Merry Christmas
December 21st, 2009 § 0
Edited: “Play Name”
November 13th, 2009 § 0
For festival information, look here. The trailer:
Dir. Dave Snyder (no relation)
On Film and Phosphorescence
October 17th, 2009 § 0
It’s hard to agree with all of Robert Bresson’s dogma, but in his tiny book Notes on Cinematography, he advances a few great metaphors about editing and the way it informs the live-ness of film, and performance on film. Yeah, he called all his actors “models”.
“Cutting. Passage of dead images to living images. Everything blossoms afresh.” p.80
“Your images will release their phosphorus only in aggregating. (An actor wants to be phosphorescent right away.)” p.82
“Cutting. Phosphorus that wells up suddenly from your models, floats around them and binds them to the objects (blue of Cézanne, grey of El Greco).” p.77
Tech Tips with Laszlo: Episode 1, Buying a TV
October 12th, 2009 § 1
Laszlo Katona
Paul SnyderChristmas in Bob Dylan’s Heart
October 11th, 2009 § 0
on Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart (2009) by Paul Snyder
Countless blurbs have been published in recent weeks about Bob Dylan and the October 13th release of his 34th studio album, 47th official album–and first Christmas album–Christmas in the Heart. The instant meme was that the record, comprised of traditional songs in a traditional setting, was a bridge too far, that Dylan had lost his mind, or worse, succumbed to the same pitiful commercialism that Christmas had. Plus, Robert Zimmerman, raised Jewish.
The sixties are dead and buried, and Bob has appeared in Cadillac and Victoria Secret ads, but he has always rejected the mantle of antiestablishmentarianism. And those of us in Dylan’s audience–which remains sizable, including many who consider his present output amongst the most interesting of his career–may actually find this record in tack with the direction of his recent work. Writing off his Christmas record in premise speaks as much to the withering state of holiday music, as the media’s fickle treatment of its own “legend.” » More «
Public Enemies and the Invention of Video
September 28th, 2009 § 0
on Public Enemies (2009) by Paul Snyder
It’s 1934. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale are very serious about committing and stopping crime, respectively, flanked by every other handsome, gruff-faced man in Hollywood, plus a wealth of Tommy guns and Marion Cotillard. Sounds good; sounds like a lot of movies made between then and now. Recounting the last few months in the life of bank robber John Dillinger, as Public Enemies does, has been done at least four times before. Michael Mann’s version isn’t historically definitive, nor narratively the most cohesive, but it looks and feels different than any predecessor — or any of this summer’s other blockbusters. Its raw aesthetic evokes a violence not of John Dillinger’s time, but of ours: the movie looks, arguably, cheap.
There are many economic and production-related reasons that filmmakers choose to shoot digital, but its flat, uncorrected look, muddy, half-visible blacks in low-light and clipped overexposures in the sun, are considered its flaws and carefully avoided. These days the technology can so closely approximate the look of film, telling the difference has become a matter of trivia (did you know that Benjamin Button and Superbad were shot digitally?). Public Enemies, shot with a mixture of non-film cameras from to the cinema-resolution Sony F23 to the $6K prosumer EX1, brings digital production’s unique — some would say, ugly — qualities to the fore. The elaborate nightclub is nearly invisible. Cotillard’s bathtub is eaten up by glare. Aside from the cast, you’d be forgiven for thinking it didn’t cost $80 million. Production value be damned, this is the Great Depression — er, Recession.
Edited: Temperley Zoetrope
September 25th, 2009 § 0
Zoetrope touring Fashion Weeks in NY, London for Spring 2010. Dirs. LEGS
Edited: Shipley & Halmos Installation
September 16th, 2009 § 0
For designers Shipley and Halmos, Fashion week 9/2009, these frames were projected on four walls in the Milk Gallery, each around 12′ tall; the panorama 40′ wide.
Dirs. LEGS
Edited: Ou Est le Swimming Pool, “Dance the Way I Feel”
June 6th, 2009 § 0
Young and Lost Club Records, Dirs. LEGS
Pixar Throws Down, with Up
June 2nd, 2009 § 0
on Up (2009) by Paul Snyder
Fifteen years since the release of Toy Story, Pixar has made it very clear that they would like to be considered a movie studio in the classic sense: their films all seem to illustrate a singular creative perspective. As their individuals films do incredible things with franchising and merchandise (Cars and Toy Story especially, notably the two with sequels in-progress), with industry-defining productions and unparalleled quality control, every Pixar film promotes the big brand name, the studio. So it was, once upon a time, with studios-cum-corporations Paramount, Warner Bros., MGM and yes, Disney.
Disney acquired Pixar in 2006 after a long distribution partnership, but the agreement doesn’t conflate Disney’s and Pixar’s product (Disney has their own CG studio, which recently released Bolt). Where the Animation Studio at Disney has trademarked princesses and fairytales with happy endings, Pixar–aptly, given the nature of 3-D computer animation–makes worlds. Most Pixar films open a portal to a fantasy where toys or cars or fish can talk and have adventures. They explore their exotic world, meet loads of funny characters, and in the end demonstrate they’re all just like us. Usually there’s a coming-of-age message in there, whether it’s learning to share (Toy Story), let go (Finding Nemo), or grow the hell up already, entire human race (WALL-E).
Up is Pixar to the core, but framed a little differently. We start familiar, with human characters in suburbia, but they find two adventures: getting to their exotic world, and the adventure that world presents when they get there. Carl Fredricksen is a grumpy old man who’d really like to simply deposit his suburban house on top of the waterfall his dead wife always imagined. That’s adventure number one, already a little more grave than most childrens’ fare, and it’s all the trailer might lead you to expect the movie is. And the story of the old man and his wife–practically a silent movie, complete with newsreel film, further nods to a cinematic era gone by–is heartrending. By the time Carl’s quest begins, the audience is completely invested in seeing that floating house get plopped on that cliff. » More «