On Hal Hartley

I remember that in Amateur, like most of my other films, a lot is not shown. I was more interested in what happens when people talk about something that happened in the past or something that will happen in the future or is simply happening somewhere else. There’s something else going on. The immediate intimate manoeuvering of people around each other while they are dealing with information. I thought that I don’t want them to talk about what is happening or will happen, I want to witness them doing; I want to look at the actual event. It’s funny, I talk to other filmmakers and they tell me “Well that’s why we got into filmmaking in the first place”. That was our first urge.” My first urge was to watch the people conversing or struggling with each other about other things.

The thing about calculation that I’ve always resisted is that there’s an assumption being made that I know who you are and I know what you think is important and what is funny and what is moving. And I really don’t think that’s true in life: I think that we’re mysterious to each other and that’s one of the reasons for instance that we keep telling ourselves stories. Stories can be told and retold because we really don’t know how we’re going to react.

Your talent often arises from your weaknesses and misconceptions.

Foods

he top ten common high antioxidant foods include:
Walnuts
Pomegranates
Sunflower seeds
Blackberries
Cranberries
Blueberries
Dried apricots
Ginger
Raspberries
Prunes

The following foods contain the most pesticide residue:
Apples
Bell peppers
Peaches
Spinach
Strawberries

On Additive Abstraction in Narrative

Bordwell

Because the narrative progression relaxes, we can weave our own connotations out of what we see and hear.

1. I’m not sure if this is additive abstraction but here’s the idea. You start out with a given situation, let’s say a story about a bike messenger who has a brother in a wheelchair. If there is an element of the story that involves his bike getting stolen it is important to NOT HINT at it. In other words, one should find a way to set up logical events without calling attention to them (or by using distractions). Another thought regarding this might be…to not have levels of hierarchy for events in a story. All events should be treated equally with the same degree of importance (which is the same thing as without any importance).

Some Breillat

1. Un homme qui aime une femme ne prend pas ses précautions
2. Des lèvres comme des fruit mûrs
3. Tu ne crois pas qu’on devrait s’arrêter là, sur un bon souvenir?

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?).

List: Camera Placement

1. Dont be too far. Get closer. It is okay to cut off the lower body somewhat and parts of the set. (But leave headroom)
2. Dont be afraid to be slightly slanted. Too straight is too cute. All morality is slanted, so the camera should reflect that.
3. Plan camera movements to give characters memorable introductions.
4. Emotional Space. Be aware of actor height. Look for visual anchors around the shot. Think of the weight and balance of the frame according to the emotional intensity of the shot/scene.
5. If someone leaves:
6. Do you track along….(only if they turn back)
7. Do you place yourself close to them and then pull back quick when they make a violent movement to leave
8. How far do they have to move before being off-frame?
9. Or better yet…is it the camera that moves to render them off-frame? Do we leave them, or do they leave us?
10. The handheld camera covers three mistakes: Bad acting, bad set design, and bad directing.

On WKW

1. Faces. Presence. (Taken from Godard) (Blueberry)
2. Intuitive motifs. Seemed to be selected playfully. (Blueberry & Mood)
3. 2046: generating stories.
4. I saw some outtakes from Mood and they were very commonplace. The lighting was good, but the scenes themselves were the stuff of early still-uninspired improvisations. Herzog seeks ecstaticness in the spaces he visits. Wong builds a space (the most flattest and cliche), rides roughshod with ideas (many commonplace), and then sculpts something with unity in tone/mood. His shooting ratio must be 40:1.

IDeas

1. Do I come up with an idea because school asks me to? How do the ideas that traverse me naturally differ from those generated by a school requirement? Must I go through the process of discarding the act of generating ideas in order to detach myself from the forced-upon feeling (which causes stress and fear) of pressure?

Diary

March 24th 2007.
My favorite time of the day for the past week has been between 4:30PM and 7:00, when the sun is on his way to setting. The luminance in my appartment is incredible and at moments the reflection of the sun on my hardwood floor is blinding. It is around this time that I prepare dinner.

List of Books I Should Read

1. Shadow of The Wind

If you love A.S. Byatt’s Possession, García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the short stories of Borges, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas or Paul Auster’s “New York” trilogy, not to mention Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, then you will love The Shadow of the Wind.