What Happens

Click on the header to go to a YouTube video.
Two points: the man has not seen the film he is trying to have banned; two - the film is closely based on a true story.
So what O'Reilly is saying is: don't tell the truth, people won't like it.
'Redacted' has not been banned, it may even be (whisper it) not very good. I don't know, I haven't seen it. But at a time when the comment on War from Hollywood focuses on safe, past wars, I think de Palma deserves some acclaim for tackling the actual war which is being fought.
Comments please.

Bloody Hell

His old mate, and his wife. A successful stage play and a one tone look. It's lovely, of course, but am I alone in wondering why such an empty film can feel so good while being consumed? Perhaps I'm just grouchy - I mean any film with Alan Rickman in it gets my 2 hours' attention. It turns out that Sweeney wasn't a real person at all! Ah well, just feast yourself on the make-up.

Seasons' Greetings

That's a plural because the season doesn't seem too sure of itself right now. A late Indian Spring, I think.Anyway, I am under strict pressure to take some quality time, so will not be blogging, filming , watching films, or even thinking of abstruse continental theories for the next few days. Unless it's Sweeney Todd, mind.
So have a great few days, grid your lions and come back as strong as Nietzsche would wish you.
Yes, I think I need a rest.
Merry Christmas.

Naomi Wolff's Ten Steps

You should read this. Just add the concluding paragraph's 'What if...?' and we have the backstory of 'House of War'.
Just click on the title of this post and off you'll whizz to The Guardian subversive British newspaper.

Noor Dar Khaliye Mira Masturat Mikonad

Thanks to Khalil.
So 'that phrase' from auto-da fe has several levels of meaning of which only two are mentioned here, and excuse the retranslated translation of a transcription, but here's what it means:

'the light (or God) inside (or doorway) halo (belonging to) mortal (self) covers (enlightens) it does.'

Hmm.

"The hidden light illuminates the mortal aura."

That will do nicely, thank you. Weststruck, indeed.
(P.S. this was an answer, for the question look at ''What a Tangled Web We Weave' post

Bibbly-O-Tek

Well - the classes of 2007 are over and we are all exhausted. here's a wee success, though: our new videotheque. We have around 200 rare and worthy titles which we own from the much derided (but sublime) 'Spirit of the Beehive' through surprise hits such as Bergman's 'Persona' and 'Shame' to Lynch's 'Eraserhead' and of course the Herzog pavillion (viewer favorites seem to be 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly' and 'Even Dwarves Started Small')... to the short films of Stan Brakhage. There are rarely fewer than twenty films out at a time, and we gloriously call that 'homework'. Oh, and Don Hertzfeld, of course!

Never argue with a petrified tree

Brazil and Other Dystopias

T. weighed in today with an explanation / proposition of a theme, or a horizontal story element (where the vertical elements are the individual character storylines) of an Abbie Hoffman style media activist whose broadcasts and show appearances could provide a consistent background and tie scenes together.
OK so far.
But this also raises the vexed question of what kind of society this future world really could be. Is it a goose-stepping dystopia as in 1984 (or 'Brazil')? or is is something more insidious? Something more or less like the world today? Just a couple of tweaks here and there.
In many ways the same question can be asked of the pre- and post-9/11 worlds. Fundamentally the same? or radically different?
This landscape needs to be discussed and settled upon. Are we Gothic or Picaresque?
Or is there a new genre developing which can register these minute yet profound changes?
Let us see...

Reversals and Obstructions

The image is about the Earth's magnetic field flipping every few millenia, hence (?) extinguishing the dinosaurs... but what we are talking about here is reversals and obstructions in story and plot.
Often, there are sets of 'rules' for writing stories, and they are - more or less - completely useless. You can't build stories from nothing, from only structure, and while there's a statistical truth to some of these rules (like the Three Act Structure') the only really help analysis after the fact, and they are not creative tools. they can be a kind of creative check, from time to time. One such is the technique of OBSTRUCTION.
Given that a story in which NOTHING happens will most likely be dull, we need to stay alert that the bits in between the high points don't just drift along.
Stories always come to us in chunks, then our intellects try to fill in the blanks. these blanks can be deadly dull.
So here's a checklist to try to help brainstorm out of those dull parts.
1) write out the high points of your story in order
2) add all the necessary, logical (boring) transition scenes to hang them together.
3) Now - for every boring transition, every logical, uninspired 'what would happen next'.... add an obstruction to prevent it from happening.
4) think of how to overcome that obstruction.

You will now be in new territory.
Obviously, not every reversal/solution will be what you want, but it will get your mind on the move again.

here's a hypothetical example:

Dave wants to leave.
Dave goes to Canada.
(pretty exciting, huh?) let's add some uninspired way stations.
Dave sneaks out of his house in the middle of the night
Dave gets on a bus to Buffalo.
Dave visits his cousin Tim.
Dave walks across the border into Canada.

Now, here are some obstructions or reversals, and the first questions they engender:
The bus depot is crawling with cops. He has to hitch. - where can he stand? how quickly must he move?
He gets a ride, but only half way. - where is he? a town? open country? a forest? which way does he move?
It's January and it's freezing rain. - is he adequately dressed? how can he shelter? does he meet anyone? who?
Tim's father won't let Dave stay in their house. - will he turn Dave in? Will Tim help dave?
Dave calls his girlfriend, she's pregnant. - should Dave continue or return?

This is what you need to do every time a facile or boring scene pops into your head. you can always throw out bad ideas, but you have to keep generating them. The great thing about this kind of process is you can do it anywhere - on a bus, in bed, on a trip, on a walk (always a good idea), late at night, early in the morning... it used to be called daydreaming, and used to be a BAD THING. But now it's called creative brainstorming and is Mos Def a GOOD THING.

OK, think on't..

It's Cold or Ice Station Zebra

I'm not recommending this book, and nor am I strictly speaking recommending the film, though there's something inherently spooky about any film set in snow and ice (viz: John Carpenter's 'The Thing') but today, as temperatures really did plummet to the low 20's, and our boycott of Iraqi oil began to seem a trifle premature (when will that Alaskan stuff arrive?) we set about getting mediaeval on the storylines posteriors.
That is, to really pull at the ideas to see whether they could take a bit of wear and tear.
My general criticism would be that a collection of ideas does not neceassarily make a good story, and each person seemed to be (understandably) going for a proliferation of ideas rather than a deepening of one single groove - the groove that would be the characteristic feel of their story.
K. has an ambitious double storyline (though she may not realize this) which involves not only the flight proper (what's the cause? what's the trajectory? where are the reversals that make the entire journey not merely peripatetic? Which border?) all this alongside a reflexive structure which has the protagonist trying to document and communicate his (sic) journey, something along the lines of setting up an Underground railroad. I liked that idea, but wonder how it can be integrated into one short segment.
A. mooted that if everyone really went all the way, we'd have a series. Maybe. I don't know if we have the force and time to set that up, though.
R. is working on the idea of the 'passive slackers', and I am trying to get some pro-active sense into that. It's true that the simple fact of a bunch of friends riffing can be amusing, and the background tension of their risk will stop it being trivial (gallows humor, or our perception of the danger not tallying with their willful ignorance of it) but as with the actual situation, a story that goes nowhere can be dull, too. Where can the spark of movement come from if not a melodramatic shock ending (e.g. a police raid)? Perhaps K's 'activist' could be the odd one out in that group of slackers? His communications could then be to his less urgent friends?
All these questions.
E. seemed to agree (provisionally) that the interviews with actual Vets could work as an anchor for the stories. From any war. Or even the parents of soldiers in the current conflict. I'd like to make these 'interviews' look as beautiful and well thought-out as the fictions, so they flow seamlessly. Not just talking heads. We discussed the methodology of spending real time and forging a sincere relationship with these people (who we canvas for) as opposed to the usual TV style Q&A sessions.
Further blurring the line between fact and fiction, which is something of the point of the whole exercise.
G. has a fantasy style story involving an 'imaginary friend'. I wonder if this can work with the proliferation of plot elements, and not tend to dispersal. certainly, holding off the revelation of the 'imaginary' nature of the friend could help, which would allow a peppering of magical (ish) elements into the story. What are the couple doing in the woods? Living out some eco-fantasy? But I have a feeling that this just might not fit in a larger piece, but be a film in its own right.
Indeed, this is becoming the major task right now - focussing the stories individually so they can stand on their own legs and survive being placed in a longer structure.
This one technique / question came up several times: the tension (and interest) caused by the gap between what the characters know and what the audience knows.
(sidebar: also saw 'In The Wild' this weekend. Not bad, but similarly unfocussed and linear with very few layers (why it's so long and diffuse). I recognized several themes in that film flowing through our own (which is reasonable as they come from the same time and space). Ivy had a deeper suggestion, thoguh, to help understand the different story shaopes we are looking at. Doubtless this is an American story, and (selon Ivy) there are two archetypes - the picaresque (i.e. a journey strung over chapters and length) and the Gothic - entrapment and isolation from the unknown. I'd be tempted to say that the former accepts the essential source of all American tales: the Land, while the latter rejects the Land as hostile. Which fits with 'In The Wild' too.
Other themes and character traits have been thrown around, too, but none have been sufficiently developed to hang together as a story.
J. has what I believe is a very strong core, but needs to explore the implications of the power of the premise. It's a very rich story but one that need a lot of deep thinking to skate around dogma and cliches. Yes - 'a woman's right to choose' is in there somewhere. But in this case, there are lives on each side of the equation. We need to look rather unflinchingly at these 'choices'.
Well, I wanted to try to bring some questionous rigour to the debate today, but ended up being the Script Nazi, i think.
Soldier on.
Oh, and R. ran into Orion Hinckley, who will give a visit in the next days. Well, that's one way of finding the lost author without using the internet.
Chinese restaurants. They have a lot to answer for.

Snow Days

This is the Station from the secret section of 'Crocodiles' but almost exactly six months later. Pretty weird.
As snow has us bound in our respective homes/huts/shelters/holes, here's a few summaries of storylines in 'House of War'.

All tales revolve around the draft, imagining we'll be in that moment of crisis again (or not...). We don't want to make a partizan film at the cost of caricature; but nor do we want to falsely (these adverbs are important) try for BBC impartiality/ presenting both sides of the argument. Part of the point of this project (on a narrative level) is to sidestep that facile thought that there are two sides to every question. This 'question' is in reality several different questions, and there are many sides to each one. Something like the democratic process. So, the point of all these debates, discussions and feeling out of territory is not to 'find the answer' or ratify anybody's opinions, but to find areas of truth and uncertainty and explore them.

Here are some storylines we are batting back and forth at the moment:

A couple do not wish to join the fight. The young woman gets pregnant. The young man gets drafted. The young woman decides to enlist alongside him. So what about the pregnancy?

A young man runs away into the woods, (falsely?) believing he's safe, but pressure is put on his family, only some of whom support his stance.

A young man flees the country. His goodbyes and the arduous trip.

A young child's view of his father's draft or enlistment.

A group of anti-war slackers passivly avoid turning up for their convocation. they find out that passive resistance isn't so easy.

A person not at risk of being drafted, enlists. Reasons and reactions.

Actual veterans from previous wars are interviewed in a relaxed way about their decisions and regrets. Somewhere between fiction and documentary.

These are our elements on this 13th of December. Now, watch 'Elephant'.

What A Tangled Web We Weave

A footnote this snowy day, this is from a different yet related film, and is being faxed to a translator so I can recall what it means. It was found on a Persian poetry website but the source lost forever in the aether.
Something about night and eyes and souls, but we'll see what a bona fide Iranian has to say. Stay tuned.

Time and Structure

Time structure?

Luc God Jean Ard

Today's talks revolved around two poles (until a sneak peek at Robert de Niro's early movies turned out to be a hilarious case of shock and awe) viz: episodic story structure and the nature of time. It is to this latter we should turn.
Godard (ever a fellow for quotes) said 'I like a film to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Not necessarily in that order'. Indeed. Here he is risking conflagration with the famous celluloid/cigarette combo.

When dealing with micro events of our stories, and when we are essentially running parallel tales, it's not the most obvious model to choose to run them one after the other.
On the other hand, a classical parallel cutting ABCDABCDABCD gets monotonous and predictable as well as fragmenting the flow of the storyline.
but nothing and no-one says you have to start at the beginning and finish at the end.
Over the next days we'll be looking at loops of timne, intersecting storylines and a looser relationship of cause to effect.
Films to look at would include the frankly tricksy 'Memento', the lovely intertwining arcs of 'Pulp Fiction' (whatever you may think of the actual stories) and Jim Jarmusch's Moebius-like 'Mystery Train'. The best, slightest (because it really doesn't draw attention to itself as a device, is probably Gus van Sant's 'Elephant'. we should all try to watch that.
the illustration is graphic artist M.C. Escher's take on the one sided strip, often taken as an illustration of a possible cyclic nature of time, the Universe and Everything.
Anyway, have a think about rivers, too. they all flow downhill, but the speed in each part is different, and in some places (eddies, whirlpools, dead arms) it can be still, circular or flowing backwards.
Don't ever ask about Marienbad, though...

Adaptations

We saw this last night. I refuse to call it anything other than 'Northern Lights'. On the way home, discussions do what discussions do: ensue. Mainly about the pitfalls and pitbulls of adaptation. The film was OK, but nowhere near the punch of the book. How can you squeeze the plot and character details of a novel into two and a half hours of film? More importantly - why would you bother?
A book has its own pace and narrative arc, not to mention (what is oft forgot) it is composed of words. Not just dialogues. As we've been at pains to pedantically insist, a screnplay should consist only of what you can see and what you can hear. That would make most novels dry as... dust (in the old sense). The opinion was voiced (and it's one I hear more and more) that TV, especially the long series form, is much better adapted to telling stories. You don't have to be so plot driven, you can allow little gracenotes, twists and turns that don't seem to get you anywhere (the Hollywood maxim is 'move the story along') but which add layers and nuances to the work.
There's also something tempting about the episodic structure - having to wait to find out what happens next. Cinema used to have it in the days of the Saturday morning serial, and its cliffhanging endings. I suppose more recent sequels try to achieve the same effect, but as they're all based on pre-existing stories, books usually, there's no real sense of suspense.
Another problem with the pure plot 'surprise' is that you can only feel it once. The secret of Darth Vader is great... once. The films of M. Night Shyalaman are all great (or at least OK) one time only. But we have all moved away from only seeing films once. DVDs and repeat viewings allow us to notice all those little layers (I almost said 'crocodiles') in back, layers which turn out to be the substance of the show. Not every series needs to be a puzzle, but every series, every film I think, needs those layers.
So, as we de-freeze our booties and sit round the table to continue with 'House of War' (working title). Let's think about how to build these layers and details in from the start. We don't necessarily need big epiphanies, or astonishing plot surprises... we need something much harder to find: affecting stories and characters we care about. Details both visual and aural that we can discover on the second or third viewing. Obviously, we'll have to really think out things like lighting, framing and camera moves to add to the expressiveness. It's a long trail.
But what films like 'The Golden Compass' (there, I said it!) show us is that the overcomplex, 'good story' does not a great film make. I'll pass on the fact that they omitted the very surprising and ambiguous ending of the book for a more neutral 'happy-ish' one in the film.
(There was another , more radical proposal, too, in light of the writers' strike: a 5-year moritorium on all adaptations, spin-offs and sequels. My, how that would smart. Thanks to Robin for these thoughts.
Lest this seem a churlish early moring rant against Hollywood or mainstream works, I confess that I am dying for the next season of LOST to begin. Where can they possibly take it? Back home?
See you soon.

All This and Doris Lessing too

The Winter Project is up and running, with about ten writers/storytellers pitching together. there will be short summaries soon, but I can now reveal that the setting is the near future, when the conflict in the Middle East has spilled over into Iran and become so out of control that the draft has been re-introduced.
The title, which will also be explained one day, is, at the moment: 'House of War'.

But here's a brief dispatch from the Manchester Guardian of today. May it serve you well.

Last night Doris Lessing, aged 88, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her acceptance speech she recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge, while those in more privileged countries shun reading for the 'inanities' of the internet
(extract)
We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come up on it. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.

We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

First Snow of Winter (project)

Not even a foto of snow? What is this? This is an axolotl and is an inside joke. Ask and it shall be explained, or simply enjoy its little' haloed digits.
This is the first posting of Indie's 2007-08 winter project. We are still in very early days, but I can reveal that the initial idea (in short film script form) came from former student Orion Hinckley, who has given us free rein to run with the story as a longer, multi-author piece. We are currently brainstorming plotlines and sorting the writers from the directors etcetera. More news will filter down as we reach the end of 2007.
Shooting is planned for after the snows in 2008, but experience and History lead me to believe that we will, variously, find ourselves standing in some frozen foreign field at 7 a.m. holding cold metal poles and wearing inadequate clothing.
It's just the nature of cinema.
Till then, look up the title to get an inkling of what we are about.