The Unarrated & Disnarrated

Any mention of an event that is not explicitly narrated.

For example: “We talked and talked and it was witty and biting, yet recounting it in written form would never give justice to the actual experience.”

Any event within a logical sequence that goes unmentioned because of a natural call for rhythm, characterization, suspense, etc.

Disnaratted.

Any events that do not happen within the narrative proper but could have and are referred to in a negative or hypothetical mode in the text.

Unrealized events. The parralelism between the unrealized and the realized. Wishes, intents, and obligations. They do not merely reflect actual events but also delineate virtual ones.

Alethic expressions of presumed impossibility or unrealized possibility. Deontic expressions of observed prohibition, epistemic expressions of ignorance, ontologic expressions of nonexistence, purely imagined worlds, desired worlds, intended worlds, unfulfilled expectations, unwarranted beliefs, failed attemps, crushed hopes, erroneous suppositions, false calculations.

“His expectations turn out to be foolish” (cue face of surprise)

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?

… … …

On Storytelling

There are some actions in life that upon reflection seemed to have been integral parts of the result of a certain process. For instance, when K. came to pick his things up because of a small quarrel we had, how would I have known that that moment was in fact the first step towards our total separateness which would occur a few weeks later.

Of course, this is the basis of good storytelling…setting up elements that resonate later. However, in real life, you only assess their meaning after the fact. In movies, the scriptwriter knows why that or this bit is inserted there. Although he may try to camouflage it.

I guess the art is in the camouflage?

—–
1 july 2008

A story’s limits have to be communicated to the viewer. Either by habit like in Hollywood movies, or explicitely outlined like in “In Bruges” or even better yet, seamlessly integrated like in my next project.

If no limits are determined, the writer suffers an anxiety as to where he can go exactly. This is the Korine syndrome where the film becomes a series of vignettes. It works because the sheer weirdness is such an unique voice (to some). These films I will designate as sprawling narratives. Not to be confused with the seemingly sprawling narratives of Malick who in fact delineates the world of the movie concisely.

Ruiz

Moi, je ne crois pas à la théorie française, saussurienne, qui veut que la pensée réside dans la langue. Je crois, avec les Russes, Vygotsky et d’autres, qu’il faut concevoir la langue comme un aéroport : la pensée atterrit dans la langue. C’est pas la langue qui produit la pensée. Ça c’est un accident…

HC. C’est comme l’image qui invoque…

RR : L’image n’est pas liée à la langue, c’est autre chose. C’est ainsi que le concevait Stanislav. C’est un mathématicien qui faisait des bombes atomiques, et entre deux bombes, il faisait un peu de philosophie. Avec un collègue à lui, ils ont inventé un système qu’ils ont appelé la méthode Monte Carlo. Un modèle très étrange. Selon lui, il y a deux types de pensée : visuelle et auditive. La pensée visuelle concerne 90% des êtres humains, la pensée auditive, beaucoup moins. Dans la pensée visuelle il y a comme des enchaînements d’idéogrammes, des séries restreintes d’images qui s’associent par association libre, et qui traversent le langage de manière octogonale, à une très grande vitesse, sillonnant l’esprit en zigzaguant. Et, peu à peu, s’établit à l’intérieur du langage ce système instable. Quand il se stabilise, la pensée meurt. C’est exactement aux antipodes de la théorie française de la pensée.

On peut aussi passer par Vygotsky, un personnage que les étudiants en cinéma devraient approfondir : le Mozart de la neurologie… Vygotsky a travaillé avec Eiseinstein qui, paraît-il, a fait partie de son groupe qui s’appelait la Troïka, composé de jeunes neurologues de 20 ans. Ils avaient la chance de disposer de cerveaux humains, un peu abîmés, fruits de la première guerre mondiale. Ils ont fait énormément avancer la neurologie, au point où maintenant, on a prouvé que toutes leurs hypothèses étaient vraies. Vygotsky aurait donné la méthode à Eisenstein qui est le seul metteur en scène de cinéma a avoir une véritable formation scientifique sérieuse. Certains ont des formations scientifiques. Il y a deux français ici qui sont physiciens [ndr : Claude Nurdsany, Marie Pérennou], mais ils ne parviennent pas à lier les deux choses. Eisenstein a lié ces deux choses de façon organique.

On The Room Short Film

As I write this reworked version of my initial synopsis. As I create the short film within the short film. I am learning to at times go beyond the cinematic fabric of the thing. That is, to momentarily disregard cinematic concerns and to involve myself more deeply into the treated subject.

Because I see now that it was a mistake to thread on the cinematic fabric, to pull the story into it.

Today I see that the art emerges from the discovery of cinematic glimpses within a foreign world. My role then becomes to give birth to these images in a way in which the viewer will recognize their cinematic inheritance but also their instant newness and unseen-beforeness.

Can you film an anus?

sexcuse mais je dois dormir trop de sexcuse mais je dois dormir a cause du sexcuse mais je dois dormir pour penser au sexcuse mais je dois dormir

ideas for film II

1. the discarding of ideas
2. the meaning of montage (see book put together my Montand’s wife in “La Guerre est finie”
3. The primacy of the camera–all else is secondary.
4. Straub-Huillet base all their films on already existing material–The tension between the wholly original and the referenced….(the impetus behind a wholly original segment in a wholly original story)
5. A film that reflects on its own formal/stylistic devices. For instance, if WKW would include in his story annotative comments about his use of slow-motion…
6. Something has to replace the clichés of self-reflexivity. The beautiful tracking shot of a tracking shot in “Contempt” as the credits are read out…should be replaced today by something new that indicates the same issues…The ‘essence’ of this sequence which I’m in love with….is something I wish to reproduce…but maybe it can be done without going through the path of self-reflexivity. The obvious alternate path would be to have a sequence with narrative meaning (unlike the extra-diegetic sequence of Contempt). So now the question would be…what are the other filmic emanations apart from extra-diegetic self-reflexivity, diegectic sequences,…I am not sure. What about the false takes an actor makes, when he taps into the ‘wrong’ feeling and the director must correct her/him? What about the kind of footage that is never in the script but ends up being shot out of sheer opportunity at the moment of filming (and the audience can feel that)?

7. A movie directed by Michel Gondry about a man who tries to convince a woman that they met the year before at a 35mm screening of Marienbad. Seeing that the woman is clearly unconvinced, he makes a short film recreating their encouter. The man is played by Peter Greenaway. The last remaining print was destroyed in an Afghan cave before a special screening for US Soldiers. During a trek to a humanitarian mission, Olivier and Hugo find bits and pieces of the print and try to put it back together.

8. Obsessive-Complusive Personality Disorder is defined by absolute denial that there is a problem. Good way to explore in an explicit way that space where the viewer knows more than the protagonist.

Knnye West - Goodnight (Graduation Bonus)

This is such a gem and should have been on the record. He talks about the idea of finding comfort in loss through the act of sleeping as in when you lose someone close and you dream of them.

He tells it by talking about his grandparents. I think his mother died after having recorded this but seen in that context this song foreshadows one of his coping mechanisms, confirmed at the Grammy performance Hey Mama remix (”Last night I saw you in my dreams…now I can’t wait to go to sleep…”)

Mos Def provides the chorus (sung). There is some other rapper on there but I did not pay attention.

http://www.zshare.net/audio/34801496cab225

Right now I can see it so vivid
Like it was just yesterday like I could relive it
Me and my grandparents on a field trid-ip
And I’m the little kid tryna touch the exhibits
But it’ll fade before I get to get a hold of that
Man I wish I could stop time like a photograph
Every joke that they told I’d know to laugh
Man, man I wouldn’t let a moment pass
What do it mean when you dream that you fallin’
What do it mean when you dream that you ballin’
What do it mean when you never dream at all then
And you don’t really know cause you can’t recall them
It’s sorta fly you get a chance to say hi to
People you never got a chance to say bye to
Maybe you could pull em up outta your dreams *
Into real life, if you try to
So close, but so far
And so far, no cigar
We can’t dwell on the past all we got is today
So I’mma live like there’s no tomorrow
No goodbye

—-
As usual his phrasing is one thought/one bar (except for asterik). with a rhyme change every four (except for the last four). This is one of his most straight forward in terms of flow/cadence/rhythm (maybe the reason why he didnt put it on the album?). Also notable is the use of the word ‘photograph’ as pseudo-rhyme to “a hold of that”. It has that effect I like where we feel taken out of the rhyme but also strangely still seated in it. The series of four questions is a nice choice also recalling the whimsical questions of a child, yet with a resonance that still affects due to the natural way in which we can’t answer those questions and still wonder today.

“But it’ll fade before I get a hold of that” — Isn’t that the cinematic convention of dreams? I imagine the source is literary…the ghostly appearances/dissapearances, but we’ve been undoubtedly served the image cinematically (Ghostbusters?).

Roots

1. World rooted in hesitance, missed opportunities, lack of effort, trust in the invisible mechanisms of fate, resentment of those mechanisms, assessment of passivity, inner anguish.

The mistake would be to assess that nobody’s to blame for one’s condition, thus the wisest reaction being a passivity and detachment from the emotional core of the hurtful event or mindstate. Although the prospect of unashamed evasiveness and unself-conscious detachment seems appealing, it is counter-ideological to conclude a supposed serenity from a logic of accusation. The question is not ‘Who is to blame?’ and although the answer is in fact “Nobody.”, the question sustains a philosophy of life based on responsible and designable entities. It is unholistic to affix introspective states to external bodies. Even “nobody” is a body.

The aim is not detachment, but understanding of the mechanics of fate. Also, with any awareness must come the awareness of the limitations of awareness. So even if I understand the existence of the mechanics of fate, and even if I understand that these mechanics govern my emotional states, it is important to understand and acknowledge our incapicity to grasp its complete intricacies.

On Duchamp

Asking his friends and contemporaries to trade the traditional chess pieces in for their own inventions at the Julien Levy Gallery was, in a way, the beginning the infiltration of his ironic relation towards visual values into broader artistic discourse.

On Ranciere

Rancière’s purely symbolic commitment to politics corresponds to a casuistic emphasis on the political power of symbols.

This is the denunciation of the facility with which we express our supposed commitments.