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Archive for July, 2011

Miscellaneous – 02

Originally appeared in The New Vulgate 7/13/11

Thoughts on Tron

by James Fotopoulos

Fragments and Awareness

“Memories Are Not the Same”

When the sun sets I am fully aware that it is going to rise the next day. Its disappearance doesn’t mean my death as early man allegedly believed. I have this same feeling when I look at films (or any art), especially older films. I cannot detach myself from the mechanics of the whole. Those pieces and how they are controlled is where I learn the most about the philosophy of the work. The knowledge of the orchestration of those parts for me is the most powerful part of the experience.

For example, once when discussing Shostakovich and how he weaved traditional folk songs into one of his symphonies I was asked, “How can anyone tell?”- the tone was as if this was a foul offense of artistic elitism. I thought that I was aware of the mechanics of the piece meant everything – it was like being awake and not asleep.

I was once asked to write an article on Curse of the Werewolf (1961) for a book on horror films (which as far as I know never was published). A few lines from that article:

“The only images and sound from the film I remember are: 1) a pan across a room from a standing mirror and out a door into a very blue night. The walls of the room were covered in very red blood. As the camera pans a woman’s scream is heard. 2) Broken wood in the shape of a teepee on a white floor. I had no other memory of the film, but I carried this cluster of images in my mind pretty much my whole life.

When I viewed Curse as an adult what was revealed to me was that those images are not even in the film. Elements of these images are in the film: the interior/exterior color separations throughout, a shattered mirror, a dead woman’s arm and very red blood. From these elements I had created a very specific false memory, but the rest of the film was a blackout. The color and texture of the sets and feel of the film were there.”

Memories of people, places and events from an artificial shadow-world that never existed are imprinted and woven into my personal history.

(Curse of the Werewolf, Shostakovich)

A Different Logic

A number of years ago I was watching Manhunt (1941) on television. And as I looked at the image I thought that perhaps the films of the past that compositionally translated successfully by elevating the image into caricature through a digital medium may be the ones of most value (incidentally the more static the image the more this is achieved) – something the makers could not have predicted. That same year I caught Vertigo (1958) playing on TV and thought the same thing – that the reduced image was interesting in how it revealed all the pieces very clearly like a miniature – giving a bird’s-eye view of the puzzle pieces of the film’s language. The acting of the film, I could not judge based on any standard as to whether it was good or bad – the painted backdrops were just that – paintings = a synthetic flat world. It was simply part of the object and beyond any such judgment – which made me think of works such as Murders in the Zoo (1933) or Shadow of Chinatown (1936) – where the film, through the strange randomness of the narrative and total lack of not just cinematic logic, but of all conceivable logic of character and story, which when all combined created a world beyond the criticism I had learned up through that point in my life – I simply had to accept and reckon with its sprawling vulgar existence. Later that year I was watching Fletch Lives (1989) and at a certain point became confused by the editing. Of these three viewings the last one I thought most about. That last film thrust me back into confusion – a primitive state of perceiving the piece. I do not believe it was the intention of the creators – but it simply occurred through the march of time and technology.

(Manhunt, Vertigo, Murders in the Zoo, Shadows of Chinatown, Fletch Lives)

All One

Once in Cleveland during a question and answer period for my film Migrating Forms (1999) I was asked by a film student why I talked almost exclusively about how the film was made (the camera, film stocks, lights, etc) and not about what things meant. I told him that I thought that they were completely connected – there was no separation. He didn’t agree.

A number of years ago there was an attempt to remake Psycho (1960) shot-for-shot. This always confused me because I thought that in order to do this correctly one would have to use the television equipment that the original had used. In my mind the use of those tools (which were innovative at the time) were inseparable from the whole of the piece. The very essence of the original’s grammar was the use of that TV crew model, the equipment and so on. One could not simply “paste” that style onto a different medium. If one was to attempt such an experiment, one should deal with the inner/outer space and separate fields that must be woven together – the field of the synthetic machine that freezes the actions before it = the camera, film stock etc. And the living field of the space with which one shoots into = set construction, location, actors etc.

(Psycho)

An Invention

Often people draw parallels between filmmaking and other mediums– “as if a painter…”, “visual music” etc. This I never understood because both the machine and the information phases of audio-visual work, exist because of a machine invented at a certain point in history (the movie camera and so on); it cannot be separated from it, regardless of the continuum that seems to exist toward the realization of particular media = still images into moving, plays with stage directions that could not be realized in their time until adapted into film or video productions, Alexander Scriabin’s Mysterium, etc. And to this day I ask myself when making work = how much is that machine doing? The film stocks… The computer programs… Therefore the need to master the parts, control them, fracture and reduce them in order to repress the level of their influence and maintain a primitive core, so that these pieces move through and brush against the primal center as the maker weaves them into a whole. When I began to show my work I described what I was attempting to do as trying to “elevate a film above the machinery that creates it.” If one could master the breakdown and assembly of the parts, an “elevation” could occur = the creation of a unified whole, which creates tension in the viewer’s perception, pushing him back onto his own personal history and into a state of strangeness and unknowing.

As I got older this was further complicated when it became clear that a lack of mastery can also achieve the same affect. I realized this did not occur necessarily from great art, but in fragments alone from either profound technical accomplishment or utter failure.

(Scriabin)

Similar … But Not the Same

When I began to make videos (between ages thirteen and sixteen) I quickly realized that what I was doing was not what I understood films to look like. I had shot a scene where my younger brother fell and hit his head on a crate. At the time this tortured me because I could not achieve the same visual language I had become so used to seeing. So by sixteen I moved to film and abandoned video. I was fully aware that I would most likely in the future be working only on video, but at whatever cost I had to move through what I considered a dead mode first – working on 16mm films – in order to understand film history and what I found familiar or strange in my own world of images and symbols. I did this for a number of years even as I started to work on video in the late 90s – fully aware I was working in a “corpse-medium”. One immediately realizes that a 16mm production is not the same as a 35mm (although there is slight affinity) and neither are remotely like a video production – only in the most abstract skeleton of the grammar – like ghostly appendages – shadows of a previous history. But I had to move through one to get to the other. The very nervous system of each was a different language and had to be approached that way. Only fragments of the language overlapped – or as one medium dies – only pieces of that collective language move forward, parts of the larger historical grammar – I tend to think of it as this image:

Optical printer = flat world

In the late 90s when I started Christabel (2001) I had originally planned to make it on 16mm film. I even came close to shooting it that way, but I halted it on the day of the first shoot. I realized that if I was to create what I imagined, the film would have been destroyed in the optical printer – the negative never could have survived so many passes through the machine: I did not have the resources Lucas had in Return of the Jedi (1983) which I believe contains some of the most optically printed shots in history – and foreshadows what would come in digital production decades later = shots with no subject, just constant movement and activity on all planes (perhaps Giorgio Morandi should be reflected upon). Around this time I had become intrigued with effects I had seen in videos projected by DJs in clubs and started to explore these techniques. Christabel would be my first shift into video.

Thinking along the lines of the optical printer, what has fascinated me about Citizen Kane (1941) was not so much what is normally praised about it, but that so much of it was created with an optical printer. The film was one giant special effect. A consciously synthetic work – which in my mind made it a truly modern work – a realization of the “inner-vision” using the most modern tools at the time – a work totally “inclusive” – piling in a multitude of elements from other mediums and the production – it seemed as if nothing was excluded but twisted (via the optical printer) into being “included.” And on the other end of the spectrum I would think of China Gate (1957) and how the optical printer was used to create close-ups of actors by zooming into the black-and-white ‘scope frame because there wasn’t time during production to cover the shots – but then “including” all that was minimally shot and “twisting” to create a new shot, a new piece of the puzzle of that film’s grammar = the close-up – to unify the whole. In these two poles one has the use of the machinery creating something totally unique – but approached in different ways, though both achieving, for me, a thrust back into the perception of unknowing – through the use of technology and orchestration of the production. In the case of the former, pushing the tool into a new realm to construct a whole and in the latter through the speed of the production and lack of resources, using the tool to try to push “back” into a whole – both reckoning with the “inclusiveness” of the creative process.

(Return of the Jedi, Morandi, Citizen Kane, China Gate)

The Core

In 2003 when I made my last 16mm film The Nest – I tried to make a film that was completely machine based – the sound was mixed all during recording and the negative timed in camera. I cut into the magnetic tape, spliced it and sent it to the lab for the optical track and then ran the answer-print off one light. I did not want to bring in any digital elements or even any post-production. All special effects were done in-camera. I wanted to create a film made “all at once” during shooting and be done with it.

After this film, when I moved into video, it was as if a great organic weight was lifted from me. I didn’t have a stable physical grounding from which to work. My sense of composing, editing and dealing with the human form was off kilter. I compensated by constructing videos at first around a series of sculptures, paintings and drawings to give a physical anchor that I was used to in filmmaking just by the nature of the equipment (the heaviness), the film stocks, the lights, all the processes involved in making a film and most of all the history of the language I had become accustomed to thinking in.

Around this time an image came to me in a daydream:

Then a second image:

Finally a third:

For a while I had thought about musical scores throughout history that could be played on any instrument or a text that can be realized by using any medium – but both retaining their strength as art at the very core = the words or notes on the page – that pure. I started to work with these three images over the next few years – first drawing them and then moving them into different media = sculptures, paintings, digital prints, computer programs etc. They appeared in videos (analog and digital), animated and so on. The idea of them as a central primitive core appealed to me and with that the idea of the power of a central style as an image or written word that was separate from the machine that creates it. For me this became a challenge as to whether I should or could continue making work. If I could not do this naturally or tap into the threads of that which I naturally contain, and harness it – then I probably should stop.

Transmission = Over

Around this same time I was in a museum and saw a video of Vito Acconci’s Claim Excerpts (1971) and was fascinated by it. It looked to me like a decaying object on a monitor. The transmission of the performance was no more – after decades it had become something else – a dead performance. I realized that in working in the video medium I had to jump ahead and create already dead transmissions in order for me to pull those fragments of the film grammar forward. So in a sense I had to create dead or false “performances.” What was intended originally with Claim – transmitting a performance – in a sense, vanished. Although at the time in which it was created that intent was necessary, but only as a start and stop – a small break in the greater arc of art making. (I’ve tried to create these small “start and stops” within the body of my own work by making certain short videos, attempting certain techniques that use an archaic grammar in film and or video – an attempt at exhaustion.) The transmission died – an advanced technology, audio-visual, did just that = it advanced forward. And in doing so reinforced the notion that the ultimate core strength in art making resided in the basic primitive elements of the craft skill – the marketplace created new tools – rendering conceptualism = marginalized.

I was always uneasy about the abandonment of narrative elements (and to go even further = genre) in art – elements that so many people use in their lives. For me it had to be reckoned with in the larger context of art making – they simply could not be excluded from the work one created (and I am fully aware as why this was once briefly necessary historically – and often first done as a phase within the greater creative careers of those that practiced it). When humans stop being born and then dying – then maybe those elements of the grammar (the narrative and figurative) could be abandoned – until then – both those elements and the singularity of art – the single unified piece – had to be worked with – in my mind anything other was an adolescent vision of life – a simple artistically limited exercise. What was needed in order for advancement was that narrative, genre, the abstract and the conceptual had to merge into “one” inclusive whole piece when creating. The conceptual was inherent in the act of any advanced production and the new technology it utilized in some sense was beyond the control of the people at the helm of the production. (I imagine the interplay like a cat and mouse game of humans vs. limited time – ie. Ridley Scott’s use of the three camera set-up) Therefore it was a natural almost commonplace piece of the puzzle (which has become grotesquely abused) – but to focus only upon it and exclude the mastery of the historical craft skills, the singular style or the primitive id core, for me, simply made no sense – and denied the reality of one’s inevitable death.

(Claim Excerpts)

Tron – Future Film

I had been interested in Disney’s animation, especially their mutliplane camera (invented by Ub Iwerks) and in particular its use in Sleeping Beauty (1952). In 1979 former Disney animator Don Bluth along with others formed their own studio and set out to make The Secret of NIHM (1982), a project that was a return to the intense and elaborate traditional animation techniques used during the zenith of Disney’s animated features of 1940s and 50s. When I was younger and considered a career as an animator I was captivated by this serious return to the “hand” and the look of the piece that Bluth and his team achieved.

As I became older I realized that the films which appealed to me were ones that possessed a strong graphic quality –a powerful display of the “drawing” ability = where an obvious command of hand-eye coordinated intelligence was apparent. Which I realize now accounts for my early fondness for the works of Fritz Lang and John Ford. They had an ability to elevate the image, the characters, sets, landscapes, into objects and caricature thus communicating a vast amount of information to the viewer. Also my interest drifted toward works where only the fragments, not unified, are in control. For example I went through a phase of watching all of Michael Curtiz’s films where the parts of the studio machine fulfilled that role. I can remember some the sets and miniatures clearly to this day – not even remembering the films – but just pieces of them. Whereas with Lang and Ford I remember the unified films.

A constant that has remained with me through my life is my interest in special effects, animation and puppetry. I enjoy works that are complete synthetic universes of effects the most. Counter to the popular trend to control production by collapsing the different productions phases into one via computers (which is a positive development if understood and managed properly – the phases always bled together, but now they can exist as a whole – a great advancement – when I draw, I draw as a whole). Much filmmaking hinges on how well one collects the various pieces of production and then arranges them to fall together – sometimes it all works, but most often it does not. Usually only certain parts of a film work. Now in the digital era, filmmaking has returned fully to the drawing impulse. For a while there was a separation – where only elements of that drawing ability could make it into a film if one had the skill to impose that graphic ability into the space of the production. But there was a distance then, now it is more immediate – where films have become so processed and constructed (the nature of editing is so fluid – like holding a pen) – the psychology of the animator, the FX person, the designer are now the dominate force at play in production and bleed into one master role.

At the same time as NIMH, and as a strange parallel, Disney made Tron – which I found more fascinating than the Bluth. With both new computer animation and traditional animation (much of which is the same as used in NIHM such as rotoscoping) the film achieved, in my mind, a profoundly unique look. Tron as far as I can see, posed a greater production risk than the Bluth in this parallel creation of the “hand”– it pushed further, in some respect, forecasting a type of filmmaking that was to come about twenty years later – the fusion of the computer, animator and designer – where the human and FX are one – existing in “drawing.” In a sense = a Future Film.

A side note:

Bluth spent a great deal of the 1980s on his video game “Dragon Slayer” (from what I remember it was difficult to play). An arcade near my parents’ home had this game as well as the “Tron” game – both of which, along with an early hologram game – visually dominated the arcade’s setting.

(Nimh, Sleeping Beauty, multiplane camera, Ub Iwerks, Lang, Ford, Curtiz, Nimh, “Dragon Slayer”, “Tron”)

10.

Style

I had always admired Jean Giraud as well as a number of other Heavy Metal magazine artists, mainly because of its focus on style, figurative work and narrative. (I mention Heavy Metal because a number of these artists would enter filmmaking in the late 70s and early 80s and have quite a visual impact, mainly through Ridley Scott productions via Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed Dune.)

As I mentioned earlier, the notion of a single style moving through mediums greatly appealed me at this time, but I was equally intrigued with Giraud’s ability to change styles with projects, adopting them with different content – and it made me think about my interest in what I believe is little understood = an artist’s mastery over his or her skill and conscious control over their creative ability. The design of his sets and costumes in Tron when merged with the special effects of the production created a unified vision similar to what I referred to earlier about Kane – a complete synthesis and creation of a modern work albeit, with Tron, only in certain sequences the total film comes together and becomes whole – not the “real world” subplot (whereas in Kane the entire film is woven together).

Giraud’s Tron design – in its singularity, fused seamlessly with the filmmaking process and content and revealed what was to come in film production and what can truly be achieved, if handled properly – a designer-art fusion – a bleed where old techniques of the cinema’s historical grammar, aren’t simply discarded, but absorbed with newer digital processes – an alchemy where a film can be digitally-molecularly assembled, truly maximizing the hand-eye power to including all the of language from the earliest silent film to the most contemporary computerized creations.

A mastering of this language can create a balance when the history is fully understood. For example, when I see a film where an entire city is green-screened and computer generated, and then the film goes onto a planet in outer space for a climax and the same technique is used = the psychology of the grammar remains the same – the street looks the same as the planet (wouldn’t a street in the opening of a film be perceived differently visually than a planet at the climax – and how would one achieve this?) – which to me reveals that at the very root of the conception there was a creative weakness – history and technology were ignored and denied – the notion of unifying was not taken into account. The content had not been psychologically wedded with the tools. When I first started to make films this idea was at the forefront of my mind – what tool, element of the grammar equates with the content and in turn how it affects the viewer.

(Giraud, Heavy Metal, Dune – Jorodowsky & Giraud, Dune – Jorodowsky & Giger, Legend, Alien, Blade Runner, Tron designs – Giraud)

11.

Return

In the Tron computer world – the design merged perfectly with the content and most importantly with the actual techniques and tools of how the film was created (no longer a window to the world – but a flat world). If that latter piece were to be pulled out – the “whole” would collapse. In order to achieve the same unification now, one would have to return to those same machine-based techniques that achieved the original film. The Giraud design itself in another medium retains its primitive uniqueness – but never obtains the same “wholeness” when removed from the series of technical processes that created the original (high contrast film, backlighting, colorization, rotoscoping, kodalith). Which again makes me think about my abandonment of appropriation (and film remakes). Its a time to create new works from the life history of the creator, with the new tools, and to stop returning to the heap of the recorded past, unless sublimating its contribution to the collective historical language, and birthing a new mode in the continuum. What is needed is the acceptance of the commonplace of conceptualism inherent in the use of advanced technology in audio-visual production (big or small) and a focus upon weaving that together with the mastering of the craft skill, personal style and themes, into an “inclusiveness”… in a way a returning to the manner in which Rousseau painted.