Thursday, 5 November 2009
Guardian Debut - ish: Clip Joint - Dead Pan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/oct/28/clip-joint-deadpan
Screenwriter Roger Avary's Tweets from jail are gut-wrenching, tragic and blackly ironic.
http://twitter.com/AVARY
Roger Avary, the co-writer of Pulp Fiction and Beowulf and director of Killing Zoe and The Rules of Attraction, currently finds himself spending a year doing bird following his conviction for manslaughter and driving under the influence in California during January of 2008. In September this year he was sentenced to a year in prison and 5 years probation. On September 26th, as befits his current cage, he apparently began to Tweet from within.
'FADE IN:
His Tweets so far are both chilling and compelling but also unavoidably cinematic. They veer in style and form from script-like instructions, to scene-setters to darkly astute observations of prison detail. Somehow they manage to convey an eerie atmosphere of paranoia, sexual predation, repetition and tragedy.
'Long scratched into the black locker are two conjunctive words, never more true: "TIME" and underneath it "FUCK". It has become a mantra. from web'
'The loudspeaker in each cell blurts out commands ("Number 34 report to Control!") and is able to listen in on inmate conversations.
Avary was convicted for driving under the influence, causing two counts of bodily injury (including to his wife) and, worse, the manslaughter of Italian passenger and friend Andreas Zini. It is difficult to imagine the terrible fug of guilt and remorse which must cloud Avary's mind, yet bizarrely, as is symptomatic of our age, Twitter appears to offer something of a cathartic outlet for him and gives us insight into what he must be contemplating and how he is adapting to his stark, new surroundings.
'Night falls, and the only real activity is an endless recounting of the terrible and pointless events that brought us all to this sad place. from web.'
His is now a career in freefall, facing the abyss of ignominy, it is a huge decline from what was, and probably still could be, a faily stellar career, wrecked by a moment of callous stupidity.
Now away from the gall and glamour of Hollywood, Avary has become like a character in a Bret Easton Ellis novel, which he once used for his own cinematic ends. He is like those characters whose capacity for narcissistic consumption only death-drives to inevitable tragedy. Fiercely intelligent though they are, the characters disarmingly acquiesce to the lures of narcotized daze. Is he aware of this terrible irony? The black tone of some of the posts seems to indicate the affirmative; they can be bleak, absurd but they can also be funny.
'The breakfast oatmeal comes in large sacks with a picture of a horse on them and labeled "Not intended for human consumption."
The strange confinement for expression that the Twitter 140 character framework provides actually neatly encapsulates the restrictive lines and bars which now surround Avary, yet the thoughts he chooses to share tell a thousand stories. The picture Avary paints in the mind's eye of his surrounds is of a tenebrous, looming, severe place, the neo-con nightmare for the West Coast liberal screen-writer where Fox news plays on repeat. There is also an acute sense of a kind of Ballardian boredom, a living death in a placed automated by remote means. Twitter's format in this context, diligently providing the exact time and date of the posts, casts the excruciating waiting and nothingness of prison time into new light. Or new darkness.
'The building is an imposing example of the Brutalist architectural movement. The windows are designed so as to not let too much light in.'
'The channels on the Rec Room television cannot be changed, and it's inexplicably always tuned to Fox., like that of Easton Ellis' Lunar Park. Of course, the access his followers have and his ability to communicate via this medium raises all kinds of ethical questions. Should he be permitted this outlet at all given his conviction? It may not last long but for the time being these Tweets provide a fascinating but unnerving insight into the long, dark night of one man's soul.
Monday, 5 October 2009
Putting Out Fire With Gasoline
So Tarantino’s latest attempt at cinematic cross-pollination has been out for a few weeks now. As is the norm with QT, critical potshots have been flying all around Inglourious Basterds. One of the latest to take aim has been David Arnold, the film composer, who recently claimed that Tarantino doesn’t really know how to use film music.
Arnold, in his disapproving tutting, has stepped out of the trenches and into the line of fire where the battle between the different schools of film scoring and soundtracking (two different things) still rages. Tarantino’s policy, infamously, is to eschew such restrictive lacquering as traditionally emotive scoring, or soundtrack music originating from the film’s ostensible epoch, and instead is keener on selecting pre-composed pieces of music from other films’ scores or pure pop music, often at odds with the tone or content of the scene.
This is often (mis) construed by critics as Tarantino’s attempts to flaunt his cinephilia, pop music literacy and extensive record collection. The other usual lazy shorthand is that he is ‘paying hommage’ (that’s the correct spelling in French as the multi-linguist Hans Landa might point out) to his cinematic or pop music heroes by reusing their works.
For example in Inglourious Basterds (as he did in Kill Bill), after apparently trying but failing to get Ennio Morricone officially on board, he quotes Morricone scores from films such as The Mercenary, The Battle of Algiers and the Return of Ringo, among others. Again the usual school of thought is that Tarantino is taking a creative short cut by simply re-using the music of those he admires, with little thought to the implications of those choices.
Though the real meat of Arnold’s beef regarding Tarantino’s musical preferences remains unclear, it appears that Tarantino himself is now clearly very conscious of how his choices can jab musical purists in the ribs and wind up tetchy cinephiles.
Tarantino uses music in profoundly different ways to Arnold. Unusually, given his own self-professed cinephile nature, he does not revere other cinematic genres or other artists’ work to the extent that they cannot be touched. He loves them deeply, sure, but there’s always another dimension you can give them. In fact, he even tells you what he’s doing with the musical pieces and cinematic genres he cuts ands splices in his deliberate misspelling in the title. He loves to bastardise. He even does it to the word ‘basterd’ as if to really carve (or score) the point in our foreheads.
Of course, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest Tarantino is also aware of the other functions of musical accompaniment – to give rhythm to cutting, character, camera movement or particular instrumentation to denote time, person or place (Morricone and Leone were masters of this). And, yes, he knows music can provide the unprofessed mood or emotion to a scene. He just also knows that there’s different ways to score a point. Or just set fire to it.
Tarantino, then, adopts other artists’ works and recontextualises them for his own ends as he does, rather brilliantly, with David Bowie and Georgio Moroder’s ‘Cat People (Putting Out Fire)’, a song originally used across the credits of Paul Schrader’s Cat People from 1982. The Bowie lyric ‘Putting out fire with gasoline’ doesn’t just point towards what Shosanna intends to do her cinema and the leaders of the Third Reich, it could also be Tarantino’s acknowledgment of how this hugely incongruent piece of music is going to provoke puritan reaction.
Actually, on reflection, this piece is an excellent choice to drive this scene. Here are some of the reasons why:
What we know, or then find out about a particular artist whose work is used as accompaniment, can give insight to character, plot, theme or genre. Take Bowie again in Inglourious Basterds. David Bowie, we all know, is the ultimate pop shapeshifter. He has always played with identity, gender and difference. Man, alien or other being he is rarely definable and always transforming in name or appearance.
Here the spacey electronic waves of the Cat People melodies accompany Shosanna’s transformation from cinema-owner to renegade, from repressed to murderous, from passive to active. Bowie’s persona is an ideal choice to compare, contrast and liquidise with Shosanna’s at that point. That Bowie and his music are anachronistic in relation to the World War 2 setting only serves emphasise the point and others he may be making around the fluidity of all things cinematic.
Audiences often forget that the lyrics of the songs accompanying the images may be chosen specifically. A good director will not just choose a song purely because it is popular or nostalgic or will get people swaying in their seats. The lyrics of a song can replace dialogue; throw light on the internal thoughts of a character or even those of the director. They can add comment to the situation on screen, signal plot developments or just make us think.
Bowie’s lyric ‘Putting out fire with gasoline’ obviously puns on what we know is going to happen to Shosanna’s cinoche, her film stock and the leaders of the Third Reich, but it could quite easily also refer to Tarantino’s attitude to his critics. The ‘I can stare for a thousand years lyric’ segues nicely with the previous scene’s toast to the ‘Thousand Years’ Reich’ and the ‘Red like jungle burning bright’ is a beautiful ode to Shosanna’s dress and the make-up/war paint she applies, completing the alignment.
Thirdly, just because the same song or piece is used in a previous film, does not mean its use in another is not justified. It can be akin to the best and most creative sampling in pop music, dance or hip-hop. It acknowledges its heritage, takes its place within that heritage and then transforms it into something new and relevant.
Bowie’s Cat People was first used in a film of the same name by Paul Schrader, lassoed around the credits. That film (a remake itself of the 1942 original by Jacques Tourneur) which played with ideas of transformation and ethics, Cat People is again a rich adjunct to Tarantino’s ideas of (il)legitimacy in Inglourious Basterds. Moreover, Paul Schrader embodies the different strata of the cinematic universe that Tarantino conflates in his fairytale. The universe that makes up Inglourious Basterds is populated by actors, filmmakers, film critics, producers and moneymen among others.
Schrader is a critic, an academic, a writer, a director and a producer. He is someone who blows up the supposed cinematic gap between, what Schrader himself calls, ‘the transcendental cinema’ of Ozu and Dreyer and films about porn. Schrader is then a nice foil for Tarantino, who, in Inglourious Basterds, looks to collapse traditional restrictive ideas of cinematic genre and language, high brow or low brow, and, hell, even historical ‘truth’ itself.
So, Tarantino’s hubris, self-promotion and garrulousness aside, it’s pretty clear that he can still nail the fusion of image with music when he wants. It’s also a good reminder that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge and simplify his musical selections. Tarantino appreciates the value of mastering the different musical languages of cinema just as he shows Hans Landa to know the value of mastering the verbal. To flammable effect.
Arnold, in his disapproving tutting, has stepped out of the trenches and into the line of fire where the battle between the different schools of film scoring and soundtracking (two different things) still rages. Tarantino’s policy, infamously, is to eschew such restrictive lacquering as traditionally emotive scoring, or soundtrack music originating from the film’s ostensible epoch, and instead is keener on selecting pre-composed pieces of music from other films’ scores or pure pop music, often at odds with the tone or content of the scene.
This is often (mis) construed by critics as Tarantino’s attempts to flaunt his cinephilia, pop music literacy and extensive record collection. The other usual lazy shorthand is that he is ‘paying hommage’ (that’s the correct spelling in French as the multi-linguist Hans Landa might point out) to his cinematic or pop music heroes by reusing their works.
For example in Inglourious Basterds (as he did in Kill Bill), after apparently trying but failing to get Ennio Morricone officially on board, he quotes Morricone scores from films such as The Mercenary, The Battle of Algiers and the Return of Ringo, among others. Again the usual school of thought is that Tarantino is taking a creative short cut by simply re-using the music of those he admires, with little thought to the implications of those choices.
Though the real meat of Arnold’s beef regarding Tarantino’s musical preferences remains unclear, it appears that Tarantino himself is now clearly very conscious of how his choices can jab musical purists in the ribs and wind up tetchy cinephiles.
Tarantino uses music in profoundly different ways to Arnold. Unusually, given his own self-professed cinephile nature, he does not revere other cinematic genres or other artists’ work to the extent that they cannot be touched. He loves them deeply, sure, but there’s always another dimension you can give them. In fact, he even tells you what he’s doing with the musical pieces and cinematic genres he cuts ands splices in his deliberate misspelling in the title. He loves to bastardise. He even does it to the word ‘basterd’ as if to really carve (or score) the point in our foreheads.
Of course, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest Tarantino is also aware of the other functions of musical accompaniment – to give rhythm to cutting, character, camera movement or particular instrumentation to denote time, person or place (Morricone and Leone were masters of this). And, yes, he knows music can provide the unprofessed mood or emotion to a scene. He just also knows that there’s different ways to score a point. Or just set fire to it.
Tarantino, then, adopts other artists’ works and recontextualises them for his own ends as he does, rather brilliantly, with David Bowie and Georgio Moroder’s ‘Cat People (Putting Out Fire)’, a song originally used across the credits of Paul Schrader’s Cat People from 1982. The Bowie lyric ‘Putting out fire with gasoline’ doesn’t just point towards what Shosanna intends to do her cinema and the leaders of the Third Reich, it could also be Tarantino’s acknowledgment of how this hugely incongruent piece of music is going to provoke puritan reaction.
Actually, on reflection, this piece is an excellent choice to drive this scene. Here are some of the reasons why:
What we know, or then find out about a particular artist whose work is used as accompaniment, can give insight to character, plot, theme or genre. Take Bowie again in Inglourious Basterds. David Bowie, we all know, is the ultimate pop shapeshifter. He has always played with identity, gender and difference. Man, alien or other being he is rarely definable and always transforming in name or appearance.
Here the spacey electronic waves of the Cat People melodies accompany Shosanna’s transformation from cinema-owner to renegade, from repressed to murderous, from passive to active. Bowie’s persona is an ideal choice to compare, contrast and liquidise with Shosanna’s at that point. That Bowie and his music are anachronistic in relation to the World War 2 setting only serves emphasise the point and others he may be making around the fluidity of all things cinematic.
Audiences often forget that the lyrics of the songs accompanying the images may be chosen specifically. A good director will not just choose a song purely because it is popular or nostalgic or will get people swaying in their seats. The lyrics of a song can replace dialogue; throw light on the internal thoughts of a character or even those of the director. They can add comment to the situation on screen, signal plot developments or just make us think.
Bowie’s lyric ‘Putting out fire with gasoline’ obviously puns on what we know is going to happen to Shosanna’s cinoche, her film stock and the leaders of the Third Reich, but it could quite easily also refer to Tarantino’s attitude to his critics. The ‘I can stare for a thousand years lyric’ segues nicely with the previous scene’s toast to the ‘Thousand Years’ Reich’ and the ‘Red like jungle burning bright’ is a beautiful ode to Shosanna’s dress and the make-up/war paint she applies, completing the alignment.
Thirdly, just because the same song or piece is used in a previous film, does not mean its use in another is not justified. It can be akin to the best and most creative sampling in pop music, dance or hip-hop. It acknowledges its heritage, takes its place within that heritage and then transforms it into something new and relevant.
Bowie’s Cat People was first used in a film of the same name by Paul Schrader, lassoed around the credits. That film (a remake itself of the 1942 original by Jacques Tourneur) which played with ideas of transformation and ethics, Cat People is again a rich adjunct to Tarantino’s ideas of (il)legitimacy in Inglourious Basterds. Moreover, Paul Schrader embodies the different strata of the cinematic universe that Tarantino conflates in his fairytale. The universe that makes up Inglourious Basterds is populated by actors, filmmakers, film critics, producers and moneymen among others.
Schrader is a critic, an academic, a writer, a director and a producer. He is someone who blows up the supposed cinematic gap between, what Schrader himself calls, ‘the transcendental cinema’ of Ozu and Dreyer and films about porn. Schrader is then a nice foil for Tarantino, who, in Inglourious Basterds, looks to collapse traditional restrictive ideas of cinematic genre and language, high brow or low brow, and, hell, even historical ‘truth’ itself.
So, Tarantino’s hubris, self-promotion and garrulousness aside, it’s pretty clear that he can still nail the fusion of image with music when he wants. It’s also a good reminder that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge and simplify his musical selections. Tarantino appreciates the value of mastering the different musical languages of cinema just as he shows Hans Landa to know the value of mastering the verbal. To flammable effect.
Thursday, 10 September 2009
Wednesday, 9 September 2009
Monday, 17 August 2009
Thursday, 13 August 2009
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