Partying at the movies The crop duster said recently Maybe I’ve been watching too many Fritz Lang movies lately, but doesn’t a lot of the film director’s art come down to understanding how to photograph rooms?  I say “yes!” and add that party scenes (moments of energy and frantic music and grinding bodies) are a way for a director to demonstrate that basic photographic skill and film-art talent in a glorious and difficult-to-capture setting.  Three recent examples, and then a fourth. (1) Black Swan. Nina and Lily go for drinks. The music is boom-boom and the lights strobe a bunch. The gimmick is every shot works like a stop-motion photograph, with each image progressively getting sluttier (Nina letting loose, a little) or more desperate (bodies clinging, people running to the restroom for not rest).  It doesn’t work at all. Aronofsky is trying to have us feel as part of the crowd: numbed and woozy and confuzzled. The problem is there’s not any of that happening on the screen, only to us, as we experience that scene. The framing is messy and proud of itself for being so disorientating. Like that beat poet you knew in college who wanted more than anything to sound elusive than expressive.  (2) Vanilla Sky Tom Cruise pulls a freak out at a club and despite great materials (well, props and script - in that scene alone) it’s very plain, very expected. We’re not impressed by the strangeness of Cruise’s one-man reprised dialogue (which had potential for the great doubling scenes of cinema: like nearly anything from Mulholland Drive wherein things happen at least twice, and never in the same way) or the fact his mask is backwards, his face is sometimes blank and his whole countenance (scars and gait and all) speaks to strangeness without ever being unusual or strange or viscerally startling.  Maybe it had to do with the fact that this was ultimately a star vehicle (Cruise, Diaz, and Cruz - the former two at the peaks for popularity, the latter a new discovery to some audiences) and that stars need attention, not scrutiny. According to their managers. At one point the camera glides above the dance floor, looking down, and for a second, Cruise is lost in the midst of dozens of actors, dozens of unrelated stories. His agony and blankness and foggy memories become a part of the scene, melt into the rhythms of a soulless beat. It’s great but it was, I think, an accident.  “How many more days we gotta shoot this scene?” ‘I dunno. Director says he wants some variety. Says the camera is too locked into the point of view of the characters.” “Let’s just dangle it from the ceiling and go home.” In a moment like that, we actually see the emotion of the story more clearly (the mask looking up, the heads bobbing, the throb of chaos: and the entire sequence looks less like a Bacardi ad than at any other point.  (3) Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me Lynch is the man. For the first time in my life with cinema, I’ve seen a scene that recreates how bars and clubbing feel (for most of it, the dialogue is purposely underheard by the too loud music) and the sense that anything could happen. Unlike the former two films I list, the party scene is an event on its own. Black Swan and Vanilla Sky follow such predictably unpredictable plots that we’re just waiting for some crazy thing to happen, some character to say something unexpected, that watching either scene from either movie becomes an exercise in clock-watching: how much longer is it gonna take before Nina goes home with some hookup or gets sick or when is Tom Cruise gonna start sulking again? The enticing stuff in Walk with Me is how little it feels guided: going to a bar isn’t some kind of hipster-class repose for its characters, but a part of the bankrupt spirituality that’s rectified by the movie’s end. Agreeing to dance, to drink, to move and follow the contours of the dance floor aren’t simple or socially expected (Nina is pretty much told to go and party to prepare for her role as First Class Ballerina in Swan Lake) but radical and acts of choice, not convenience. The moral choices of the characters (Laura’s friend agrees to meet men/whore it up as a means of sympathy and personal expression) make the scene throb.  The framing of the back room, the fact this bar even has a back room and not just one big square of a dancing space, the way certain sections or corners have allegiance from different characters, that the auxiliary characters have tendencies and ticks: this stuff adds to the power of the scene as a chaotic and sort of petri dish of narrative potential.  At one point, a character stumbles outside, fed up with the noise and the alcohol, and the music still swells and grabs at our ears. It’s a point like this when we realize that realism and mimetic devices were never what made the scene so good and that they were maybe not so realistic or mimetic at all - that it was a matter of directorial control, of stylized facts and turns of the camera that purported and then revealed an expression that the film only builds on. It’s a moment like this that honestly points out the falseness of any decently shot scene - the necessity for artifice. The fact that the only true realism is security camera footage. The fact that stories of fantasy cannot state their purpose (“It was all a dream that I signed up for and my tech support guy will help me out now” or “I was perfect, and maybe hallucinating”) but can only reveal in similarly created ways the emotional and spiritual stuffs that draw us to the movie in the first place.  It’s why Twin Peaks ends with such big images - large smiles, clunky heavenly graphics, the series’s archetypal images of red curtains and chess board floors.  A director’s art is also one of fidelity: maintaining the dedication to art in small things like the ability to photograph a room, the medium things like the above mentioned party tricks, and the big grandstanding finales: finding ways to connect these images to the director’s vision without everything collapsing into silliness. 

Partying at the movies

The crop duster said recently

Maybe I’ve been watching too many Fritz Lang movies lately, but doesn’t a lot of the film director’s art come down to understanding how to photograph rooms? 

I say “yes!” and add that party scenes (moments of energy and frantic music and grinding bodies) are a way for a director to demonstrate that basic photographic skill and film-art talent in a glorious and difficult-to-capture setting. 

Three recent examples, and then a fourth.

(1) Black Swan. Nina and Lily go for drinks. The music is boom-boom and the lights strobe a bunch. The gimmick is every shot works like a stop-motion photograph, with each image progressively getting sluttier (Nina letting loose, a little) or more desperate (bodies clinging, people running to the restroom for not rest). 

It doesn’t work at all. Aronofsky is trying to have us feel as part of the crowd: numbed and woozy and confuzzled. The problem is there’s not any of that happening on the screen, only to us, as we experience that scene. The framing is messy and proud of itself for being so disorientating. Like that beat poet you knew in college who wanted more than anything to sound elusive than expressive. 

(2) Vanilla Sky

Tom Cruise pulls a freak out at a club and despite great materials (well, props and script - in that scene alone) it’s very plain, very expected. We’re not impressed by the strangeness of Cruise’s one-man reprised dialogue (which had potential for the great doubling scenes of cinema: like nearly anything from Mulholland Drive wherein things happen at least twice, and never in the same way) or the fact his mask is backwards, his face is sometimes blank and his whole countenance (scars and gait and all) speaks to strangeness without ever being unusual or strange or viscerally startling. 

Maybe it had to do with the fact that this was ultimately a star vehicle (Cruise, Diaz, and Cruz - the former two at the peaks for popularity, the latter a new discovery to some audiences) and that stars need attention, not scrutiny. According to their managers.

At one point the camera glides above the dance floor, looking down, and for a second, Cruise is lost in the midst of dozens of actors, dozens of unrelated stories. His agony and blankness and foggy memories become a part of the scene, melt into the rhythms of a soulless beat. It’s great but it was, I think, an accident. 

“How many more days we gotta shoot this scene?”

‘I dunno. Director says he wants some variety. Says the camera is too locked into the point of view of the characters.”

“Let’s just dangle it from the ceiling and go home.”

In a moment like that, we actually see the emotion of the story more clearly (the mask looking up, the heads bobbing, the throb of chaos: and the entire sequence looks less like a Bacardi ad than at any other point. 

(3) Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

Lynch is the man. For the first time in my life with cinema, I’ve seen a scene that recreates how bars and clubbing feel (for most of it, the dialogue is purposely underheard by the too loud music) and the sense that anything could happen.

Unlike the former two films I list, the party scene is an event on its own. Black Swan and Vanilla Sky follow such predictably unpredictable plots that we’re just waiting for some crazy thing to happen, some character to say something unexpected, that watching either scene from either movie becomes an exercise in clock-watching: how much longer is it gonna take before Nina goes home with some hookup or gets sick or when is Tom Cruise gonna start sulking again?

The enticing stuff in Walk with Me is how little it feels guided: going to a bar isn’t some kind of hipster-class repose for its characters, but a part of the bankrupt spirituality that’s rectified by the movie’s end. Agreeing to dance, to drink, to move and follow the contours of the dance floor aren’t simple or socially expected (Nina is pretty much told to go and party to prepare for her role as First Class Ballerina in Swan Lake) but radical and acts of choice, not convenience. The moral choices of the characters (Laura’s friend agrees to meet men/whore it up as a means of sympathy and personal expression) make the scene throb. 

The framing of the back room, the fact this bar even has a back room and not just one big square of a dancing space, the way certain sections or corners have allegiance from different characters, that the auxiliary characters have tendencies and ticks: this stuff adds to the power of the scene as a chaotic and sort of petri dish of narrative potential. 

At one point, a character stumbles outside, fed up with the noise and the alcohol, and the music still swells and grabs at our ears. It’s a point like this when we realize that realism and mimetic devices were never what made the scene so good and that they were maybe not so realistic or mimetic at all - that it was a matter of directorial control, of stylized facts and turns of the camera that purported and then revealed an expression that the film only builds on.

It’s a moment like this that honestly points out the falseness of any decently shot scene - the necessity for artifice. The fact that the only true realism is security camera footage. The fact that stories of fantasy cannot state their purpose (“It was all a dream that I signed up for and my tech support guy will help me out now” or “I was perfect, and maybe hallucinating”) but can only reveal in similarly created ways the emotional and spiritual stuffs that draw us to the movie in the first place. 

It’s why Twin Peaks ends with such big images - large smiles, clunky heavenly graphics, the series’s archetypal images of red curtains and chess board floors. 

A director’s art is also one of fidelity: maintaining the dedication to art in small things like the ability to photograph a room, the medium things like the above mentioned party tricks, and the big grandstanding finales: finding ways to connect these images to the director’s vision without everything collapsing into silliness.