James Horner: In Memoriam

When I was 14 years old, I had a regular habit of sneaking into my sister’s bedroom and “borrowing” CDs, mostly of the sort I was too sheepish to admit I enjoyed. The album I swiped perhaps more than any other was the Titanic soundtrack. I would take it back to my room and listen for long chunks of time. I remember intuitively turning the volume up for the really sweeping cues—such as those written for the ship’s sinking—before catching myself and turning the dial down, out of fear that others were hearing. You see, I was somewhat embarrassed of own my love of film music, particularly the kind of soppy, sentimental scores that James Horner was so gifted at spinning. When I woke up this morning and learned of his unexpected death, I instantly recalled the many hours I had spent in quiet seclusion thrilling to his music.

James Horner had no fear or hesitation about going right for the heart. His music is lush and expressive; it is never in the background but ingrained into the emotional fabric of a movie. All the same, to listen to a Horner score free from its visual context is to undergo an emotional journey unto its own. It is at once monumental and intimate, conveying a unique sensibility that I find easy to identify. More than almost any other musician, I can identify his music purely based on an impression. He was sometimes criticized for his scores sounding similar to each other, but there is actually quite a lot of variety in his melodies and themes. Yet, there is an unmistakable James Horner sound that I will miss from movies. It’s a kind of poeticism that exists separate from the notes and orchestrations.

To me, that sound is pure emotiveness. Horner embraced that fully and unreservedly, and he helped me to recognize and embrace that in myself. Today I’ll be listening to the Titanic score—among selections from many others—and I won’t be adjusting the volume in hopes no one will hear.

Back to school

In honor of the annual autumnal return to school and the end of the Big Summer Blockbusters, now is as good a time as any to crack out those pencils and erasers, and put on my thinking cap for Dr. Zachary Smith's End of the Summer Quiz over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. As always, Dennis has come up with some doozies for questions, with topics ranging from reflections on the summer to the failed promise of movie posters. Below are my answers.

Your favorite musical moment in a movie

There are just too many. But if I may show my true colors as a rank sentimentalist, the final sequence in Edward Scissorhands still stands out as one of the finest marriages of image and sound, narrative and music. It's tough to say what a musical moment is, because I'm inclined to think that some movies are more musically inclined than others and can be like pieces of music themselves. For someone like Tim Burton, the breadth of a moving image only takes shape with music, and the finale from Edward Scissorhands, as well as various other sequences of musical punctuation provide shape and scope to the affective climate he has created.

Ray Milland or Dana Andrews

Wish I knew more about both of these gentlemen, but I'd give the edge to Dana Andrews, if only for his memorable detective in Laura.

Favorite Sidney Lumet movie

Maybe this will answer the question...

"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! You think you've merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations; there are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems; one vast, interwoven, interacting, multivaried, multinational dominion of dollars. It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America, and democracy. There is no America; there is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today."

Substitute some of those proper nouns with the corporate juggernauts of today, and this speech is downright prophetic... in a really scary way.

Biggest surprise of the just-past summer movie season:

How about Brendan Fraser starring in two (nearly) $100 million movies? I'm sure they're both deliciously bad, and I can't wait to see them! Hats off to him.


Since I haven't seen either film in the Fraser double feature, the biggest surprise among films I have seen is that neither Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or The Dark Knight were tops on my list of favorite blockbusters. (That honor goes to Hellboy II: The Golden Army.) Indiana Jones was more of a personal / childhood nostalgia experience than it was a movie, and while I liked it very much I don't think it was among the cream of the summer's crop. The bigger surprise is that The Dark Knight didn't ring true on any level. Unsurprisingly, I loved Wall-E. Finally, if Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World can be considered among the blockbuster crop for its limited run in July, than that would easily take the prize for best film of the summer.

Gene Tierney or Rita Hayworth

Remember that head swing in Gilda? Enough said. Hayworth.

What’s the last movie you saw on DVD? In theaters?

Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 and Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Stalag 17 is not among my favorite Billy Wilder pictures, but is worth seeing for William Holden's masterful performance alone. I guess I've seen so many prison break movies to really appreciate the film to which so many owe their existence.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona was the perfect movie to see at summer's end: breezy, gorgeous, tinged with feeling. Like it or not, any critic who wishes to assert that Woody Allen's desire or gift for filmmaking is becoming the broken record that Woody himself is so often called. Allen's observations about people and relationships are resonant (as usual), but what makes this movie special is that it is both painfully tragic but light as a feather. This is movie is about wounded souls, and Allen succeeds at straddling the line between tragedy and comedy.

Irwin Allen’s finest hour?

The Towering Inferno, if only for its massive scope and its great (but little-known) John Williams main theme. Though when it comes to skyscraper disaster movies, I much prefer Joe Dante's Gremlins 2.

What were the films where you would rather see the movie promised by the poster than the one that was actually made?

Cutthroat Island. I'll admit I'm a big sucker for Drew Struzan's work, but this one is especially interesting in how it falsely advertises throwback adventure in the vein of The Sea Hawk. I can't blame Struzan for anything other than turning out some of his best work for a movie that simply can't live up to it. That's not to say I disliked Cutthroat Island at all. But it certainly doesn't live up to the promise of the poster, which promises just about the coolest pirate adventure ever. Renny Harlin has said this is his favorite movie poster. It's a shame he didn't live up to his end of the deal and make a movie deserving of such poster greatness.

On a side note: I'll bet that John Debney's magnificent score was inspired more by the poster than the movie.

Most pretentious movie ever

Most pretentious movie I liked: Dances With Wolves.

This movie is still maligned by just about every critic who didn't vote for the Oscars in 1990. Of course, Dances With Wolves not hold up under close ideological scrutiny, but I was staggered by Costner's vision of the American West. Of all the characters, Two Socks the wolf was most endearing. There is something so benevolent about the early sequences in which Costner and Two Socks are familiarized with one another, with John Barry's music echoing over brown plains stretching into the horizon. This may be shallow stuff, but it hits me hard.


Most pretentious movie I didn't like: The Usual Suspects.

I'm with you, Roger Ebert. I still do not understand why this movie is so beloved by many. It's confusing, uninteresting, and painfully overlong. It exists solely for the big twist, making it little more than a parlor trick. And the fact that director Bryan Singer plays it off so suavely (as if to say "Gotcha! Now aren't we cool?") is even more repulsive. Simply put, this movie is carried away with itself.

Name the movie that you feel best reflects yourself, a movie you would recommend to an acquaintance that most accurately says, “This is me.”

From the moment I saw Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation, I don't think I've ever felt more close to a movie. I likely never will again. It's not that I "relate" to the characters so much that the film captures the feelings (and subsequent implications) of human interaction and relationships so painfully, fleetingly, and delicately. I can't even describe how it does it. No amount of discussion about performances or shot lengths can explain this movie or sum up why it's good. For me, Lost In Translation is the perfect expression of humanity, from introspective explorations of loneliness to the benign and transient feeling of connecting with another person.

Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo

Garbo.

Best movie snack? Most vile movie snack?

Nothing beats it a tall, cold Coke. As for the worst, anything I eat too much of and then feel sick while watching the movie.

Fitzcarraldo—yes or no?

Yes! But it's only Herzog's second best jungle movie starring Klaus Kinski. Much like Aguirre: The Wrath of God, this film is a hypnotic fever dream, both a celebration and revulsion of obsession and Man's awkward relationship with technology, nature, and fellow Man.

Your assignment is to book the ultimate triple bill to inaugurate your own revival theater. What three movies will we see on opening night?

Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., Henri Clouzot's Wages of Fear, and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These movies fully showcase the wonderment of cinema in very different capacities, exhibiting the range and the perpetually expanding horizon that one can experience in cinema. The series could be called "Movement, narrative, and affect."

Most impressive debut performance by an actor/actress.

Ahmad Razvi in Man Push Cart. Of course, you could say that not much was asked of Ahmad Razvi in portraying an emotionally guarded New York city street vendor, but this performance is among my very favorites in recent memory. The movie reminds me of Lost In Translation in how it so pointedly observes its central characters simply existing in the world around them. The performances may be restrained, but Razvi's in particular is deft and mature.

2008 inductee into the Academy of the Overrated

Iron Man. Conventional wisdom would say The Dark Knight, but at least that film had a small, but vocal crowd of detractors. Very few critics were bold enough to come out against the more harmless and less incisive Iron Man, a film whose politics are curiously irresponsible. Jon Favreau is an excellent craftsman; he lives for this stuff. But he is failed by a pedantic and condescending script. There is very little here.

2008 inductee into the Academy of the Underrated

My Blueberry Nights. Please allow me to quote my favorite piece of criticism this year, Matt Zoller Seitz's review of Wong War-Kai's underrated gem. No words I write could hold a candle to the planes Matt reaches here. Poetic criticism for a poetic film:

"There's no sense pretending that My Blueberry Nights is a towering addition to Wong's filmography. The stakes are quite low throughout, and the movie's pace is as boozy-meandering as the tempo of its soundtrack selections. (Cooder's instrumental tracks recall his work on Wenders' melancholy, Sam Shepard-scripted road movie Paris, Texas.) Jones is a stunning camera subject and never less than likable, but she lacks the technique to suggest a complex interior life. Law is, as usual, gorgeous and charming but not especially exciting. Weisz's performance is a touch shrill, her "southern" accent a botch; she only rallies during Sue Lynn's confession. Portman is livelier here than she's been in some time -- the character's brassiness liberates her -- but the role still doesn't quite seem to fit. (Was it written with an older actress in mind?) Of the major players, only Strathairn makes a deep impression; few actors are better at playing men coming to terms with failure. Yet if you're willing to ease into Wong's mindset -- that of a barfly who's in such a good mood that he doesn't care what he's drinking or what's on the jukebox or how many hours are left till closing time -- none of the aforementioned flaws feel like flaws. My Blueberry Nights seems to be unfolding in a world of perpetual night -- one in which the darkness is illuminating. It's an exploration of interiors, geographical and emotional, and it seems acutely alive -- as if the movie itself is a luminous being that has seen the world and survived heartbreak and resolved to savor each remaining second of its existence, however long or short it may be."

Antonioni once said, “I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.” What filmmaker working today most fruitfully ignores the rules? What does ignoring the rules of cinema mean in 2008?

Stylistically, that's tough to say. There are so many filmmakers stretching the capacity of film, from redefining compositional conventions to re-calibrating the notion of "Film as Narrative." Where we still need to make great strides is in overcoming the commercial censorship of cinematic representations of sexuality. Unfortunately, pornography has staked a claim on visualizations of sexuality, which has certain implications for what it means to visually represent sexuality in cinematic terms. Movies have been pushing the envelope for years, challenging the standards and chipping away at the censorship tower. Recently, John Cameron Mitchell made a bold film called Shortbus, which was essentially an attempt at making an artful movie about sex. It succeeded on many symbolic levels -- Mitchell himself has described the film as a statement of rage and protest for having to endure last seven to eight years of the Bush administration. But the tower still remains and is as powerful now as ever, and my hope is that more filmmakers seize on the opportunities presented by the shifting conditions of digital culture.

What’s the movie coming up in 2008 you’re most looking forward to? Why?

Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. No screenwriter in recent memory is as creative as Kaufman. The Spike Jonze two-punch of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation is arguably the most impressive tandem of screenplays in contemporary American movies. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind isn't too far behind, either. I'm really looking forward to what he'll do with a camera.

What deceased director would you want to resurrect in order that she/he might make one more film?

Alfred Hitchcock. Call me a traditionalist, but I don't think there is a more impressive filmmaking resume than the one he has put together between the 1930's and 1970's. It's now trendy to like Hitch, but there is a dangerous tendency to reduce his films to a matter of flashy style and surface detail. For me, Hitchcock has always represented much more; even a great deal of his throwaway films took us to some kind of void. Seeing his style develop over time is a real treat, with his images become more sublime and subtle as he aged. He gave us a brief glimpse of what he might do without the bounds of censorship in Frenzy, but not my mind is only left to wonder.

What director would you like to see, if not literally entombed, then at least go silent creatively?

Rob Reiner. If he hadn't shown so much promise in the 80's (e,g. The Princess Bride, This is Spinal Tap, etc.), I wouldn't be so offended by the atrocities against filmmaking he has been committing for the better part of 15 years.

My favorite Randy Newman score

Please excuse this brief excursion into cinephilia...

Last weekend I was out of town, and in my endless channel-flipping one morning during my hotel stay, I came across one of my very favorite comedies, The Naked Gun (1988). I'd seen it numerous times since I was a kid and still cherish it immensely, but I never would have thought to gain insight into why this film always made such an impression on me, especially for being such an absurd comedy. Maybe it was the change of scenery, but I was able to enjoy the movie in a way that was both familiar (i.e. anticipating every shot, every joke) but different. It was kind of like being in a room that you're inside frequently, like an office or bedroom or classroom, but standing in a completely different area of it. You know the room, but it feels so strange and new from a different angle. My epiphany with The Naked Gun was the realization that it contains a perfect montage.

Here's the set-up: The scene occurs late in the movie, when Lt. Drebin (Leslie Nielson) is undercover as the home plate umpire at the Angels / Mariners game, where during the 7th inning stretch, one of the players is supposed to kill the visiting Queen of England. Drebin doesn't know which player will commit the crime, so he attempts to frisk each and every player at some point during the game. This isn't terribly interesting stuff, but it makes for some delightful comedic payoffs in the hands of Leslie Nielson, the world's best actor at playing dumb. It also sets up nicely for an expedient montage that shows us the passage of time in the game and provides comedy in rhythmic doses of visual set-ups.

Well, this montage does that and more, combining the perfect musical score with images of sports bloopers and Nielson-esque comedy. Have a look:



If you're seeing this for the first time, the absence of context may make it difficult to distinguish between this and the current (dismal) crop of spoofs. But for me, it's a time capsule to the 80's-- Not just with the Zucker brand of comedy (which began with Airplane!) that seemed so fresh, delightfully offensive, and hilarious at the time, but also the many minor details such as the old-but-not-vintage baseball uniforms, the facial hair and wardrobe of the spectators, etc.

That music you hear is one of Randy Newman's finest scores, even though it's not the film's score (which was written by Ira Newborn). The song is "I Love L.A.", and it it's got that perfect combination of a pleasurable, jumpy melody and a touch of synthesized sound that grounds the scene in the 80's. Although the song first appeared on Newman's 1983 album, Trouble in Paradise, it was beautifully employed here for this montage, representing a likely scenario in which the music for a scene was selected before the images were edited. In other words, it's the music that guides the images. The quick-cut images would have no life without the music; it would be dull and static. But with that song, the images just seem right. Something about the jovial tune, Newman's raspy voice, and the unbelievability of the game melding together in one short sequence is just perfect.

The images make little sense in the context of baseball or in any other way, whether it's the players rounding second base one-by-one to the high electronic notes in the song, or an elongated celebration at the plate after a home run (while Drebin frisks them all), or the frequent cuts to changing electronic numbers on the scoreboard. But they have an inexplicable rhythm and atmosphere that sells us on the comedy, the passage of time, and most importantly, the affective state or atmosphere that is unique to The Naked Gun which seems to exist outside the bounds of space and time.

While surely bearing no significance to those who didn't grow up watching this movie and associating it with childhood memories, montages like this one illustrate perhaps in some small way the intangible accessibility of movies; the way they are both relevant within and outside of our lives, how they reflect and inform our own state or the state of the world. These sensibilities extend far beyond conventionally attractive movies (by the standards of most critics), as I'm sure all of us have those movies that we simply love, no matter how critically taboo. Only when we change and movies do not can we realize that movies -- no matter how serious, dramatic, absurd, etc. -- mean something to us (both immediately and retrospectively) beyond our conscious appreciation.

How ironic that Montage allows us to experience that impermeability that movies have to time -- since, after all, Montage is all about time. As a concept and practice, montage can be thoroughly analyzed and dissected, but even if we are successful at excavating the sensations it can create in us in a comprehensible way --nostalgic or otherwise-- the sensuousness of that experience would likely be drained. Whether they are comprised of one shot or many, maybe movies themselves are larger montages in that, apart from boasting many individual moments, are moments unto themselves, enrapturing us in an affective experience built on associations and linkages having little to do with logic.

Sounds of the Knight

Of all the Hollywood blockbusters released in recent years --from superhero flicks to fantasy epics-- none stand out to me as more memorable and significant than Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. Although there are other worthwhile, even great studio films in the last decade, Batman Begins is distinct in that it weaves intelligence, craftmanship, and character together with a narrative that is relevant.

At the heart of the film lies a central tension regarding the hero myth, which the film neither embraces nor shuns. The movie poses the question: Can one person rise above sweeping corruption, and make a difference in the lives of those preyed upon most by those with power? Moral fiber is the one attribute that has always separated heroes from villains, and yet the film seriously questions whether a moral center is enough to counter the fear and complacency that mass corruption breeds. Moreover, the film outright questions whether morality and goodness are productive in this struggle at all.

Complementing and enlivening these thematic depths is a dense aesthetic that is noirish in mood, but naturalistic in structure. Gotham city lacks an architectural identity. It is instead defined by labyrinthine streets and contemporary glass skyscrapers rising above the poverty beneath them. Their twinkling lights glimmer in the background of many compositions, obscured by the shear multitude of their numbers.

Part of what enables these images to breathe life to the narrative is the music by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. Interestingly, traditional film score fans single out this score as one of the worst in recent years, which is likely due to the fact that it --like the film-- is incongruous with the expectations of a "superhero" film. The score rarely waltzes into the familiar ground of brass-driven heroic ostinatos (such as in Danny Elfman's outstanding theme for Tim Burton's Batman films), as the composers instead opted to auditorily augment the noir-ish visual style and subtle characterization with rhythmic, driving music for a man who seeks to embody a more primitive state of mind than most other heroes. When the camera pans the rooftops of Gotham, we can hear these rhythms building, pulsing, but not necessarily with much direction. Contrasting with these rhythms are frequent swirlings of strings and faint electronic echoes giving voice to a city (and a film) with no clear villain, but a plurality of pain, fear, and corruption underneath the slick, glossy surface.

Although The Dark Knight is still almost two months away, Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard have recently given an interview to the LA Times. On The Dark Knight and Nolan's "intellectual" style, they shared their views about the place for music in this film and the 2005 film that preceded it. Excerpts below:

"Why go with a fast-and-simple string pattern rather than give the film a big, easily recognizable theme?

Zimmer: I wanted to take the romance out of it -- the fake fantasy to it. One of the things I kept thinking about was just how iconic the bat symbol is, and at the same time how dark and unadorned it is. I spent forever getting rid of notes to get it down to just two notes in this ostinato pattern.... The bat symbol is so efficient at getting the idea across. I wanted to get really efficient.

Howard: At the same time, when you write a traditional, conventional superhero theme, it gives you so much information that it might be misleading about that character. Our Batman? We're still getting to know him. He's a very complicated guy. To attach a theme to him, a theme you can sort of hum, it defines him emotionally in a way that is false.... It advertises so much about who you are during the film. I think, in a way, a theme like that would have done that. This theme is about implication, and it's about menace.

And there is still a recognizable sound attached to the character.

Zimmer: But I'm letting the character finish the thought. It leaves a lot more space. I don't see Batman as a superhero. I wanted to be very clear about that. I wanted to take out anything that is super about this.

Let’s talk about the "Joker Suite." This almost sounded like an orchestral interpretation of an industrial song.

Zimmer: Look, I'm German, so I come from the German tradition of Kraftwerk.... But I kept thinking I wanted to find a way to bring corrosion into Gotham -- corrosion and recklessness. The funny thing about that piece is that I knew what I wanted to do, but it took me months to actually do it. Nobody could play it.

It's all about acting and attitude, in a way. It's very much of the idea of taking one note and expressing any part of fearlessness and recklessness and surprise.... It is very industrial music. I tried to give it a punk attitude. I used to work with the Damned and bands like that.

Howard: What's great about the Joker theme to me is that it feels totally untethered. It just kind of exists. It lives somewhere in the cracks.

What else is different this time around?

Zimmer: This is what surprised me, and I think this needs a little clarifying. Everyone keeps saying that this film is darker than the last one. I always think that people think that means more violence. It's not that at all. There's much more of a precise intellectual thought that went into Christopher [Nolan] and his brother [Jonathan] while writing. The ideas are somehow more real and more grown-up. We're doing a summer blockbuster that deals with anarchy and old-fashioned values versus the modern man. That's a lot of fun to play with.

You guys split up characters a bit. James, can you talk about what you created for Harvey Dent/Two Face?

Howard: Basically, Harvey Dent is Gotham's great hope. He's going to turn things around. He starts out with the best of intentions. He's a brave, courageous, high-minded man. Over the course of this story, he becomes seduced and corrupted -- really by the Joker. The Joker kind of wins. It's just the arc of his character, which ultimately ends up in a very tragic self-destructive place. That was the musical line.

Zimmer: What makes it interesting is that there are such extremes. The music James wrote for Harvey Dent is really beautiful. On the hand, you have the Joker theme, and on the other hand you have that contrast of something really elegant and beautiful.

What makes this movie -– and this score -– interesting is the extremes. The black is a lot blacker because of the light."

It's first worth noting that Hans Zimmer is nowhere close to the talent level of James Newton Howard when it comes to film score, at least in my view. That said, his perspectives on how he approaches a film or character are always interesting and upfront. He also takes over the interview, as Howard's comments are usually pushed to the side.

At any rate, it's a very interesting interview that's worth the read if you're an admirer of Batman Begins, both the film and the score. There are definitely some hints dropped about the movie, but what's really intriguing is how they explain their approach to the musical texture of the first film, and how that carries over to Knight.

Howard's comments are more appealing on an intellectual level (as I noted in March), especially his reflection on how brashly heroic or dark themes for characters can constrict their ability to develop and morph. He describes the theme they've written for Batman to be more about "implication," which is certainly reflected in the score, I would say. It will be especially interesting how that theme is developed in Knight, and whether Batman will become more of a hero in that film. Something tells me that the film is headed in a new direction, as Zimmer notes in the later passage about the new film being more outwardly cerebral than the last movie.

Although my sensibilities are more aligned with Howard's more quiet, intangible sense of marrying music and images, Zimmer wins the award for the most provocative remark about "letting the character finish the thought," and the music "leaving more space," in being more about implication.

I would be interested to hear how others feel on these matters. So, your thoughts regarding your likes or dislikes in the score to Batman Begins, or the overall approach that Howard and Zimmer advocate about the role of music in the construction of character?

Losing my SCMS virginity (Part I)

I have been in graduate school for two and a half years, and I regret to admit that (until recently) I have not attended an academic conference in media or communication studies. I've read abstracts, paged through programs, and read reports, but I've never actually been to one. Had I not been asked by bloggers and PhD students Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb of Dr. Mabuse's Kaleidoscope, I still would not have been to one. Being only a part-time student with a full time job makes traveling and preparing a presentation unrealistic in most cases. But with Society of Cinema and Media Studies annual conference taking place in my hometown of Philadelphia this year, and having the unique opportunity of being asked onto a workshop panel (which I will discuss in my second of two posts on SCMS), the situation was ideal for my first conference attendance and presentation.

The workshop in which I participated was slated to begin at 4:00 pm on Saturday, March 8th, but I arrived at the conference around 10:30 in the morning so as to gain familiarity with the atmosphere of the participants, attendees, and the minglings in the hallways. I made sure to attend a variety of panel presentations to get a sense of the overall flavor of the conference -- its academic and social policies. Although I initially paged through the program with the intention of attending as many panels as possible with presenters whose work I've read, I stuck to my guns and wandered in and out of different presentations.

I brief poked in to a panel on documentary filmmaking, entitled "Claiming the Real: Documentary as Practice." Chaired by Shilyh Warren of Duke University, this panel examined the ways in which documentary filmmaking not only provides voice, but enables a kind of agency that is elsewhere non-existent, such as in mainstream news media. I didn't stay long, but found the presentations provocative, especially in light of my increased viewings of documentaries, which are desperately in need of greater study, not so much as a separate kind of cinema, i.e. Cinema B to narrative cinema's Cinema A. Documentaries are wide-ranging, and very accessible now. As more films become available and more people become aware of them, it's nice to know there is a devoted body of scholarship out there. It's not my focus of study, but it's one that interests me greatly, as it should any student of cinema.

I then attended a textbook writing workshop, where Louise Spence, Jeremy Butler, Kristin Thompson and others gleaned social and economic issues of text book writing. I felt I was in the company of other text book writers, mostly, which is a shame because I found their dialogue especially enlightening. The central question that kept coming up was, "How can text book writing remain relevant?" and it's an important one for non-text book writers because text books are the vehicles through which professors teach. They are physical manifestations of canonized film criticism. Writing one requires great care and knowledge, even though none of the topics discussed in these books do not provide the in-depth commentary to which most text book writers and other film professors are accustomed. Their design is such that real, analytical film criticism is not possible. And yet they are utterly essential as tools for guiding and reflecting the pulse of film scholarship.

One of my very favorite lectures from the conference was the panel entitled "More Notes on Soundtracks," chaired by Carol Vernalis, who, despite proudly "taking on Bordwell" (in her own words), was arguably the least interesting of the four presentations. Her central premise --that "music video aesthetics" represent a new kind of cinematic aesthetic, one that is less based on intensified variations of continuity established by classical cinema-- is intriguing, but ultimately works better as a conceptual model than the proposal for a new direction in sound and image studies. What she fails to consider, in my judgment, is that there may be an inherent rhythm to cinematic images made in the classical tradition, with or without music. I'm sure she didn't present her whole thesis, and that time did not allow her to really articulate this music video aesthetics model. But, however interesting it was, it seems that she, like many contemporary scholars, is too quick to draw a line between contemporary aesthetics and classical aesthetics.

Also on that panel, Jeff Smith examined the significance of music in cinema, specifically detailing the function of music and the manners in which film scores are situated in a film depending on the genre, time period, and setting. His exploration of the deviation from the classic tradition of symphonic film scoring was very noteworthy, especially in an age of pop cinema in which the film score is but a distant memory.

Finally, I attended Malcom Turvey's panel on Noel Carrol's influential work in cognitivism, Mystifying Movies, which featured two wonderfully articulate presentations (neither by Carroll himself, who spoke after them) on contemporary film theory. Turvey's analysis of cognitivism and critique of criticism aimed at it was challenging and provocative. In particular, his musings on the spatiotemporality of cinema I found most interesting. He noted that most scholarship seeking to overturn the common bias of space over time to favor time over space ultimately fails because it presupposed a spatial order within which any conception of time is brought forth.

The last panel, on Carroll's Mystifying Movies was one of the few panels providing an in-depth look into film form. I'm not referring to neoformalism or cognitivism, specifically, when I invoke the term "film form." I use the term as a broader notion for the audiovisual relations of cinema. Where a great deal of scholarship seems to look at form of content, there seems to be little of it (at least at this conference) focused on forms of expression, and the relationship between forms of expression and forms of content. Too often that binary is honored in film scholarship, as if form and content can be isolated from one another.

Despite this qualm, I was overall mostly impressed with the diversity of the presentations, even though I didn't see 90 percent of them. Paging through the program gave me a sense of the overall conference, especially when situated against the panels I did attend. One of the panels on Sunday I would have loved to attend was the panel entitled, Untimely Bodies: Towards a Comparative Film Theory of Human Figures, Temporalities, and Visibilities.” Steven Shaviro, a respondent on the panel, recently posted his three-page piece from the panel on his blog. Having read it, I only wish more that I had attended this panel on Sunday. Here is an excerpt from his presentation:

"The speakers on this panel all point, in one way or another, to the hauntological dimension of the movies. They testify to the ways that -- as Gilles Deleuze puts it in a different context -- the cinematic image is never simply in the present: for it contains, rolled up within it, virtual dimensions of pastness and futurity. But beyond this, they suggest that film is itself the hauntological art par excellence. It is not just that a certain practice of cinema might be described as hauntological; but more importantly that hauntology itself, in its evanescent yet more-than-real spectrality, is inherently cinematic. Film does not capture and reproduce the real, so much as it always already haunts reality, sapping its apparent solidity from within. Film is implicitly an art of specters: of what Brian Wall calls “spirit,” and what Chika Kinoshita designates as “the passive regime of the image.” The presence of the movie star involves an uncanny doubling of physical presence and ghostly evanescence, of fiction and lived experience, as Prakash Younger shows in his discussion of the career of Meena Kumari. In the most general sense, and from its nineteenth-century origins to its twenty-first century actuality, cinema is most essentially what Tom Gunning describes as a phantasmagoria of “invisible bodies” and “intangible images.”

...

I discuss Tom Gunning's talk last, because it engages in a more general consideration of the issues that the other three panelists raised in relation to specific films. Gunning traces the ways that spectrality has been crucial to film from its very beginnings. The familiar concern with vision and the gaze, with the powers of surveillance and visual control, has always been doubled and undermined, within the cinematic apparatus itself, by the play and display of a resistant opacity. The very thickness of material reality disrupts the perspectival organization of the world by the gaze. Material density and embodied vision find their correlates in “a rhetoric of invisibility and a very complex form of disembodiment.” This is less paradoxical than it might seem at first. For the depth of bodies – and one might also say the sheer givenness of matter, or of what we characterize as “objects” – exceeds and exhausts the capacity of even the most phallic and penetrating gaze. Or to make the same point in an entirely different register, the temporality of the body-as-image is irreducible to the spatializing logic of “the model of vision as total transparency and surveillance.” which Gunning rightly dismisses as an “ultimate fantasy of totalitarianism,” but never an actuality.

What's crucial to Gunning's account, as to those of all the speakers on this panel, is the way that invisibility, impalpability, disappearance, and disembodiment are by no means opposed to an insistence, not just upon the materiality of the film itself, and of the cinematic apparatus, but also upon the embodiment of the spectator, and the materiality of the images or bodies or things that appear onscreen. That is to say, spectrality is not an effect of “lack,” or of the supposed gap between representation and its referent. Rather, we encounter the specter at the very heart of materiality and presence. Or – if a phenomenological manner of speaking be preferred – spectrality is a supplemental dimension of manifestation and appearance themselves. Cinema is not a Platonic cave of illusions, as the old-style film theory would have it, but a hauntological apparatus, a machine for raising ghosts."

One could only hope that Shaviro more explicitly focuses his future writing on some of the issue he talked about on the panel. Although I have not personally read or seen any of the individuals' work he cites, Shaviro is after a new way of thinking about cinema. Whether he was aware of it or not, his piece broadly functions in some way other another of the beginnings of a model for a new kind of film criticism: one not focused on "form" or "content," but of figures, temporalities, and visibilities.

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In wrapping my thoughts on my experience at SCMS as an observer, I'd say the overall experience was overwhelming. It took place more than three weeks ago, and there are still ideas bouncing around in my mind; some totally random asides I picked up from conversations, others are gestating critiques and/or expansions on theoretical inquiries put forth by the variety of presenters whom I saw give their presentations.

If there's one thing I learned --or at least was reminded of-- from my wanderings, it's that there is no end to the amount of ways for thinking about (and with) media, specifically cinema. Some of these theoretical frameworks were built and maintained over decades, such as Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxism. These are the old reliables of media theorizing; but for as lucrative as each of these established bodies may be, they are perhaps employed too often and stringently to reveal anything about media and cinema. Other theoretical bodies are relatively recent, such as cognitivism, post-modernism, and post-structuralism, all of which lend significant insights into film scholarship. The problem with these schools of thought is in how proponents of them position themselves as the extreme reverse of established theories like psychoanalysis. In other words, many of these more trendy contemporary theoretical inquiries tend to be substituting one Grand Theory for another. This idea is the central argument of my own presentation, and is currently the topic of the project I'm working on right now in my independent study of Deleuze and media. (More on this in the next post...)

Although film and media scholarship has fractured into countless factions and schools of thought, there was a distinct flavor to most of the proceedings I witness at SCMS. Based on the the sessions I attended and reading through the program, I gathered that the conference errs on the conservative side (for the most part) with regards to modes of theoretical inquiry. I can't say that for certain, since I'm basing this observation on one day of attendance at one conference, but I get that feeling.

What this year's offerings lacked in terms of media content, however, it somewhat made up for in media content. This may not so much be to the credit of the Society itself, but to media scholarship as a whole in the last 15 to 20 years. Nevertheless, I attended a few panels and workshops representing diverse interests and inquiries into world cinema, documentary filmmaking, many of which were well versed in cultural studies. One hopes that this is not a short-lived trend, but instead the beginning of a larger movement within scholarly cinema and media research that will blossom into a greater understanding of various forms of content and expression reflected in and enacted by new and old media.

I acknowledge my overtly optimistic attitude toward cinema, concerning its limitless aesthetic and communicative possibilities, but the shear diversity of the kinds of films, social policies, and and modes of cultural agency that is currently being explored by students and scholars is wide-ranging, and inspiring to say the least. I do not envision this "cinema of tomorrow" as a much-needed cultural convergence through the various forms of analogic and digital media now available. Rather, electronic and digital media that have re-calibrated individual and collective means for participating in social policies and institutions. And since these forms of media are increasingly constitutive of our cultural agencies, cinema's relevance as an aesthetic means of communicating, sharing and experiencing narrative, and a form of discourse. This last notion is perhaps most intriguing, but the extent to which it is realized and developed hinges on necessary paradigm shifts which have yet to play out.

On the cinema of music

"There's a role that music plays in just filling up the screen. You don't necessarily hear every detail, but it's behind all the action, it's around all the action -- in the front of it, on the sides."

"One thing you don't want is for the music to become self-conscious, for the music to draw attention to itself. It really needs to be in the film, not sitting on top of the film."

"It really takes the right notes, the right gesture, the right amount of activity at the right time..."
- James Newton Howard

Musicians and filmmakers who intuitively grasp their art form have a way of tapping into the mysteries of perception, movement, and memory, and how they relate to each other. There are striking remblances between music and cinema. One can even say that cinema is a kind of musical expression, or that music has a cinematic-like motion.

These were thoughts I had while watching Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton, a movie about law, corporate corruption, and social responsibility. Involving from start to finish, the film has a consistent line of quality regarding formal details, such as writing, acting, lighting, etc. I was surprised with the amount of very distinct moments in Michael Clayton that were like little cinematic universes to themselves. By that I mean the kind of moments that breach that elusive momentary sublimity that the best cinema constructs. These moments creep in, out, and around the movie, despite never really defining it. Sometimes it's a simple composition of a darkly lit street or office building corridor, or a well-acted and crisply-written exchange between two actors. Other times it is an intangible abstraction within seemingly simple movements. These moments often occur when the movement of sound and image interact together.

One of these moment occurs at end of the film, as Clayton (George Clooney) walks away from Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) as authorities swarm the premises. He walks directly toward the camera in a simple, evocative shot of hotel lobby area. As Clayton walks from the lobby to the escalator, the musical score enters into the image with just the right sound, speed, and rhythms to imbue the images with nobility and finality. A subtle piano chord accompanies these long shots of Clooney exiting the hotel and getting into a cab. It's a simple theme, consisting of only a few notes, but it compliments the images and the catharsis of the movie's climax to an extent that they breathe outside the typical Cathartic Climax you so commonly see at the end of a film. Until that point in the movie, the score is hardly noticeable. It features eletronics and ambient sounds, and builds subtle motifs for various moments and characters. But at the end, despite it still remaining quiet, it enables the climax a kind of fresh catharsis, one that hits the right note without overstating it. The sustained string chords and the extended shot of Clooney's face in the back of the taxi cab make for one of the more memorable film endings of 2007. Both the image and the music to "fit" each other. Neither would be right without the other.

The music was written by James Newton Howard, one of the more prominent composer of American film scores today. Howard seems to grasp not just musical theory and composition, with a strong knowledge of classical tradition of both the western orchestra and film scores as well as a keen ear for contemporary arrangements and electronic ambiance. Yet unlike many prominent film composers who write for Hollywood studio films, Howard understands the role of music in cinema. Music itself is a kind of cinema. In a recent video interview, Howard discussed the frequencies of music, noting that certain notes have particular textural and sensual properties. Many musicians have noted this in the past, but Howard's explanation of this notion of particularly interesting. He says:

"I've always felt that all music comes from the same source. I visualize a gigantic shpere --maybe it's a universe itself-- and from that sphere is basically everything that already exists. Because let's face it: everything in music already exists. It's just a matter of unravelling certain things and uncovering certain numbers of layers and finding things that were there. We're not inventing any frequencies. The frequencies exist in physics. They have always existed; they're there. The patterns of frequencies, the relationship of frequencies to each other, the timbres involved -- they're all pieces of some wonderful puzzle that a composer takes and puts together in whatever way [she or he] is able to to form a musical idea. But the salient idea for me is that its already there; it's there floating all around us. it's just a question of getting out of one's own way and letting it kind of come to you. That's really all I do. I spend most of my time trying to get out of my own way."

James Newton Howard would make a very good film critic. His understanding of music stretches beyond music, and seems to have more to do with the plane of sensory perception, i.e. experience. When we evaluate movies or pieces of music as cohesive wholes, all we have to go on is our memory if the chain of moments. These moments don't have specific starting or end points, but are instead multi-varied, ambiguous, and constantly bouncing off of each other. Our experience of perceptual stimulii of any kind seems to come down to how we arrange those moments, how we pluck them from the plane of experience and structure them to make sense, to mean. They cannot be reduced to mere linearities, boxed into symptoms or descriptions, but instead function assemblages of sound, memory, and emotion. The specific sensation of one single note or image is difficult to isolate from the rest of the experience and examined; it is changing along with the image and/or music.

In art, or narrative in general, we arranged images and sounds in recognizable patterns according to visual or musical vocabulary so that the viewer/listener may perceive them and situate them according to the pre-established clusters of visual and musical information. But the essence of cinema, and music as well, is in the experience of those sensations. It's not about understanding or interpreting, but seeing, hearing, feeling. The most effective cinematic and musical compositions are about moments that we experience in unison with various other moments, which we then reconstruct in our memories to form a greater sense of a shot, a scene, or a film, or a note, a bridge, and melody. The only difference is that we see images and hear music. But do we not also hear images and see music?

Although we have been socialized to experience and understand perceptual stimuli in a heavy categorical manner—i.e. sight, touch, taste, etc.—one could argue that sensual perception is a far more fluid process, and that we only condition ourselves to separate and distinguish between them. Artistic expressions like cinema or music employ all of the senses to construct and consume. Some would argue they even incorporate different ones. To "see" a film is to hear it, to touch it, to smell it, to taste it.

This idea is the greater basis for a more Deleuzian definition of cinematic movement, in which the movement-image is not exlusively a visual phenomenon, but also an auditory one, a musical one. Images—even those without sounds—are rhythmic, auditory, even musical. By the same token, cinematic sound deeply embodies the aesthetics of fluid motion and movements in an image. Movement and sound are entwined together. And that's the beauty of each. Cinema and music are the same expression insofar that they each dive into the senses and innate processes of sensation, thought, and lived experience.

We can analyze cinema from a particular theoretical perspective, e.g. Lacanian psycoanalysis or Bordwellian cognitivism, but as useful as it is learn about a film's thematic meaning or systematic relations, perhaps cinema creates a new kind of sensual experience that goes beyond the universalization of experience, which many of said bodies of concepts purport. Maybe it's difficult to recognize how perfect cinema really is because we've broken it down via theoretical or empirical means. But the Deleuzian cinema is right there in front of us. Maybe we just need to know how to see it.

What are some other movies or movie moments that capture this fleeting wonderment of sound and motion?

Indiana Jones and the Trailer of Digital Nostalgia

With last week's debuting of the long-awaited Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull trailer, cinephiles, Indy fans, and casual movie watchers are now officially engaged in a three-month period of hype for the Man with the Hat's return to the big screen. For fans of the beloved 80's action series, the trailer serves up a heavy dose of nostalgia in painting Jones as a conqueror of worlds. The first minute (roughly) is a travelogue over the three films as a long build-up to the sight of Indy, 20 years later and fiesty as ever. After Indy and his hat are appropriately introduced via silhouette, all set to the instantly recognizable horn notes of the Raiders March, the trailer then presents a rapid-fire series of images from the new film, showing various explosions, wide-shots of exotic locations, character close-ups, and tons of "punchings." And within two minutes, the trailer has succeeded in reminding you why the world simply can't live without this character.

Although I don't usually keep up with the latest movie trailers (outside the occassional on-Demand trailer search), I should admit to having anticipated this one for some time. This is just one of those films that will escape all logical criticism for me. The series is too closely tied to my childhood for me to even pretend like this is any other movie. But now that I've seen it, digested it, and listened to various interpretations of its quality (or lack thereof), I've been thinking a lot about movie trailers in general; that is, how trailers and their condensed images work on viewers in the variety of ways they do. Obviously, a trailer for an "Indiana Jones" movie is different than your average trailer, especially with regards to how it's staged as "an event" (like the movie itself), and because it's function is not so much to advertise the movie as it is to envelop the viewer in a kind of cultural nostalgia. Specifically, the image-sound relations of this trailer are constructed in such a way so as to sell you on the idea that there has been a great void in "the movies" since Indy left the screen in 1989.

And indeed much has changed, both in the world and in mainstream filmmaking styles. While the cultural significance of "Indiana Jones" as a brand name for old-fashioned adventure, and/or the aesthetics of American action films are certainly interesting topics to think about and discuss, I'm more interested here in how these concepts are envisioned, drawn on, and constructed through a two minute advertisement. The notion that a movie trailer can create a kind of cinematic nostalgia as a device to sell a movie is really quite interesting, particularly when it comes to the warring aesthetics of the trailer. Also, how this discussion can be framed fromt the concept of "movie trailer as event" is .

In today's market for action films --as opposed to 20 years ago-- the trailer is everything. The task of the preview is essentially to play out the film in two to three minutes, or at least provide a sense of the film's visual styles. When it comes to plot, viewers don't want to know too much. But you can never have too many quick action shots of guns, explosions, and chases. Interestingly, action films themselves have disappointed in recent years. Even long-awaited sequels to Die Hard and Rambo, two of the more successful franchises in the heyday of action franchises, are failing to garner the same interest they once did. A large number of current action films fail both at the box office and in terms of overall cultural significance. The films (for the most part) are so dependent on the level of destruction rather than a sense of space, tension, and character; elements that must work for a strong action film. After all, there is an art to these movies -- the serious ones and even the throwaway B-movies -- that has largely been forgotten with regards to large-scale filmmaking.

Although the movies themselves may fail to resonate, their respective trailers are so hyped, so pumped-up with action, that they have become the event, or the movies themselves. Thinking about trailers for Bad Boys II, Pearl Harbor, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and others, there is an epic cinematic quality to them, something that wasn't present in the action/fantasy/adventure/sci-fi films of the 80's, and even the 90's. The aesthetics of movie trailers have changed so much in recent years to reflect changes in mainstream contemporary action filmmaking, which now prizes not seeing rather than seeing. With more close-ups, shaky camera work, and rapid editing, action films are intensifying established styles to such an extent that they are embodying a new aesthetic: a trailer aesthetic of sorts. (Of course, many filmmakers are fiercely contesting this popular trend; namely David Cronenberg. But I'm mostly talking about mainstream cinematic conventions.) This movement is so firmly established that when one looks back on old action flicks, it's easy to recognize the massive gap between the then and the now. It also may account for why trailers for mega-budgeted productions are more memorable than the movies themselves. These extremely popular hyper-styles of camerawork and editing work excellently in short stints, as for trailers. It's almost designed for trailers. But in many cases, this aesthetic doesn't sustain itself in two hour-long films. When it works though, e.g. The Bourne films, Cloverfield, etc., you've got a hit. Interestingly, the trailers for the Bourne films as well as Cloverfield were very different than the epic trailers for other established franchises that floundered.

Trailers aesthetics is one small part of the picture when it comes to analyzing the box office success and cultural impact of action films in the digital age. There are so many more elements at play, but before I blow this discussion up to something epic in itself, I'd like to regain a little bit of focus and get back to the trailer for "Indiana Jones," and tackle the issue of why it seems so... off. Broadly speaking, it's caught between two worlds: one that's firmly built around contemporary demographics and current mainstream action film appeal, and one that's built on nostalgia for an age of filmmaking that couldn't be further removed from now. The first half of the trailer employs synthesized orchestral music to accompany the digitally mastered images from the first three films, which is a clear nod to new/old appeal it's trying to bridge. But in the second portion, everything goes haywire. The famous Indy theme seems misplaced with the rapid-fire and somewhat artificial-looking computer-generated images.

Looking at the trailers for the previous films, John Williams' music was far more conducive to the rhythms of the longer shots, which, captured the more old-fashioned style in which the films are made. Even if the images were cut together more quickly, the sense of hyper-motion doesn't pervade the old trailers. Which is why they aren't nearly as exciting. Nevertheless, it worked for its time because trailers were not nearly as significant a force in selling a movie as they are now. For the new preview, this old-fashioned musical approach simply doesn't work, and comes off as quite awkward. From a visual standpoint, the trailer is thoroughly contemporary, making the melodic beats of the Raiders March seem almost cartoonish as accompaniment to the images, resulting in a disorienting experience. And yet, looking at the films themselves, one should note that the Raiders March fits like a glove in some of the more memorable action set-pieces, notably in the quintessential chase scene, the desert truck chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The average shot length in that eight or nine minute sequence is probably not too different from, say, the trailer to The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and yet the music is rhythmically sound with the images.

One the best criticisms of the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull trailer comes in the form of another trailer --fan-made, presumably-- using the same images from the recent trailer. This trailer, now on YouTube, is arguably more effective than the trailer we've got. What it does is break up the images of the trailer, re-assembles them, and present them according to the traditional model and aesthetic design for action films of the 80's. It uses audio and visual cues from previous "Indiana Jones" previews, displaying the disparate styles of trailers from 20 years ago and trailers from now. Despite the deliberate datedness and strange constrasts (especially after seeing the official trailer), this "old school" trailer actually works more effectively than the new trailer. It's still cut too quickly, which is perhaps inevitable since the source of most of images is the overcut preview. But it works still in spite of this. The images and the music together feel more appropriate for each other, and there is a consistent aesthetic structure throughout. The "old school" trailer is a strong reminder that a single image or shot is dependent on context. Its effect of an individual image depends on how it exists in relation not just to other images and shots, but to sounds as well. Which is why this fan-made trailer is more consistent and overall more satisfying than the colliding stylistic sensibilities of the official trailer.

Another fascinating venue of discussion is the 2008 representing a digital age, not so much in terms of specific technologies, but as a social environment. The conditions under which images are made and seen are overall much less linear than it was before the introduction of the digital. Information is not conveyed the same way or even defined in a similar manner. Which is perhaps why a sequel to a popular action series of the 1980's, made by a director who has long since changed his own aesthetics, is especially interesting in today's market. Twenty years ago this trailer analysis would not have even occurred, let alone have been possible. There would no old school trailers or discussions about the contrasts between aesthetic styles of different times. The "old school" trailer is reflective of the current sensibility of reflexivity with regards to how contemporary viewers understand older stylistic tendencies and conventions; it's self-awareness is oddly reminiscent of Tarantino-style pastiche, in which digital viewers come to udnerstand older styles through reflexive visual cues.

Ultimately, this discussion of digital reflections and nostaglia may breach on larger issues of why Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was made at all, and what kind of movie it will be... if it's even a movie at all, that is, rather than an experience in cultural nostalgia and digital reflexivity. But in keeping this discussion closely linked to the trailer itself, I would like to know your thoughts and reactions, no matter what angle you're coming from. Thus far, most reactions I've read/heard have been either extremely positive, mostly people who have bought right into the nostalgia, or extremely negative, i.e. those complaining about the use of CGI and the rapid-fire editing, and such. I feel both positively and negatively about it. I was swept into old reliable state of watching an Indiana Jones film. But the aesthetics of the preview are a constant reminder that no matter how true to style this film may be with regards to the previous films, it simply cannot recreate something that it's trying so hard to recreate. That's not to say that the movie will be made in this style -- just that the trailer is disjointed because of it. The movie may be an entirely different matter. It will be quite an interesting movie to watch indeed. Although it will be set in the 1950's, we will undoubtedly be seeing Indiana Jones in the digital age.

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Update - 2/20 - 4:25 PM: Some post-thoughts after reading one comment and writing one myself... If the trailer is any indication, this movie will be try to show that Indiana Jones is a timeless, mythic hero. After all, this trailer is not selling the movie at all. It's selling the significance and recognizability of the brand name of Indiana Jones. Just pay attention to how Indy is re-introduced without showing the face of Harrison Ford. The two most key points to Indy's re-introduction is the hat --seen first on the ground (when the music starts up), then in silhouette-- and the shot of Indy dodging bullets to the tune of "dah--dah-dah-DAHHH," which is the clear money-shot of the trailer. This trailer clearly demonstrates that it's not about proving anything in terms of Harrison's Ford age. If anything, they're using the impossibilty of his age --he is currently 65 years-old-- as an asset to Indy's timelessness and cementing as the modern heroic archetype.

Let's keep this discussion up!

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In the next (and final) episode of The Cinematic Art's "Indiana Jones" discussion series, we will take a look at the evils of the Motion Picture Association of America, who have once again wreaked havoc on the American moviegoing public, using censorship to impose certain values and ideas on us in their phantom removal of guns. The real question is: whose values/ideas are they representing? All that and more in the next chapter in this blogging saga... "Indiana Jones and the MPAA's Crusade."

The Altman / Williams connection

Director-composer collaborations gave always been a great interest of mine. Rich in the old Hollywood filmmaking tradition, some of the best creative partnerships have been between directors and composers. Some of these relationships are so strong and long-lasting that it would be nearly impossible to imagine a director's images without his collaborating composer's music: case in point Tim Burton / Danny Elfman, and Steven Spielberg / John Williams. But in reality, many of these collaborations don't ensure, and the ones that do last tend to fade before too long. Perhaps the most famous director-composer relationship fitting this description is that of Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, who worked together to create some of the most beautiful and exhilirating marriages of image and sound the movies as ever known: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1954), Vertigo (1958), North By Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), Marnie (1964), etc. And even though there is little consensus to this day regarding why they split -- the most reliable story to date being a feud over Torn Curtain (1966) -- it was no secret that they had a severe falling out. Still, I can't help but wonder what it would have been like had they settled their creative differences and continued their collaboration. Maybe the twilight in Hitchcock's career, from 1966 to 1976 would have been better remembered. But we will never know.

Although long-lasting collaborations between filmmakers and musicians are interesting, more intriguing are the relationships that never realized themselves after a spark of fire between two minds, one thinking in images, the other in notes. One of these mini-collaborations that is rarely spoken of is that of Robert Altman and John Williams, who worked together on two films early in both of their careers: Images (1972) and The Long Goodbye (1973). I'm sure there are numerous instances in the history of Hollywood in which a composer and director have worked together that many wouldn't consider to be a mini-collaboration; it's kind of like calling two consecutive wins a "winning streak." But I am more interested here in the kind of filmmaking minds these two individuals possessed, and how they uniquely came together resulting in two wonderful films and scores. After all, I would venture to guess that Robert Altman and John Williams aren't typically mentioned in the same sentence together, not just in terms of director-composer collaborations, but also when it comes to artistic sensibilities.

Images is one of Robert Altman's strangest films, especially considering how early in his career it was. Echoing Bergman and other abstract European filmmaking, it told a story through a series of disparate images and even more dissonant music. After listening to Williams' melodic work on Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Harry Potter, it's hard to imagine that his name was attached to the film. But as devoted followers of his know, Williams is more than capable of writing strong abstract music. The score contrasts a haunting central theme with unconventional percussion which may first sound like noise but slowly reveals itself to be very complex.

For Altman, Images came one year after his critical success (and masterpiece, in this writer's perspective) McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), a film that stands today as the quintessential Altman film, whose only score was the gentle voice and guitar of Leonard Cohen. But Altman finds such beautiful music in the silence of his images, and in the neorealist-inspired narrative and compositional style. It would come as a surprise, then, that Altman would choose (or maybe he didn't choose) John Williams to compose the other-worldy score for Images. At the time, Williams was mostly known for throwaway comedy scores, for which he was being typecast as a composer. However, he had also been dabbling in action scoring for the disaster flicks of the pre-Star Wars era of action filmmaking. Either way, he wasn't known for writing the kind of music that Images called for. Whether the studio arbitrarily selected Williams or whether Altman picked up on Williams keen sensiblity for evoking beauties in "simple" cinematic images (e.g,, his beautiful take on Americana in The Reivers), it proved to be a wise decision, since the music injects the movement and non-movement of Altman's film.

Images was something of a departure for both Altman and Williams, but its effect is dizzying and at particular moments mesmerizing. Not a major hit at the time, Images still does not stand out as a significant entry in either Altman or Williams' filmography. After watching it though, it may provide new perspective on their work to follow.

Their second, and final collaborative effort came the following year, with a film that was about as far away from Images as one could imagine. The film, The Long Goodbye, was both a homage to and parody of the film noir genre, which, at the time, was thought to have run it's course. Although Chinatown, released the following year in 1974, was deemed the revisionist film noir of the 1970's (and rightly so), some credit should also be given to Altman's film, which is arguably just as impressive, if not as subtle. But then again, film noir was never known for its absence of identifiable style, but rather its extreme incorporation of shadow, smoke, and cold emotion. For Altman, The Long Goodbye was his third impressive showing in a row. Despite the film fitting a different tone than the previous two, with a somewhat comedic and outwardly self-aware detective story played in a dead-straight manner, Altman managed to create an evocative atmosphere through long takes and wide-angle lenses that permeates a mood both light and dark.

For Williams, the film presented a unique scenario wherein he could play off the pre-established norms of music for film noirs as well as ample opportunity for building comedy around musical ideas. Employing a leitmotif approach, Williams built the whole score around a single theme, a theme that is played and repeated several times over and in various orchestrations. It's so overtly repetitive that takes on farcical dimensions, which at times contrasts with the level of serious detail in the images -- far more than your typical parody. The combination of the images and the music make for an oddly intoxicating, yet comedic film that is one of Altman's more unique efforts behind the camera. One can almost see traces of style that would come to full light in later films like Short Cuits or The Player. Williams never again composed a score for Robert Altman, who in many ways moved away from traditional musical scores towards the late 70's and all through the 80's. Yet their brief collaboration, now a third of a century ago, can be viewed as a precursor to various movements and themes they would draw on and evoke in each of their respective careers, even though neither of them would return to this specific style of filmmaking/composing.

John Williams' and Robert Altman's short-lived time working together came at just the right crossroads in their respective careers, when they were each relatively new but had some credit to their respectives names. After The Long Goodbye their careers took off in directions, with Altman gaining more artistic freedom to pursue various personal projects before settling down and embracing his indie maverick status, and Williams hitting the double-jackpot with Jaws (1975)and Star Wars (1977) shortly therafter. Despite each showing tendencies and subtle returns to that style (Altman to the epic auteur image and Williams to the quieter simplicity that defines much of his best work), their paths would cross no more leaving movie and score lovers only to wonder what could have come of the seemingly endless plane of possibility evident in these two lesser known films in the early 1970's. And although their directions after The Long Goodbye and Images took very different shapes, there are traces of that crossing throughout each of their respective work.

This is one of my favorite Never-Fully-Realized director/composer relationships. Are there any other memorable (however short or long) filmmaker/musician collaborations worth discussing? If so, please share.

Halloween special: memorable slasher title sequences

One of the reasons why Jim Emerson's Opening Shots project is so essential is that it highlights the importance of atmosphere and mood in cinema. When seeing a movie, these affective states are established immediately, from the opening shot of a film through its expository scenes. Unlike other scenes, shots, or moments, there is something unique about the opening of a film, which probably has something to do with the idea that in the openings shots and scenes, the "world" of the film is being established. Every sight and sound is working toward the construction of a cinematic universe into which the viewer enters. And the amazing thing about opening scenes (like cinema itself) is that one can do practically anything with them, from establishing themes, characters, and locales, to forshadowing them. Sometimes these sequence are movies unto themselves, offering complexities wrapped in simplicity through the simple power of images and sounds. They have such power so as to manipulate the viewer into perceiving and interpreting particular things that will influence how she or he partakes in or understands the film's elements.

While Jim's project represents a rather thorough exploration of the endless possibilities of opening shots and how they connect to their respective films, there is another cinematic device (often consisting of many shots, or sometimes just one) that can build atmospheres and moods so effectively: the opening titles (or opening scene, if there are no titles). In the spirit of Halloween, ahead are a few of my favorite opening titles sequences from horror movies over the years. Since so many opening sequences from horror cinema stand out in my mind, I'll limit my selection for slasher movies for the sake of brevity and because the treasures of slasher movies are sometimes overlooked. So, without further pontificiation, here are some of my favorite slasher movie opening scenes:

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Perhaps the quintessential slasher title sequence is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Part of Hitchcock's intent with this film was to really manipulate audiences' sensibilities and expectations by torturing and twisting around accepting narrative structures. His famous remark about the film, saying that he "played the audience like a violin," all too accurately sums up the film. He relied not just on narrative and cinematic convention, confounding them and contorting them, but also the viewers' expectations of his own work. Hitchcock's most recent films (North by Northwest (1959), Vertigo (1958), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)) were wide-spanning stories, almost epic in their execution and thematic detail. Although they were stylistically distinct from one another, Hitchcock's direction in all of these films was enveloping and deeply focused on particular ideas. With Psycho, he wanted to provide the most simple, gritty version of the very same themes (i.e., guilt, murder) he'd been dealing with on a larger scale for quite some time. This comes through in the frantic opening title sequence, which resembles that of Vertigo and North By Northwest only in sense that it's visually conceptual and latent with the film's themes.

Although nothing happens in these moments from a narrative standpoint, one could argue that the entire movie is in this title sequence. Right away, the stark black and white image and the shrilling strings of Bernard Herrmann's score grab you, sweeping the viewer into a frenzy. As the countless perfectly sliced lines move up and down the screen, fading the titles in and out in the process, the string section -- the only section of the orchestra employed in the film's entire score -- harshly and violently chops along to the image, providing a sense that all the lines and titles are stabbing the viewer. But the thing about all the lines is that they are all even, perhaps suggesting the persistent, even chops that Norman unleashes on the poor, unsuspecting Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) midway through the film. After the "Directed by Alfred Hitchcock" title appears, the lines then fade out the gray background to reveal an open shot of the city, the opening shot of the picture. The music comes to an abrupt end, transitioning from its climax of high strings to very low chords suggesting the guilt of the character we will soon be following.

The brilliance of this title sequence is while the film itself hasn't even started, Hitchcock works you into such a state just on the pure combination of images and music that the abrupt contrast to the rather subdued, even talky opening scenes is jarring and unsettling. What Hitchcock is doing, if course, is planting these sounds and images deep within the unconscious of the viewers, preparing them for what's to come but also manipulating their senses by jumping into a seemingly random story about a secret affair. It's a masterful sequence, one that has inspired films of all kinds over the last (almost) 50 years. Hitchcock's ability to play with narrative conventions, stylistic devices, and the psychological states of the film viewer gave him a unique perspective of the relationship between the viewer and the screen.

Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)

John Carpenter's Halloween is considered by many to be the next generation of Psycho. Where Psycho essentially created the slasher movie, Halloween gave it new life and spawned legions of imitators. Perhaps it is appropriate that its opening title sequence (among other things) has taken inspiration from the historic Hitchcock film. However, while the film has similaritites to Hitchcock's picture, it is its own unique entry in the horror genre, and no doubt one of the finest. Appropriately, the opening titles to Halloween are much more brooding and ominous than Hitchcock's slap-you-in-the-face style. That's due to the fact that Carpenter is not interested in incongruous juxtapositions or reflexivity. He is more interested in building and sustaining an atmosphere of dread set within small-town America, where a masked, implaccable villain terrorizes a community (not unlike the leviathan from another horror masterpiece, Jaws, a movie that owes much to Hitchcock). Every moment of Carpenter's film is building toward the showdown between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers on Halloween night.

In the opening titles, Carpenter shoots a lone, plain-looking jack-o-lantern set amongst the black void, which calls attention to the mesmerizing flickering light within the pumpkin. The pumpin itself is on the left side of the shot, with the orange titles appearing alongside it on the right. As the camera zooms in closer to the pumpkin, the ordinary pumpkin seems to embody the evil that will soon overtake the small town of Haddonfield. As we get closer, the plainness of the face carved out of the pumpkin actually looks like Myers' mask. And what gives the scene that building effect is John Carpenter's now legendary electronic-based music, which takes a simple melody and compounds it, layering it with foreboding chords.

Like Psycho, this opening title sets the stage for the rest of the film, informing you that much lies in store without even showing you a single image other than this pumpkin. I have watched this film every Halloween for the last ten years or so, and it never loses its impact, which is partly due to the perfection of this title sequence. It sucks me in each time, pulling me into its nightmare long before Michael Myers is ever seen on film. While the movie conceals Michael through much of its running time (another tactic borrowed from Jaws), the marriage of the images and music in this title sequence invites you into simply mystery of the seemingly indestructible, reasonless beast that prowls the streets of small-town America wearing only a gray suit and a mask.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984)

Although the film is often mocked for its wise-cracking villain and infinite bad sequels, A Nightmare on Elm Street remains one of most visually creative and out-and-out enjoyable horror movies that established Wes Craven as the near-legend he is now. While the film suffered from Craven's somewhat clunky dialogue and phony performances, which Craven would gradually tune over the course of his career, it stands out as pinnacle of the endless number of teen slasher pics from the 80's, and boasts quite a few terrifying dream sequences that rank among my favorite moments in horror cinema.

One of the best of these sequences is the film's opening scene, in which Freddy Krueger stalks a young teenage girl through an inferno-like labyrinth full of dripping pipes and endless dark hallways. The scene is very disorienting because it follows a close-up montage of a figure (presumably Freddy) putting together a glove with knives for fingers. Then, it abruptly cuts to this girl entering this maze, where she encounters sheep and hears a deep voice whose voices echoes throughout the chamber as he calls her name. The girl contrasts with her environment, embodying a youthful feminine innocence that Freddy will (quite literally) rape with his knife-fingers later in the film. From the outset, we never get the feeling that Freddy exists within a real time and space, but is everywhere, around every corner, behind every wall. Unlike the end of the film and in all of the sequels, Freddy is seemingly indestructible here, shot in shadow so as to accentuate the scarred, pulsating tissue on his face. But before the climax of murder, the film cuts away to the girl awakening from what we subsequently understand to be a nightmare.

As I mentioned already, the rest of the film doesn't live up to this sequence, which is common of a Craven film (as the next film I'll look at demonstrates as well). However, the movie offers several brilliantly realized scenes showcasing a nightmarish dreamworld wherein the line between reality and the dreamlines is ambiguous.

Despite its falling short just when it should be picking up (at the end) A Nightmare on Elm Street is an, atmospheric, intelligent, and well-structured slasher movie the likes of which is rarely captured nowadays. Its opening sequence will live within my mind for as long as I can still dream at night.

Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)

Just 12 years later, Wes Craven had corrected his initial problems of directing actors and had already built his reputation as a master of horror. This enabled him to enter a more reflexive stage of his career, when he made "meta" horror movies like Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), by far the finest of all the Elm Street sequels. But one of his most accomplished and underrated films (despite its popularity) is the 1996 sensation, Scream, which satirized teen slasher comedies while simultaneously playing out as one.

One thing I love about Scream is its opening scene. After the Dimension logo and a very brief title announcing the film, it launches into a six or seven-minute scene starring Drew Barrymore as a defenseless teen, Casey Becker who is home alone. The sequence is the most powerful in the movie, and the most violent. It has Casey (Barrymore) taking calls from a movie-obsessed stalker who at first seems charming but slowly becomes quite terrifying. He first questions her about her favorite scary movies, to which she playfully and flirtatiously responds, feeling very secure. But soon the man alludes to seeing her from outside, and we are hit with the hard reality that she is in a defenseless position against a killer who will stop at nothing to kill her. After a tense moment in which he offers her a horror trivia for her life, the ghost-masked killer breaks into her house, prowls around as she hides and eventually chases her outside as the girl's parents arrive home.

As she is rather mercilessly slaughtered on her lawn, Craven interestingly manages to tap into many of the things Hitchcock was after with his suspense films. He presents a murder in extreme, unrelenting detail, as if to push the boundaries of what we will accept as pleasure. Craven wants to explore how much gore and blood we can take before it affects us and makes us violent. His killer has seen horror movies, internalized them, and is now bringing them to life. And while the scene itself is one of those prototypical horror scenes, Craven imbues it with an edge of realism. Part of what makes it work is Barrymore's earnest performance. When she runs and hides, we don't disbelieve her for a second. You can almost feel the cold rush of blood running through her body, both in disbelief but reacting as necessary. She fights valiantly, but the killer eventually straddles her squirming body and penetrates it with his knife over and over again. Where most horror movies will dump out and cut away after a quick death, Casey dies slowly and is hung to dry (again, literally) for her parents to see. Suddenly, we go from cliche horror to outright tragedy, and the scenes is played to perfection. By the end, it's hard not to be emotionally wrung outof the experience. I still remember sneaking into the theater to see this when I was 13 years old and being so wrenched by it, and by the experience of feeling rebelious (yes, that was rebelious for me at that age). It's just a movie, Craven asserts. And In a quick seven minute scene, he considers the implications of this mentality. The rest of the movie doesn't approach this genius and unnerving sequence, but its resonate nonetheless and represents fine slasher cinema.