On Film Directing

Photo

Thu, 09 May 2013 05:03:00 -0400

the things she does with the word ‘today’ in case...

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:52:00 -0400

the things she does with the word ‘today’

in case the audio is too short — there is a conversation about beautiful eyes later on

Luzmila Carpio - Kuntur Mallku (señor condor)

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:40:42 -0400

Luzmila Carpio - Kuntur Mallku (señor condor)

"Your goal is to generate enough material to locate your best options."

Thu, 02 May 2013 12:36:13 -0400

“Your goal is to generate enough material to locate your best options.”

- Writing Analytically, 6th ed. (A) about exploratory writing (“In the invention stage, you follow prescribed methods for coming up with things to say, material which can then be arranged into the most effective form (presentation)”).

turns out, Homer was fun and big thanks to Robert Fagles of...

Thu, 02 May 2013 12:08:00 -0400

turns out, Homer was fun

and big thanks to Robert Fagles of course

Out of all my Douglas Sirk screenshots where the key person in...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:00:10 -0400

Out of all my Douglas Sirk screenshots where the key person in the scene is marked with the stuff above their head (lamps (evil light or just on-off status), flowers, a flag, a meaningful banner, a picture), this one is my favorite.

The guy is the villain in this scene & I just love his pose, the choice of “his” bouquet & “villain” color, and so on.

Also, it’s because of Sirk’s movies that I realized that some* directors parallel ALL characters in the scene with props (e.g. pictures on the walls, sculptures or other objects nearby).

E.g., when people in the dialogue are equal, Sirk lines up pictures side by side. But here there is a dominance, so the pictures are above each other. He also added additional layer of symbolism (current mental state of the characters) with (the choice of) these two bouquets, and another layer — via the way he lined up men & women in the room (it’s 1950s, a party at the country club, i.e. Sirk “hints” the purpose of these events).

* — well, Maurice Pialat did it too.

Yann Tiersen - Les jours tristes

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:37:45 -0400

Yann Tiersen - Les jours tristes

MARGAUX: Sheila has this passage in her book about this house, where Sheila and Sholem and Jon live,...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:32:57 -0400

MARGAUX: Sheila has this passage in her book about this house, where Sheila and Sholem and Jon live, and this cop on a horse walking by. And then Ryan is singing songs about where he lives, and Sholem is drawing his own face …and it starts to make your world look pretty meaningful, when you see it being looked at.

— ARTINFO Canada, 2011

1. ”I still try to always write when I have that feeling. If I don’t …— then I feel really...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:24:00 -0400

1. ”I still try to always write when I have that feeling. If I don’t …— then I feel really bad and like I’ve let myself down.”

SH: It took probably ten years or so for me to accept my way working, and to believe that work was going to get done. But when I was writing The Middle Stories, even then my only discipline was that when I felt like writing I had to write. You can’t miss those times. That was the foundation of discipline for me. I really tried to be sensitive to those moments. Sometimes I’d leave class and go home to write. Now, I don’t just wait for those moments of, let’s say, inspiration, but I still try to always write when I have that feeling. If I don’t—if I have the feeling, but instead watch a movie, or read a book, or go on the Internet or email—then I feel really bad and like I’ve let myself down. It’s like something wanted to be expressed in that moment and I missed it and I’ll never get it back.

2. ”The world doesn’t need your books.”

SH: …The world doesn’t need your books. So it seems silly to force yourself to write if there’s nothing to write.

JM: “The world doesn’t need your books” is an interesting statement coming from a writer. Can you talk about that a bit more?

SH: Well, the world isn’t sitting around waiting for your books. The world is taking care of children and making money to pay the rent and eating dinner. If you don’t write your books, pretty much who cares? There are already more than enough good books for any reading person. You do it because you want to, not because the world is begging you.

3. “…what’s the rush? You want to make something good.”

SH: …my imagination for what writing can do has expanded. I used to only think about writing in terms of the sentence, but now I think that a piece of writing can be a game that a readers uses to play with the world, a book can be so many things. So all new kinds of calibration are needed.

…It’s like, if you work for a number of years on something, then there are just layers to it that give it more meaning than you could give it if you just spent a week or a month on it. I think that’s the most interesting thing about writing—working on something over five or six years. I’ve learned to really love that. I guess Ticknor was my first experience of that. You’d think that you’d get bored, but there are so many different angles on something and there’s a whole world that you’re looking at and so I think the text becomes more intelligent the more time you spend on it.

…I don’t think two years is enough.

…For me, I think you need five years. That so far seems like the right amount of time to spend on a book. Maybe seven years is even better. That’s one full cycle they say, right?

JM: Do you always feel that patient with the process?

SH: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

JM: So you’re really, truly enjoying the process?

SH: I mean, what’s the rush? You want to make something good.

— Jill Margo interviews Sheila Heti, Numéro Cinq

on finding no narrative

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 15:54:10 -0400

BLVR: And I wonder, as a human and as a writer, if you don’t have the same people around you, not just family but also friends, also landmarks in a city that you’ve lived in for many years—because cities change—does one become more fragmented-feeling, more atomized?

JD: Well, I think you do, and then you have to learn to deal with that. I mean, that was part of what I was doing in this book. This book was quite personal. I don’t mean it was personal because I talked about things in my life that were personal; I mean it was personal in that I was dealing with my own inability to find the narrative.

BLVR: So what does it feel like to come out of a book you’ve written that doesn’t have a narrative?

JD: Well, it’s not an encouraging attitude, but at this moment, I wanted to flat-out deal with the fact that I did not have, at the moment, an encouraging attitude. [Laughs]

BLVR: Writing something fragmented as opposed to narrative, was it a different kind of thinking?

JD: Absolutely it was a different kind of thinking. Because what you’re normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative. And a lot of the pieces I’ve written over the past ten years or so have had to do with finding the narrative. This was exactly the opposite. This book proceeds from the idea that the narrative isn’t there and it’s not going to matter.

BLVR: So where is the intensity of the thinking located, then, if not in finding the narrative?

JD: Well, in the idea that narrative doesn’t matter, I guess.

BLVR: Does that feel more true to you than being able to find a narrative? Is that a deeper truth?

JD: At the moment it seems so to me, yes. That’s kind of what this turned out to be about.

— Joan Didion about Blue Nights, an interview by Sheila Heti

in Anafiotika (Athens, Greece), by Ioannisdg

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 15:51:00 -0400

in Anafiotika (Athens, Greece), by Ioannisdg

The Humanist: How do you define critical thinking? Rush Holt: Let me define instead what I like to...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 19:55:22 -0400

The Humanist: How do you define critical thinking?

Rush Holt: Let me define instead what I like to call “thinking like a scientist.” It’s asking questions that can be answered based on evidence; it’s expressing questions in a way that allows someone to check your work. If you don’t have both of those elements, it’s too easy to fool yourself or to get lazy in your thinking. I wouldn’t say that critical thinking is hard thinking, because I don’t want to discourage people from doing it, but like anything else, it’s easier if you practice.

Third graders, for example, are often very good at thinking like scientists. Like scientists, they know that if you ask how something works, what something means, or how something happens, you should do it in a way that allows for more than just pure thinking. There should be some evidence, something empirical. You should form your question so that it allows someone else to ask that same question and observe the evidence to see if they get the same answer as you do. And that’s the essential part of critical thinking. If you say, “I’ve been thinking about this deeply and, by golly, now I understand it,” but then you try to explain it to someone else and can’t, then you probably don’t understand it … or it’s not very reliable knowledge.

I keep trying to get science taught in a way that, even if you can’t remember a single Latin term or are a klutz at solving equations, you’ve learned how to frame questions and sift evidence. I talk about verification but another way of putting it is: be ready for the cross-examination. Prepare to explain yourself.

— Thinking Like a Scientist, The Humanist

Mr. Soderbergh said he shared what he described as Gray’s need “to keep making art in order to get...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:51:45 -0400

Mr. Soderbergh said he shared what he described as Gray’s need “to keep making art in order to get out of bed in the morning.” So he felt an admittedly irrational fear that what Gray suffered would somehow “splash onto him.” His anxiety was so great, he said, that he never made contact with Gray after the accident.

“I was totally absent in a way that is inexcusable to me,” he said. “And this entire movie is in part an act of contrition. The irony is that I spent the better part of three years immersed in something I tried to avoid. But as Spalding would say, ‘What are we to do with any of this except make a piece of art?’ ”

— NYT, Steven Soderbergh about And Everything Is Going Fine (2010)

Russian critics have noted that Chekhov’s style, his choice of words and so on, did not...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:47:54 -0400

Russian critics have noted that Chekhov’s style, his choice of words and so on, did not reveal any of those special artistic preoccupations that obsessed, for instance, Gogol or Flaubert or Henry James. His dictionary is poor, his combination of words almost trivial—the purple patch, the juicy verb, the hothouse adjective, the crême-de-menthe epithet, brought in on a silver tray, these were foreign to him. He was not a verbal inventor in the sense that Gogol was; his literary style goes to parties clad in its everyday suit. Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve. When Turgenev sits down to discuss a landscape, you notice that he is concerned with the trouser-crease of his phrase; he crosses his legs with an eye upon the color of his socks. Chekhov does not mind, not because these matters are not important—for some writers they are naturally and very beautifully important when the right temperament is there—but Chekhov does not mind because his temperament is quite foreign to verbal inventiveness. Even a bit of bad grammar or a slack newspaperish sentence left him unconcerned.* The magical part of it is that in spite of his tolerating flaws which a bright beginner would have avoided, in spite of his being quite satisfied with the man-in-the-street among words, the word-in-the-street, so to say, Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was. He did it by keeping all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of gray, a tint between the color of an old fence and that of a low cloud. The variety of his moods, the flicker of his charming wit, the deeply artistic economy of characterization, the vivid detail, and the fade-out of human life—all the peculiar Chekhovian features—are enhanced by being suffused and surrounded by a faintly iridescent verbal haziness.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Anton Chekhov (from Lectures on Russian Literature)

“Swans, real swans,” says the latter, contemplating them with sacred awe. An old...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:25:25 -0400

“Swans, real swans,” says the latter, contemplating them with sacred awe.

An old peasant comes up. “Well,” he says with a cunning and ironic smile, “white they are, but what of it? If my two horses were stuffed with oats, they would be quite as sleek. I’d like to see those two put to plow and whipped up.”

Now, in a didactic story, especially in one with good ideas and purposes, this sentence would be the voice of wisdom, and the old peasant who so simply and deeply expresses the idea of a modus of life regulating existence would be shown further on as a good fine old man, the symbol of the peasant class consciousness as a rising class, etc. What does Chekhov do? Very probably he did not notice himself that he had put into the old peasant’s mind a truth sacred to the radicals of his day. What interested him was that it was true to life, true to the character of the man as a character and not as a symbol — a man who spoke so not because he was wise but because he was always trying to be unpleasant, to spoil other people’s pleasures: he hated the white horses, the fat handsome coachman; he was himself a lonely man, a widower, his life was dull (he could not work because of an illness …He got his money from his son who worked in a candy-shop in a big town, and all day long he wandered about idly and if he met a peasant bringing home a log or fishing, he would say, “That log is rotten” or “In this weather fish don’t bite.”

In other words, instead of making a character the medium of a lesson and instead of following up what would seem to Gorki, or to any Soviet author, a socialistic truth by making the rest of the man beautifully good (just as in an ordinary bourgeois story if you love your mother or your dog you cannot be a bad man), instead of this, Chekhov gives us a living human being without bothering about political messages or traditions of writing. Incidentally, we might note that his wise men are usually bores, just as Polonius is.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Anton Chekhov (from Lectures on Russian Literature)

Intertextuality

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:17:00 -0400

examples for one of the figures, allusion

For others, it was a more lonesome affair, paced out in a sort of private morse code like following bread crumbs through a forest.

— Tilda Swinton’s speech refers to Charles Perrault’s Little Tom Thumb

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

— Vladimir Nabokov refers to Aesop’s fable, The Shepherd’s Boy and the Wolf

When others move to silence or violence, step out of the conversation and Make It Safe. When safety...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:45:59 -0400

When others move to silence or violence, step out of the conversation and Make It Safe. When safety is restored, go back to the issue at hand and continue the dialogue.

“violence” = verbal violence (e.g., sarcastic remarks instead of discussion)

The authors argue that even if you only apply Learn to Look and Make It Safe recommendations out of their whole list, the quality of conversations will drastically improve.

So these are notes from Make It Safe chapter.

1. Mutual Purpose (= the entrance condition)

Do others believe you care about their goals in this conversation?
Do they trust your motives?

Crucial conversations often go awry not because others dislike the content of the conversation, but because they believe the content (even if it’s delivered in a gentle way) suggests that you have a malicious intent. How can others feel safe when they believe you’re out to harm them? Soon, every word out of your mouth is suspect. You can’t utter a harmless “good morning” without others interpreting it in a negative way.

Consequently, the first condition of safety is Mutual Purpose. Mutual Purpose means that others perceive that you’re working toward a common outcome in the conversation, that you care about their goals, interests, and values. And vice versa. You believe they care about yours. Consequently, Mutual Purpose is the entry condition of dialogue. Find a shared goal, and you have both a good reason and a healthy climate for talking.

2. Mutual Respect (= the continuance condition of dialogue)

Do others believe you respect them?

…As people perceive that others don’t respect them, the conversation immediately becomes unsafe and dialogue comes to a screeching halt.

Why? Because respect is like air. As long as it’s present, nobody thinks about it. But if you take it away, it’s all that people can think about. The instant people perceive disrespect in a conversation, the interaction is no longer about the original purpose—it is now about defending dignity.

Can You Respect People You Don’t Respect?

Some people fear they’ll never be able to maintain Mutual Purpose or Mutual Respect with certain individuals or in certain circumstances. How, they wonder, can they share the same purpose with people who come from completely different backgrounds or whose morals or values differ from theirs?

…Dialogue truly would be doomed if we had to share every objective or respect every element of another person’s character before we could talk. If this were the case, we’d all be mute. However, we can stay in dialogue by finding a way to honor and regard another person’s basic humanity. In essence, feelings of disrespect often come when we dwell on how others are different from ourselves. We can counteract these feelings by looking for ways we are similar.

…A rather clever person once hinted how to do this in the form of a prayer—“Lord, help me forgive those who sin differently than I.” When we recognize that we all have weaknesses, it’s easier to find a way to respect others.

What to do once you Step Out:

1) Apologize When Appropriate. When you’ve clearly violated respect, apologize.

2) Contrast to Fix Misunderstanding. When others misunderstand either your purpose or your intent, use Contrasting. Start with what you don’t intend or mean. Then explain what you do intend or mean.

3) Create a Mutual Purpose. When you are at cross-purposes,

Commit to seek Mutual Purpose.

Recognize the purpose behind the strategy.

Invent a Mutual Purpose.

Brainstorm new strategies.

— Crucial Conversations:Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, 2nd ed.

derniere-seance: David Niven and Marius Goring on the set of A...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:45:48 -0400

derniere-seance:

David Niven and Marius Goring on the set of A Matter of Life and Death (Une question de vie ou de mort) directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946. Photo Eric Gray © National Portrait Gallery.

“elbows” AMIS: I want to ask about your prose. Your prose makes Raymond Chandler look...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:28:00 -0400

“elbows”

AMIS: I want to ask about your prose. Your prose makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy. Now the way I do it is: I say the sentence in my head until nothing sticks out, there are no “elbows,” there are no stubbings of toe; it just seems to chime with some tuning fork inside my head. And then I know the sentence is ready. In your work, pages and pages go by without me spotting any “elbows.” Even with the great stylists of modern fiction, you know you’re always going to come across phrases like “Standing on the landing” or “the cook took a look at the book. ” There’s always some “elbow” sticking out, there’s some rhyme causing the reader to pause and wonder and think, “That’s not quite right.” With you, it’s all planed flat. How do you plane your prose into this wonderful instrument?

LEONARD: First of all, I’m always writing from a point of view. I decide what the purpose of the scene is, and at least begin with some purpose. But, even more important, from whose point of view is this scene seen? Because then the narrative will take on somewhat the sound of the person who is seeing the scene. And from his dialogue, that’s what goes, somewhat, into the narrative. I start to write and I think, “Upon entering the room, “and I know I don’t want to say “Upon entering the room.” I don’t want my writing to sound like the way we were taught to write. Because I don’t want you to be aware of my writing. I don’t have the language. I have to rely upon my characters.

— Martin Amis interviews Elmore Leonard, Jan 1998 (pdf)

AMIS: What I do find, and my father Kingsley Amis used to find, is that when you come up against...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:18:51 -0400

AMIS: What I do find, and my father Kingsley Amis used to find, is that when you come up against some difficulty, some mechanism in the novel that isn’t working, it fills you with despair and you think, “I’m not going to be able to get around this.” Then you look back at what you’ve done, and you find you already have a mechanism in place to get you through this. A minor character, say, who’s well placed to get the information across that you need to put across. I always used to think (and he agreed) that: Thank God, writing is much more of an unconscious process than many people think.

I think the guy in the street thinks that the novelist, first of all, decides on his subject (what should be addressed), then he thinks of his theme and his plot and then jots down the various characters that will illustrate these various themes. That sounds like a description of writer’s block to me. I think you’re in a very bad way when that happens. Vladimir Nabokov, when he spoke about Lolita, refers to the “first throb” of Lolita going through him, and I recognize that feeling. All it is is your next book. It’s the next thing that’s there for you to write. Now, do you settle down and map out your plots? I suspect you don’t.

LEONARD: No, I don’t. I start with a character. Let’s say I want to write a book about a bail bondsman or a process server or a bank robber and a woman federal marshal. And they meet and something happens. That’s as much of an idea as I begin with. And then I see him in a situation, and I begin writing it and one thing leads to another. By Page 100, roughly, I should have my characters assembled. I should know my characters because they’re sort of auditioned in the opening scenes, and I can find out if they can talk or not. And if they can’t talk, they’re out. Or they get a minor role.

But in every book there’s a minor character who comes along and pushes his way into the plot. He’s just needed to give some information, but all of a sudden he comes to life for me. Maybe it’s the way he says it. He might not even have a name the first time he appears. The second time he has a name. The third time he has a few more lines, and away he goes, and he becomes a plot turn in the book. […]

AMIS: I admire the fluidity of your process because it’s meant to be a rule in the highbrow novel that the characters have no free will at all. E.M. Forster said he used to line up his characters before beginning a novel, and he would say, “Right, no larks.” And Nabokov, when this was quoted to him, he looked aghast, and he said, “My characters cringe when I come near them.” He said, “I’ve seen whole avenues of imagined trees lose their leaves with terror at my approach.”

— Martin Amis interviews Elmore Leonard, Jan 1998 (pdf)