On Film Directing

I am a great fan of Claude Sautet, especially Un coeur en hiver.

Wes Anderson (x)

As a general rule, the characters in French films seem more grownup than those in American films. They do not consider love and sex as a teenager might, as the prizes in life. Instead, they are challenges and responsibilities, and not always to be embraced. Most movie romances begin with two people who should be in love, and end, after great difficulties, with those two people in love. Here is a movie about two people who should not be in love, and how they deal with that discovery.

— Roger Ebert about Un coeur en hiver (A Heart in Winter) (x)

Look what Jonathan Demme is doing.

They are sisters, and this is, in a way, a making peace scene, after conflicts throughout the previous part of the movie.

And uniting, being sisters (the color of Anne’s eyebrows and Rosemarie’s hair actually match), the older one “embracing”/protecting younger one even more when she starts crying harder — all this is shown/reminded about by the lock of hair. 


“No” is an ugly looking movie – literally – for an ugly time. It’s smeary, with little pictorial beauty or detail, but its anti-aesthetic is purposeful and, after your eyes stop hurting, watchable and persuasive. …Mr. Larraín has given this one a distinct visual style that serves the story, in this case by shooting with a pair of rebuilt U-matic video cameras. By using the U-matic for the dramatic portions of his movie, Mr. Larraín blurs the line between the fiction and the clips from the real No campaign woven throughout. This has the effect of underscoring the truth of the dramatic section, as if Rene weren’t just creating his campaign but also living it, which he is.
“No” is by far the strongest movie in Mr. Larraín’s trilogy and one of best selections at Cannes so far. 

… “No” is also Mr. Larraín’s last movie about the dictatorship. “You could make really, really, a thousand movies, there are so many stories, it’s absolutely endless,” he said. “There’s a huge mystery for me about those days.” And while he knows about the horrors and the bodies, the fundamental, terrible mystery of those years, what he describes as an “invisible truth,” remains. “After making three films I didn’t get it, so I’m done.”
— Manohla Dargis about a Chilean movie, ‘No’ (NYTimes.com)

“No” is an ugly looking movie – literally – for an ugly time. It’s smeary, with little pictorial beauty or detail, but its anti-aesthetic is purposeful and, after your eyes stop hurting, watchable and persuasive. …Mr. Larraín has given this one a distinct visual style that serves the story, in this case by shooting with a pair of rebuilt U-matic video cameras. By using the U-matic for the dramatic portions of his movie, Mr. Larraín blurs the line between the fiction and the clips from the real No campaign woven throughout. This has the effect of underscoring the truth of the dramatic section, as if Rene weren’t just creating his campaign but also living it, which he is.

“No” is by far the strongest movie in Mr. Larraín’s trilogy and one of best selections at Cannes so far. 

… “No” is also Mr. Larraín’s last movie about the dictatorship. “You could make really, really, a thousand movies, there are so many stories, it’s absolutely endless,” he said. “There’s a huge mystery for me about those days.” And while he knows about the horrors and the bodies, the fundamental, terrible mystery of those years, what he describes as an “invisible truth,” remains. “After making three films I didn’t get it, so I’m done.

— Manohla Dargis about a Chilean movie, ‘No’ (NYTimes.com)


the whole world has been paying attention to what’s going on here. this shit’s been all over the news, people are arguing left and right about all sorts of things relating to it…and i’m not even going to go into it. i’ll post some of the links below if you wanna read further.but i’m not getting involved in the arguments on those blogs and stuff. i can’t. i don’t have the energy, not now. i’m so, so, so tired. all i’ve been doing (wait for it…) is WORKING ON THE FUCKING RECORD RELEASE. i’ve barely had time to stop and breathe. i’m not going to use the energy i could be spending on my record on some nitwits who think that using kickstarter is “shaking my fans up and down for change” or that kickstarter should be reserved “real struggling artists.” man alive. who are these people and where have they been? i’ve seen so many people in the last week MISS THE POINT COMPLETELY that i just have to turn away and hunker down - i can’t even look any more. this is the fucking future. the old label system is DYING. artists are going to ASK YOU FOR DIRECT SUPPORT. that’s the reality.as bob dylan so clearly put it in a great song: please get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand, motherfuckers. the times, they are a-changing.

— blog.amandapalmer.net

the whole world has been paying attention to what’s going on here. 
this shit’s been all over the news, people are arguing left and right about all sorts of things relating to it…and i’m not even going to go into it. i’ll post some of the links below if you wanna read further.
but i’m not getting involved in the arguments on those blogs and stuff. i can’t. i don’t have the energy, not now. i’m so, so, so tired. all i’ve been doing (wait for it…) is WORKING ON THE FUCKING RECORD RELEASE. i’ve barely had time to stop and breathe. i’m not going to use the energy i could be spending on my record on some nitwits who think that using kickstarter is “shaking my fans up and down for change” or that kickstarter should be reserved “real struggling artists.” man alive. who are these people and where have they been? i’ve seen so many people in the last week MISS THE POINT COMPLETELY that i just have to turn away and hunker down - i can’t even look any more. 

this is the fucking future. 
the old label system is DYING. 
artists are going to ASK YOU FOR DIRECT SUPPORT. 
that’s the reality.

as bob dylan so clearly put it in a great song: 

please get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand, motherfuckers. 

the times, they are a-changing.

blog.amandapalmer.net

Like many Southerners, Mr. Thornton, who grew up in Arkansas, is a gifted storyteller, with an eye for the telling detail and a moving way of blending comedy with tragedy.

NYTimes.com about Billy Bob Thornton

writing
am clinging to everyone and everything around to avoid completing key tasks for the week

am clinging to everyone and everything around to avoid completing key tasks for the week

2012

Guidelines for Living in a World of Systems

  1. Get the beat of the system. 
  2. Expose your mental models to the light of day.
  3. Honor, respect, and distribute information. 
  4. Use language with care and enrich it with systems concepts. 
  5. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
  6. Make feedback policies for feedback systems. 
  7. Go for the good of the whole. 
  8. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
  9. Locate responsibility within the system.
  10. Stay humble—stay a learner. 
  11. Celebrate complexity. 
  12. Expand time horizons. 
  13. Defy the disciplines.
  14. Expand the boundary of caring.
  15. Don’t erode the goal of goodness.

Places to Intervene in a System

(in increasing order of effectiveness)

  • 12. Numbers: Constants and parameters such as subsidies, taxes, and standards
  • 11. Buffers: The sizes of stabilizing stocks relative to their flows
  • 10. Stock-and-Flow Structures: Physical systems and their nodes of intersection
  •  9. Delays: The lengths of time relative to the rates of system changes
  •  8. Balancing Feedback Loops: The strength of the feedbacks relative to the impacts they are trying to correct
  •  7. Reinforcing Feedback Loops: The strength of the gain of driving loops
  •  6. Information Flows: The structure of who does and does not have access to information
  •  5. Rules: Incentives, punishments, constraints
  •  4. Self-Organization: The power to add, change, or evolve system structure 
  •  3. Goals: The purpose of the system
  •  2.  Paradigms: The mind-set out of which the system—its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters—arises
  •  1. Transcending Paradigms

— Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

Uncertainty and Opportunities of Systems Thinking

The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionist science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can’t optimize; we don’t even know what to optimize. 

We can’t keep track of everything. We can’t find a proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror. 

For those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take. If you can’t understand, predict, and control, what is there to do? 

Systems thinking leads to another conclusion, however, waiting, shining, obvious, as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of “doing.” The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can’t impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.

We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

…I don’t think the systems way of seeing is better than the reductionist way of thinking. I think it’s complementary, and therefore revealing. You can see some things through the lens of the human eye, other things through the lens of a microscope, others through the lens of a telescope, and still others through the lens of systems theory. Everything seen through each kind of lens is actually there. Each way of seeing allows our knowledge of the wondrous world in which we live to become a little more complete.

— Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

I should have been re-reading this book/notes for it each 3mo. You walk in circles for weeks (or months?), and then open your old file of notes for some irrelevant reason and it’s just what you needed.