Intro: 21 films available to be nominated this year, and you must watch all to nominate at all; this year’s diversity: 2 “classic” animation, one CG and two stop motion

Coraline 3D clip #1 (into the other world)

Henry Selick Q&A:

This project came about because [said with slight irony] Neil Gaiman saw the credits of Nightmare Before Christmas and actually noticed that Tim Burton was not the director, so Gaiman contacted him while working on the book for Coraline.

How do you make a scary movie for kids? How do you sell it? Disney’s been doing it for years.

stop motion characters had “blocks” and “rehearsal”

Lenny Lipton helped with the 3D; it was different working with 3D. They tried to flatten the regular world a little and give the other world more dimensionality.

Jack Skeleton had 150 heads with different expressions. They wanted to make Coraline more expressive — they were able to have someone draw her expressions in 2D then have a computer render it to 3D, which could be printed out.

Coraline 3D clip #2 (escape)

Fantastic Mr. Fox clip #1 (courting)

Fantastic Mr. Fox clip #2 (Bean’s Secret Cider Cellar)

The Princess and the Frog clip #1a (”Almost There”)

The Princess and the Frog clip #1b (”Friends on the Other Side”)

John Musker and Ron Clements Q&A:

Disney had been talking about a version of this Grimm’s fairy tale for years, as had Pixar. Pixar envisioned a version set in Chicago at one point. John Lasseter wanted it set in New Orleans. John and Ron proposed a 1920s American fairy tale featuring an African American heroine set in New Orleans.

writing the music– the music should advance the story, you shouldn’t be able to take them out; they met with Randy Newman — this was different than the way he usually worked songs being integral to the movie; they showed him story boards w/ ideas and he filled in the rest

The clip we saw was the third version of almost there because they moved the location (and therefore the feel–optimistic / sad) of the song twice. Currently there’s a reprise where the song originally was.

The first clip’s style was inspired by Aaron Douglas from the Harlem Renaissance.

Parts of New Orleans today are similar to how they were in the 1920s. They went to visit 3 times for research (didn’t do this for most of their movies like Aladdin or The Little Mermaid). The first time they met a Voodoo priestess who showed them some sites. Their first tour guide Reggie was inspiration for the “Ron” character. They wanted authentic details — a valentine to New Orleans.

any cuts? no “soup eating sequence” as in Snow White

they call theirs a “self-inflicted partnership”

The Princess and the Frog clip #3 (swamp gumbo)

“the year’s ‘Hollywood story’ comes from Ireland”

The Secret of Kells clip #1 (in the forest)

Tomm Moore Q&A

The history of the Book of Kells

saw with Mulan and Hercules tat you can take indigenous art and update it and present it with animation

thought it would be funny kids going to their parents “mom, i want to see the story about the medieval monks and the manuscript”

work for the film done in Ireland, France, Belgium, Hungary, and Brazil

utilized triptychs, inspired by the styles of medieval manuscripts and artists such as Klimt

used variety of animation — if 2D is “dead” they wanted to make it as 2D as possible

The Secret of Kells clip #2 (Viking attack)

Up 3D clip #1 (courting and marriage)

Pete Docter Q&A
wanted to make a movie about a grouchy old man character — like his grandpa — can just say whatever he want

approached it the same as 2D — wanted it to look good in 2D and 3D; used 3D emotionally — so flattened the scenes where he’s sad or depressions and made more exciting scenes have more depth

Up 3D clip #2 (talking dog)

Q&A with whole panel: what they like most about directing these films, what they like least, why animation?, how do they relate to characters so different from themselves? (apparently it’s easy), etc.

brief notes:

Rita Gonzalez (Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art) and Alex Klein (Ralph M. Parsons Curatorial Fellow, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department)
Intro:
-Anthony McCall: “In recent years, the art world has paid a lot of attention to work in film and video, yet the dichotomy between avant-garde film (and video) makers, and artists ‘working in film/video,’ still seems to be with us. Despite the important role being played by museums such as the Whitney in bridging this divide, the two worlds sometimes seem like Crick and Watson’s double helix, spiraling closely around one another without ever quite meeting.”
-how film is physically presented and therefore historicized
-ruining actual context with ~artificial art context?
-ramifications of sudden commodification of film as “art”
-where is film located disciplinarily and institutionally?
-time-based work in gallery setting

Gloria Sutton, art historian, emphasis on Stan VanDerBeek
-his quote new “aesthetics of anticipation” vs. older “aesthetics of meditation”
-VanDerBeek worked with John Cage (Variations V)
-what is film? different forms edited different ways. Poemfields, BEFLIX; which print is the “actual” work?
-Movie-Drome – utopian vision, in some ways more the art than the actual place
-”expanded cinema” “experimental” “avant garde” American version
-Vision ‘65 using computers for graphic design etc.
-communication theories of Sontag and McLuhan
-his work was more about changing models of audience reception than technophilia; how people occupy space
-Kubelka’s Invisible Cinema
-steam screens
-utopian and dystopian use of technology

Stuart Comer, Curator of Film, Tate Modern
-why is the art museum the arbiter of value now?
-we haven’t yet figured out what the legacy of the recent era of experimental filmmakers is/will be
-only now being taken seriously because shown in commercial galleries—double edged sword—will drive up price at a point when the work needs to be archived before it literally starts falling apart
-like with VanDerBeek “where a certain medium was always being cannibalized and re-mediated through other media”
-not video installations, cinema presentations
-turbine space at the Tate

panel discussion / questions
-why not set up rooms/displays of the films: people walk by rather than engage with the film (vs. room w/ computers, where they sit and watch)
-the artists put requirements on how things should be displayed.
-what about artists who want the film to look/be legitimately degraded over the years; conflict with “art world” of archiving, saving, commodifying
-why current young artists use old mediums such at 16mm; fetishizing the past + a “wishful conversation across time”
-films recorded 16mm should be shown 16mm because that’s the work; but there is a role for showing archived versions–digital or youtube
-value is assigned to objects—so the actual film or the projector
-there are limited ways to develop / produce certain kinds of film, so why engage with that? (because of that?)
-roles of curators, politics of museums
-when museum “owns” work, do they have the “right” to do what they want with it?
-models of spectatorship are culturally inculcated

“To create a space that never existed is what interests me.” — architect Daniel Libeskind (on TED Talks, shown here)

“I’ve come to the conclusion that men don’t make history, I think history makes personalities.” — novelist Joseph Heller (in this interview [youtube clip]) (This clip also contains some interesting (moreso in hindsight) commentary about John Kennedy’s election over Richard Nixon)

“And one of the first things they did was they tried to take the comics page as is and transplant it to monitors, which is a classic McLuhanesque mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the content of the new technology.” — cartoonist Scott McCloud (on TED Talks here)

In this “historic time” (as people enjoy saying), it’s interesting (though admittedly not necessarily that worthwhile) to consider how we’ll be viewed through the lenses of history—what true facts will remain and what misinformation will have crept in. Misinformation—from the entirely unbelievable to urban legends to “old wive’s tales” to little white lies/fallacies—used to be spread by word of mouth. Now we have the internet.

This is a very roundabout way of not talking about the “historical” things in progress (is that an oxymoron?), but instead talking about what things and how things become “historical facts” (or just facts). Take Bannerman’s Castle:

There is what I would describe as a “castle” on an island on the Hudson River that you will pass while riding the Metro Rail North south from Beacon to Manhattan. I finally remembered that I wanted to find out more about this castle, so I looked it up online. It’s on Pollepel Island, aka Bannerman’s Island, and was set up as a residence and advertisement for Bannerman’s army surplus business, post Spanish-American War. (The business’ storage facilities were also on the island.)

HOWEVER, I get this information from Wikipedia, and this is where it gets sticky. The Pollepel Island page says “[Bannerman's Castle] remains one of a very small number of structures in the United States which can properly be called a castle.” At this point I wonder: “Is ‘castle’ one of those things that is very specific, but we use the term all-inclusively, like ‘Champagne’ or ‘Kleenex,’ or is it just a general architectural term?”

So I do some internet research. In a footnote, Wikipedia’s page on castles says (with no reference point): “Although it should be noted that there are no true castles in the United States.” So which is true? There are or there aren’t castles in America? Is “no true castles in the U.S.” just one of those quirky (and actually untrue) “facts” that gets spread around?

FURTHERMORE, in the end does it matter? When it enters general consciousness as a fact, does it become a fact? If enough people say the phrase “he did a complete 360″ instead of “a complete 180″ and enough people post it online and enough people read it and enough people repeat it, doesn’t it become fact? (After all, that is to some extent the way words enter the language.) And the people who argue for the true truth become “sticklers” or just plain annoying.

What of today, what of yesterday will end up as true legend, exagerated legend, false legend? Does it matter?

some notes, from memory, since I forgot to take notes:

Andersen begins by showing the architecture section from his 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, then (after noting wryly that he is aware the Chemosphere has eight sides, he’s just not aware of the difference between a hexagon and an octagon), he reads this quote from Gary Indiana’s Artforum review: “Andersen decries the movies’ ‘frequent casting of Los Angeles’s unsurpassed, innovative domestic architecture as the residences of drug dealers, pimps, and other unsavory types, like the Pierce Patchett character in L.A. Confidential. He feels that these locations, thus used, reflect the contempt both the movies and local architecture critics feel for architects like Richard Neutra and John Lautner. There is no mention of R.M. Schindler, whose buildings have appeared in many less ‘negative’ representations than ones Andersen cites; moreover, despite a genuine-feeling riff about LA’s dispossessed—slum dwellers, bus riders, the black family without hope—his architectural survey chooses for especial sarcasm the theme restaurant situated on the grounds of Los Angeles International Airport, virtually the only structure in the film designed by a black architect, Paul Williams.”

So the point of this presentation, Andersen says, is to address whether the claims he made in Los Angeles Plays Itself, the ones that Gary Indiana took exception to, are, in fact, wrong. (As an aside, Andersen first explains that his point about the LAX theme restaurant was that since the rest of the airport was so boring, it occasionally is used as a passenger terminal, as in Why Do Fools Fall in Love? and Smog (1962, which the UCLA Film and Television archive screened in April of this year, and though not mentioned in Andersen’s documentary is certainly worth seeing if you’re into that sort of thing).)

Andersen says he can’t think of the “many” examples of Schindler houses being used in film that Gary Indiana may mean, but he grants that in Impulse (1990) and Fly Paper (? not sure if i got that right) the heroes, or at least the least-bad guys live in Schindler houses.

He also shows clips from several more movies not included in Los Angeles Plays Itself that house the villains in Lautner residences: Less Than Zero (1987, Silvertop), Bandits (2001, Sheats-Goldstein Residence—same as Jackie Treehorn’s house in The Big Lebowski), Southlander (2001, I can’t remember the point of this clip—whether a bad guy did reside in the Lautner house, but it featured the Sheats-Goldstein Residence and Beck).

The timeline Andersen gives is: In the 1930s Hollywood (esp. MGM) helped popularize the Art Deco style. In the 1950s they were fond of Mid-century Modernism, as seen in Kiss Me Deadly, where the protagonist lives in what is now the Wilshire corridor. Then there was a shift in architecture and architecture criticism in the ’70s and ’80s away from Modernism and towards Postmodern styles, and that un-fondness of Modernism is reflected in the movies (and, as is typical, the movies pick up on the trend a little late). But now, he says, thanks to magazines such as Wallpaper (which is “easy to criticize”—a phrase Andersen is fond of), Modernism is back “in” and even more elite.

He uses clips from Charlie’s Angels (2000, where the villain lives in the Chemosphere—actually a studio set rebuild of the Chemosphere that cost more than the actual house to build and had a few adjustments, including in the view of the city (in diorama form)) and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003, where the hero Lucy Liu’s character lives in Sheats-Goldstein Residence) to illustrate that shift.

He shows Neutra houses cast as the protagonists’ homes in The Anniversary Party (2001) and Laurel Canyon (2002).

His point being: If he were to do the documentary now, he might have something different to say, since there seems to have been a shift, but there are still plenty of newer examples of villains living in Modernist houses. He concludes this point with clips from The Glass House (2001), Hostage (2005), and Fracture (2007), but he calls these Modernist mansions, and doesn’t have too much of a problem with villains living in them. It’s the middle class constructions of Lautner, Schindler and Neutra that he’s more defensive of, though admittedly these houses are no longer middle class.

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.”

“During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.”