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.

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.

The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

    Soderbergh’s films are pretty hit and miss as a whole but migrate towards the positive end of the spectrum.  It is not immediately apparent just where on the scale this film sits.  The 2009 experimental drama received mixed critical reviews and, not surprisingly, didn’t fare too well at the box office.  Upon reflection, though, it becomes quite apparent that this is a far cry from the super independent experiment Soderbergh conducted back in 2005.  Bubble was mostly unwatchable and while it may have achieved something for the filmmaker personally, did nothing for his audience.
    The Girlfriend Experience is much easier to justify from a spectator standpoint.  Shot with the wunderkind of cameras, the RedOne, it juxtaposes a handheld, overexposed subjectivity reminiscent of Ocean’s 12 with a carefully composed, architecturally sound interior world of glass and steel.  These frames are much more interesting, much emptier emotionally.  The inhospitality of these environments, all hard lines with sharply defined edges, may mirror the attachment absent in the main character.  The apartment even, lit smoothly and beautifully with what should be a warm red glow, remains cold in a wide and unceasing master shot.  The closest we ever get to two characters actually connecting in the classic shot/ reverse shot is between the escort and a reporter, secluding themselves to window seats in a restaurant.  Just as the viewer remains physically distant from all characters so do the characters fail to connect themselves.
    Chelsea fashions herself a high-class escort providing paid-for emotional attachment to her clients while at the same time maintaining a relationship with her boyfriend.  We rarely see their connection, rather, we see them living out their independent lives that occasionally cross and eventually disintegrate.  All human interactions in the film, as there is really no other kind here, retain as sense of everyday realism.  Their world is not exceedingly cinematic; Chelsea’s profession is not exploited like most other films would likely handle it.  (The fact that Sasha Grey’s name promotes the movie is another story.)  The conversations, especially if one is expecting more, come off as mundane, yet appropriately so.  The closest we come is a john promising a career-building week in Dubai full of cocaine, rich Indian businessmen, and skyscraping hotels; the type of location most prostitute movies would inhabit.  Naturally, the reviewer turns out an insulting review of her services.
    Soderbergh’s film is a languid exploration approaching urban ennui.  Nearly all of her rich clients report on their crumbling economic status, spending much of their paid for time talking rather than…  Yet we never see anyone do much of anything.  The exception being the gym, where mindless minions perfect their bodies, presumably for sex with whomever.  There exists a bleakness to the world; the sun never seems to shine.  The only sense of energy comes from street musicians who provide a contrastingly upbeat soundtrack for spurts of time only to be cut out abruptly.  Experiment is certainly the right word for the film and its success is debatable.  Yet in its completion it strikes the right chord, at least for me at the time.  So what more can be said about a film that feels like something more must be said?  Just that, that it is easy to consider this film more meaningful than it is.  Or perhaps it is that meaningful, you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

            Von Trier seems incapable of not pushing the modern movie making boundaries in any film he does.  The intoxicating carnality of Antichrist is a testament to his depression.  The Five Obstructions has him literally forcing another filmmaker to experiment.  And his co-creation of Dogme 95 is only the beginning.  So the fact that he employed over 100 cameras for his 2000 musical was just another notch on his belt.

            Bjork stars as an immigrant working a dangerous factory job with deteriorating eyesight to pay for an operation so her son doesn't follow in her footsteps.  She also has a love for musicals where the characters break out into song for no apparent reason and plot elements are satisfactorily concluded, at least for their characters.  In this film, the musical numbers are set within the construct of the mind, and in their conclusion, we return to the unchanged diegetic world and nothing has been resolved to the benefit of the protagonist.  Rather, it was just a bunch of singing and dancing existing entirely as escapist fare.

        It was von Trier’s attempt to shoot this musical numbers, with the 100 customized Cinemascope-ish lenses, as a live event.  With this number of cameras running the event would only have to happen once and could be cut in real time.  DVD interviews show von Trier displeased with the failure of his experiment.  The rest of the film is not representative of the failure von Trier talks about.  The harsh elements Bjork encounters only expand to the point of no return.  Von Trier makes the point clear that in his musical, singing and dancing will not overturn the narrative course of events and that even such usually good-natured fun can end sour.

            It is another case of von Trier pushing his female leads to the extreme and on-set relations between the two are notoriously strained.  The film strays from the usual cheery lighting of commercial musicals thus grounding the film a bit further in reality.  In fact, it would be safer to not to call it a musical but rather a dramatic and depressing narrative with self-mocking musical interludes.