A Funeral And A Poet

Films are often thought of as belonging to the dramatic genre, like theatre, with an emphasis on dialogue and the resulting confrontation of characters leading to a final catharsis. However, the medium of film is quite capable of expressing more poetic or narrative features as well. In this scene from Doctor Zhivago, the young poet attends his mother's funeral. What may take a few pages to describe in a novel, the way he feels, is done here by silent acting and visual poetry. Things that would be clumsy if they were told in a dialogue, and probably less effective via simple narration. A way to describe a sensitive person in film is to guide the camera to see what he perceives from what is going around him. The fall of the leaves and the blow of the wind, the slow but powerful accumulation of gentle feelings interrupted by the disturbing reality of the sight of someone whom one had seen living, walking, breathing... enclosed motionless in a box and buried underground. Meanderings of a perception quite easily attracted by the subtle ways reality is wrapped around us, among which death is only one; one, perhaps not fully understood at the first encounter, one that may not even seem more important than others, yet stubborn and unalterable. A poet's way to introduce a poet...

Daft Punk - Interstella 5555

Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger von Darksith47

Interstella 5555 is an animated film for the album Discovery of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, better known as Daft Punk. It is a bitter-sweet story of some alien musicians who are abducted from their home planet to be brought to Earth and form a band here. The animation was supervised by Leiji Matsumoto, a veteran of animated space sagas. I have chosen two tracks to post here. "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", which I often hear when I work to give me the feeling that my work is great and important... :) The other is "Aerodynamics", which simply just communicates something exciting to me... like my electric nerve impulses were part of the music, and somebody was able to play something nice using them...


Daft Punk - Aerodynamic von EMI_Music

Columbo And The Case Of Intelligence, Talent And Genius

The above video is from the Columbo episode "The Bye Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case", which actually made me think about this question of intelligence, talent and genius. In fact, there is some difference between these terms, tho they overlap, as people often seem to freely exchange them. There is this notion of intelligent people as being the great puzzle solvers or others that can tell you the square root of a 40 digit number up to 10 decimal places... Intelligence has to do something with the ability to give some proper reaction to situations. If we look at it like that, puzzle solving may indeed have something to do with it, and yet I don't think it is just that simple. Not everything can be included in a puzzle, and I would even venture that some very intelligent people would have hard time with them. We are different... Also being able to deal with large numbers, is what I would rather call a gift, a talent, it does not necessarily mean intelligent behaviour otherwise. And if they asked me which is a genius, who can deal with large numbers or who, while not being able to do so, invents the pocket calculator, I would tend to pick the latter. Tho, "genius" is perhaps the hardest of all. Talent is perhaps the easiest to realise. Intelligence may take a while to see and could come in many forms... But genius... is more like being able to do something unique with either or both of these. The genius must create to make himself known, otherwise he has buried his talent. He may not be successful tho. Success depends on politics at least as much as on whether you are genial or not. I do think that there are quite some intelligent and talented people who cannot get along well, whom we know nothing about, because they cannot handle people. And then there are those who adapt in some way... And this is the story and method of Columbo, a disguised intelligence, who anticipates people looking down on him, even annoys them with it... The video below is from the very first Columbo, "Prescription: Murder" in which he is analysed by a wife murdering psychiatrist.

Misery

Misery is originally a novel written by Stephen King, about a writer who suffers an accident and is rescued by a fan. The writer soon has to realize that he is actually a captive, and forced to correct his mistake of killing off his heroine... The film version here was made in 1990, and is usually remembered for the award winning performance of Kathy Bates as the obsessive fan, Annie Wilkes. About what I have read of Stephen King, I often felt the urge to describe his work as "the horror of stereotypes". A sort of small town environment, with people and situations intensified to a grotesque and often supernatural level, which still remains recognisable. Sometimes they are so well written that it hurts me to read, because the fact that people can live following and make others follow a mindless pattern, as often they do, though they have the ability to do better, just annoys me. In this case, however, there is no supernatural, just plain obsession. The book was planned to be one that King wrote under the pen name Richard Bachman, which he used for these less supernatural, and more explicit writings, until the identity of Bachman was revealed. The horror is based on the entrapment of writer Paul Sheldon in a hopeless situation. In his isolation and helplessness, he must find a way to break free. King builds up new and new hopes to achieve this goal, and breaks them one after the other followed by some not too pleasant retaliation from the captor. This builds up tension and hatred up to the point where there is no choice left for either of the characters, and hell breaks loose... I find the story interesting for many reasons. First, because of the way Wilkes "loves". I think this is a far more common way people think of love as it may seem at first sight. People often love what they imagine another person to be, and not what he is. They are not afraid to cause pain in the interest of the "beloved", so that he could become the image they love. There cannot be love without the possibility of change, and perhaps loss. Misery is a nightmare of being a helpless victim to such a love. On the other hand, if anybody ever tried to create something, they will know that sometimes it goes only if one has no choice. With choice come other things to do. Of course what one creates may or may not be what he wanted or what he likes... but high impact events tend to open up new ways. There is some difference between the film and the book how the experiece influences the creative artist, and also the amount of violent love the nurse is willing to give... but still, I think has more than enough to make the point... If I had to pick a Stephen King film at this very moment, Misery would be my choice.

Drawing A Face

It's been a while since I draw a human face, until I have decided to sit down and do it again last year, based on a bw image of a friend. I used a mechanic pencil (and rubber), on simple office print paper (about 15x20 cm). These are normally available when I am at work, and I often draw, though mostly only things that others would not recognise or make no sense at all, except perhaps in some far corner of my mind, like the image in one of my first posts. Nevertheless, sometimes I get the motivation to make something that actually expresses something out of me in a more approachable fashion, or just simply create the likeness of something to see if people recognize it. A human face is an ideal subject for that, but then it can be a very hard combination of 3D shapes one has to project to 2D. I had a somewhat easier task here since I worked with a photo. It is still a challenge to give a perception of light and shadow, which defines a nose, or in the case of such a smooth face, the presence of a sublime smile. After scanning, now that I can see the drawing in a much larger size than the original was, I can also discover some places of possible improvement. First of all, I draw faintly, I always did. Somehow I find faint things more attractive, but it may also be true that stronger lines are harder to control. I am not sure if I want to change this, but seeing the scanned image, and comparing it to the original, I can only see some of the subtler details if I tilt the screen due to the stronger brightness. I normally start from an eye, and measure distance in "eye-widths". I started off from the left eye this time, and I can sense a slight disproportion looking at the right, though this may be due to the fact that the head was slightly turned on the photo, which I tried to mimic on the drawing. And how to draw the hair when at moments it appears to me that each piece points to a different direction, in a somehow naturally arranged disorder? All in all, I am not sure if I served full justice to the qualities of the model... but it was recognised, and I should not disappointed at least about this. Maybe next time I will experiment with a 3D model...

French and Saunders

French and Saunders is a long running British comedy show of the duo Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. They often did spoofs of movies and celebrities. I have just collected here a few I especially liked. The first one is a Kill Bill parody, with all the gestures and sound effects... Then there is a parody of Björk, whose style seems particularly suitable for this sort of parody. And finally a more complete spoof a Whatever happened to Baby Jane?, a Robert Aldrich thriller from 1962, featuring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.