Watching Ray and Charles Eames' Toccata for Toy Trains (1957) and Ayn Rand & King Vidor's The Fountainhead (1949), I noticed a strange dissonance between the two works. Apart from the obvious differences (that one is a short, the other feature length, one is experimental, the other Hollywood etc.), one particular anomaly seemed to stick out the most; that Toccata for Toy Trains was a far more enjoyable and human experience than The Fountainhead.
Toccata for Toy Trains is populated entirely by toys made of metal, wood and plastic, it has no dialogue, and no story to speak of. The Fountainhead is character-focused and dialogue heavy, and its cast is made up of popular, well known actors. Yet I found myself drawn towards the first film, and indifferent to the second. Somehow the two films seemed to have switched places, so that Toccata for Toy Trains feels as though it's filled with people, while The Fountainhead comes across as cold, mechanical and distant.
Toccata for Toy Trains achieves this humanising effect through movement, rapid editing, and its focus on the toys from an angle that makes them appear life-sized. Through this, the toys shed their appearance as mere commodities - as simple, lifeless objects - and are given the breath of life. In the world of Toccata for Toy Trains, where toys go about their business free of human influence and witnessed by us at eye-level, how could we imagine them as anything less than living?
As The Fountainhead begins, we are shown a montage of Howard Roark being scolded for his stubborn attitude by various figures of the establishment. This sequence - which is designed to immediately establish the ideas the film will present us - shows Roark only from behind. Throughout these opening shots we see only the back of his head; a shot that is replicated again as Roark sits in court, awaiting the results of his trial. In denying the audience a view of Roark's face, the filmmakers deny the audience any chance of connecting with his character. Without a face, we can't see how he feels about his situation, and so we are held back at a distance. Characters speak more like mouthpieces for Rand's philosophy than they would as real, and therefore emotional, human beings. Roark usually answers people with a cold "yes" or "no". He is blunt and all conversation is simply a way to further explain his attitude to life.
The Fountainhead's characters, who serve as examples to explain Rand's thinking, thus comes across as not only preachy, but as an attempt to educate, rather than entertain. Toccata for Toy Trains is pure enjoyment - it is playful and fun. Many people, especially as children, fantasize about their toys having lives of their own, of being real and alive, and the Eames' film is a realisation of this fantasy. It has a dreamlike quality to it, yet it is completely unaware of itself - the toys live as real people do, without irony or self-awareness.
Perhaps the two films, and the striking differences they suggest exist between people and commodities in the modern world, offers us an understanding of how much our relationship to our property has changed and of how we ourselves have changed because of this. We can easily imagine situations in which people say they love their phones, or where someone names their car. Products have become more than simple objects, as Toccata for Toy Trains suggests. We have given them their own lives by making them so important to us in ours, and, as The Fountainhead implies, we have lost something of ourselves because of this. No longer are people just people and things just things; throughout modernity, we find ourselves becoming united as a single entity, so that people without objects, are not fully human at all.
**** just in case things sounded muddled, I want to note here that in the last paragraph I'm not talking about the ideas in The Fountainhead, but rather the way in which the film expresses itself.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Stop Motion Animation
Stop motion effects feature throughout many of the films we have viewed during the course, and here I will talk about two specific cases: King Kong and Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair. Stop motion is created by taking still shots of an object, and slowly moving the object between each shot, so that when the film is played back at normal speed, it gives the appearance of movement. The simplicity of the process helped its widespread use throughout film history; from it's earliest stages, such as in Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton's The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898), right through to today, in T.V. shows like Robot Chicken.
The process of stop motion itself is interesting in terms of its place in modernism. Firstly, it combines still photography with film; a series of frozen moments play out rapidly, creating the illusion of movement. I'd like to suggest that this relationship is akin to the relationship of pre-modern art, and art since the end of the 19th century. The still images are like paintings, while their rapid succession is like film*. At one point during Charles and Ray Eames' Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair (1960) we are shown a selection of their Molded Plastic Side Chairs (Model DSSN). The chairs grow in numbers, various coloured chairs move along rows of the DSSN, and the chairs are shown as if stacking themselves. Here we have a prime example of a modernist take on a traditional piece of furniture, already in itself a comment on the connection between the old and new worlds, which is then made to look as if it has it's own lifeforce - the static chair is made mobile, a part of the modernist push towards animation (pun intended) and movement.
Another aspect of stop motion that is notable for us is the way in which it manipulates miniatures to look like giant behemoth's onscreen. In King Kong (1933), a monstrously over-sized ape is captured and brought back to New York, where it runs amok before being killed on the streets below the Empire State Building. Kong, who appears enormous in the film, was in fact a tiny clay-molded miniature. So, stop motion presents us with an effect that is simultaneously on a micro (personal, individual) level and a macro (global) scale, much like the modern world, in which we live not only individual lives, but also global lives - thanks to the possibilities of airplanes, telephones (and after King Kong), television, satellite communication and the internet.
Although stop motion has been all but replaced by CGI in filmmaking, its significance in the birth and rise of cinema parallels the inherent duality of the format. As cinema helped usher in the modern world, stop motion brought the past into the present, frame by frame.
*well, it quite literally is film, but never mind that for now
The process of stop motion itself is interesting in terms of its place in modernism. Firstly, it combines still photography with film; a series of frozen moments play out rapidly, creating the illusion of movement. I'd like to suggest that this relationship is akin to the relationship of pre-modern art, and art since the end of the 19th century. The still images are like paintings, while their rapid succession is like film*. At one point during Charles and Ray Eames' Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair (1960) we are shown a selection of their Molded Plastic Side Chairs (Model DSSN). The chairs grow in numbers, various coloured chairs move along rows of the DSSN, and the chairs are shown as if stacking themselves. Here we have a prime example of a modernist take on a traditional piece of furniture, already in itself a comment on the connection between the old and new worlds, which is then made to look as if it has it's own lifeforce - the static chair is made mobile, a part of the modernist push towards animation (pun intended) and movement.
Another aspect of stop motion that is notable for us is the way in which it manipulates miniatures to look like giant behemoth's onscreen. In King Kong (1933), a monstrously over-sized ape is captured and brought back to New York, where it runs amok before being killed on the streets below the Empire State Building. Kong, who appears enormous in the film, was in fact a tiny clay-molded miniature. So, stop motion presents us with an effect that is simultaneously on a micro (personal, individual) level and a macro (global) scale, much like the modern world, in which we live not only individual lives, but also global lives - thanks to the possibilities of airplanes, telephones (and after King Kong), television, satellite communication and the internet.
Although stop motion has been all but replaced by CGI in filmmaking, its significance in the birth and rise of cinema parallels the inherent duality of the format. As cinema helped usher in the modern world, stop motion brought the past into the present, frame by frame.
*well, it quite literally is film, but never mind that for now
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City vs. Man with a Movie Camera
Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film, Man with a Movie Camera seems to closely follow on from Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, made two years before. Stylistically, visually and aesthetically the two films share much common ground. Generally speaking, they are also quite similar in a thematic sense; both offer the viewer a tour through a newly industrialised cityscape that is in constant movement. Both films offer us cities that are thriving, living organisms; cities that are being propelled towards an unknown yet electrified future. However, although made around the same time, and employing many of the same filmic techniques, Vertov and Ruttman offer very different readings of the condition of man in the modern world, and also of what the great machines of the industrial age signify for man’s future in years to come.
Watching Berlin, one gets the sense that Ruttman is clearly trying to avoid any political alignments or commentary in his work. True, there are fleeting shots of beggars and paupers, but these quickly blend into the scenery. We are shown a sequence of people eating at lunchtime in the city; people eat in restaurants and cafes, at home, next to street vendors and so on. Inter-cut with this are shots of animals eating in the zoo, and briefly, a shot of a starving woman and two children. Ruttman edits this in a way that you are not able to focus on the starving woman and her children for long enough to get a sense of their poverty. Almost as soon as the image registers, it is gone, replaced by people with ample sustenance. Further, Ruttman clearly made the decision to keep Berlin a predominantly aesthetic experience. The audience is positioned so that they are able to marvel at the magnificence of the modern city, its inhabitants and its machinery. As the viewer is posited to watch the film in this particular way, any emotional interaction with the images on screen are thus subdued, and dulled to a point that they become negligible, if not entirely irrelevant.
Throughout Berlin we are shown people going to work, at work and coming home from work. However, there is never a sense of the hardship of their labour. In fact, the film seems to focus on all other aspects of city life; people walk the streets, drive cars, eat, and generally are seen to enjoy themselves. Ruttman’s film shows the population as living a life that is considerably more leisurely than it is laborious – the exact opposite of Vertov’s film. In Man with a Movie Camera we are shown people constantly at work, and the films goes to painstaking detail to show the chaotic nature of modern life in scenes of telephone operators crossing wire over wire, of cigarettes being counted and packaged, of butter wrappers being made over and over again. Even the movies - a recreational activity - is named the "proletariat cinema"! For Vertov, modern life is work, for Ruttman it's everything surrounding it.
Watching Berlin, one gets the sense that Ruttman is clearly trying to avoid any political alignments or commentary in his work. True, there are fleeting shots of beggars and paupers, but these quickly blend into the scenery. We are shown a sequence of people eating at lunchtime in the city; people eat in restaurants and cafes, at home, next to street vendors and so on. Inter-cut with this are shots of animals eating in the zoo, and briefly, a shot of a starving woman and two children. Ruttman edits this in a way that you are not able to focus on the starving woman and her children for long enough to get a sense of their poverty. Almost as soon as the image registers, it is gone, replaced by people with ample sustenance. Further, Ruttman clearly made the decision to keep Berlin a predominantly aesthetic experience. The audience is positioned so that they are able to marvel at the magnificence of the modern city, its inhabitants and its machinery. As the viewer is posited to watch the film in this particular way, any emotional interaction with the images on screen are thus subdued, and dulled to a point that they become negligible, if not entirely irrelevant.
Throughout Berlin we are shown people going to work, at work and coming home from work. However, there is never a sense of the hardship of their labour. In fact, the film seems to focus on all other aspects of city life; people walk the streets, drive cars, eat, and generally are seen to enjoy themselves. Ruttman’s film shows the population as living a life that is considerably more leisurely than it is laborious – the exact opposite of Vertov’s film. In Man with a Movie Camera we are shown people constantly at work, and the films goes to painstaking detail to show the chaotic nature of modern life in scenes of telephone operators crossing wire over wire, of cigarettes being counted and packaged, of butter wrappers being made over and over again. Even the movies - a recreational activity - is named the "proletariat cinema"! For Vertov, modern life is work, for Ruttman it's everything surrounding it.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Rose Hobart
Joseph Cornell's reworking of East of Borneo from a feature length jungle picture into a 19-minute ode to the film's star was created out of an obsession formed around the actress Rose Hobart. Cornell, having bought a copy of the movie for his own viewing pleasure, became captivated by Hobart’s beauty, and subsequently cut the film up so that what remained was a series of vignettes focusing almost exclusively on the actress. In exhibiting the film to a public audience, Cornell’s film openly expressed his own private desire and fixation on a cinematic idol.
The significance of his work is that it exposes the way in which we all fixate on celebrities; Rose Hobart can be seen as the ultimate movie in this way, as it removes all the detritus surrounding the idealized fetish object – the star. In creating a focus exclusively around Rose Hobart, Cornell gives voice to the fantasy of what the celebrity represents to an audience, and to the way in which an audience interacts and projects their own desires onto film stars.
Cornell first exhibited his work in 1936, from a film that was made in 1931. Although (comparatively to our perspective) the film industry was still young at this point, significant technical and artistic mastery of the form had already been achieved. By 1936, films were well into the sound era, and the use of colour in film was already slowly seeping into the mainstream, with The Wizard Of Oz (as a famous example of (Techni)colour film) only three years away. By this point, both the film industry and its audience had a solid grasp on how films were to be made and then viewed. The focus of Hollywood, if not all traditional narrative driven films, was on the actors and actresses featured on the silver screen. Since the early days of nickelodeons, it had become noticeably apparent that people would respond to certain faces on screen, faces that they would willingly pay to see again and again. With early feature films in the silent era, the demand for certain actors had already become firmly entrenched in audience’s minds. And so, we find the beginning of a filmic tradition that has remained unchanged since: the star system.
Rose Hobart is a prime example of how we, the audience, respond to these stars. We see them as some sort of ideal, an image of perfection. The star offers us a fantasy in which we can see ourselves in their place. They provide a point that we can fixate on, and fetishize. Cornell cut up East of Borneo so that this point of fetish is all that remains; story, dialogue, action, etc. are made irrelevant in the face of the all-powerful Rose Hobart, who remains on screen as a constant focus throughout. Rose Hobart gives us exactly the opposite of what a traditional film gives us. Instead of anticipation and build up, the film is all pay off, it is all climax.
Cornell goes to further extremes to give the audience the ultimate in voyeuristic pleasure. We don’t want stars to live normal lives, and we don’t want them to exist in the real world. For stars to be stars, to give us the pleasure of fantasy and role-play, they must exist in a perfect, fantastic world – the world of film. Rose Hobart is tinted blue, is slowed down to a graceful, leisurely and elegant pace and is without dialogue. The star is unencumbered by any intrusion of reality whatsoever, and exists only as an object of our (or in this case Cornell’s) desire.
The significance of his work is that it exposes the way in which we all fixate on celebrities; Rose Hobart can be seen as the ultimate movie in this way, as it removes all the detritus surrounding the idealized fetish object – the star. In creating a focus exclusively around Rose Hobart, Cornell gives voice to the fantasy of what the celebrity represents to an audience, and to the way in which an audience interacts and projects their own desires onto film stars.
Cornell first exhibited his work in 1936, from a film that was made in 1931. Although (comparatively to our perspective) the film industry was still young at this point, significant technical and artistic mastery of the form had already been achieved. By 1936, films were well into the sound era, and the use of colour in film was already slowly seeping into the mainstream, with The Wizard Of Oz (as a famous example of (Techni)colour film) only three years away. By this point, both the film industry and its audience had a solid grasp on how films were to be made and then viewed. The focus of Hollywood, if not all traditional narrative driven films, was on the actors and actresses featured on the silver screen. Since the early days of nickelodeons, it had become noticeably apparent that people would respond to certain faces on screen, faces that they would willingly pay to see again and again. With early feature films in the silent era, the demand for certain actors had already become firmly entrenched in audience’s minds. And so, we find the beginning of a filmic tradition that has remained unchanged since: the star system.
Rose Hobart is a prime example of how we, the audience, respond to these stars. We see them as some sort of ideal, an image of perfection. The star offers us a fantasy in which we can see ourselves in their place. They provide a point that we can fixate on, and fetishize. Cornell cut up East of Borneo so that this point of fetish is all that remains; story, dialogue, action, etc. are made irrelevant in the face of the all-powerful Rose Hobart, who remains on screen as a constant focus throughout. Rose Hobart gives us exactly the opposite of what a traditional film gives us. Instead of anticipation and build up, the film is all pay off, it is all climax.
Cornell goes to further extremes to give the audience the ultimate in voyeuristic pleasure. We don’t want stars to live normal lives, and we don’t want them to exist in the real world. For stars to be stars, to give us the pleasure of fantasy and role-play, they must exist in a perfect, fantastic world – the world of film. Rose Hobart is tinted blue, is slowed down to a graceful, leisurely and elegant pace and is without dialogue. The star is unencumbered by any intrusion of reality whatsoever, and exists only as an object of our (or in this case Cornell’s) desire.
Monday, March 16, 2009
first post
hi, this is my blog thing.
my top five movies at the moment are:
1. That Thing You Do!
2. Wayne's World
3. Robocop
4. Return Of The Living Dead
5. Holy Mountain
that's not in any order by the way, i like them all the same amount. and its not my top five ever cause i can't work that out at all.
i saw someone wrote that they thought benjamin button should have won the oscar? i dunno, i think the wrestler and mickey rourke were robbed. denied!
my top five movies at the moment are:
1. That Thing You Do!
2. Wayne's World
3. Robocop
4. Return Of The Living Dead
5. Holy Mountain
that's not in any order by the way, i like them all the same amount. and its not my top five ever cause i can't work that out at all.
i saw someone wrote that they thought benjamin button should have won the oscar? i dunno, i think the wrestler and mickey rourke were robbed. denied!
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