Category: Art

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The Ingenue

An ingénue is a dramatic and literary archetype. “The ingénue symbolizes the mutable character par excellence, the blank slate in search of an identity,” the French scholar Julia V. Douthwaite wrote about the role of the ingénue in Ancien Régime French fiction. The ingénue is defined by her age — that crepuscular moment between adolescence and adulthood — and also by her innocence. A naïf in a complex, urbane, foreign world, she moves unaware of the hypocrisy, duplicity and exploitation all around her. She is credulous and vulnerable and dependent on a protective paternal figure and lives in constant peril of being exploited or corrupted by some lurking cad or villain. This threat is the central tension of her life. What makes her interesting are the questions of how she will navigate this world, who she will become and what will become of her. Traditionally, there have existed two possible outcomes: marriage (whether successful or ruinous) or death.

From New York Times, Carina Chochano, April 22, 2011

Link to the Full Article

So, at the very heart of it, the ingénue doesn’t know she is about to be tricked into having sex.

Once she realizes that the men in her life are willing to use her, she becomes a different person. Either she takes control of her life and becomes “worldly” or “cool”; or she becomes a victim, destined to appear on Oprah.

Kim Yu-Na, the Olympic figure skating champion, appears to me to have almost perfect proportions.  Waist, trunk, thighs, arms, shoulders: perfect.  If I was looking for a model for a sculpture of “Eve”, I’d ask her.

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The Perfect Car

To me, you are just perfect.

My dream car. At least, when I was 14, this is the car I dreamed of. I saw a dark, maroon version of it in a movie once– I forget which one. Probably some kind of spy film. I remember that it was occupied by a very large, bald man and he was coming to kill the hero. He wasn’t the real bad guy– just a henchman. That’s the car I dreamed of owning some day.

I saw this in an ad a few years ago. I suddenly realized that, if I had really wanted to, I could have bought it right then and there. It was about $14K.

Anywhere, here, for my own personal contemplation, the actual car.  Fourteen thousand dollars.  I could have bought it, but I’m old and more sense than that.

 

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Fast Cuts: Mediocre Directors

All right, you’ve finished shooting. You assemble your video and your audio and your special effects and start trying to pull it altogether into a coherent whole. You think you’re finished and the big moment arrives– you show it to your friends, some crew, film company execs, sponsors, whatever. It’s boring. It’s dull. It doesn’t “move”.

You are mortified. What can you do? Don’t give up! You promise everyone you’ll go back into the editing suite and fix it. But you can’t reshoot, because the actors have gone home, the crew is dispersed, the light’s different…

No problem. Just shorten every cut. Shorten every cut to about .6 seconds. That’s right, less than a second. Cut, cut, cut. Then add some more sound effects, lasers, metal on metal, whoosh! More cuts. More, until you have about 40 cuts a minute, if not more. Loud music, loud effects. Now, let’s jiggle the camera, as if your camera was drunk, staggering around in circles, totally discombobulated. That’s it– makes it look like this is really happening to Brad Pitt, right. You can tell it’s really happening because the camera man is jiggling the camera, man. That like a documentary! Looks real. Looks really real.

Fast cuts never make any scene look great, but they prevent lousy scenes from looking really, really bad. You can’t tell any more– each shot is only on the screen for a second or less. What you have is the illusion of action and movement, which is analogous to being able to be the eyes in the heads of five different people in rapid succession. This does not reveal anything to the viewer: it merely keeps him from realizing that the director is unable to develop an interesting sequence of actions from a single point of view.

This is not the same as Eisenstein’s theory of montage: in Eisenstein’s view, each cut provides a comment on the previous and succeeding cuts, thereby creating a coherent sequence that gives meaning to the action. The famous scene of the baby carriage rolling down the steps and the Cossack holding his sword aloft and the woman about to scream…. Modern action films simply provide a succession of shots without any inner coherence at all. That would require work.

Sergei Eisenstein, also known as the Soviet Eraserhead.

 

Why do ALL the previews now have quick cuts going to black? Can’t anyone do anything on their own nowadays? Who started it? Who did it first? Who said now everyone has to do it the same way: short, quick cuts, fade to black, fade to black, fade to black. The audience can really tell that this film has lots of action, so they will want to see it. Do not, under any circumstances, give the audience any idea of what the movie will actually be about, because it’s not about anything: it’s guns, helicopters, and babes, and moving cameras, and explosions, and revenge and mayhem.

Event the trailers for the films that appear to be about relationships or character are now chopped into tiny little disconnected shots, fading to black…

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Here and There: Neo-Puritanism and the Dutch

I am prompted by this ridiculous story about a young woman training to become a teacher. She had once posted a picture of herself drinking, wearing a pirate hat, at a party, on her Myspace page. later in life, while in placement as a prospective teacher, her supervisor googled her and spotted the picture and expressed his deep, solemn, disapproval. He and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, in their ultimate, beneficent, instructional piety and wisdom, decided that Ms. Stacy Snyder was thereby not worthy of a teaching job, and denied her a teaching degree.

Ms. Snyder went to court and, stunningly– to me– lost. (Of course, this was a U.S. court, where judges are elected by the same people who made Britney Spears a household name). The ruling was that this was not an infringement of her right to “free speech”. Is that what they thought the issue was?

How dare they? How dare those puritanical, self-righteous, stupid zealots deprive this young woman of her dreamed-of career because she didn’t meet their fanatical standards of purity and innocence?

I’ll bet those gentleman are patriotic. I’ll bet they are pious. I’ll bet they are believers. I’ll bet they would feel far more comfortable living with a bunch of Islamic extremists than they could ever imagine. I’ll bet that deep down in their tiny, crispy, blackened little hearts, they would love to force Ms. Snyder to wear a burka.

* * *

One thing I’ve always liked about the Dutch– and one reason a lot of people don’t like them– is this kind of pragmatism that was apparently too rational and sensible for the delicate Americans.

July 9, 2010

[I’m going to note in fairness here that getting accurate, detailed information about this well-worn story about the six-year-old kissing his classmate is difficult, and there are websites out there that believe the offense was more serious than just one kiss. On the balance of things, however, I still think giving the six-year-old a suspension was a tacit confession that the adults in charge had no clue about their jobs, children, or life. While I’m at it, let me note that as for the woman who sued McDonald’s because the coffee was too hot– I’m on her side. There’s a lot more to that story than the media generally admits. It’s become a stalking-horse for conservatives who want to relieve corporations of liability for their defective or dangerous products.]

Speaking of alleged urban myths… has there been a single confirmed use of the “date rape” drug yet?

We appear to have quietly entered an era of Neo-Puritanism in North America. While you can show any kind of violence, blood-letting, torture, cruelty, dismemberment, and murder on television or movies at any time or place, we have become extremely weak-minded and hysterical at the idea of sex.

Part of this is due to the unfortunate, unholy alliance between feminist psychology and Christian fundamentalism in the 1980’s. Off-hand, you might think these two cultural streams had very little in common. They did. But there was one thing they shared: an almost frantic paranoia about sexuality. The result: a kindergarten student is suspended for kissing a classmate on the cheek. Another student is taken away in handcuffs are drawing pictures of weapons. And another student is busted for waving a chicken-finger like a gun.

But the most egregious sins of this ilk are committed by middling managers– people who have some authority because they are astute suck-ups with a bit of education who can fill in forms and transfer money to consultants. They are afraid to make real decision and, therefore, not really smart enough to evaluate advice either. They always tell you, “the consultant said…”, or “the expert said…” So they see the 6-year-old kissing a classmate and they are too crumblingly stupid to realize that this was not ever what was intended by the term “sexual harassment”. * * *

What if your school day consisted of playing guitar, making papier-mâché “aliens” for your Mars project, dropping eggs from the roof to see how they splattered, and learning how to create puppets? Insanity, right? That’s how St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights operates.

I don’t know why it’s taken me 54 years, but I have finally begun to realize just how arbitrary so many of our social and cultural institutions are. In the 60’s and 70’s, we often talked about how schools basically train us to be mindless consumer drones, but, only a few years later, we began to “realize” how impractical it would have been do things otherwise.

And here is St. Ann’s, a towering affront to conventional wisdom. St. Ann’s does not award grades. There are few rules. Students are encouraged to explore their creative sides. And the kids are all right– they go on to good colleges and universities. The sky does not fall in on them.

I have no problem believing that a school like this would be quite successful, and that the students who spend all of their high school years in this institution would be capable, accomplished, and competent, and ready to take on the world.

I think thirty years ago I would have believed the products of this system would be nearly illiterate. Just as I would have believed that someone without access to surgery would die young. Or that a nation without a military (like Costa Rica) would be invaded by its neighbors.

At the same time, the Obama Administration is pushing the Bush educational program: teaching to the tests. Firing teachers and principals if a school does not meet the minimum average. Not an iota of effort made in the direction of teaching children how to actually think: we’ve gone back to the 1950’s where we only want them to read, write, and show up at the assembly line– or, more likely, Walmart, for their minimum wage jobs– and consume, consume, consume.

Go into debt — the modern form of indentured servitude.

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Streep’s Choice

Sophie is not a Jew, of course: she is a Pole. In fact, it is at times suggested that she is an anti-Semite, and Nathan certainly accuses her of it.

Hollywood simplifies. Reality is complex. Read this document about the remarkable experiences of Eleonore Hodys. I respect “Sophie’s Choice” for leaving intact the complexities, and thus giving us a taste of the astonishing ability of real events to confound our expectations.

As I said, I basically like “Sophie’s Choice”, but if you are a bright young author out there and you’re writing your first great book, please resist the temptation to have your characters fall over themselves praising your talent, as Styron does in “Sophie’s Choice” (Stingo is obviously a stand-in for Styron as a young man in New York); Sophie and Nathan, of course, think he is brilliant.

* * *

The mystery of Meryl Streep: it’s a great performance… that constantly calls attention to itself. It’s hard to describe what is meant exactly by that phrase– “calls attention to itself” — but I know it when I see it. (Dustin Hoffman — in “Rain Man” for example– is another great practitioner of the art of calling attention to himself being a character.) She’s so good in other respects, it’s almost possible to completely ignore it. But there are scenes when Streep is so much the actor being a brilliant actor that you almost forget the character: all you see is technique. Brilliant technique, but still technique. It’s so obvious in her performance that I could never believe in the relationship with Nathan– there doesn’t seem to be room in her technique for him, let alone a real passion.

The greatest flaw in actors like Streep (Ryan Gosling is another) is that they intuitively demand that every scene be absorbed into their performance. I always felt that any actor could have played Nathan– all you had to do was stand there an let Streep paint the colours of her day on your canvas. It’s the kind of technique that wins awards.

Streep is a very, very good actress at times, but one of the least generous actors I’ve ever seen. By generous, I mean giving the other actors and the film-maker space within which to do their own work. I mean studying the other actors to see what they’re doing and how you can contribute to the overall effect, rather than just call attention to yourself.

Kate Winslet is the opposite of Streep– look at her in “Heavenly Creatures” or even “Titanic”–: not as accomplished as Streep, but far more generous, and often more convincing. In “Heavenly Creatures”, she makes Melanie Lynskey, her co-star, look brilliant.

Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, Amy Adams– all generous.  Rachel McAdams is usually generous.  Meg Ryan is generous in “When Harry met Sally”: she gave Crystal room to ham it up.

Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams and especially Jim Carrey: utterly selfish. Every scene they are in is always only about them.

Next time you’re at a movie, ask yourself if the actor you are watching intently on the screen is contributing to the impact of the other actors.

And one more note: according to Wiki, Streep obtained an unauthorized copy of the script before it went into production and went to Alan Pakula’s house and threw herself onto the ground and begged for the role.

Smart girl: she knew it would win her an award because,

a) it has Nazis,
b) it has an accent.
c) it’s a period piece

[added 2019-11-20]

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The Orwellian Camera

On one of the new Sony digital cameras, you can choose a setting that will prevent the camera from taking a picture unless it detects a smile on the face of your subject.

We have reached the ultimate of the nanny corporation: telling you when to take a picture, when someone’s face is worth of immortalization, when you will be suitably charmed by the results.

As cameras get better and better at basic tasks, it becomes more and more difficult for professional photographers to distinguish themselves from a reasonably astute– and cheap– amateur.  In the world of art, this incubated the developments of expressionism, cubism, and abstract art.  If anyone (with a camera) could create a reasonably accurate image of a face, then what makes a work of art “valuable”?  Something you can’t do with a camera: expressionism.

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Method John Adams

I am presently enjoying the mini-series “John Adams” from HBO. Paul Giamatti plays Mr. Adams, and Laura Linney his wife, Abigail. It’s a superb series– I recommend it.

It’s marred, in my mind, by only one thing: Paul Giamatti’s bizarre performance.

Once upon time, actors learned techniques, for voice and gesture, intonation and rhythm, and how to evoke character. This worked very well on the stage, where a large number of people had to not only see you, but hear you. In the movies, however, the excessive embrace of technique sometimes led to ridiculous results–look at “Dr. Zhivago”, for example. The “drama”– especially during scenes that were supposed to be extremely emotional– is, by today’s standards, stiff and constrained. Clearly, the actors are applying technique, not instinct, to their performance. Watch Marlene Dietrich in “Witness for the Prosecution”. It’s hard to believe this performance got past the director and into the final cut. They make the formal gestures, but you can see that there is no intensity or spontaneity in their faces– as there would be in real life. It’s like those stage kisses still often used– the illusion is temporarily shattered.

Along came “the method”, popularized by Lee Strasburg at the Actor’s Studio in New York in the 1930’s, and, later . Strasberg, in turn, picked up the idea from Konstantin Stanislavski, the great Russian actor. In the words of wiki: In Stanislavski’s ‘system’ the actor analyzes deeply the motivations and emotions of the character in order to personify him or her with psychological realism and emotional authenticity. Using the Method, an actor recalls emotions or reactions from his or her own life and uses them to identify with the character being portrayed.

Now, I personally can’t remember which is “sense” memory and which is “emotional” memory and what the Meisner technique is, but suffice to say they are all variations on the idea that one should mumble one’s lines so that nobody in the audience can understand what you say and, therefore, will conclude that you are incredibly deep.

This is not all bad. Some of the most compelling performances of the past 30 years have come from method actors. And some of the worst.

The problem is this: Marlon Brando was a method actor. Marlon Brando used the method to arrive at a character, in the movie “On the Waterfront”, who happened to be inarticulate and shy. Brando mumbled. Brando received widespread acclaim and a new era of realism was heralded in. Therefore, great acting consists of mumbling.

So we have Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and– worst of all of them– Ryan Gosling. All mumbling and whispering and looking painfully introverted as they do their best imitation of what they think made Brando successful: mumbling. It’s as if an athlete came to the conclusion that the way to train for a race was to practice ascending the podium. [2011-03: Just saw Ryan Gosling in “Blue Valentine”. No actor of his generation is less fun to watch than he is. I’m not saying he can’t act– it just isn’t fun to watch.]

Even when your character is in a large room full of people to whom he is trying to speak: mumble softly. Even when the character you are speaking to is talking normally because otherwise you couldn’t hear him. Mumble anyway– he’ll know what you said because he has a script.

So we have the spectacle of Paul Giamatti– who is not a bad actor, by the way– whispering to his fellow revolutionaries– and being close-miked in order to be audible. You can actually hear them change over to different miking when he speaks. Why? What has possessed the man to such ridiculous lengths? To make his character more “real” he makes him utterly implausible and, at times, ridiculous. It hurts every scene he’s in… except, when he and his wife are in bed together– the only time his vocal mannerisms make sense.

There are obvious reasons for an actor’s preference for “the Method”, especially for actors who are more talented– at least, more ambitious– than average: the method relies on the actor ransacking his own memories and emotions to evoke the character’s actions and expressions. When an actor takes his “art” seriously, it helps to be able to explain that he or she has tapped into some incredibly deep emotional experiences in order to portray the character required. He’s deep; I’m deep; we’re all deep. You like me? You really like me?

I actually don’t mind the method, when sensibly applied. If you watch enough Leslie Howard and Richard Burton, you might start longing for “the Method”.

But you don’t see Phillip Seymour Hoffman whispering when his character is speaking to a large gathering. The Method has its limits.

The Diminished Ego of Dustin Hoffman

“Dustin [Hoffman] told me that if the director wants you to do something, and it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Do what you want. It was nice to hear it from a vet.” Canadian actress Liane Balaban kindly informing directors everywhere just who will make the final decisions on the set.

Hoffman, whose own career has steadily descended into sustained mediocrity (quick: tell me the last really great film he was in), hasn’t created a memorable character since… well, “Tootsie”. And even that was implausible– they insisted on an actor completely physically unsuited for a transgender role because the actor was famous. The same goes for Robin Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire”.

Is Dustin Hoffman still a good actor? I don’t think so. Watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman for a comparison. You can believe, at times, that Phillip S. Hoffman is the character he is playing. It’s very hard to see Dustin Hoffman without thinking right away, “that’s an actor in the twilight of his career”.

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Have You Heard of Hugh Thompson

Hugh Thompson, Larry Colburn, Glenn Andreotti. You probably don’t know their names. I didn’t know their names, off hand, until just recently.

Hugh Thompson was a warrant officer and helicopter pilot in Viet Nam in 1968. He happened to be flying over My Lai at the time of the massacre. When he realized what was going on, he lowered his helicopter between William Calley and several women and children and demanded that he stop the killing. Calley was a Lieutenant, and Thompson a mere warrant officer. Calley stopped, for the moment, and Thompson was able to evacuate several women and children. When Thompson returned to his base, he demanded the someone intervene to stop the slaughter. Nobody did much of anything.

It’s human nature that today we all know the names of Mark Spitz and Jessica Simpson and Michael Jackson and Regis Philbin…. but I’ll bet most people could never tell you who Hugh Thompson is.

The Remarkable Lt. William Calley apparently massacred more than 500 civilians all by himself. No one else has ever been convicted of participation in the My Lai massacre.

Calley, nevertheless, was only charged specifically for the deaths of 109.

What is the punishment for 109 counts of murder? This is America, the land of law and order, remember? This is the bible-believing Godly nation of belt-buckle blustering bible-thumping believers… The nation that believes justice should be swift and true…. the nation that sentences drunk drivers to life in prison, and video-tape thieves to 30 years, and charlatans to 144 years…

So what should be the sentence for 109 cold-blooded murders?

Three and one half years of house arrest.

And then there was an outcry from the “Pro-Life” Christian community and our evangelical leaders that this sentence made a mockery of the lives of those innocent Viet Namese civilians….

Well, no, not that I remember.

I think most of our evangelical leaders were actually calling for Calley to be pardoned. After all, you know, boys will be boys.

I’ll bet you didn’t know

  • Calley is 5′ 4″ tall
  • He’s still alive today.
  • Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, as a 31-year-old Major, was part of the cover up. He investigated complaints about U.S. behavior towards Viet Namese civilians in the region and came to the conclusion that “relations were excellent”. In fact, they were a slam-dunk of good relationships.

So I went home and talked to my friends and my relatives and all of my people who I thought had been my mentors. They all, almost to the person, said, ‘Shut up. Shut up. This is none of your business—leave it alone.'” – Ron Ridenhour.

We think we are a moral people, a nation with principles and integrity. But Ron Ridenhour came home from Viet Nam aware of an awful atrocity that had been committed by U.S. soldiers and he asked his friends and relatives what to do and they did not say: speak up, report it, let justice be done. They had been to the parades and monuments and speeches and dedications, and they all knew that all of it was a lie. Freedom? Democracy?

Ridenhour ignored his friends’ advice and followed his own conscience and reported what he had heard to his congressman, among others. Eventually, at the insistence of Morris Udall, an investigation was initiated and the My Lai Massacre was exposed.

How does a soldier decide if the orders he has received are lawful or not lawful? From the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, 1971, the United States vs. William Calley:

[16] The acts of a subordinate done in compliance with an unlawful order given him by his superior are excused and impose no criminal liability upon him unless the superior’s order is one which a man of ordinary sense and understanding would, under the circumstances, know to be unlawful, or if the order in question is actually known to the accused to be unlawful.

[19] Colonel William Winthrop, the leading American commentator on military law, notes: … Where the order is apparently regular and lawful on its face, he [the subordinate] is not to go behind it to satisfy himself that his superior has proceeded with authority, but is to obey it according to its terms, the only exceptions recognized to the rule of obedience being cases of orders so manifestly beyond the legal power or discretion of the commander as to admit of no rational doubt of their unlawfulness. … Except in such instances of palpable illegality, which must be of rare occurrence, the inferior should presume that the order was lawful and authorized and obey it accordingly. … Winthrop’s Military Law and Precedents, 2d ed., 1920 Reprint, at 296–297.

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Hallelujah

I learned that love was desperation and cunning, flagellation and mysticism, grunting and grasping and kissing and licking and scratching for the tiniest fragment of grace in a world of obscene emotional brutality.