Girl are you the Hays Code the way you consider media irredeemable if it depicts anything that strays away from the norm you're comfortable with or depicts anything morally questionable without definitively condemning it and anyone associated with it, therefore creating worse stories and content and making it difficult for people to engage with complicated issues from a nuanced and controlled perspective?
Imagine you’re a kings guard and you think you’re gonna have a real quick tourney for your king because someone (finally) punched the brat and you turn around and LYONEL FUCKING BARATHEON pulls up to fight against you and so does BAELOR FUCKING TARGARYEN
Fun facts I’ve learned from LARPing* a character who wears Celtic woad war paint:
^^ it me! Basically, considers this one part costume/LARP makeup tutorial and one part archaeological study via performance art. (Photo Credit)
(*LARP stands for “Live Action Role Playing” aka, Dungeons and Dragons but you run around in the woods in full costume as your character and yes that means you stay in-character for hours and have to perform all the combat yourself.)
- If you ever see a character with complex war paint on their body, back, or dominant arm that is at all graceful and not just slapped on pigment, then they must have had a friend do it for them. So any surly loner type figure that ALSO has elaborate warpaint is a fucking joke. You literally can’t have warpaint be symmetrical or pretty in places you can’t reach without having an available group of companions and, better yet, artistically inclined friends to put it on for you. War paint would have, by necessity, been a communal activity with group members putting on war paint for one another before going into battle, especially before the invention of easily accessible, high quality mirrors.
Addendum: war paint takes quite a lot of time to apply if you want it to be pretty or symmetrical. I regularly have to clean it all off and start over if I want symmetry and that’s with a mirror and a high-quality paint brush. A warrior that wears elaborate war paint but “doesn’t care about his/her appearance” is a goddamn liar. Unless you are with a group of warriors who are putting your makeup on for you, you do care about your appearance and you are very delicately applying makeup for just as long as a YouTube makeup star, at minimum. It’s a very ego-driven look with a lot of artistic skill required either by you or someone else. Even just making the appearance of a simple straight line on your face can be quite hard since your face has curves and bumps all over it. To do delicate lines takes forever. I chose bold strokes to make it easier and even those take a long time to apply if you’re in a hurry. A warrior who is wearing detailed war paint must have had at least an hour putting their face on to look pretty for the big fight, and don’t let them tell you otherwise.
(Sorry, Kassandra, your warpaint doesn’t make any f-ing sense unless a member of your crew put it on for you.)
- Brightly colored paint on your face will make your eyes look beady and small unless you cake dark eyeliner or pigment around your eyes to make them look bigger. It’s the main difference between good looking war woad pictures (usually on women) and bad looking woad pictures (usually on men) because they don’t remember to put eyeliner on so the colored paint doesn’t drown out their eyes. Even in video games, the best looking and most iconic war paint (like Senua or Kassandra) makes sure to cover the area around the eyes with paint, otherwise the eyes look beady and small. Case in point:
Not to call out real people, but this pic was on the internet. Notice how his blue eyes are drowned out by the pigment, making them look smaller, compared to when there’s pigment around the eyes so that doesn’t happen. By contrast:
^^^ Here, the black pigment around the eyes keeps her eye color from being drowned out by the bold blue. As a final example:
- Fun fact about war paint: that shit transfers everywhere and I mean everywhere without a binding agent of some kind. You’re not wearing war paint with your best silks. Wearing it naked into battle actually makes a lot of sense, as does permanent tattooing instead of temporary paint.
- War paint is actually intimidating as fuck. I’m quite a petite woman (5′4″, 130 lb) but I’m also a fight junky. I knew I was going toe-to-toe with guys twice my size and I wanted to be taken seriously as a warrior, not brushed off as small or cute. And boy howdy, did the warpaint work. And this is why:
- War paint disguises you. It basically works like extreme contouring in that it literally transforms your face. I’ve LARPed across from people for actual years who didn’t know who I was after when I took the paint off. It’s because the brain just registers the paint as my features to them, because most people don’t look at bone structure when recognizing others. It allowed me to build a myth around my character as an intimidating fighter that I could never have built around my normal features. It made my character a truly different person from me, one people only associated with who they see on the battlefield.
Anyway, thank you for coming to my rambling TED talk, I hope you enjoyed!
(gripping the sink) yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring yes i deserve a spring
Cosplay the Classics: Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
My closet cosplay of Maya Deren in her film Meshes of the Afternoon
I’ve been sitting on this cosplay for a shamefully long amount of time at this point. Originally, I thought to myself, “self, there’s no need to write anything long-form or meaningful to accompany this cosplay. Everybody knows Maya Deren.” But, then I did a quick little search around the internet and felt the inauspicious tug of the Curse of Knowledge.
Over the eighty years since Maya Deren made Meshes of the Afternoon, images of Deren have become emblematic of experimental film, both here in the United States and internationally. I’ve been privileged enough in my life to have formally studied the history of independent film in America and have also worked at an institution that specializes in preserving avant-garde film. So, for me, Deren’s shadow looms large. She is, no exaggeration, one of the most important figures in the American experimental film tradition. On tumblr, Deren’s image (particularly in Meshes of the Afternoon) has proliferated even further with popular sets of gifs and stills. That said, I can’t pin down quite how much the average film fan knows about Deren’s films and ideas. To put some things in context, I’d like to start by highlighting how she became an icon of experimental film.
Picture it: America in the 1940s. You’ve delved into filmmaking for the first time without a production company behind you. You’ve independently created a short, silent, poetic, experimental film at the height of the US’ studio era. The same qualities that might classify a film as niche today were even more pressing in the 1940s. So, how do you get it seen? Maya Deren had some ideas about that.
Deren was confident in film as an artistic medium. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, Deren arranged her own screenings by renting out a playhouse, and marketed and packaged her films for universities and artistic and cultural institutions in the US and in Europe. Deren also wrote pretty extensively about film form and also about the nature of and meanings behind her films. Deren would also speak at screenings of her films. So, basically, before there was a festival circuit or arthouses or cinematheques in the US, Deren positioned herself as author and primary marketer of her films. This necessary self promotion was pattern setting for the time, but also created an indelible association between her image and the developing independent film scene in mid-century America.
Deren’s image being the emblem of experimental American film is largely due to the way she continually promoted her films and engaged directly with her audience and with discussions around her work. (Additionally, seeing as Deren’s movies were self-produced, how much she could make renting and screening the films would provide the budget for the next film.)
If you’ve gotten this far in this write up and haven’t seen many/any of Deren’s films, first of all, thanks, but second of all, I recommend checking out a triple feature of films commonly grouped together as her “trance” films: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944) [my personal fave], and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945). They are all less than 15 minutes by the way, so don’t be daunted at the suggestion of watching three films in a row! Keep in mind that all three of these films were initially conceived of and released without a soundtrack. There is an authorized score for Meshes of the Afternoon composed later by Deren’s third husband, Teiji Ito, but how well that score serves the film is debatable. So, depending on where you choose to watch her films you may want to watch them soundlessly the first time, just to be sure that the music doesn’t get in the way. (Though I will say some of the scores I’ve seen people make on their own are crackerjack!)
As a preface to your viewing experience, I’d like to advise you not to get too caught up in overly logical and literal thinking—don’t intellectualize. Getting too hung up on whether you “got” a piece or art or not is just a barrier to genuine experience. Oddly, this is something I bang on about a lot in real life (and maybe I have on here before, I don’t remember) but it was pretty exciting reading more of Deren’s writing and coming upon this very relevant passage:
“It is therefore relevant to underline, here, the fact that the appreciation of a work based on experiential, or inner, realities consists not in a laborious analysis based on the logic of a reality which a ‘prepared’ spectator brings to the work. It consists, rather, in an abandonment of all previously conceived realities. It depends upon an attitude of innocent receptivity which permits the perception and the experience of the new reality. Once this reality has been perceived and experienced, its logic may be deduced if one wishes. Such a deduction is not necessary to the perception and can only follow it as a secondary activity, much as an analysis of love, for example, can only follow upon the experience but can never induce it.”
— Cinema as an Art Form" by Maya Deren, New Directions 9, 1946
The anecdote I often bring up to illustrate “innocent receptivity” to people who are reticent to take my advice is from David Lynch. Lynch recounts a private screening of his work for Mel Brooks when Brooks was considering him to direct The Elephant Man (1980), which Brooks was producing. Lynch assumed that that was the end of the line for him, but instead, Brooks loved his films and shared his own emotionally-grounded read on Eraserhead (1977). Lynch hadn’t anticipated Brooks’ intelligence as an artist and film enthusiast or his receptivity to the form. Lynch was obviously hired. Basically, we could all do with being more like Mel Brooks.
If you get the chance, and you’re interested in expanding your understanding of film as art, I strongly recommend checking out Deren’s writing. Her prose might seem florid, but I promise it’s a floridity based on precision of explanation, it’s not an exclusionary type of wordiness. There is a collection of some of Deren’s work from 2004 called Essential Deren (available on the Internet Archive). I’ve also been considering recording a reading of her essay “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality” if having an audio file would be appealing to anyone?
Well, thanks for making it all the way through! I know I haven’t really been doing longer-form stuff for this blog lately. Words are kind of a struggle for me and I get pretty easily discouraged to express myself with them, but upon reflection, I knew Maya Deren deserved the effort. I hope that I’ve provided sufficient inducement for you all to check out her work!
A couple of reference photos for my closet cosplay
P.S. I posted some excerpts of Deren’s writing over on my “whatever” tumblr
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