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pictures | cinematography

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Anna Biller - Shorts

Shown at Deeper into Movies @ Moth club

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Mildred Pierce 1945 opening scene Joan Crawford

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Vagabond

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3 Women

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Rosa Aiello - Temper 

Outpost interview: http://www.norwichoutpost.org/calendar/123-rosa-aiello

MW: Could you reveal any other horror tactics that you've planted into the filming or editing?

RA: Something to do with paralysis of point of view. You want to turn your head to see what's following you, but you can't. Things are held longer than you can stand (a tone, a note, an angle, something unsaid, something heavier).

MW: You spoke about your interest in the multiple meanings of the word Temper , like that it can mean to soften metal yet harden metal. Whilst producing the film and considering the ideas about the show, were you referring to or applying to its definitions?

RA: I want it to refer to loss of control as much as it does to restraint. The visible characters hold a lot in, the audible characters let a lot fly. I felt pulled between two poles: the wild and free feeling of letting yourself hold something for a long time v. the discipline, and the oppressive or boring endurance of making yourself hold something for a long time. Maybe related are the simultaneous diverging timescales going on. The visible characters are wound up like manic toy workers, while the voices are doing a slow melt into frustration and eternal return. But the timescales are continuous and affect each other, and hopefully result in some third sense of time.

- Visual V Audio sense of time = third sense. RE Wishbone, the music, longing. Emotional V the restraint of the image. Heightened V every day

- Holding oneself together. Tightness

MW: Can you cite any influences from films or text that revolve around these ideas of shifting time, altering rhythms, or any other themes that you think may feed into it all?

RA: Hitchcock is a big one. For his use of form, for how he uses the camera. Music drives the videos I want to make most of the time. I’ve gotten ideas listening to the music of Miles Davis, Mica Levy, Laurie Spiegel, Danny Elfman, as examples. And listening to all kinds of reallife drone, like two planes passing and harmonizing, or the harmony between refrigerator hum, light bulb hum, and an electric toothbrush, or the sound of wind moving through garbage cans. I love Annie Baker's plays, she's a master of long holds, and of the rhythm of everyday speech, and she's so funny. Samuel Beckett helps me understand how to appreciate words for their rhythm, hypnotic, bumbling, poetic. For a long time I couldn't understand the actual words in the neighbours’ argument at all, but it was so musical, the cadences of their speech got into my head like a song.

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Rosa Aiello - Temper (its my stereo it isnt yours you didnt pay for it)

Domestic - The domestic gone malign. 

Female acts in hyperdrive - cleaning, eating alone, washing, drawing curtains changing. Behavioural malfunction 

Camera slowed down, like a drunk. Acts seem too fast, mechanical turned hysteric. 

A glitch

Distortion 

Tone - Unease, unsettling, internally

Gesture - tapping fingers 

hands 

contain or represent repression 

Manipulative techniques - Distancing 

Containing things in generalities 

The feeling of specific experience in general everyday actions 

Rituals of every day - Specific tone 

Hyperdrive 

Audience finish the experience in their viewing of it

Whats left out of frame, suggested

Distortion leaves gaps for an audience to feel 

generalities - nothing surprising 

- allows you a language to see and speak of it 

Mundane activity is given an extra weight 

Internal + External 

Distance between sounds + individual 

Record sound from the ear - on body recordings, as though in the body 

Affecting techniques - might be our experience 

Pushing into body 

Mundanity

Accidental focus - corner of the eye 

Fragments 

HOW?

Master frame - zoom in post

Decaying image - authenticity 

Pixels 

Shift / in flux. Nothing concrete

Gaseous state 

Perish in process of obscure self 

Not knowing 

Narrative - the sound is the narrative 

On the noise

makes up for lack

Moyra Davey - Blue 

how to manage personnel in work and be generous to others feelings without taking up all the roo

Leave gaps in work 

Falsity --> showing you its a representation --> this is truthful

conformity - struggling to be. 

Never makes it past a representation

This is more truthful 

Don't pretend to represent reality

But the conformity of trying to be real 

Virtual reality? 

Stylish, silk, cool - contemporary mode

Using VR goggles 

But this is shown in modest small ways

Like the VR glitches 

The domestic setting is like an institutions 

- Strange house

- Plastic, fake flowers 

THE DOMESTIC INSTITUTION 

Locked in 

Straining to be outside

Confined 

The window

Door + bird 

Emphasizes the inside by the glass and the longing for an exterior 

But its artificial

Caged itself through frames 

Defamiliarization 

Generalised Personal 

Objets can contain effects, gestures and rituals too. 

Not explain 

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Barry Lyndon - Kubrick 

Oil paintings 

Light 

Technical aiding the story - the push for new technology. Cause + reasoning. Think Portrait 

Almost every Kubrick film is a showcase for some major innovation in technique – in 2001 it was the revolutionary visual effects; in The Shining, his mastery of the Steadicam. On Barry Lyndon, Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott set themselves the task of shooting as many sequences as possible without recourse to electrical light. 

The stately, painterly, often determinedly static quality of Barry Lyndon was at least in part dictated by this stylistic choice – lit only by candles, the actors in the many sequences of dining and gambling were under instruction to move as slowly as possible, to avoid underexposure. But it fits perfectly with Kubrick's gilded-cage aesthetic – the film is consciously a museum piece, its characters pinned to the frame like butterflies.

Kubrick and Alcott looked to the landscapes of Watteau and Gainsborough; the day-lit interiors owe a lot to Hogarth, with whom Thackeray had always been fascinated.

Subjected to the director's infamous regime of many, many arduous takes, their faces light up the film and the era, like a series of fine, carefully hung, oil portraits. Kubrick's cast may have been required to sit for these for days and weeks on end, but no one could say the results weren't worth it.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/07/27/kubrick-by-candlelight-how-barry-lyndon-became-a-gorgeous-period/

Story

Anticipation 

Everything in life pre planned - Idea of fate. 

Taped in

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Lynne Ramsey - Swimmer

Glimpses of people, drifting past shots 

Trauma 

Escape and running/swimming

Use of old radio

Nostalgia mixed with funfair sound 

Folklore

Childhood - Almost peter pan + lost boys

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Zadie Smith Interview: On Shame, Rage and Writing

“Writing is all shame.” Zadie Smith – often referred to as “the superstar of British literature” – here talks about how shame can be used to “propel you on t...

Zadie Smith - On Real Emotions & Disembodiment 

I think you have to think of emotions as real, even when they are extremely alien to you, I think that’s the first step in having some form of communication

Min 10. 

We (my husband and I) have been reading a lot of books by young women. How many times in these books, the character usually in the first person, something emotional will happen and instead of responding either in the narrative or verbally as you would in a ‘traditional novel’, will pinch a bit of their skin till it bleeds, or pinch their leg or hold their jaw. It’s so strange. As if the boy was a disassociated thing you know.

‘He said that to me and I put my fingernails into my hand until it bled’. I keep on finding these lines over and over again

That's very fascinating to me you know. 

The idea of verbalising an emotion is quite distant. And the body is treated like this strange thing you have to drag around after you've finished your texting, emailing and virtual life. Why have I got this flesh bucket I need to carry around?

I keep finding this perspective. It’s new.

I don’t think it’s a sad thing. The arch of these novels every often seems to be that the character starts out very arch, embedded in  ideologies and internet argument,  and by the end of the book realises simple things like ‘I have a body, I might want a baby, love is complicated,  you cant just love anyone in any direction.’

They learn these things that for us would have been first principles at the end. But I don't think that means they are slower. They are saying, ‘Here are these things we’ve been given, they don’t seem to have relevance to us, oh no wait actually I do have these flesh packet and it has various irrational desires and needs’

I am very engaged by it - the way they are writing - so disassociated from themselves’ 

Min 15.

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Kirsten Lepore - Bottle

Vimeo staff pick 

Simplicity 

The sameness / otherness in self and other 

Idea of exchange 

Economy of love 

Animation good for shorts - suits the form 

Use of location

Elements 

Novelty 

‘Cuteness’ / personification and identification

Appeal to inner child 

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My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117 - Chris Morris

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2003/feb/21/artsfeatures.television

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Koncert Zyxzen - Krzysztof Kieślowski

Power shots 

Face CU in wides. Obnixious 

Framing - whose ahead and behind 

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Koncert Zyczen - Krzysztof Kieślowski

Cinema 16 - Europe 

Driving force 

The watcher - Who is the protagonist? 

Observed intimacy - Moments of tenderness and also the observer figure

Steady camera work

Set up of oppositions in frames 

Camera flows with movement and emphasizes - Focus from one act to another 

Power play between male and females

Use of pop music mixed with Eastern European landscape and wildlife. 

Youth culture.

The teacher being an antagonist 

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Call me by your name - Luca Guadagnino 

2 February 2018 - Lighthouse 

Film stock

Sunlight

Sensual

Alive

Love of humanity, flesh and life 

Seduction of that sensuality

Made one want ot be there, in the film, in the haze

Lovesick feeling in stomach

Lead performance - mesmerising 

languidness

Holiday romance feeling 

Tenderness of the characters 

Level of personal independent and individuality accepted

The role of the parents - support 

Moving 

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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - Martin McDonagh

1 February 2018 - IFI 

Red haze from posters 

Gratuitous 

Moments of tenderness

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Leviathan - Andrey Zvyagintsev

31 January 2018 - IFI Retrospective

Tone: Mix of humour and tragity

Lilya - Unknown and most real’ alluring characterCarries on her face

Ref Samantha Morton

The projection of the unknown

Acts - Doesn't speak

Small flickers in eyes

Moment of intense beauty - The whale and her CU response

Ref La Jetee frame

Meaning?

Fim unpredictable

The use of the unknownable - What happens off screen

The affair sex assault, Lilya’s death. Like Lilya - that which evades permeates.

Peoples motives are left open, acts come from desire, often primal and messy.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Dawn, dusk and sea

Blueness

Look up Bluets - Maggie Nelson. Comparisons?

Yellow houses of village against the blue

Complimentary colours

Hypocrisy V comedy, humanity

Range of characters

All of humanity

No judgement

Caricatures have air of truth in them

Funny moments, piercing, the corruption of the high officials comedy doesn't lighten the darkness or threat of greed

Rare balance

Shots to remember:

- Omens - Drive past car with the back all knocked in. 

- The skeleton of the whale seen after