FIRST IMPRESSIONS

By Stephen Garrett

Stephen Garrett on crafting a winning trailer

THE CINEMA IS A TRAIN: ON STEVEN MCQUEEN’S “HUNGER”

The Cinema is the Train: Part One
Economy of Narrative + Abundance of Truth = Poetry in Cinema

In an earlier essay for Filmmaker, I argued that “…cinema’s ‘vocabulary of forms’ is typically under-utilized… While there are any number of cinematic languages that could exist, most of the time films tend to rely heavily upon what we could call the basics of film grammar – shot/counter-shot, close-ups, wide shots, over-the-shoulders and reverses, as well as certain editing paces and conventions of lighting and score,” and went on to praise Enter The Void for its progressive formalism.

In keeping with Jean-Luc Godard’s dictum inspired by one of the first films ever made – “The cinema is not the station, the cinema is the train” – this series aims to explore potential new directions in cinematic style, where that train might be headed. Whether or not the Mumblecore filmmaking of the early-to-mid aughts constitutes a movement is still up for debate; if it doesn’t, cinema hasn’t had a bona fide movement since Dogme 95. As American independent cinema becomes increasingly difficult to finance, and artistic filmmakers find themselves forced to make genre films in order to produce work, it is imperative to reassert the primacy of the medium as an art form. Independent cinema may be in a difficult place at the moment, but the desire for artistic representation is as old as humanity itself, and this industry isn’t going anywhere. Neither will its capacity for challenging, serious work that pushes the limits of what is possible in filmmaking.

In 10th grade I had an English teacher who provided a particularly compelling definition of poetry. “Poetry,” he stated, “is the evocation of a meaning or series of meanings in less words than would be necessary for the reader to articulate the meaning of the poem.” In layman’s terms, poetry operates by saying more with less. Into as little as a paltry line or two it packs worlds of meaning, thematic content, feeling and sentiment. A few words, if delivered properly, can require an entire essay to explicate.

Trying to make a … Read the rest

KANYE WEST DEBUTS “ENTER THE LIGHTS” (“ALL OF THE VOID”)

By Scott Macaulay

As followers of my Twitter feed know, for me Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was the defining album of 2010. A new video directed by Hype Williams has just dropped for “All of the Lights,” featuring Rihanna and Kid Cudi. I hope something — a check, case of Cristal, or maybe just an autographed poster — is winging its way to Mr. Gaspar Noe. (Or, on second thought, there are a bunch of songs left on the album without videos. “Monster” is already taken, but what about “Hell of a Life”? I’d love to see what the great French director would do with that one.)

… Read the rest

THE ANXIETIES OF “LET ME IN” AND “ENTER THE VOID”

By Scott Macaulay

Two new pieces up here at Filmmaker. In the latest “Into the Splice” from Nicholas Rombes, he goes to a lonely multiplex on a Monday night to see Let Me In, stewing on the way to the theater over the sacrilege of its production:

I went to see Let Me In with low expectations. Like so many, I had seen and been awed by the original Swedish version, Let the Right One In (directed by Tomas Alfredson), whose quiet pacing and lonely stretches of relative silence only made the horror more horrible when it came. An American version, surely, would speed up the pace and overload the naturalistic violence with CGI-generated hyper-energy. On the way to the theater I asked Lisa about this.

“I don’t know,” she said, “give it a chance.”

“But I don’t want to give it a chance. I want to hate it.”

“Then why go?”

“Because I told Scott I was going.”

“Shouldn’t you be open minded?”

“Why?”

That was a real question, if a flip one. More to the point: is it even possible to be open minded, especially when it comes to a remake of a great movie? I got to thinking about the anxiety of influence, not so much the way Harold Bloom meant it (the phrase comes from his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry) as writers struggling against the influence of previous writers, but rather as viewers hindered by our own memories and expectations. In other words, was it even possible for me to give Let Me In a fair shake?

Zachary Wigon, who wrote a dazzling three-parter on Catfish a couple of weeks back, returns with “A Movie is Like a Person” — his riff on Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void and the challenge posed by its filmmaking. An excerpt:

By rigidly structuring rules of what the camera can and cannot do — it can’t really show a memory from any angle other than behind Oscar’s head; when it’s from the point of view of his soul, it’s almost always floating overhead; the

… Read the rest

A MOVIE IS LIKE A PERSON: “ENTER THE VOID”

“Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of, for those who want to analyze,” Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal essay Against Interpretation. “For the cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of forms — the explicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements, cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into the making of a film.” Toward the very end of the same essay, she advocated, “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”

One senses that cinema’s “vocabulary of forms” is typically under-utilized, much in the same way that our brains only realize about 10% of their potential. While there are any number of cinematic languages that could exist, most of the time films tend to rely heavily upon what we could call the basics of film grammar – shot/counter-shot, close-ups, wide shots, over-the-shoulders and reverses, as well as certain editing paces and conventions of lighting and score. This film grammar is sort of cinema’s “default mode” for presenting the world via filmmaking. It’s not so dissimilar from how each individual has their own way of experiencing and existing in the world — we all have ways of seeing and hearing, acting and reacting, that are so deeply embedded within us that they’re unrecognizable to us, second nature. The difference between this and film grammar is that while the same film grammar is employed in so many films, one can imagine that the endless variations on the individual require that each person has a entirely unique way of experiencing life.

The poet Earl Coleman used to tell me that “Art, at its best, marries the artist to the world.” What he meant was that art of merit had something to communicate, something to say that would be relevant to pretty much everyone. True though that may be, at times I’ve found it useful to focus on the statement from a different perspective — that it is an individual … Read the rest

SUMMER ISSUE ONLINE

By Jason Guerrasio

Select stories from our Summer issue are now available, including this year’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. (Read the press release here.)

You can now read online our interviews with Amir Bar-Lev on his new doc, The Tillman Story; Gaspar Noe talks about his psychedelic look at the afterlife in Enter the Void; we look at the latest innovations in DSLR cameras; and some of our friends give their favorite apps, program and Web services.

Plus, Lance Weiler’s Culture Hacker column focuses on transmedia while Anthony Kaufman’s Industry Beat looks at the realities of the Do It With Others new media tools.

The issue hits stands next week, but you can read the whole issue now on your desktop by subscribing to our digital issue. Learn more here.

Enjoy.… Read the rest

THE TRIP

By Brandon Harris

Beginning with the dying moments of a young drug dealer in Tokyo, Gaspar Noé travels deep into our subconscious to explore what happens after we Enter the Void.

GASPAR NOE’S “ENTER THE VOID” OPENING CREDITS

By Scott Macaulay

While checking out the Lovely Machine website because I’m doing a panel with filmmaker Gregory Bayne today at The Conversation I came across his blog, which has some very tastefully curated links. To wit: the opening credit sequence of Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void. This has been floating around the web but it’s the first time I caught up with it online. These credits are pretty amazing — check them out.

Related: Michele Civetta on Enter the Void here at Filmmaker.… Read the rest

GASPAR NOE’S “ENTER THE VOID” By Michele Civetta

The Further Adventures of Death Tripper, Ouroboros and What lies Beyond Jupiter

Cannes, France. In a cinematic year filled with visions of extreme sex and violence, the enfant provocateur of French cinema Gaspar Noe illuminates a phosphorescent direction forward. In person Noe could be mistaken as the progeny of Aleister Crowley with sunken-in, charcoal-lined eyes and shaved head. But lurking behind this visage is a filmmaker who courts controversy with vivacity and confidence. The last time Noe was at Cannes was to premiere his film Irreversible; he ingratiated himself into the hearts and minds of audiences willing to be subjugated to his extreme vision of rape, revenge, murder and ultimate transcendence. This year, Noe unveiled his psychedelic mind-bending odyssey of life after death, Enter the Void. A philosophical tour de force disguised as a generational drug film. The film’s hypnotic imagery and unnerving soundscape is at the forefront of cinematic revolution — it is a work of startling complexity, paradox and perversity. A film born of the avant-garde tradition of Paul Sharits, Peter Tscherkassky and Kenneth Anger. Noe is the inheritor of this tradition in the 21st century and the film can be seen quite liberally to have transposed the ’60s fascination with occult mythology, Egyptian monuments and sacred sites for the totems and taboos of the new millennium cybernetic generation of virtual reality. One could imagine Noe directing the film through a PS2 video-game joystick to capture the stunning array of hypnotic imagery and virtuoso ballet mecanique camera movements. In the crackpot Cuisinart of ideas that propel the narrative, Noe creates a cosmology composed of DMT shamanic drug lore, Nietzchean eternal recurrence theories and Buddhism’s transmigration of Souls.

The story opens with Oscar, a lanky twenty-something Canadian expat, as he lights up a drug pipe in the shabby Tokyo Shinjuku apartment he shares with his kid sister. As Oscar inhales DMT, a concentrated form of ayahuasca, one of the strongest pyschedelic substances on earth, Noe invites us to slip through the proverbial rabbit hole and trip the lights fantastik with his protagonist as he drifts into a … Read the rest