FTV Blog 12: Music videos, Distant Relatives & NABIL.com

I follow Kanye West on Twitter and one of my favourite things is when he talks about other rappers--it's just like they're normal friends in this high-profile social circle. A few months ago Kanye tweeted a link to a music video by Nabil Elderkin for the Nas & Damian Marley song Patience (which I love, from the album Distant Relatives, which I also love, having listened to it a lot since week one).

DISTANT RELATIVES "Patience" from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

PART ONE: NABIL.COM

I didn't pay any attention to its director when I first watched it a few months ago (Kanye had tweeted with praise, as though he was a friend of the director's, or had previously worked with him), but I looked it up again recently because I wanted to listen to Patience while on a computer at uni. Its vimeo page has a link to Elderkin's website, Nabil.com, so I had a look.

The first thing that struck me was the unique way it's layed out. I actually like it, just white with a very long horizontal-scrolling line of videos, almost like a gallery of frames, each as visually artistic & classy as the last. I only scrolled across to see if Nabil has made music videos for any other artists or song that I know (he has; Kanye, k'naan, Bruno Mars) but I ended up fascinated and a little attracted to this idea of a catalogue of music singles compiled by the filmmaker. A showreel. With music videos it's always the opposite; a collection of songs listed by artist.

PART TWO: DISTANT RELATIVES MUSIC VIDEOS
My friend showed me the film clip for another song on the album, Nah Mean.

It's also a cool video but a completely different style to that in Patience. The two are almost opposites. It got me thinking about different philosophies in making music videos, different approaches. Should you tell a separate story in your film clip? Create a piece of visual art? Simply have a raw display of music, filming a live or studio performance of the song? It's an interesting medium, and I can see why so many filmmakers hone their skills on it. It's a short video but can include a vast range of narrative and stylistic possibilities.

FTV Blog 11: Footballer compilation videos

Over the past ten weeks I've tried to cover a wide range of media, offering a window into my thoughts. I'd like to talk about a fairly specific form of entertainment that's a small obsession of mine. This YouTube-based medium is a blend of short film, music video, and sports documentary. The best way to describe these videos is that they are basically highlight compilations for footballers (soccer players), made by fans. There are thousands of generic football videos where people upload highlights and maybe add a song they like over the commentary, but at the other end of the scale are the truly talented editors who create works of beauty and emotion. These are comparable to the stylised highlights you might see at the end of a match on TV, for example. Of course, it helps if you know about the players and the stories, or at least like football to start with.

Anyway, my current favourite is a certain video on Steven Gerrard, champion leader of Liverpool FC, made by MilanKakaBaros. The reputation of MKB for making these videos is perhaps greatest of all. A Liverpool fan, many were anticipating he would eventually make a Gerrard video. The result (below) is surprisingly restrained, with black & white filter and only the slightest red gradient over the picture, not to mention the beautiful music, a powerful juxtaposition against the high-intensity physical drama of Gerrard's feats.

Interestingly, the song was originally composed another football video, this one incredibly unique and definitely worth watching:

FTV Blog 10: The Piano

Very melodramatic, increasingly so towards the end. My favourite part was the climax where Sam Neill's character drags Ada back during the huge storm and he cuts her finger off. I'm not being sadistic or anything but it was deliciously dramatic, a proper spectacle. Having said that, the main reason I didn't like The Piano was for the melodrama. The characters behaved in a way that was surreal. They made strange, unbelievable decisions, like Baines' method of seducing Ada (and, in turn, Ada's puzzling affection for Baines). The story operated on a level that I didn't empathise with.

This is a clear pattern across the three Jane Campion films we watched: the whole thing was like a woman's strange fantasy. Every aspect of The Piano is heightened to increase the sexual repression, which grows the fantasy. It's in the remote forest, few people around; set in the 19th Century when sex was a far less discussed topic and the was certainly less sexual liberty; the protagonist, incredibly, is unable to speak yet she has two strong, handsome men fighting over her.

The movie reminded me of Porphyria's Lover, an 1836 poem by Robert Browning in which a psychotic man murders his lover, a pale woman who meets him in his small cottage during a cold, stormy English night.

We were asked to take notes on symbolism, setting and mis en scène, and for the latter I got absolutely nothing. I know what it means and I know what it entails but I find it impossible to take notes on it when watching a movie. To me it's a matter of either stating the obvious or looking too deeply and pulling meaning out of thin air. I won't do either.

I did, however, not that the titular instrument was a very direct, clear (it must be obvious if I realised it) symbol for Ada's voice, emotions, mood, etc. both in diegetic and non-diegetic score. You could also make a case for the piano representing Ada's heart or where her affections lie.

As for the setting, I note that the lush forest was not a typical paradisaical beauty but a dark, menacing landscape of nightmarish scale with difficult, ghoulish terrain. This adds to Campion's fantasy--have the love triangle developed in a larger settlement, say in a Scottish city or even Sydney cove, it would have been far less powerful (nor would that setting have allowed for some narrative aspects, like the piano left on the beach, the lack of characters/places for Ada to escape to early on).

FTV Blog 9: Jerrycan

Jerrycan was my favourite of the three short films we watched. Clearer story, surface level interactions--bully picking fights, aggressive dialogue. The film was more up front (than Gasman or Crackerbag). Fascinated by boys that age. The drama more colourful here. More instantly entertaining, you could just sit there and watch it.

(Perhaps as somebody not too far from that--boys, of that age, only 5 or so years younger) I enjoyed learning the dynamics within this group between these boys--the obnoxious leader who rules with a 'fuck you' attitude. He is so clear-cut it's a pleasure to watch. I've not been directly subjected to that sort of character before in real life but, like anyone else, I've been through stages of insecurity growing up where you struggle to find a balance between peer pressure, strength of character/identity, and social acceptance. The ages 13 or 14 are notorious in boys for brining out the worst. This film divulged that whole social world as well as telling its story clearly and concisely.

Jerrycan looked good, yeah, and again it was shot on real film. I'm convinced that that alone raises the grade of any movie. The three shorts we saw all had high production values--not necessarily high budget but high standard of production, detail...

You can praise all you like the quiet, beautiful pictures and they're fine but at the end of the day I enjoy watching Jerrycan far more.

FTV Blog 8: agIdeas

I made the decision to attend agIdeas, a three-day design conference at Melbourne Conventon Centre where acclaimed designers from Australia & the world speak to an audience of around 2,500. Some spoke about their work & influences, detailing projects like you would read an art museum curator describe an exhibition--jargon, dull, difficult. Others spoke about their lives and told stories about how they came to their current point in life. Most speakers offered advice and lessons they've learnt during their careers.

Walking out of the convention centre at the end of the third day I was feeling mixed opinions. My ticket cost $300, is that justifiable? There was so much to take in but no measurable outcome. So much conceptual inspiration and wisdom but so little tangible value.

There were two messages at the forefront of my mind. One was that the best designers have the type of character that sees them 'putting themselves out there', being proactive, working out of passion rather than to pass a uni course or comply to the boss's instructions. They go out and work on their own projects and interests regardless of whether it's paid or acclaimed or popular (yet). Only then can be fit to be employed or make a career out of designing something.

The second message I hold from agIdeas is that collaboration is greater than any individual labour. This is not a new philosophy or a revelation to me but it was notable to hear it repeatedly from people who are somehow seen on a pedestal by much of the adoring audience.

FTV Blog 7: A Quiet Word with Rob Sitch

The other week my parents were interested in watching this show A Quiet Word With..., a half-hour talk show hosted by Tony Martin, again on ABC. 'Hosted' is actually an overstatement; each episode he sits down one-on-one with his guest and chats about their career, old times, anecdotes, etc. On Easter Saturday, Martin's guest was Lily Tomlin, who I had never heard of and who didn't interest me at all. I didn't have any enjoyment watching her reminisce about shows and people I didn't care for.

Anyway last week the guest was Rob Sitch, comedian member of Working Dog productions, the film team responsible for the likes of Frontline, The Panel, Thank God You're Here and The Hollowmen. I love Frontline and I'm a big fan of the group, fairly familiar with their work. So it was properly interesting watching him talk about his projects at a very root level, not polishing the final product or phrasing himself like an advertisement.

Having done a few months of this course, slowly understanding the processes within the creation of a film or TV Show, it was good to hear Sitch discuss the way he and his team take ideas and run with them. He says sometimes everybody quietly agrees an idea is great but they leave it for a few years because nobody want to step forward and be responsible for it.

Review of 'Targets' (1968)

Targets is a quiet, simple film, its plot basic but dark: an American man (played by Tim O’Kelly) goes on a killing spree, escalating to a massacre at a drive-in cinema. Meanwhile, horror actor Byron Orlock (Boris Karloff) prepares to speak at the drive-in for his last appearance before retirement. While it’s a terrible thought that a sniper is killing off audience members in their cars, the emotional impact of Targets could have been far deeper if (for example) we became familiar with a family of cinema-goers during the daytime before they are killed that night. Instead, Boris Karloff’s story had little bearing other than to provide quirky, self-referential parallels of film-within-film. Targets is less a scary movie and more a comment on the evolution of the horror genre & its changing reception by audiences.

FTV Blog 6: Music & film thoughts

I wonder if anybody has made a feature film inspired solely by a music album. I know music and film have a close relationship, but how direct has it been?

• At one end of the spectrum is the music video; short movie clips
  

Maybe what I'm searching for is a movie that is not only based on the music but goes beyond the music video and presents a whole story and illustrates the imagery inspired by/created within a song.

FTV Blog 5: Human Planet

I just watched an episode of BBC's eight-part documentary Human Planet, which is being aired on ABC at the moment. Each episode looks at a different type of landscape (grasslands, mountains, etc.) and how humans have learnt to live off--and survive in--these unforgiving lands. Tonight's episode was about desert, so they documented different ways local people find water.

When ABC began promoting this series a few weeks back, I was desperate to watch it, hoping for a documentary of staggering scope that delved into the history of civilisation. In the end the show was less historical and more anecdotal. In the globe's obscurest corners, people of exotic tribes apply time-honoured, crucial skills to accomplish mammoth tasks or epic journeys, doing what's necessary to survive.

While watching the desert episode tonight, it became clear that this show presents its content very much like stories rather than research. It's almost like hearing a fable, ancient and beautifully simple. I can't remember the details of this particular story but one chapter of tonight's episode went something like this:

Deep in the Gobi Desert, there is a Mongolian camel herder. Once a year he must travel for days with his camels to find new water. In the desert he must be wary of the wolves, greedy and savage. Each midnight he leaves his tent to check his herd. One night he counts one missing--his prize female, heavily pregnant. Dawn arrives and the Mongolian embarks on his search fearful that the camel has fallen prey to the wolf. He climbs atop a ridge peak to view the land below. It is vast, unceasing, daunting. But he sees the camel, a tiny speck in a sea of dust. He makes his way towards her, seeing she has given birth. The calf is on the ground, not moving. The Mongolian's fear returns briefly, but the calf is breathing. He carries the calf and leads its mother back to his tent. His sons are happy to meet the young offspring.

Review of 'Written on the Wind' (1956)

At first I found Written on the Wind boring, being dropped into the courtship between Lucy and Kyle without knowledge of the characters, so I had no feeling, interest or care for the story. But the film soon developed spectacle as the larger tree of characters was revealed and we had first glimpse of the family dynamics, cleanly illustrated in the bar fight scene between Mary-Lee’s admirer & Kyle. However, Written on the Wind snowballed into absurdity as the melodrama itself came to dominate. The film continued to entertain mildly although my engagement with the story faded under a blanket of traditional but tiresome melodramatic traits--over-the-top music, characters’ over-reactions and their cartoonish personalities.

Review of 'The Gunfighter' (1950)

I truly enjoyed The Gunfighter. The nature of Jimmy Ringo's fame problem was immediately clear when he was hassled by a cocky young cowboy. The tension in that first scene was not only discernible but recognisable--celebrity ‘reputation-versus-temperament’ incidents are as present today as they were when this movie was made sixty years ago (and that same culture is believably present in the film’s 19th-century setting). I loved The Gunfighter’s Western imagery and language. While the period set was not showcased like that in Once Upon a Time in the West, it was a pleasure to watch the story unfold within this old-fashioned world.

Film Noir; Review of 'Pickup on South Street' (1953)

It was surprisingly simple to learn the characteristics that make a movie a ‘film noir’ movie. Always aware of the genre, I never knew what it described but imagined it indicated fairly stringent visual style. Now my understanding is that the term film noir refers more to narrative elements than the artistic merits implied by its name. Thankfully, these narrative aspects were easily apparent in Pick Up on South Street: the moral ambiguity of its characters, their cynicism, questionable motivations, etc. Visually, much of the story unfolds at night, another film noir trait. I enjoyed decoding the underworld language, an embellishment for the essentially simple story that lays at the film’s core.

FTV Blog 4: Kate Grenville's 'The Lieutenant'

In year 12 English I studied The Secret River by Kate Grenville, a fictional book about a convict's relations with native Australians. Australian history never took my fancy but it was my favourite of the three books we read (preferring it over The Kite Runner and Nineteen Eighty-Four) because of the beautiful language Grenville employs to tell her stories. My Dad had a copy lying around of The Lieutenant, another Grenville work of similar content, so I started reading it. I hardly ever read proper novels but I knew with Grenville it would be a pleasure to roll through the words on the page, effortlessly absorbing the deftly crafted descriptions of scenery and characters.

While wondering how to describe Grenville's style, it's occurred to that despite being elegantly presented, I wouldn't say it's 'subtle'. Often Grenville will spell out the thoughts of the protagonist, but I don't think this is a bad thing at all. It means I don't have to read between the lines looking for deeper meaning. Gladly, I see the book as a great story rather than a work that relies on heavy interpretation or analysis from the reader.

FTV Blog 3: Photographic Journalism: Reuters Full Focus

I stumbled across a series of photo albums on Reuters the other day and was awe-struck instantly. Some of these photos are incredible; simply stunning. I often overlook photographs as a medium to look up, view, or 'consume', but these completely change my opinion. I would rather have a hard copy of some of these than buy a good novel or DVD or music album. 'A picture can tell a thousand words', well it's more than that, isn't it? Photography--especially in journalism, I think--has a capacity to invoke emotions and stimulate the mind beyond words. Interestingly, I came across this around the same time I started using flickr for photography class. While it occured to me to 'flick' through photos on flickr, just highly-rated or popular ones on its home page, I am completely sure that I prefer the photos found here. Not only are they often equally artistic or aesthetically appealing, but they are journalistic, documenting real life, events and emotion in the extreme corners of our civilisation. These images are the as powerful as possible without being there live on the site.

Review of 'Sullivan's Travels' (1941)

Sullivan's Travels opens with a fight scene atop a moving train. I liked that; grand, audacious, exciting, even by today's standards. I believe the movie maintained this standard of production and ambition throughout. It seemed like it would have been quite a blockbuster in its day, which made it very easy to watch. Road movies, too, are generally a pleasure to watch--and Sullivan’s Travels is as much an adventure films as it is comedy--because they double that effect of ‘escapism’, of the viewer being able to lose themselves in the narrative for the duration of the picture. I’m not crazy about Sullivan’s Travels but it would be a hopeless man who couldn’t enjoy it.

Review of The Crowd (1928)

Paul Harris' introduction to The Crowd left me eager to watch the film, expecting a slow, solemn exploration of the bleaker realities of life. While the narrative content matched my expectations--the protagonist learns the hard way that life doesn't work out the way you planned, having faced an uphill battle for his job, his money, his family, and his place in the world--the movie itself was was a melodrama instead of a thriller. I felt it was too rapidly paced and the tension too often eased with small slapstick jokes, making the film lose much of the potential emotive power in a story with such dark themes.

FTV Blog 2: Copy Shop, The Making of Collision Course

The other night my Mum invited me to sit down and watch a show she came across on ABC. It was an Australian documentary about the process of using high-speed cameras to film dancers (and wrestlers, athletes, gymnasts) performing mid-air to get super slow motion footage. The point of filming them was for the purely aesthetic beauty of the human figures moving so slowly in mid-air, but when watching this after the behind-the-scenes the effect was lost on me because the magic had already been exposed. Also, I was pre-occupied with the knowledge the dancers weren't actually doing anything natural, they had been told to 'collide like this' or 'jump like that'. Strange that the feature was a behind-the-scenes with occasional clips of the polished product. Almost always the making-of has a back seat role but then again, there is no ordinary medium in which to present these slow-mo shots. You can't have an entire TV or episode full of these shots ans nothing else. Perhaps I would have appreciated this documentary more had I already seen these slow-mo shots (apparently projected onto arts centres' exterior walls).

Interuterion by Samantha Ray
A key part of the final product (the shots, not the making-of TV show) was a Samantha Ray song called Interuterion, a deeply emotive and immersive soundscape

Copy Shop. Had no idea what that was going to be about and soon enough found myself hit with the 'what on Earth is going on?' feeling. The film didn't just engage me but demanded my attention as I became more and more desperate to understand what was happening. My impression of the ending was that in killing himself, all the copies would die too (although class consensus seemed that the suicidal man was not the original, just another copy, so the other copies would remain unaffected by his death). To interpret the plot, one analogy could be that all the copies are like voices in your head--the slight but numerous factors, experiences and beliefs that make up your conscience--and the cancerous copy men in the film are like the voices in your head if you go insane; enormous internal conflict and hysteria. So one way to end those voices is to end your entire being (suicide)--in the film, the copied men cannot exist without the original.



Stylistically, however, Copy Shop was very impressive. It was not innately pleasing to the eye (with a dirty, grey picture) but was technically brilliant. There was some clever work with the non-diegetic video, like the superimposed newspaper flicking across the frame (complete with sound effect) as we see a man reading a newspaper, or the transition between one shot and the next when the protagonist tears in half a photocopy of himself--the frame is torn down the middle to reveal an identical shot only without the character, who has accidentally made himself disappear after destroying the copy of himself. (A lazy description of the technique. Best see for yourself what I mean.)

FTV Blog 1: Distant Relatives, Spellbound

In the past week I've been doing some listening to Distant Relatives, an joint album by New York hip hop veteran Nas and Jamaican reggae/rapper Damian Marley. Musically it stounds out for its beats & backing vocals, both borrowing African elements, but where it truly distinguishes itself is by the themes it explores, dropping stereotypical hip hop's tribal and materialistic allusions to sex, fame and fortune in favour of deeper wisdom and moral questions such as having grace before desire (Count Your Blessings), valuing strength of character (Friends), and the troubling nature of man's existence (Patience).
Arguably most rap already involves these ideas only in much cruder lyrics. In fact, on the track Friends, Nas' lyric 'real men, we have a code of ethics, no questions / no jealousy, no feminine tendencies...' is instantly comparable to the Jay-Z line 'males shouldn't be jealous, that's a female trait' (track Heart of the City, album The Blueprint). While both exhibit rappers' supposed chauvism when read out of context, Jay-Z is easier to criticize because his sound is very commercial and he's had tremendous mainstream success, putting him in the firing line for hip hop skeptics to label him as just another sexist rapper. Nas, in contrast, sounds more respectable because he and Marley are not ashamed to speak openly about their values with sensitivity and sentiment. They would be unfashionably saccharine if they weren't already highly respected musicians.

I watched Spellbound on Friday night, the American documentary that follows a handful of children before then during the National Spelling Bee. I watched it about ten years ago when it came out in cinemas and absolutely loved it. I suppose the filmmaker did his job; I got caught up in the drama of the spelling bee, I was completely engaged with the story and rode all the bumps with the characters.

This time I watched it I still enjoyed it but acknkowledged it was occasionally dull, such as the early scenes in rural Texas. I realised that the most recent thing I watched from this part of Texas was Friday Night Lights, which involves the punishment & glory of emotionally charged high-stakes football; a rather contrasting genre to a spelling bee (but arguably no more dramatic for its protagonists than Spellbound, in its own way). I noted this with amusement but with equal measure of wariness I also avoided drawing parallels about the way I've changed over the past ten years.