A Song to Cinema

Shot in 5 days during the 2012 Traverse City Film Festival.


Created by The Treefort Collective.

Cloud Control

Dances of the Leaves

Shot on a Canon 5D in 24p.
Didn't do much with sound, obviously.

Compare to Leaf Dance.
Shot on JVC.

Walk with a Stranger

This short was shot on a warm summer day in 2010.  Storyboarded 2 years prior it was about to collect dust until I realized I had no excuses not to shoot.  It was filmed on VHS, cut in FCE, and could literally not be any lower resolution besides hand-drawing it.

The Island (2005)

                I had 2 objectives when I decided to watch this movie. 1.) To watch something that I would not have to think about afterwards, and 2.) To watch something that would allow me to test the capabilities of my new stereo system from G-Will.  Needless to say this Michael Bay film met all of my requirements.
              Set in the startlingly near future it left me worried about the fate of mankind, especially our clothing choices.  In a mix of cold gray concrete and sterile white laboratory adorned with LEDs the future us sit at mindless assembly line jobs like the current us.  If there is one thing they didn't learn form us it is how to get robots to do all the busy work.  The rest of the plot is too tedious to explain.
             The film is kind of a Truman Show meets Surrogates meets Michael Bay meets Every Other Crappy Sci-Fi-Dystopian-Neon-Future movie.  A society where everyone is the same, love is forbidden, heaven is just a lottery away, dudes in black are bad, etc.  Luckily the film cuts so fast you don't have to worry about your eyes getting bored.
             Yes this is the movie that Michael Bay would borrow shots from in his later Transformers blockbusters.  This movie cost $126 million and grossed $162.  Think how many smaller movies could have been made for that amount.
              It should go without saying that the vigor and enthusiasm with which I currently write is matches my enthusiasm of the film itself.

In much scarier news, Michael Bay is attached as producer of the upcoming Ninja Turtles reboot...uh oh.

Halloween Night

Baraka (1992)

    14 months.  24 countries.  6 continents.  Sounds like a shoot I’d like to be on.  From the cinematographer of Koyaanisqatsi (1982), John Fricke, comes a similar visual exploration of the diversity across our planet.  From the sky grabbing towers of American cities to the full-body Yakuza tattoos seen in Japanese bathhouses, from lines of yellow taxis stretching into infinity to the stars sweeping across the sky.  We’ve gotten used to the moving camera time-lapse shots that run rampant on Vimeo, but here, they hold a power not reached by current video professionals.  Perhaps the 70mm (i.e. 8K UDHD master) adds a degree of scope not available to anyone with a limited checkbook.  And unlike most 5-minute videos that occupy the internet, Baraka is infinitely mesmerizing.  Little yellow chicks flow like water through a conveyer belt and shoot system.  Hoards of travelers ascend escalators.  Clouds ooze over mountaintops and forests.
    The film appears to be about our relationship with world.  And by us I mean humans, seen here in all shapes, colors, attire, environments, comfort, and age.  Both staged and observational, the countless cultures around the world are immortalized before the camera’s eye.  They manage to interact, or rather exist, in seeming harmony.  Yet the film is one of contradictions.  The mass-produced mechanical repetition of electronics and food soon becomes a montage of bodies sleeping on the streets, of lonely children, of prostitution.  What was first a natural world of immense waterfalls and rainforests has become very unnatural.
    It’s unclear just how judgmental this film is.  While outwardly beautiful, the context is often darkly unfortunate.  Fiery inferno’s flare into the sky across vast oil fields where burned out vehicles are scattered like tombstones. 
    The music is appropriately haunting, at times full and at times empty, yet always capturing the magnificent scope of the visuals involved.  This is a cinematic world lost in much of today’s computer generated foreplay. Everything here is real and amazing be it man-made or natural.  The film lends equal attention to that which is beautiful regardless of its origin.  It treats the absurdity of the world’s religions with equal interest and observation.  We are all different but we are all the same.
    It’s pretty easier to look for some deeper meaning and universal context to the film.  And there is certainly no reason not to.  It is equally easy to let go of any rhyme or reason and allow the visuals to play out, to live out, and to build something bigger.

Enter the Void (2009)

     In a pulsating phantasmagoria of acid-tripped title cards, Noe introduces his latest feature atop a pulse-pounding electronic heartbeat hyped on amphetamines.  There is no doubt that many, many narcotics are to come.  If the endless neon lights of Tokyo side streets weren’t clue enough the POV DMT hit seals the deal.  This is a drug movie.  One that resists the ethical considerations surrounding their use and instead gets strung out on life, death, and sex.  There are no moral debates to the aforementioned topics, unlike Irreversible; Noe doesn’t delve into ethical implications.  Rather, he inhales the intoxicating fumes of Dimethyltryptamine and trips through death in the labyrinthine Tokyo streets.  The viewer must be willing, or equally intoxicated, to join the ride.
    Our point of view is through the eyes of Oscar, a twentysomething American living in Tokyo.  He is also a heavy drug user, a literal motherf*cker, and a prospective spiritualist.  He takes a few hits of DMT, the same chemical released when one is about to die, and disappears into a psychedelic stream…  From the hands of his friend, Alex, comes The Tibetan Book of the Dead.  It tells of the afterlife.  They discuss this existence, explained by the book, as a cycle where the spirit is absorbed into light sources to higher and higher levels.  The concepts are nominally intangible yet conceptually akin to someone accustomed to different plains of consciousness.  As the pair walks the carnival-like streets to The Void we experience every footstep, every blink, nearly every sensory input Oscar receives.  He enters the neon bar, black lights illuminating the darkness like a synthetic Pandora.  Seconds later he is in the bathroom frantically dumping pills into the ground level Japanese toilet.  He hurriedly scrapes them from amongst the cigarette butts and unclean tile.  A bullet rips through his chest; his fingers fumble in the warm blood.  Oscar dies on the disgusting bathroom floor, the only cinematic locale to rival Trainspotting. 
    The remaining two hours are a beautiful nightmare, one in which he watches over his stripper sister; seeing both conception and abortion of her baby.  He drifts through walls, passing countless, rooms, stairways, and endless partitions.  There is a renowned sense of freedom not even possible during the heaviest trips.  He cycles, passing through glowing orbs in the environment before starting again with the events that carry on after his death.  More walls, more lights, more sounds textures and luminescent voids.  Until finally, as dreamed of before death, he floats through a hotel filled with friends.  He glides above room after room of copulating couples and passionate threesomes; a sexual cornucopia that fuses Eyes Wide Shut and 2001 A Space Odyssey into a relentless foray until he becomes, almost perfectly, the starchild.
    Gasper Noe’s style is very much intact.  The opening title cards, perhaps seizure inducing, introduce the strobing, neon color space in which the entire film exists.  Oscar’s room is illuminated heavily by blinking advertisements from outside, shifting from green to purple to red and yellow.  White, it seems, does not exist.  Nearly every shot is from behind his eyes.  The single exception may be his initial DMT hit that slowly floats above even him; but it is still clearly his point of view.  We are treated to the unreal trip sequences as otherworldly shapes intertwine and morph between colors, sometimes resembling dendrites or caterpillars or mind-tunnels to other dimensions.  Present too, in amplified color swirling accents, is raw, uncensored, pornographic exploits.  Where Irreversible teetered between violence and sex, Enter the Void dissolves the former for heavy doses of the latter.
    The film may be the new ultimate trip, clearly influenced by Kubrickian obsessions.  It, too, runs a little long for the conventional viewer yet is fully motivated by its content.  And more than many filmmakers today, Noe has created an experience, one fraught with visual and audible stimulus and intending an experience beyond the typical drama.  In this case, a psychedelic melodrama.

Posters. Posters. Posters.

A giant haul of awesome posters.  No talk just look.

Mash-Ups

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/26/the-best-movie-poster-mas_n_587649.html#s92928&title=undefined

Minimalist

http://www.listal.com/list/minimalist-posters

Alternate Universe

http://hartter.blogspot.com/2009/11/misc.html

Check 'em all out.

Irreversible (2002)

            The first frames are credit roll.  Last names only and backwards E’s, N’s, and R’s.  The words are at first cryptic and stream by in blood red capitals before slowly titling sideways and finally spinning out of control.  This flows naturally into the first shots of the film; tilted, off-angle exteriors with flashing lights and brick walls.  The camera twists and turns out of control, unencumbered by the formal expectations of feature film viewership.  Through the S&M nightclub, The Rectum, Marcus searches for le Tenia (the tapeworm), the man who raped and abused his girlfriend.  He falls victim instead, his arm broken backwards before his friend Pierre smashes the man’s face with a fire extinguisher.  The blows are relentless, the camera-eye unflinching, the metal body unyielding.  The man is left with only his lower jaw and a pile of mush where his face and skull used to be.

            Noe’s film is relentless; a series of long takes playing in reverse chronology that follow a man seeking revenge and the irreversible consequences that take place during a night of extreme violence.  Yet these first few minutes, complete with infrasound at 28Hz, while indeed disturbing and horrific are nothing compared to the inciting incident that takes place in an underpass below the Parisian streets.  Noe is clearly asking if the violence we are introduced to initially is justified by the ungodly time spent in hell; a red lined tunnel converging in the distance, void of any earthly familiarity.

            I’d be inclined to say yes, if the man Pierre obliterated had in fact been le Tenia.  Instead, le Tenia looked on amusedly knowing the pair will soon be arrested and his crime will go unpunished.  The complete lack of consequence with which Tenia observes the murder foreshadows the complete lack of humanity with which he commits his own crime.  If anything, the man’s unrecognizable face is a reminder of earlier in the night.

            It cannot go unquestioned how images like Noe’s can be put on film.  The weight of what they represent and the vérité in which they are presented leave a considerable impression on the viewer’s mind.  It is one that is immediately shocking and unendingly disturbing.  They serve as warning, as cautions, as artistic testaments to the evils of mankind.  Yet we can still wonder why Noe chooses to show what he does; why he wants his audiences to be uncomfortable both physiologically and emotionally.  Is this exploitation cinema or are they raw warnings?  For me, the jury is still out but both remain plausible explanations.