every way: lighting, framing, editing, and even acting.


And it's difficult not to seem like a hard-hearted American when discussing the plot: here's a man who has a sore throat. He dials the phone, two men show up at his door, and drive him to the hospital, where he stays for about a week, for free.


When Hollywood tackled the same subject, we got "About Schmidt" 2002, with Jack Nicholson, a comedy.


I really sat down and looked for original framing, a la Antonioni, and found none, but this is certainly not a Hollywood movie, and the best example I can use is the one everybody remembers about "Umberto D": the dog.


A Hollywood film would "personalize" the dog - make him into a character. Think about it, every Hollywood comedy goes for it: the "reaction" shot of the dog. An actor does or says something, and we cut away to the dog for a reaction shot. It's cheap, easy comedy, and it works every time.


Not in "Umberto D." This dog is a stunt dog in the best sense of the word: he does everything he has to do to move the scene along, but that's it. We move in close only when it's important to know what the he's doing, like holding the hat to beg. Otherwise, no closeups, no ground-level shots, no dog POV. And that's what makes this Neo-Realist.


So there's my appreciation: none of that Hollywood baloney and, still, everyone remembers that dog.

The Storyteller's Aesthetic Part One

Improbable Basterds- So I saw my big summer movie last night and it makes me a little sad, because it means that summer's almost over and Quentin's best wasn't all I'd hoped it would be. I'm sensitive to the fact that I don't want to spoil it for others, so I'm going to wait awhile before talking about it.

I've settled on The Storyteller's Aesthetic as a title to describe how I want to talk about American movies. It's a very unsexy label, but it helps me describe a decade that has no name.("The first decade of the 21st Century" appears to be the best we can come up with.)

I see the impressionists making commercials for Cialis and the storytellers struggling along, trying to Make It New, but forgetting all the lessons of the past.

Which reminds me: everyone should see "Breathless" the Goddard film that really turned everyone's head around in the 50's. Here's the thing about Goddard: every shot represents an idea. His cameraman has said that Goddard would be referencing dozens of films every time the camera changed position and would drive him crazy.

The Germans seem to take their storytelling very seriously. They have two words, which have to be loosely translated, which they use to categorise their entire oral tradition.

Here's what Wikipedia says:

"Märchen," loosely translated as "fairy tale(s)" (though fairies are rare in them) take place in a kind of separate "once-upon-a-time" world of nowhere-in-particular. They are clearly not intended to be understood as true. The stories are full of clearly defined incidents, and peopled by rather flat characters with little or no interior life. When the supernatural occurs, it is presented matter-of-factly, without surprise. Indeed, there is very little affect, generally; bloodcurdling events may take place, but with little call for emotional response from the listener.
"Sagen," best translated as "legends," are supposed to have actually happened, very often at a particular time and place, and they draw much of their power from this fact. When the supernatural intrudes (as it often does), it does so in an emotionally fraught manner. Ghost and lover's leap stories belong in this category, as do many UFO-stories, and stories of supernatural beings and events.

So - without meaning to - I'm back to Impossible Basterds again: the movie starts with the letters "Once upon a time..." on the screen, which the audience takes as a joke, but is really a warning about the ending.

So let's see how this works in the movies: I'm thinking "The Lord of the Rings" and "Star Wars" are Marchen, or fairy tales, because the characters and events have no direct space/time relationship to us. But all Westerns and war movies and even horror movies are Sagen or legends, because they "draw much of their power" from their connection to us, here in real-time.

So there, I said it: Impossible Basterds starts off as a Sagen and ends up as a Marchen.

Dialogue

Just having read Sean's comment on August 6 regarding film dialogue, I'm compelled to pass along the sum total of NYU film school guidance on the subject: Harold Pinter.

Pinter (who died just last year) wrote those great 20th century plays: The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, and The Caretaker. I think they've all been turned into BBC productions. We studied "Accident", one of those films where the main character(s) die in the first scene (remember 'Lawrence of Arabia"?) and then the rest of the movie is an extended flashback.
For sheer nastiness, his dialogue, and his characters can't be beat. I saw a movie based on a minor screenplay of his, "The Quiller Memorandum" as a kid, and it was a formative experience: it was the first time I was in the movie theatre when (adults) actually yelled at the screen to tell a character to watch out.

As far as more recent efforts are concerned, I'm impressed by "Pulp Fiction" as everyone else is, and by anything David Mamet writes. Regarding any Mamet movie: even when many things are bad, the dialogue is still great.

Touch of Evil again

I last wrote about "Touch of Evil" (1958) on August 11 and I keep thinking about it.

So I have to point out a couple of things:

Janet Leigh in that motel room in 1958: and I've never seen a reference to this in all the Hitchcock literature but, come on, when Hitchcock was casting Psycho (1960), he had to remember that image of Janet Leigh in her underwear opening that motel room door with all those crazy Mexicans running around.

And then there's that character played by Dennis Weaver (who is most famous as the star in the TV series, "McCloud"), the motel room night manager. I don't know my Shakespeare well enough, but it's been said that his character is lifted right out of a Shakespeare play. Remember, Welles knew his Shakespeare, so it's not an outrageous assertion, but I'd be interested in any parallels anyone can come up with. Remember, there's that night watchman Mike played in "Much Ado About Nothing"?

One of my favorite shots is: Charlton Heston, in the convertible, and it appears that the camera has been mounted right above the hood, so you get this great sense of motion, and the wind whipping around, and he's there, like a rock, right in the middle of this world.

This is a pure Film Noir shot. Among other things, Film Noir got rid of a lot of Hollywood camera trickery, like "day for night", and "process shots" out of car windows. You know the ones: the actors are riding in a fake car and you watch fake images out the windows in the background. So this shot must have been eye-opening to those who first saw in on screen: it's the real thing.

(And Sam Peckinpah remembered that shot when he made "The Getaway"1972.)

The Movie is Better Than the Book

I was re-reading Sean's comment from August 5 concerning the mannerist connection to "A Clockwork Orange" (I don't think so, but the subject's up for discussion after we see "Bastards") and I thought I'd like to start an ongoing list of movies that are better than their source material. Let me say right here that this is not film criticism, this is just for fun, or just stupid, depending on whether you're in the mood or not. You don't need a fancy degree to know that comparing media is a waste of time and critically unsupportable. (But, and this is a big but, that's what makes movie music so interesting: the tension between what you see and what you hear. Brakhage knew this, and that's why his movies are (really) silent.)

"A Clockwork Orange" tops the list. And, I'll admit, Anthony Burgess is one of my favorite authors, but his novel is really mediocre. It's the film that's great. And "Singin' in the Rain" is not mentioned in the book.

Another one is "The Searchers" by John Ford. The book is awful. Although I think that may hold true for any Ford source material.

And any Hitchcock source material too. Even "The Birds" is just a creepy short story by a good author (Daphne du Maurier) made into a great movie.

I'm so old that I remember when "The Godfather" was a book: a bestseller by Mario Puzo... it seemed like everyone in my family was reading it. And the book is OK, but...

Finally, there's West Side Story. If we put aside the quality of the acting in the movie, I have to admit that I like all the cuts and all the changes they made to whip that movie into shape (152 minutes running time). I think Mike disagrees with me on this, but I'd like hear if there are any specific changes that stand out as bad decisions....

Eldorado

I think Eldorado is my first Belgian film...

No disrespect intended, but I think this film should be shown at Chaminade, with an essay on Sin and Redemption due afterward.
It's hard to talk about the subject matter in any terms but Catholic terms.
Let's face it, the main character does nothing but good deeds for the entire movie.
But it was Sean's Pick, and Sean, among other things, wanted to talk about mise en scene.
(The Jesus Prologue was really the worst part of the movie. If the director really felt like he had to leave the only thing that was heavy-handed in the movie, that's fine, but someone should have talked him out of it.
The real first shot, of the main character driving his car, seems to go on forever, but it really sets you up for the rest of the film with a warning: this is going to be a slow-moving film, so get used to it.
My favorite use of mise en scene: the homecoming.


The two guys drive up to the parent's house, they meet the mother, and the three of them talk at the kitchen table. Then the son goes to talk to the father. Instead of following him, we stay in the kitchen, listening to the argument that ensues. You can envision how it could have been done, cross-cutting between the kitchen and, say, the living room where the argument is taking place. Instead, we stay with the mother for a very long time, with pain and sadness registering on her face. This was a really good cinematic moment and pure mise en scene.


In the end, the prophesy is fulfilled.

The literary connection may be obvious, but I will spell it out anyway: There should be a good name for it but we'll call it "This is really about something else" just as most road movies are not travelogues. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, which was published after WWI and for next decade or so everyone talked about the Odyssey connection, but after WWII people started to realise that the book was not "an ordinary day in the life of Dublin" but was the story of what Leopold Bloom does on a day when he finds out that his wife is planning to spend the afternoon in his bedroom with another man. Hemingway read Ulysses and said "I can do this" and wrote the short story "Big Two-Hearted River" which seems to be about a fishing trip but is really about dealing with the nightmares of war. My screenwriting teacher, Jackie Parks, told us that the master of "not saying what you really mean" is the playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter.
(And by the way, this is one of the reasons that TV shows are so bad: everyone always says what they mean.)

Eldorado is 100% linear except for the home-movie excerpt of the two brothers playing in their bathing suits.


If there were a Road Movie Hall of Fame, we'd have to include La Strada and Easy Rider (a slow-moving relic of the 60's). Two of my personal favorites are Wild at Heart (David Lynch) and Y Tu Mama Tambien (which definitely cannot be shown at Chaminade). If there's a list of road movies out there, I'd be interested.

Silent Pictures

Last night we saw "Singin' in the Rain" the play, based on the film. I've seen the film recently.



The film perpetuated the myth of all the silent film stars that lost their jobs because their voices were squeaky. In reality, since most film people came from vaudeville, their voices were just fine. The real problem was that the technical limitations of sound made most camerawork so bad for a few years there: between 1927 and 1932. There's one, only one actor I can think of who didn't make it to the talkies because of his voice, and that's John Gilbert ("The Big Parade").



Anyway, it turns out that now is the best time to see early films, because so many are available on DVD, and they're being restored at a pretty good clip.



Between comedy, horror, and drama, I think only comedy is really appreciated, and I really have to talk about that later. Horror would be a fun subject to deal with - I actually had a professor pitch an idea for a Master's Thesis to me with a movie horror theme - so I will try to see what I can see.



Drama may be hopeless. It's hard to take early dramas seriously, unless they're offensive, like "The Birth of a Nation."



And "Silent Pictures" is a pretty dumb label anyway, since all Hollywood productions were made to be shown with musical accompaniment. And the music is part of what's being "restored" as those new DVD's are coming out. "Early Film" sounds better, but is not precise. "Pre-Talkie" is good but dull. I'm looking for better suggestions....

Intentionality

I want to explain something that I'm not writing about: film maker's intentions. And here I'm borrowing a page from art history.

Since the Renaissance, artists have been writers, too. Michelangelo wrote quite a bit.
Journalists (I mean newspaper journalists) have always been happy to get quotations from artists, especially with the advent of "shows" and "exhibitions" in the 19th century. They'd ask questions like, "What was your inspiration for this? Why does it look like that? What did you intend?"
Artists were always happy to promote their work and would give the best answers that they could, sometimes boring, sometimes pompous, and most times, elitist. Just after the turn of the 20th century, the Surrealists came along, and decided to play the game their own way: they would say the most outrageous things they could think of, they would lie, and they would deliberately mislead. The journalists were all too happy to oblige by taking it all down and printing it, and sometimes what was said would cause a sensation and everyone would buy more newspapers.
Serious historians, however, were horrified. They were used to self-serving liars but Surrealists were taking lies and turning them into something new and strange.
And what came out of this is: intentionality, for an art historian or an art critic, is a waste of time. The work of art is, among other things, the fact in front of you. What the artist says he thought or what he intended is at best, irrelevant, and at worst, deliberately misleading.

I'm not saying intentionality is not important. It's important in law ("Did you intend to steal that laptop or did you just forget you had it when you walked out of the store?) and it's important for Catholics ("the intention of sin" being just as bad as the sin itself) and I'm sure it's important somewhere in psychology, too.

But if you want to talk about art, you just don't have to deal with intentionality, and probably shouldn't deal with it.

Addendum - posted August 19:

OK - so I did not realise that this idea has a name, "The Intentional Fallacy", and that it's at least as old as an essay in 1946, and did not originate amongst art historians. Here's what wikipedia says:
Intentional fallacy, in literary criticism, addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. By characterizing this assumption as a "fallacy," a critic suggests that the author's intention is not important. The term is an important principle of New Criticism and was first used by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their essay "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946 rev. 1954): "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art."

I could not have said it better myself.

Coraline and animation

Coraline - We had two personal connections to this movie. We just had dinner in Chicago with Neil Gaiman (and 750 other people). He wrote the book "Coraline" and was being honored with the 2009 Newberry Medal for "The Graveyard Book". And Mary went to elementary school in New Jersey with Henry Selick, the director of "Coraline" the movie.

Children's movies cannot be long (this one was 1 hour and 45 minutes) and that's a good thing. And I really liked this one, mostly, for what it was not, which is Shrek - possibly the worst animated film ever made. There were none of those wink-wink adult references to adult things, put in there to keep Mom and Dad from getting bored. There were no stupid movie references that- once again - are designed to make adults feel smug and superior. (Like the references to "The Matrix" in "Shrek") And the artistic references were motivated: the trapeze lady recites Shakespeare (Mike thinks Hamlet) because she's a retired actress/showgirl.



Animated movies are free to use space in ways that are difficult, expensive or just impossible in live-action films, especially those without special effects. There was quite a bit of moving toward and away from the camera in "Coraline" and, now that I think about it, was probably put in there to justify the 3D version (I'm thinking of that trapeze again and any scene involving the acrobatic neighbor).



I'm not sure why, but spatial relationships are just more interesting in live action than in animation, possibly because it's just so easy to do in animation (you start with Wile E. Coyote's eyeball as he falls off the edge of the mesa until he becomes a little puff of smoke as he lands on the desert floor below) and it's so hard to do in live action.



I'm thinking of that opening shot of Touch of Evil. It starts off with what we think of as a traditional close-up: the clock. But it's not a close up at all -and it's not just a clock either. Instead of a cut, the camera pulls away (or, I should say, the clock is pulled away), and we see that the clock is really the timing device for the dynamite, and the space of the whole movie opens up before our eyes. It's a mise en scene tour de force. The camera keeps creating more and more space; more and more of the world; until the things we've been following, the car and the people, are destroyed in the explosion.

(The shot is supposed to be about seven minutes long. And now I'm wondering if the clock/timer is set for 7 minutes... but anyway the whole thing is also an exercise in real time, as opposed to movie time, because there are no cuts.)

I'll have to deal with this animation/space thing again. And I've got to see Touch of Evil again, too.



Historical footnote: that shot was, famously, not done in one take.

Julie & Julia

Julie & Julia: So I want to start on a positive note: It's great to go to the movies with a lot of people who are having a great time. Mary and I saw Julie & Julia last night and it was like a meeting of the Meryl Streep fan club. They laughed and applauded through the whole thing. The movie itself was just a machine for making money: so conventional it made my teeth hurt.

Here's another critical thought: I was thinking that I couldn't describe this movie as plot-driven. It's a "comedy of manners." Which is a theatrical term, which makes me think that if the whole thing would have worked as a play, then what (or where) was the cinema? And the answer is: maybe there's no cinema there.
I know I've seen movies that would have worked better as radio plays, with zero visual coefficient. And this is not a bad place to be: asking what is the (visual) point?

Vermeer alert

At the Met:

Vermeer's Masterpiece: The Milkmaid
September 10, 2009–November 29, 2009

On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s historic voyage to Manhattan from Amsterdam, that city’s Rijksmuseum will send The Milkmaid, perhaps the most admired painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) to the Metropolitan Museum. To celebrate this extraordinary loan, the Metropolitan Museum will present Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid, a special exhibition that will bring together all five paintings by Vermeer from its collection, along with a select group of works by other Delft artists, placing Vermeer’s superb picture in its historical context. Along with The Milkmaid, important works will be on view by Pieter de Hooch, Gabriël Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, Emanuel de Witte, Hendrick van Vliet, and Hendrick Sorgh, all masters who, like Vermeer, were active during the remarkable period of exploration, trade, and artistic flowering that occurred during the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century. Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid will mark the first time that the painting has traveled to the United States since it was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair 70 years ago.

I know everybody's going back to college before September 10, but look: this exhibit doesn't close until the Monday after Thanksgiving, so mark your calendars. Maybe I can drag Mike and anyone else who's interested on the Friday or Saturday after Thanksgiving, that's 11/27 or 11/28, so mark your calendars...

Herzog and Antonioni

"Encounters at the End of the World" - Werner Herzog's Antarctica documentary - I was disappointed. But Herzog sure is honest: he says, he saw some underwater photography of the Ross Sea at the South Pole and was "invited" to go (I think that means that someone gave him the money to make the movie) and then he shows us what, and who, he found there. And the answer is: what he found just wasn't all that compelling. But someone who loved the movie wrote on IMDB that you have to see it on the big screen, and maybe he's right...

What's my favorite movie? (It's a good question because it's revealing.) I have to say L'avventura (1960) by Antonioni. (Which is a real conversation stopper because so few people have seen it.) But I have to warn you, people who see it for the first time usually find it infuriating. When it was first shown (I think at Cannes) people actually yelled at the screen.

It does seem like everyone sees 8-1/2 before they see all those other Italian movies that Fellini makes fun of. That was certainly my experience. It's great to see the really hard core Italian neo-realist films - I'm thinking of "Open City" as a great example - so you can understand where Fellini, Rossellini and Antonioni came from. I think the Italians had a conversation with each other, as opposed to the French New Wave, which seemed to be having a conversation with Hollywood.

I'm going to see Umberto D again, so I can talk about it.

A list: there's so much to say

Here's a list of things I want to talk about, in no particular order. I invite comments, though, if someone wishes to prioritize...

-ontology of film: this is more fun than it sounds, and I think Mike will back me up here

-comedy, with a subset of situation comedy or "Why I hate Seinfeld"

-Italian movies

- intentionality: I must talk about this (pun intended) because, whether you're involved with art criticism or film criticism, it's an incredible time saver

-the one must-see movie by Orson Welles; no, not Citizen Kane, it's Touch of Evil

-mannerist cinema: this will be more relevant after the new Quentin Tarrentino movie comes out

And what's not on the list: semiotics of film. I'm not sure if semiotics is worth it anymore, but I'm thinking about it, and will let you know what I come up with.

Storytelling and film school

I want to circle around the idea of the storyteller again, this time with examples from the NYU film writing department. I learned from three teachers: Jackie Parks, Mardik Martin, and Charlie Russell. Mardik Martin wrote the screenplay to "Raging Bull."

The film school was filled with students who wanted to hold a camera, be on a film shoot, and have their name on the screen. Martin Scorcese had taught there, and his early film "Mean Streets" with Robert Deniro seemed to be the quintessential post-NYU film.

The writing department seemed resigned to the fact that no undergraduate wanted to be a writer. I hope that they at least had graduate students that were more motivated.

The cliche was, "I can write a script, but I can't write dialog." The word "improv" was not commonly used outside of acting classes in the 70's. I think we all felt that improvisation was a way for a director to give up control and we hadn't learned to get control yet.

In retrospect, I realise that Jackie Parks had read theories of semiotics and was kind of testing them out with us -but she never used the word and we weren't even vaguely interested.

Mardik Martin had one big message for anybody who would listen: "Conflict. Every scene has to have conflict." I thought I got it at the time, but I've come to realize that this was the most important critical lesson I learned at film school, and I still use it to think about films. If you ever wonder why a film is so boring, it's usually because someone has written a scene that moves the plot along (at least), but has no conflict.

Now, is conflict the essence of storytelling? I don't know for sure, but you can see how someone could make the case for it. The contrasting viewpoint is: "No. Conflict is great for comic books, but characters make the story." (In fact "Characters Make the Story" is a pretty influential scriptwriting guide.

Let me try to sum up where I'm going with this: film making is not a fine art. That's not news. There are only three fine arts: painting, sculpture, and architecture. And I don't give a damn what anybody in any theatre department says (or, in my experience, hints at): film making is not some modern branch of capital T Theatre. In the past 50 years, film making has become the greatest method of storytelling ever invented.
I know it would be cute to come to the defense of campfires and puppet shows, but nobody serious really would. Someone really serious would come to the defense of Theatre, and that's where a real argument exists. (To use the word "argument" is a real 60's thing, but at least I know when I'm being old-fashioned.)
And, of course, we're in Visual Arts World here. I have no bone to pick with the written word, because words just exist in a different world, and that's just how I see it (pun intended.)
Even Brakhage said, "A picture is worth a thousand words, except when a poet is speaking." (No, that does not sound quite right, but you get the idea. He wrote a lot, but never well.)

This is my prejudice completely: "suspension of disbelief" works much better for me at the movies than at the theatre. And, to be honest, it does not require a complicated philosophy to be truthful about that.

Jan Vermeer: it's all about the light

I want to address a few things, mostly things Sean addressed in his comment.

But first, I want to start naming movies I see as I see them. Not as recommendations, but as opportunities to use them as examples if we wish. And I cannot help myself from saying a few words as I go along:

Doubt: a waste of great acting talent. A movie by John Patrick Shanley who thinks that because he can write a play, that he can direct a movie. He cannot. I cannot think of a single playwright who's adapted his own play for the movies well. (OK - I can think of one: David Mamet) I usually come away with the feeling that they're really telling us - underneath all that money and effort - that you really should have seen the play.

Maya Deren: Stan Brakhage said (in that NYU class) that Maya Deren was the greatest film editor who ever lived. That she had an impeccable command of timing. She was older, and I thing she was something of a mentor to him, as was, I think, Norman McClaren.

I saw that trailer for Eldorado and it looks very funny, so I'm putting it close to the top of my Netflix list, right after Coraline.

I want to use two painters to talk about Storytellers and Impressionists again: Johannes Vermeer and Caravaggio. You can check out the paintings online, although - I'm warning you - you can't make any judgements based on a computer image. Especially about Vermeer.

Caravaggio came first. He's one of the most influential painters of the Western World (although "influence" is not what it used to be). He's a classic storyteller. You stand in front of one of his paintings, and ask, what's going on?, and if you're pretty good with your New Testament you can figure it all out. But one of the ways he told his stories was his use of (what we'd call now) theatrical lighting. It all very dramatic: like spotlights on a dark stage. His light picks out the details and emphasizes what he wants you to see, and at the same time, makes it special.

Vermeer, on the other hand is very Dutch, very Protestant, and very un-dramatic. He shows you people in everyday situations, and you look and you realise that the subject is the light itself(connotation? denotation? I'm sorry, but I think they get in the way) No one had painted light like that before. So, for me, it's a very Brakhage moment: he's saying, look, just look at that light. And everybody who saw those paintings learned from them and it was not until Monet that you got that same obsessiveness with light. (Haystacks in the morning, haystacks at twilight, haystacks in the cold, frosty air.)

Tony the tour guide says: the best Caravaggios in NYC are at the Met and the best Vermeer in NYC is at the Frick. And if you have never been to the Frick, well, you just have to go...