setsuled | Entries tagged with art

Here's a comic I made for students last week when I was stuck at my desk during testing:

I didn't do my usual lousy lettering but instead awkwardly inserted computer text so Japanese junior high school students can read it. In this world of astounding if, at times, inappropriately surreal AI art, my poorly formatted font looks like 1999. You're welcome!

AI art's kind of starting to remind me of William Burroughs' cut-up technique (attributed to Brion Gysin). It's interesting when it makes unexpected deviations. That's now but I suppose, sooner or later, someone's going to figure how to make AI reliably do what they want it to do. And all the artists who have a hard enough struggle proving they have value in this world will have an even harder time. I can see it being particularly hard in Japan where artificiality has long been seen as an intrinsically valuable. I see the young artists at the school where I work and can't imagine the insurmountable challenges as they try to make careers for themselves three or four years from now. It's good to keep in mind it's always best for writers to write for themselves first and foremost but that might be pretty cold comfort.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: A machine
Current Music: "Voodoo Chile" - The Jimi Hendrix Experience

That picture in Gordon's office makes perfect sense and yet is also totally absurd. And that's the essence of David Lynch at his best, as he was with Twin Peaks season three. I'm now on my fourth viewing since it premiered in 2017 and am further confirmed in my impression of it as a masterpiece. At this point, I do think it's better than the original series, though I wonder if I'm biased by factors like how many times I watched the old series. A lot of the power of Lynch is in how he surprises the viewer with sounds and images and the more you rewatch his works, the less potency there is in that power. Yet the mysteries on Twin Peaks yield their own rewards for repeat viewings.

It's a sensory experience above all, though. And facts and clues have value insofar as they contribute to that sensory experience. I still come to the end of every episode with that delicious, transformed feeling I normally only get from watching an extraordinary, particularly good movie.

What Lynch crafts is something about the energy between people and the strangeness and improbability of human life. To take an example, the scene where the Buckhorn police are examining the body in Ruth Davenport's apartment. Detective Macklay (Brent Briscoe) walks into the bedroom, holding his hands in the air, which are covered with blue latex gloves. Talbot (Jane Adams) looks up and says, "Good, Dave. You're behaving yourself." It makes sense when you think about it--she's in charge of forensics and maybe in the past Macklay wasn't very careful about putting on gloves to avoid contaminating a crime scene. But without this context, we're forced to contemplate the strangeness of the moment of a man holding his blue hands in the air and a woman expressing approval with slow, careful words.

Even the little moments force you to pay attention, to figure out what's happening not from the standpoint of what you expect from a TV show but what you expect from life.

In this way, the show is a perfect antidote for narrow thinking. It requires a receptive viewer, of course. But if you're willing to sit quietly with it in a dark room, it can help you breathe like few other things in media can these days.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Gordon's office
Current Music: "Three" - The Cure

Last night I went to see the greatest movie of all time, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, in a movie theatre. Well, it's the most current number one in Sight and Sound's poll of critics worldwide. It's certainly my favourite movie though I've always felt weirdly uncertain that it deserves that top spot more than Citizen Kane, partly because I know very few people who like Vertigo that much. Generally the reaction I see is people think it's okay but don't quite understand what the fuss about.

I was hoping to get some impression of the audience's reaction last night though, as it turned out, it was a blessedly quiet crowd of about twenty five people, nearly all women, ranging in age from mid twenties to mid forties, from what I could tell. Whether or not they liked the movie, they were good movie-goers who kept quiet for the most part and I was able to thoroughly enjoy the experience of the film. I wish it'd been louder, I was hoping for Bernard Herrmann's score to really blast in the opening credits but otherwise I have no complaints about how it was shown.

Fathom Events is screening Vertigo in cinemas for its sixtieth anniversary. It also happens to be the ten year anniversary of the week I spent obsessively watching it over and over before I wrote this analysis in 2008. I stand by all my opinions in that analysis and I think it's one of the best things I've written. But one of the great things about Vertigo is my perspective is different every time. Like the protagonist in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, who watches Vertigo in one scene and explains the movie is different now because he, the viewer, is different now, I find myself responding to different things.

I'm more interested in religious symbolism now than I was ten years ago and I found myself thinking about how Hellish Elster's office looks. That desk looks like it was carved from the bloody flesh of tortured souls. A lot of people talk about how green is used in the film but there's a lot to be said about its use of red, too. There's the black cherry wood in the McKittrick hotel and the intense, almost magenta wallpaper at Ernie's, the restaurant where Scottie first sees Madeleine.

When I wrote my analysis in 2008 I spent a lot of time reading what other people had written about the film and tried not to repeat anything but I'm not doing that to-day. So maybe it's already been pointed out but it occurred to me last night that Judy's fate at the end being caused by the sudden appearance of a nun may be seen as an act of God. Scottie's finally broken free of all the illusions and the manipulations to reach the moment of clarity that cures his vertigo. One could say that a benevolent God watching this said, okay, he's done enough, now I'll take Judy off the table so he won't be tempted to go back into that cycle. But there doesn't seem to be anything good in Judy's death--a repeat of her apparent death earlier in the film, it seems mainly to be confirmation that Scottie's trapped in a cycle instead of breaking free of one.

It's a deliberately frustrating and uncertain ending, not unlike the ending of the new season of Twin Peaks. In both cases, we have a detective character traversing hazards of dream and illusion in an effort to save a woman who may or may not be real, a journey that questions the criteria for what we regard as reality. Having recently watched Mississippi Mermaid, I was compelled to think of how important Vertigo was to the French New Wave filmmakers. Like Godard continually thwarting audience expectations by abrupt changes to the score in Pierrot le Fou, Hitchcock continually plays with what audiences expect from a movie and uses those expectations to make the audience a part of the story. He sets up Scottie as a hero and thus makes us complicit in his deviance, he sets up a spirit possession plot and then dashes it aside because, after all, that's a bit fantastical, right? What were we thinking?

But is Carlotta's ghost really a hoax or is its reality simply in a different and deeper form than we're conditioned to expect? The effect of Carlotta's haunting is there, the paradigm of freedom defined by the control of others is set up by her story, and the pattern of dominated people trying to dominate others has an echo in the idea of Carlotta, victim to the whims of a man in life, controlling the fates of men and women after her death. The lack of any explicit proof of her haunting, aside from possibly Scottie's attention being drawn to the necklace in his dream, is in a weird way integral to the power she asserts. Just as "Madeleine" holds so much influence for not truly existing.

Last night I was struck by this pair of shots as Judy and Scottie discuss her dream that leads them to San Juan Bautista:

Hitchcock keeps cutting back and forth between the two. Judy and Scottie are in two different places but their faces are placed in almost exactly the same relationship with the lamp. Like Scottie's dream where he falls into Carlotta's grave or when he falls onto the roof the shot seems to suggest he and Madeleine are the same person. One could say that Madeleine is the joint creation of Elster, Elster's unseen wife, Judy, and Scottie but primarily Judy and Scottie. It's like a masque written by Elster about his wife in which Judy is the actress and Scottie is the audience/participant. Or maybe more accurately, it's like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign written by Elster, Judy is the Dungeon Master, and Scottie is a player. Scottie isn't a passive audience and Judy isn't simply a performer of written lines, they're both creating the story. The lamp is a little clearer next to Judy's face but it's closer and blurrier next to Scottie's--she gives him the dream, raw material, he interprets the dream and comes up with a plan of action based on it.

Yes, I guess this movie will always be fresh for me. It was an incredible pleasure seeing it on a big screen. The incredible visuals, apart from any interpretations of them, are wonderful to experience in themselves. I love these two consecutive shots as we watch Judy and Scottie leave the forest and then we see Judy at the beach by that twisted tree:

Current Mood: groggy
Current Location: A dream
Current Music: "Virtually Unreal" - The Jesus and Mary Chain

One can take deep pleasure in observing the beauty of human life in its myriad and extraordinary forms, or one can have the sensual pleasure of experiencing them first hand, but it's impossible to experience both at the same time. Having one means sacrificing the other in Wim Wender's 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin--literally "The Heavens Over Berlin" but released as Wings of Desire to English speaking audiences. I prefer the German title as it expresses better the broad nature of the film's story though the two titles might also reflect that dichotomy of observation and experience. In one sense, it's a beautiful exploration of artistic endeavours while in another sense its a lovely portrait of the human experience. It's quite good either way.

Bruno Ganz plays Damiel, one of many Angels who roam Berlin, invisible to adults. Damiel and another angel, Cassiel (Otto Sander), meet to exchange observations of commonplace yet extraordinary behaviour, like a woman who puts away her umbrella to let herself get soaked by a rainstorm. We see them rest their heads and hands comfortingly on humans in distress and some humans are receptive to the support of the angels even if they can't see them. The angels don't seem to be tied to any specific religion and we see them equally concerned with Jews and Muslims as presumed Christians.

We see them with a wide variety of individuals but the film pays particular attention to three--a trapeze artist named Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a elderly poet named Homer (Curt Bois), and the American actor Peter Falk (playing himself).

All three are artists of different kinds. If one thinks of Friedrich Nietzsche's use of the Dionysian and Apollonian dichotomy in art, one can see the actor and the trapeze artist as representatives of the Dionysian, artists who literally put themselves into the performance, while in the film's dedication to "former angels", directors Yasujiro Ozu, Francois Truffaut, and Andrei Tarkovsky, who had all died before this film's release, we can see the identification of film directing with the angels, or the Apollonian--the angels are cut off from personal participation but bring the poetry and revelation of dreams.

I would have said the film's style owes more to Bergman than anyone else but of course Bergman was still alive when the film was released. Not just for the way aspects of the human experience and mind are anthropomorphised but also the tone of the conversations between the angels feels very Bergman in their remoteness, pleasure, and contemplation. But of the three named, the film seems stylistically closest to Tarkovsky in its parts where it avoids attachment to specific characters and it resembles Truffaut in its contemplation of the fundamental nature of human relationships. Its visual style didn't remind me of Ozu very much but in its sense of detachment from and yet love for the complexity of human community I could certainly see the influence of Ohayo or Floating Weeds.

I love Wender's use of black and white and colour. The angels are only visible in black and white shots while colour footage is used to portray the more sensually connected world of human life. It's common cinematic parlance to use black and white to establish scenes as taking place in a distant past but as true cinephiles will tell you there's more to black and white than an evocation of the old. Like the observation of the angels, it transmutes reality to the dream-like, the fantastic, and the sublime. And yet colour is undeniably more complex and reflects a certain kind of emotional intensity--and for its greater realism it grounds the viewer in the more down-to-earth world of humans.

Eventually, one of the angels decides to become mortal in order to experience the sensory pleasures and it's significant that he can't have both worlds. Yet when he finally meets the woman he's fallen for, her immediate reaction is to intellectualise the experience as she discusses what their attraction means on a bigger philosophical level. It's not only angels who can travel between modes of thought, it seems, and perhaps each mode owes its strength to its understanding of and sympathy for the other.

Twitter Sonnet #1019

A language wrote above the beauty's hill.
A thousand tongues partook of wine at night.
A turkey strange departs the woods at will.
No shuffled cards can sure dispel the sight.
In troubles snaking by there's paint besides.
A calibration botched between the points.
A course distorted puts the weeds in tides.
A skull beheld its written name in joints.
Plantains at night recall potassium.
All drained of colour, crimping teeth.
No hue could come to bones for calcium.
The only pigment made subdued the wreath.
A leaden orb upstaged the thatchéd sun.
A circling heart resolves a painted run.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Location: Berlin
Current Music: "Plain Gold Ring" - Nina Simone

The stakes seem to be getting higher on Twin Peaks as several characters seem to be trapped, unable to move forward. I identified last week a theme of victimised children and that's certainly become even more prominent this week. Along with this, issues of identity and the line between innocence and guilt are being further developed. And of course, it's all beautifully shot and the soundtrack album is going to be phenomenal.

Spoilers after the screenshot

I'm a little sad people seem to be getting impatient with the Dougie storyline, but I guess that's to be expected. It might be the most autobiographical story David Lynch has ever filmed and part of the reason people are having trouble understanding it is that there's a growing misunderstanding of what it means to be an artist. People increasingly believe that great art is produced by formulae, that every effect an artist achieves is due to a master plan. There is plenty of calculation that goes into the work of most artists but most artists will also tell you they have no idea which things they do will have a meaningful impact on people and which they'll barely notice. That's what we see when Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) makes those seemingly meaningless doodles on the case files--and later they surprisingly have real significance to Dougie's boss, though Cooper himself seems to have no conscious understanding of what he'd produced.

Cooper had always been childlike and possessed of a great power of intuition. His experience in the Black Lodge seems to have rendered him a sleep walker and all of his powers of intuition have been enhanced. Or rather, his powers of intuition seem to be the only cognitive ability he has. But it all works as a metaphor for the artistic experience--Cooper starts out finding slot machine wins, a simple display of innate talent. Now he's moved on to something more sophisticated. At the same time, Mike (Al Strobel) implores him, "Don't die", which suggests he can't safely stay in this somnambulist state forever, and this is beautifully expressed in the idea of this great character, Agent Cooper, drowning in the dull life of Dougie Jones. This is the world of algorithms and formula that drowns an artist.

Janey E (Naomi Watts) seems to have all the other side. Her euphoria at the cash windfall has evolved--now she doesn't only want to pay off the 50 grand debt, she's decided to make the surplus from 125,000 even greater by negotiating the debt down to the original 25,000 loan. Now if only she and Cooper can combine their talents to a shared goal.

Cooper's also connected to children--Dougie's boss specifically describes his drawings as a "childish scribble"--and Cooper seems to have an instinctive connection with Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon). There are three innocent little boys now--Sonny Jim, the Drugged Out Mother's (Hailey Gates) son, and the poor little boy who gets hit by a car and killed, witnessed by Carl (Harry Dean Stanton).

Poor Carl. He'd already gone places and was happy where he was, as he said in Fire Walk with Me. All he wanted was a nice day in the park but it's Harry Dean Stanton's reactions that sold the emotional impact of the scene more than anything else.

These little boys--it's easy to look back and see them recurring throughout Lynch's films--Isabella Rossellini's son in Blue Velvet, Sailor and Lula's son in Wild at Heart, the child in The Grandmother. That last one, like Cooper now, seems pretty autobiographical and Lynch seems to identify with these kids, helpless in an angry and violent world.

Kids affected by war are mentioned twice--Frank (Robert Forster) and Doris (Candy Clark) had a son who committed suicide, apparently related to PTSD following service in one of the recent wars, and then Carl talks to a young man whose wife was apparently injured in the war. Neither of these characters are literally children but we learn about them through point of view characters who are their parents or old enough to be their parents.

Richard Horne (Eamon Farren), the sinister, predatory guy from the Bang Bang Bar last week, makes it clear he does not want to be thought of as "a kid" and in the process of trying to avoid this identity he kills a child, something he angrily rationalises almost immediately to avoid feeling guilty.

A generally melancholy episode, a mood assisted much by more score from Angelo Badalamenti and a closing song by Sharon Van Etten, also had some lovely lighter moments. Albert (Miguel Ferrer) angrily curses out Gene Kelly though he does so in a beautiful shot. We learn that the legendary Diane has been Laura Dern all this time, which of course makes sense, and back at the RR we see that Heidi (Andrea Hays) finally got her car started.

I also loved the sequence of Hawk (Michael Horse) finding those pages in a bathroom stall. Would those be pages from Laura Palmer's diary containing the message Annie told Laura to write in Fire Walk with Me? It seems likely though I don't see how knowing the good Dale was in the Lodge and can't leave is going to help anything. Maybe that's not all Laura wrote.

Also, is this the Black Spot from Treasure Island?

Twitter Sonnet #1002

All green collapsing matter was glued.
In ev'ry fallen hole arrived the dough.
Interred in cokey urns the drugs renewed.
A finer Hur than Ben will never row.
To set the cruel and metal chin was moot.
For tables growth discussions can result.
You must look out for any miser's suit.
Emboldened bins assay a dust assault.
Reactions mute beside the dropping face.
Above the wires speak with voice in arms.
A bunker stack of coffees start the race.
The oil sees but some of what it harms.
Inside a cauliflower stem's a mind
A hundred botanists could never find.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: The RR
Current Music: "Doctor Robert" - The Beatles