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.

Notes:

Crawford
-Hitler wanted to “cleanse” music too; wanted to get rid of the culture of chaos in the Weimar Republic

-book covers 31 of the musicians who immigrated to L.A. during the Nazi era including composers and all kinds of performers, especially focused on those with paper “legacy” for research — letters etc.

-utilized Gladys Caldwell’s collection of newspaper articles about live music reviews starting from the ’20s from LAPL

-writers came to L.A. too and some of these people knew each other (Mann, Brecht); émigré circles

-chapter about film composers — how they saved themselves as “composers” (didn’t want to be looked down on as film composers only); composer for Errol Flynn movies

-in those days in Hollywood every studio had a full orchestra

-LACC opera workshop, first of its kind (i.e. at public school); but no opera in L.A. until 1986 which was tough for many of the composers who came from opera-rich Europe, so singers trained in L.A. had to go to Europe

-why did so many of these artists end up in L.A.? tried other European cities first but the Great Depression meant quotas had been set up to save jobs for locals, whereas the film industry had a lot of jobs to go around. +, of course, the weather

-Ojai Festival

-people saving their money to bring people out of Europe

Kraft
-after the wars arts take on a new dimension: after WWI experimentation (Schoenberg 12-tone), after WWII trying to make order from the chaos; in these cases didn’t draw on the past so much

-Tom Mix westerns uncredited composers

-”no minor chords” (Sam Goldwyn)

-L.A. Music Festival (Waxman)

-playing “donuts” = whole notes

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

notes
introduction
1st use of the word “documentary” = “document of reality” in the New York Sun in 1926 about Robert Flaherty’s film Moana
more truth than recreated reality
Lumière brothers 1st documentaries pre-1900 edited ‘in camera’
1907 1st documentary recreation of real incident = Stanford white murder
1900-1920 “scenics”/travelogues; Berlin, Symphony of a City in Europe
escaping the “bourgeois excess” of dramatic fiction (Vertov)
types: newsreels; propaganda; cinéma vérité (editor makes the narrative)

Kate Amend
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000)
-secretive so there was no actual footage
-convey traumatic experience
-create shots of train; researchers found (abstract) train footage then slowed down to give dreamlike memory quality
-subjects brought photos—then effects to add movement to photos
-bigger budget than Beah
-watch dailies, select moments from interviews; director had a good idea of how to unfold stories
-super 16–>35mm
Beah: A Black Woman Speaks (2003)
- ~30 40-min interviews while she is sick (she died shortly after)
-they didn’t want a biography but a history of her life as political figure, teacher, actress, and how she is facing death
-”so in the ‘I am’ thing” (Beah)
-LisaGay Hamilton: 1st time filmmaker; didn’t start out to make a film just wanted to talk with Beah (they had met working on Beloved); she was also the narrator
-structure is not linear
-use of Beah’s poetry throughout

William Cartwright
-started out working on Paul Coates television documentaries
-the point of editing is to build energy of a piece
Four Days in November (1964)
-JFK assassination; began work on this while still finished up The Making of the President 1960
-newsreel footage and voice-overs; additional voice-over; photo of death scene not footage
-shots of clocks around Dallas to keep time-frame; shot along w/ book depository footage and driving scenes by crews who flew down to Dallas
-verisimilitude
-16mm–>35mm (doesn’t blow up well, but adds a certain feel)
-detail of Presidents steak being one chosen at random of 2500
-shots of protesters (”Hail Ceasar” [sic])
-”we lost something great…he was not an ordinary man” (Cartwright)
Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (1994)
-Vietnam Memorial
-how film arrives at design (first time we see it is the watercolor)
-then hear the veteran’s dislike of it
-but the immediacy of a person’s name on a wall—being able to touch it
-Cezanne’s theory of cones, spheres, cubes
-her other designs (e.g. in Montgomery, at Yale) include water—living quality

Joe Bini
Grizzly Man (2005)
-Timothy was protecting bears in a national park (already protected); 100 hrs of his footage
-they edited in 6 wks
-when they first watched his footage they didn’t like him, but grew to respect him as filmmaker
-first half is building up the circumstances; second is looking at the psychology of the man
-central thing to be dealt w/ in the film is the tape; one theme of Herzog’s is exploitation
-inventive directoral choice—his listening to the tape then disposing of it
-juxtaposed next w/ scene of bear fight then Timothy
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008)
-80 interviews in about 5 years + archived footage + his films and their soundtracks
-film focuses on his trial
-titles instead of narration
-his version vs her version and how they overlap—2 opinions that amount to nearly the same thing (Rashomon)
-life imitating art (The Fat and the Lean) judge staged the trial
-exploitation

Brian Johnson
Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
-150 hrs of footage
-24-track applied over camera sound; Ry Cooder remixed for the film
-Ibrahim in his apartment–>live session juxtaposed with street scenes in Cuba
-the vivid colors of the rusty automobile
Fighting for Life (2008)
-trained doctors and nurses of the armed forces
-shots at the school, then the graduates in Germany, the the wounded in Iraq, then back to Germany, then to Walter Reed Naval Hospital
-need to have lighter scenes intermixed to give the audience a break so it’s not so oppressive and depressing

Jacques Derrida in interview with L.A. Times, April 9, 2003

on reasons for not wanting his image to appear in books or in the media:

“First, I had what you might describe as ideological objections to the conventional author photograph—a head shot, a picture of the writer at his desk—because it struck me as a concession to selling and to media.”

Θ Material Memories: Time And The Cinematic Image by Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky)—article about film and music and memory and time and a lot more crammed in

Θ Journal of Social History—George Mason University site containing abstracts for articles in the journal

Θ Century of the Self (watch: part 1, 2, 3, 4)—2002 documentary about Freud’s theories, advertising, the masses, smoking, and all kinds of good make-you-think stuff

Θ “it’s Greek to me” and similar phrases in other languages that mean, roughly, “it’s incomprehensible”—a friend sent me this article today, which is fantastic. It directs you to the wikipedia and omniglot pages, which list various versions of this phrase (such as Slovenian’s “This is a Spanish village to me” and “Am I speaking Chinese?”). Chinese seems to be a common one, and ex-Soviet nations seem to think Spanish is the ultimate foreign language.

• In English we use our adverb that means “good” (”well”) as an interjection (”well, i don’t know what you mean”). In Spanish they use “bueno” in the same way.
• I don’t know what the expression is in Spanish before a photo, but it’s not “say cheese” (i.e. I didn’t hear them say anything about “queso” when “say cheese” appeared in the subtitles).
• Most of the characters pronounced noche as “noch” (leaving off the second syllable). I’m not sure if this is just colloquial or a dialect.

2. This British site explains when you double the final letter of a word when conjugating it to an -ing or -ed verb. Apparently the rule is “double a single consonant letter at the end of any base where the preceding vowel is spelled with a single letter and stressed,” and don’t double if a previous syllable is stressed. (occur –> occurring; answer –> answering). However, there are (of course!) exceptions, such as “travel” which adds two “l”s to become “travelling” in British English (but “traveling” is prefered in American), and words that add “k” (”panicking”).

3. emotionML: I haven’t figured it out yet, but it’s an emotion markup language (as opposed to hypertext markup language or speech synthesis markup language). At first I accused W3C of being “drunk with power” for even attempting to create this, but I should go read the report before forming any real conclusions. But thoughts off the cuff: seems very weird, possibly useless, and definitely difficult if not impossible (representing emotions in computer language?).

Intro to report: “Human emotions are increasingly understood to be a crucial aspect in human-machine interactive systems. Especially for non-expert end users, reactions to complex intelligent systems resemble social interactions, involving feelings such as frustration, impatience, or helplessness if things go wrong. Dealing with these kinds of states in technological systems requires a suitable representation, which should make the concepts and descriptions developed in the scientific literature available for use in technological contexts. To the extent that the web is becoming truly ubiquitous, and involves increasingly multimodal paradigms of interaction, it seems appropriate to define a Web standard for representing emotion-related states, which can provide the required functionality.”

It’s hard to articulate how I feel about it, but, of course, I’ll try.

First, there’s the fact of Joan Didion. I really enjoy her essays, and I liked this book (her only fiction I’ve read). However, I think Thom Andersen is right in his criticism of her and her ilk in Los Angeles Plays Itself (”Forget the mystical blatherings of Joan Didion and company about the automobile and the freeways. They say nobody walks. They mean no rich white people like us walk.”): She’s writing from a certain class about a certain class. Not everybody leads lives of wealth and seeming leisure like the characters of this book/movie. In that way this story reminds me of The Great Gatsby: It’s good literature/film but not universal—you have to keep in mind its context when interpreting the characters’ actions.

So on one hand Maria Wyeth is sympathetic as *depressed woman who believes life lacks meaning*; on the other she’s wealthy and spoiled, and really could use a lesson in reality. Not everyone, for example, can be renting a house and then decide to go rent an apartment too because they don’t want to deal with the things the house means. Also, frankly, not everyone has the time to ponder what ails them. Some people are just trying to get by. (Though in thinking of “trying to get by” (Maslow’s Hierarchy-style), I imagined Maria in Lord of the Flies. I think she could probably pull off *depressed woman who believes life lacks meaning* there too…)

Two scenes stuck out to me this time:

1. BZ explaining to Maria how he deals with life: what his grandfather did, what his father did, and what he’s done.

2. The woman who runs the motel asking Maria “Don’t you have any hobbies?” and explaining how her life ended up at this point.

two possible options for Maria?—acceptance or action? In the end she chooses something else, and I’m not sure whether that choice is just a product of her lifestyle or the only real option she has.

Basically: · I’m conflicted about how to interpret her. · Any interpretation will say more about me than the character. · I should re-read the book. · And I apparently think Lord of the Flies the kind of book that could toughen up a character.

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.

“Found photographs are media artifacts of a peculiar kind because they were never meant to be viewed and interpreted by total strangers. Because the original contexts that anchored their meaning have been severed from them, found photographs foster a new and valuable ‘reading’ disposition, one that sharpens our inferential skills and reflects upon our ordinary habits of perception. The best conclusions we can draw from found photographs are conclusions about ourselves; when we interpret and react to found photographs, we reveal our own perceptual processes.” (4)

found photo finder as “voyeur, detective, Surrealist, and social scientist” (12)