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 PERFECT SWAN

(Editor’s Note: This essay contains spoilers.)

In literature or in oratory, where rhetoric arose from, it’s somewhat difficult to separate the argument’s mode of persuasion from its substance. In order to make an entirely skilled rhetorical point, the writer or speaker will have to present a series of assumptions and assertions, facts and hypotheses, in such a way that makes the argument’s substance apparent. That’s why literature lends itself to the intellectual: it’s founded upon a progression of ideas.

Cinema is often referred to as a different kind of linguistic medium (the “language of film”), but a linguistic one nevertheless, and it’s true that cinema has its own rhetorical tools. A film’s style — the sum total of its formal decisions — becomes a mode of rhetoric, as the film tries to advance any number of points. The points being advanced aren’t necessarily didactic in nature — it’s not like every, or even most, movies are trying to “tell us” something directly – but as a movie progresses, it builds an argument, a case, whether it wants to or not. The problem is that, while text or speech is (to a certain extent) predicated upon an argument that follows a logical progression, cinema can make its arguments in a less logical fashion.

I found myself thinking about all this after I saw Black Swan last Friday. The film is utterly compelling, stylistically superb, but it advances a few ideas about art that I realized, after the haze of the film’s compelling rhetoric faded, I entirely disagreed with. Yet that didn’t diminish my enjoyment at all; the film’s rhetoric/style and its ideology were two separate things for me, even though the film uses the former to advance the latter. This separation is hardly an uncommon thing — for an extreme example, think of Triumph of the Will, which is a stylistically superb film that advances an appalling ideology; ditto Birth of a Nation.

Still, the more I thought about Black Swan, the more it began to bug me: the movie was so much fun to watch, yet … 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