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? …

First Films

You sort of have to make that first film your sort of empty canvas film, with a lot of whitespace, white backgrounds, minimalism. When people see it they think it’s just low production values but it’s not. It’s really you working out the canvas. Being tentative with colors. Trying to fill up that space you don’t know how to manage just yet.

The problem is everyone makes one of those. Godard his Breathless. Rohmer his Signe du Lion. Truffaut’s miston. Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise. That’s just how some of these work.

Critcism

-Desfois j’ai envie de regarder des paysages, desfois j’ai envie de regarder des gens.

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

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.

Tania Ruiz

http://www.arpla.univ-paris8.fr/~canal20/adnm/wp-flv/cubosor.flv

download and play in VLC Media Player.

Dans cet exemple, les pixels de l’image vidéo initiale sont transformés en voxels (éléments volumiques), selon une technique mise au point pour l’imagerie du cerveau.
—

Objet représentatif de temps-espace…l’objet lui-même occupe un espace virtuel. The fallacy here is that it remains a 2-D representation. But good effort on the nesting of spatial realities (space within space within space). Also of interest, how the space itself (the pixels that represent it) is the matter with which the image becomes a 3-D object (a box, yeah I know, boring). Still, it speaks of our notions of perspective and the consistency of matter (how thick is that brick wall?).

This life is pixelated, and we have been sedated
If what we see, is what we get, then we might never make it
In this computer vision, binary composition
Video image

Now On ft. Aloe Blacc – Touch

Deleuze Quotes

1. For there is a vast difference between destroying in order to conserve and perpetuate the established order of representations, models, and copies, and destroying the models and copies in order to institute the chaos which creates, making the simulacra function and raising a phantasm – the most innocent of all destructions, the destruction of Platonism. Off “Logic of Sense”

Forever War

http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N48/foreverwar.html

In Haldeman’s novel, the protagonist, a physicist, is drafted into a long-fought war against an alien race, where distant battlegrounds are reached by faster-than-light travel. The Earth ages thousands of years in his absence due to relativistic effects. Every time he comes back from combat, the protagonist finds an entirely new human civilization.

Euphoria

intense, transcendent happiness combined with an overwhelming sense of well being

an exaggerated state, resulting from psychological or pharmacological stressors and not typically achieved during the normal course of human experience

what is a normal course of human experience?

an indefinite sense of love and happiness

—–
Eminem – ThreeSixty Five – Verse
Some people say I’m strange, I tell them ain’t shit changed
I’m still the same lame asshole with a different name
that came late to the last show with a different dame
Brain ate from the last O that I sniffed the cane
Yo know your spaced the fuck out like George Lucas
When your pukus, turnin to yellow with orange mukus
So when I grab a pencil and squeeze it between fingers
I’m not a rapper, I’m a demon who speaks English
A freak genuis, too extreme for the weak and squeemish
Burn you alive till you screamin to be extinguished
Cause when I drop the science, motherfuckers tell me to stop the violence
Start a fire and block the hydrants
I’m just a mean person, you never seen worse than
So when Slim gets this M-16 burstin
You gettin spun backwards like every word of obscene cursin
On the B-side of my first single with the clean version
Stoppin your short life when you still a teen virgin
Unless you get a kidney specimen from a spleen surgeon
In the best hospital possible for emergency surgery
To try to stop the blood from your ruptured sternum internally
I’ll take it back before we knew each others name
Run in a ultrasound and snatch you out your mothers frame
I’ll take it further back than that
Back to Lover’s Lane, to the night you was thought of
And cock block your father’s game
I’ll plead the fifth like my jaws was muzzled
So suck my dick while I take a shit and do this crossword puzzle
And when I’m down with ten seconds left in the whole bout
I’ma throw a head-but so hard, I’ll knock us both out…