The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

I have yet to see ‘The Informant!’, but this alternate cut of GFE is better than the theatrical release. This is all very Godard mostly because of the self-reflexivity. So it is some kind of intellectual exercise on the building of self through narrative.

There is a journalist that interviews our main character throughout…possibly for a biography. He looks for stories, and the emotional rationale behind them. Unfortunately, the stories she tells are simple, her conflicts are voiced naturally with reservations, so there never really is a connection from us to her narratives. We may assume that they are partly “real” because the actress is some kind of sex worker in real life…but who really cares about that when the movie itself doesn’t take us places.

But it does takes us to some. The small space of narrative constantly referring to itself. But there is no movie world, only the characters. Story is people in this case (hello Italian cinema). So the main character is into personology. She falls in love with a client who is a screenwriter. He gives her a ‘painting’ as a present, something that looks like a doodle, a sketch, maybe abstract, something very similar to this draft-essay-film. An ‘escort critic’ played by a real life movie critic, Glenn Kenny, gives her a bad review. Everyone is involved in running their own businesses, looking for independent capital. There are many talks about economic depression and investment opportunities. In the final scene, she soothes the urges of a client, a hasidic jeweler (yes in the Diamond District, NY), simply by undressing and letting him hug her. A metaphor for his Hollywood producers? And there is a trip to Vegas that is constantly postponed…Ocean’s 11 anyone?

I like to watch this kind of stuff. Small personal essays that masquerade as real movies.

Ruiz Again

“Task: Make a film approximately ten minutes long, consisting of shots in which the centrifugal function predominates, so that when the film is projected in reverse we discover at the end a second story. Or the same story (narrative palindrome). Or that both stories complement each other, thus creating a third story.”

Raúl Ruiz, “The Six functions of the shot” — from ‘Images of Passage’….via filmnotebook.

Police Interrogation

police interrogation:

are you gonna tell us what this piece is about? what is this? why is it the first image? why’d you put it as the first image. Are you gonna tell us that?

Hey, what do you wanna know? Why you asking me all these questions?

aren’t you gonna tell us you little fucker? We need to know you prick!

Okay. Take it easy would ya? It’ like this you see…It’s simple. This is the start of the film, right? This is the start of cinema. And what is the start of cinema? Well it’s those Lumiere bros. And that train station. And those people who ran away from the theater cuz they thought the train was coming at them. That is cinema. That is the birth of cinema. So you have to show trains when you start a film. It’s a rule. It’s a tradition. It’s like the cinema religion. You just have to pay respect. So all good directors do that. They start their film with trains or railways. So what I did here, I filmed the railway that is close to my crib. It’s nice there. And when you film that, you sorta add to the catalog of railroad images worldwide. Your shot is a reference now. So you have to try and make it nice, so that it can be really representative of the space it’s in.

You know you’re crazy you fucker! Hit him, Tony!

Arrghhhh….

The. Start. Of. This. Cinema.

notes for novel

19/07/08

A book about a writer overlooking the shooting of the movie adaption of one of his novels.

He comments intelligently about the ontology of adapting a novel for the screen. He comments thoroughly on the validity of the director’s cinematic interpretation of his novel. At the same time, he comments on his novel and on the ontology of the novel, of language, of writing.

Basically, he outlines his novel’s characteristics, he witnesses the shooting of the director’s interpretation, and as he witnesses he narrates along the accuracy of the interpretation.

A novel about novels, about the filming of a novel.

The coup de theatre is that the account of the filming is the story (so what can they be filming?).

The other coup de theatre would be if Fincher decided to adapt it!

23/07/08

…And the third coup de theatre would be if there was a film about Fincher’s adaptation.

One question might be…What is the story of the novel they are adapting?

This is a problem that must be solved because

If there is an actual story: everything becomes allegorical because by introducing a proper story the audience can clearly make out the seams of the levels being overlayed. There is a writer. A novel he wrote that is being adapted. He is at the shooting of this adaptation and he will walk us throughout the story, commenting on the director’s interpretation. The fact that there is a story seduces the viewer into an immersive state (the urge to experience the story of the novel being mounted in a hopefully compelling film). The real question would become: how do we make this metanovel be as compelling as the story. A weak solution in the past has been to simply have a compelling inner story…and to have the outer story not be an actual story but only a mere framework. Weak.

The challenge is to make the outerstory as compelling as the inner one.

But the initial problems are these:

1. What is it they are shooting?
In order to answer that question, the narrator would have to reveal the story of the novel they are adapting. Yet, there is not supposed to be a novel. The only novel is the one about the novel being made into a film.

The reader wants to know the story of what is being filmed. But the narrator is only giving the story of the shooting, not the story of what’s being shot.

(That is because there is nothing being shot. It is only an excuse to wax philosophically about the nature of writing, the nature of filming, the nature of filming writing, and the nature of self-refexive art.)

So what to do? How to reveal a story that does not exist?

… … …

****
Update: The character-director rewatches his own movie several years after having made it and does not recall directing it. Did he produce those images? Did the camera fail him by failing to etch the images in his mind? or did he fail himself? …

dsir

à qui dois-je parler si je désire filmer ici?

qui dois-je filmer si je désire parler ici?

si je désire parler, qui dois-je filmer?

on trust

there’s no war for the best. if you are good, you are good. you just have to keep working to get better. but if u start out good, you just are, you can only get better. but i tend to forget that.

there is no rush either. life has its course. if you’re not meant to do everything you’ve wanted to, youre not. if you complain because work is keeping you away from art, don’t. art will keep you away from sustenance. it all makes sense. trust it.

get interested in the things that people you love, love. there is something waiting for you. it wont be the same thing as them but it will have the same spirit. that’s the beauty of it, how your unique self can pick up that thing they didnt see themselves.

Theory – Ideas

film as a living sculpture, a 25-hour film you can just project on your living room wall, come back to it whenever you want to, decoration, work of art.

experiment film = third world film

equipment. equipment leads to control by the rich owners of the equipement.

the cinema enables them to exist, rather than their enabling the cinema to exist.

a television series isnt produced, it is produced for distribution

Nanarrattivve

An aesthetic of my aesthetics

mutual desire to create narratives.
how do they go about creating their own story?

what works in the narratives they create reflects the short-stop and dead-endenness of their own entanglement.

what is not in real-life but is in narratives: loops. tied knots.

body enhancement

Eureka! (How I Solved The Folding)

Ok. Our main character lives in L.A. and is a regular extra in movies. He is working on this huge Spartacus-like scene but in Grecian times. He tries to get in front of the camera (could quote Charlie Chaplin’s “Kid Auto Races at Venice”) but he can’t be sure, all his scenes are within the crowd with the camera on a crane hovering over . He lives a pretty dull existence, lonely and wifeless. A year later, he goes to see the movie in hopes of seeing himself in a shot. He enters the movie theater. It is packed. (Here we have a Kurosawan shot of the entire audience looking at the screen, it is now hard to spot our main character). The movie is a dud, people start booing, they throw things at the screen, then they start to leave. In the brouhaha, our main character tries to dock projectiles, see his way through all the hands and heads standing up so he can watch the screen (this is still happening in that Kurowasean shot). Everyone starts leaving one by one. The scenes on screen show the crowd shots where our main character is trying to find himself. The last person is on their way out, only our main character remains. The movie is at a cliffhanger scene when suddenly we cut back to our main character sitting alone in the Kurosawan shot….offspace sound of the film-within….movie continues…our man keeps looking….for a long time….5 minute static shot (five minutes so that people get bored and leave just like in the story)…till credits appear over the shot….

—-
I hope it’s not too muddled, but basically…the idea is that the solution to this guy’s problem is a formal solution that takes place not within the story, but within the form of the film. That final static shot amongst a crowd…is his prized trophy. In other words, the outside-film, answers to the film-within, and the film-within-the-film-within (the Grecian tragedy) serves as a stand-in for the outside-film. That’s 4 levels if you include the audience watching the outside-film.

Heh. A film about someone who wants to see himself in a film.

Dylan, Narrative Experimentation, and The Cinema

Dylan spoke to him about R.W. Fassbinder’s Beware of the Holy Whore, “a film about the collective idea, and about its impossibility.”

As for Godard, Dylan recalled that, although he had never seen a movie like Breathless, once he did, it seemed totally familiar; he remembered thinking, “Yeah man, why didn’t I do that, I could have done that.”

Sam Shepard was enjoined to study the epic backstage love story Children of Paradise (the one previous movie that Dylan thought to have successfully “stopped time”) and Truffaut’s New Wave noir, Shoot the Piano Player. (“Is that the kind of movie you want to make?” Shepard asked, receiving the laconic reply: “Something like that.”

Scorsese has always been interested in intelligent self-reference in film, but never had the smarts to delve deep into it. So he produced Dylan’s ‘No Direction Home’ as the only project that he would be capable of competently tackling that would be circumstancially self-referential. A movie about a man who wanted to make movies about movies. His experiment fails, and we get another Italian neo-realist portrait of a man and his life (‘Casino’, ‘Raging Bull’).

I’m Not There is a unique collaboration. It’s an essay that derives its intellectual force from the idea of Bob Dylan, and its emotional depth from his songs. Haynes doesn’t deny his subject’s insistence that his authentic self could never be explained or portrayed—and might not even exist. “I don’t know who I am most of the time,” little Woody confesses in the midst of his compulsive mythmaking. We don’t either, although, then again, we really do.

Moments before I’m Not There ends, Haynes presents a shock close-up of the young Dylan taking a harmonica solo and then, over the credits, the sound of the inexhaustible performance that is “Like a Rolling Stone.” There’s a chill every time the actual voice is heard. Six characters and one ghost who, except for that brief moment, is not even there. This is the Dylan movie that Dylan himself could never make.

Bob Dylan Brownsville Girl

Even the most unappealing Dylan album has something to recommend it. Knocked Out Loaded, marred by weird 1986 production, and mostly uninteresting songs, has Brownsville Girl, Dylan’s collaboration with playwright/actor/former Holy Modal Rounder Sam Shepard. Clocking in at close to eleven minutes, it’s a winding, half-sung, half-spoken song about, um, something probably. Dylan mentions a girl, a trial, a bunch of places in Texas. Mainly, the song seems to be about this movie Dylan seen one time, ’bout a man riding ‘cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck. As Dylan ruminates his way across the song (”The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter”, he sings at one point, and at another, “Oh if there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now”) he returns to his Gregory Peck movie again and again. He thinks he sat through it twice.

Something about that movie though, well I just can’t get it out of my head
But I can’t remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play.
All I remember about it was Gregory Peck and the way people moved
And a lot of them seemed to be lookin’ my way.