February 9, 2012 at 8:37 pm · Filed under Ways of Seeing
Composition in photograph has been on my mind. What’s going to be in this shot? At which angle will I get my best view at the scene? Who can be inside the frame? What should be left out? Some say digital photography lets composition take a back seat when the photographer is out shooting, because she can take so many more photos and “see what’s there” later. “Crop” seems to be the buzzword of digital manipulation. I think this notion travels contrary to the artistic vision, however. I think this way because I’ve tried many times the machine-gun “shooting” technique and have seldom found inspiring compositions within the set.
To compare those rapid-fire photos with what I remembered of the place, and scene, left me wanting: “I should have got that sign in”; “This would be great if I had not cut that person in half”; “The reflection off the water would have been perfect if I had just waited!” I shoot often for travel writing gigs, but am constantly on the prowl for dramatic “art” shots—of people, architecture, wildlife, cityscapes. Travel seldom allows me to go back the next day to reset the shot that I missed. In retrospect, I know this to be true: all of my best shots have come after I’ve consciously set the shot by understanding what is in the frame and how best I can capture my intentions of its use.
There are no shortcuts to good photography, or any art. I find now that I want to study the scene (and always be prepared to start shooting) before taking shots. Perhaps this comes from my writing background. I need to understand before writing what is involved in a scene, who is there, why they are there, what objects occupy the place, and how everything there “looks” and “sounds” to the reader. I have brought those sensibilities to museum galleries to see how masters have built a painting, constructed a sculpture … and to see how I might bring those techniques into my writing.
The transference between one art-form technique to another can be an exhilarating experience, and inspirational. Ezra Pound taught this to Ernest Hemingway when he walked him through the Louvre. Mozart set operatic music to great poetry. Look at Matthew Brady’s American Civil War photographs. These are seldom mere “war is hell” pictures. They develop what I like to call the beauty of the grotesque, something found in every classical art form.
A photograph likewise tells so much more when you want it to do so, and when you use techniques from all our sensory capabilities. We are visual creatures, firstly, but we listen, we touch, we taste, we feel movement. A snow-covered mountaintop is beautiful, but it is just a beautiful mountaintop; on a windy day you can capture a stream of white blowing from the cornice, and then you create for the viewer motion, and sound … and drama. A bicyclist in a park is all movement, but let your shutter speed leave a blur in the wheel, or run off the back of rider, and you’ve demanded from the viewer his understanding of speed’s dimension to the visual frame, and perhaps create a story in the composition.
Our “why?” of art is individual as fingerprints or shades in a sketch. How we come from the why to the how that makes art beautiful and dynamic instead of turgid and stale is the state of our understanding of the process of art. Rembrandt van Rijn created thousands of etchings, but not one came from magic. He studied his subjects, understood his environment, and knew how to tell a story through simple, beautiful images.
February 1, 2012 at 8:53 pm · Filed under Ways of Seeing
This essay is going to be short. George Clooney’s written/starred in/directed movie “The Ides of March” hasn’t the characters nor life that Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer deliver in “The Help” because, simply put, Clooney’s movie was more style and “of the moment” than the humanistic, affecting story of black maids in 1964 Mississippi.
My biggest problem with “Ides” is its speedy plot that jumps over who these people are, and so loses its chance to take the mind of the viewer into what these people want and why they are doing what they’re doing to get it. The simplest character is Clooney’s governor/pres candidate; we don’t know this guy beyond his cardboard cutout of pretty much every/any Democrat out there in the poly-sphere. Next most transparent is Philip Seymore-Hoffman. His characterization of a campaign director gets one dramatic scene that pays off, but this comes too late and is, unfortunately, a mere stepping stone for the lead character’s move toward pulling his values inside out to get what he wants. Ryan Gosling’s strong-willed, though oddly naive, character is the centerpiece of this political thriller. Of course this character shows himself, but he’s more a cartoon, a wish-upon-a-star for political enthusiasts to hang some semblance of honor on their favorite poly-operatives type (not to say anything about the candidates themselves). His preening self-delusion about the political gamesmanship his chosen profession dishes up, and the politicians’ do-anything-to-win attitude and can’t-do-wrong personalities, is enough to choke on by the final credits. Basically, at the end of the film, and to sum up, it’s a cliché that’s older than Willie Stark.
On the other hand, “The Help” immediately draws you into its story by letting its characters speak and act in ways that are as far from cliché as the Earth and Moon. Why? Because they show their world in words and actions we can look into, see working themselves through, and so we’re able to draw inferences quickly and summations sooner than later. Never mind that this world is 1963, and is Mississippi, and takes us into the middle-class homes of bigots and shanty homes of black maids. What we, the audience, see is the recidivism of downtrod lives against society and gov’t that not only doesn’t care, but has manufactured itself to function just so. But both of these has a human face, that speaks and acts and reacts. The three rules of Aristotelian drama.
January 19, 2012 at 2:48 pm · Filed under Ways of Seeing
Samuel Johnson once explained to James Boswell his mind on conversation:
“There must, in the first place, be knowledge, there must be materials; in the second place, there must be a command of words; in the third place, there must be imagination, to place things in such views as they are not commonly seen in; and in the fourth place, there must be presence of mind, and a resolution that is not to be overcome by failures; this last is an essential requisite; for want of it many people do not excel in conversation.”
As much as we cannot want to intellectualize all subjects, we do find a need to challenge our friends, acquaintances, and even ourselves. We are social animals, and the need for interaction demands the need for conversation. “Never is there more a need for reasonable conversation than in today’s society, wherever people live.” Do you know where this quote comes from? It’s familiar, isn’t it? It comes from no one famous, in fact, because I just wrote it. Yet we have all heard something like it spoken or written somewhere. And, it cannot be more wrong.
Today is no more important, and likely less so, than the dark days of WWII; the blighted years of politically and socially banned books (pick your favorite century); 1,200 years of Catholic Inquisition combating “heresy”; or all of history’s oppression of women (no less objectionable to what is found today in India or throughout the Muslim Middle East and Africa). There has been, historically, a distinct lack of social conversation available to people where it could affect change. Much of the “good” conversation reserved itself inside senatorial houses, philosopher’s academies, monarchical courts, and those private chambers of the social elite.
Since the advent of the printing press, and, later, the establishment of largely parliamentary and democratic societies, people worked at making conversation a vital structure of society’s machinery. When governments failed, too often, at debate and compromise,at least the educated people demonstrated ample enthusiasm to conversation’s benefits.
In Parisian parlors of the 17th and 18th centuries, conversation came into its own. A whole coterie of parlor groups met, sometimes in secret, to discuss issues of the day, including politics, male-female relationships, sex (without the potty talk), and art of all kinds. For a time, most of those who met were women (of high means). The French were known already for their manners, their dress, their codes of honor (among both sexes). The women, it has been argue (“The Age of Conversation” by Benedetta Craveri) took it upon themselves to improve society (and their own positions within) by improving the manners and conversation of the French males. Success for women and society, on that smallish level, was great. Many of these parlor members kept diaries, and recorded conversations after a night of talk. Some have been published, but either have not been translated into English, or wallow away somewhere in a long-since out-of-print copy on a library shelf.
Over in England, in the middle half of the 18th century, Dr. Samuel Johnson had elevated conversation to somewhat of an art form. He had become famous for his “Dictionary of the English Language” (1755), and for writing twice-weekly essays under the title “The Rambler.” What Johnson might have lacked in oratorical compromise, he made up for in breadth of subjects he was willing and able to discuss. He particularly liked questions of liberty, and argued vehemently against changing one’s religion. Regardless of subject matter, Johnson demanded people bring knowledge to a conversation. Force of character and demonstrative positioning meant nothing if an argument did not come with humanist logic.
Today’s high-speed media environment could learn a lot from Dr. Johnson. The term “news cycle” has helped to fracture any attempt at sustained speech, or conversation. Sure, we have political and social talk shows, but too often they flounder in the sea of entertainment channels. And the American mind suffers from this lack.
While “The Simpsons,” “The Big Bang Theory” and “American Idol” achieve high viewer ratings — that turn advertising into gold dust — can we say they do something for conversation? Perhaps. And what is the difference between those entertainment programs and “60 Minutes” newsmagazine to initiate conversation? Any tense, psycho-political drama brings up important issues. An amateur-hour program can induce people to talk about what vocal art is … and is not. Exploring hot news topics or celebrity gossip can engage social discussion or reminiscences. But do any of these actually make discussion rather than seem to make discussion? Of course, we must not leave out the emergence of TWITTER and FACEBOOK. Conversation? Yes … but make it quick, because I’m stepping off the train.
If one looks at blogs, we find 4-5 sentence “posts” that often quote other sources (some spurious), or else link to an article written by—surprise!—a professional with a byline at a national newspaper or magazine. These posts are likely followed by shorter comments. Both resemble a nature that is difficult to define as conversation. Repetitive banter may more aptly describe their character. Nevertheless, one can argue, people are “connecting” where recently they were merely sitting in front of the television.
If there is yet conversation among us, and I think there is, it should get into the daily diet of all thinking people. I’m suggesting that people, if they are not doing so, get into the habit of talking about subjects that come to their minds, and not necessarily those in the news. Subjects that excite you, trouble you, irritate you (always a classic), or subjects you know little about but want to try to understand them through conversation with family, a lover, friends, colleagues.
I have my own suggestions: What thing of beauty have you seen today? How can you talk about that as art? Engagement with society is not a spectator sport, but something, I think, is of intrinsic importance to our individual lives.
January 10, 2012 at 7:31 pm · Filed under Ways of Seeing
“Koyaanisqatsi” is a film you can easily envision having been made in the 1920s or ‘30s, or even the 1950s — that wonderful Cold War decade that sent schoolchildren scrambling beneath their desks for nuclear war safety drills — a film out of somewhere like China, or Russia. One of those strange, state-sponsored films to show capitalism in disreputable, and unchecked, disintegration. Likewise, to show some Benevolent Government (it doesn’t have to be China or Russia, but I’m a Westerner and have been properly washed of all things harmful coming from Daddy Country; this year such a country could be Iran, or Venezuela; or America!) in perfect resolve to protect its people and uplift them, and show the outside world the splendid life they live, under the watchful and care of said Benevolent Gov’t.
Nothing could be further from the truth, however. This scenario comes wholly from the imagination of historical happenstance. “Koyaanisqatsi” premiered in 1982, directed by Godfrey Reggio (famous for broad, panning scopes that articulate the world in poetic folds of visual concentration), and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. The film features what many high-profile reviews and casual viewers have described as “a movie with no conventional plot.” Fifteen thousand home reviews gave it an 8.1 out of 10, by the way.
What’s here is a focus on humanity’s unbalanced relationship with the Earth’s environment, brought about through untamed progress. One can disagree with the reviews my own, simple, synopsis of “Koyaanisqatsi.” It’s certainly an art film, by all stretches of modern film description. Yet it also holds that socio-political angle, if at least (or, only?) by interpretation of its subtitle: “Life Out of Balance”.
I have rarely review movies. As my passion for arts extends to each possible room of art’s domicile, I can say something about how the movie affected me. Before I do so — let me point out that this affect has little to do with my overall point of this essay. Nonetheless, readers expect this, in the back of their mind, to the effect of asking themselves, “But what do you think about the movie?”
So here’s my take on “Koyaanisqatsi.” Reggio presents a vision of life that seems straight out of Alvin Toffler’s 1970’s “Future Shock”, a dramatic exposition of life happening so quickly that people’s minds — partly because of genetics, perhaps, but more likely their sense of history and of themselves in its maelstrom — cannot grasp the ever new landscape presented to them by science, medicine, manufacturing, social change, architecture, even art. All this sounds familiar, doesn’t it? A computer’s life is about two years; pharmacology has advanced to such a point that people live much longer than they should ever rightly expect; the Internet has changed everything about communication and information retrieval for the present and into the long, long future. Do you think future shock is lived by you? Now? Think again. If I were writing this essay in 1970, I would have had to stop and go to the library to look up Toffler’s book for the year it was published; likewise for Reggio’s ”Koyaanisqatsi” — 12 years later! Instead, I found both references—and all the information I could possibly want and mostly discard— within 18 seconds, just by Googling both names. That, my friends, is future shock.
“Koyaanisqatsi” makes a case for life out of balance through images and sound. First, by showing in those broad, sweeping pans, Mother Earth in its pristine nature. Then, gradually, it introduces the effects of humanity on both Earth’s landscape and, ultimately, the environment. As this happens, music plays; first with the tempo appropriate to Earth’s historic geological progress, then, increasingly, according to humanity’s intrusion on the world, right up to that present day when the film’s last roll was shot in 1981. I won’t say more of “what happens” in the film, because that would sully the overall experience each of us can have with its images and musical score. However, a few minor notes before one overriding issue: there is no dialogue; there are no characters; and, you can watch this film with popcorn and soda.
That Web sites and reviews call ”Koyaanisqatsi” “without conventional plot,” I would both agree and disagree. Shut up, please, and let me be contradictory for a moment. “Plot” is such a conventional term that I’m not surprised ”Koyaanisqatsi” is described that way. Yet plot is not needed, or, to wit, plot need not be talked about at all with so much else going on. What else is there going on, Mr Reviewer? you may ask. I will tell you!
Metaphor.
Reggio uses images and music to do the work in 1.5 hours that thousands of voices in the ‘60-70’s “ecology” movement did to finally help establish the Environmental Protection Agency in the USA raised for at least a decade: too much is going on with our lives, and in society, that affects the environment and humanity. This film is the microscope under which these issues are enlarged.
Plot? Plot?? Who needs plot when you have character? “The Earth”; “Machinery”; “Shapeless High-Rise Buildings”; “A Man Walking Quickly”; “A Woman Staring.” Or, who needs plot when you have metaphor? “Man Vs. Himself; “The Machinery of Progress Vs. Necessities of Life Fully Lived; “Modern Life’s Speed Vs. Stress on One’s Humanness”. Or…come up with your own after you’ve watched the film.
The irony of that ubiquitous statement— “a film without conventional plot” — is part of what ”Koyaanisqatsi” battles against. Plot summaries are quick avenues to the notation of materials, be they film, book, play, ballet, television plot, and even poetry. Speed is what society, worldwide, is all about nowadays. We want things fast. We want information there, when we need it, as we demand it. I’m no different. When I searched for the “Future Shock” reference, I had to wait nearly two seconds for the page to load. What agony when I’m holding onto a thought to complete the sentence I had in mind to write!
Yes. Life out of balance. The increased speed with which we live, and thus demand of those objects — and people — that we use for our business, relationships, relaxation, and pleasure. There is no time for plotless movies, is there? Well, if that where true, there is then no time for metaphor, no time for irony (if people even know what that is anymore); and, then, there is little enough time for Shakespeare, for Sam Johnson, even for … … plug in your own ending.
Shame on this sentiment. And a pox, too! For when we loose the mental image that metaphor creates, and then the story that springs from metaphor (yes, story), we as humans are in fact the slaves to the very machines that we’ve demanded use of in order to lessen our dependence on long, painstaking tasks, and thus leave us more time to read, to succeed in our relationships; more time for love, for our children, even time to contemplate the world. If that limitation becomes reality, what is to happen to our sense of ethics, skepticism, or even honor?
BTW: can you “like” this on Facebook? And, oh … oh: Tweet it, too? Just go ahead and get this out to all that soc-media stuff
At a dinner party over the holidays, we got to talking about Samuel Beckett through the ebb and flow of conversation. I mentioned that people can surf to websites and download the text of many of Beckett’s plays, including “Waiting for Godot,” “Krapp’s Last Tape,” and “Endgame.” A dinner mate brought around the comment that Beckett’s plays were not meant to be read, but performed. I couldn’t agree more, yet actor’s must first read the play before they can perform a part. Likewise, director’s must gain an insight of a play—ideally to what the author had in mind while writing it—so they can stage the drama to its greatest affect.
I read Waiting for Godot before I saw it performed at London’s Old Vic Theater in 1997, with Ben Kingsley as Estragon. I wanted to “get a handle on it,” as I thought at the time. My reading was quick, as I remember. This wasn’t a mistake, per se, but it did show me something about the difference between reading a Beckett play (perhaps any play) and seeing it performed. I had little knowledge of Samuel Beckett beyond survey courses at college, or what I would pick up in the bookstore while browsing the stacks. Then came the stage performance at The Old Vic.
The silence that stretched between one spoken line and the next astonished me. It wasn’t the silence itself, actually, but what was happening during these periods between Estragon and Vladimir’s dialogue. I saw reflection—on what was said, what was meant by what was said, or what could be meant by what was said; I saw where a piece of dialogue had taken a character into his present condition, and nowhere else. I saw expressive countenance, the enlightened eyes or frown-in-flummox. I saw the dramatic gesture, an act with meaning all of itself. I saw the ponderable and the imponderable between Estragon and Vladimir. Silence says so much, Beckett was telling us.
In an interview with Kingsley and Alan Howard (Vladimir) near the end of rehearsals for the Old Vic performances, of which I’ve only today been able to read thanks to web archives, Kingsley and Howard had this to say:
Ben Kingsley: We’ve done such a lot of talking during rehearsals. There comes a time when things have to be allowed to settle. Where our brains ought to be now is veering towards silence.
Alan Howard: We’ve had to dig and delve. It’s the nature of the beast. Godot is made up of millions of fragments and connections.
[ . . . ]
Howard: I think it would be very difficult for actors to do this play unless there was a natural aptitude for each other . . .
Kingsley: . . . to be in on the same joke.
Howard: It can’t be arranged or structured. There’s such an astonishing musicality in the text and rhythms of speaking, intonation and connection, quite apart from what is being said. [Becket] uses simple language, which becomes more and more involved. A simple line can carry great complexity with the way it is timed, intoned. The way in which it rubs up against the line before and the line after it. It is a piece of material constantly moving, with 10,000 interweaving strands.
Kingsley: It eats you up. You go home in a take-away bag.
Howard: It’s very, very exacting.
In 1985 Samuel Beckett directed his three most famous plays—Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Endgame—for film productions, grouped under the title “Beckett Directs Beckett.” I’ve read several accounts of Beckett’s directorial involvement, including that, during rehearsals, he made many textual changes to the “acting text” of the plays. At one point in the rehearsals for Endgame, Beckett stopped the actor, Rick Cluchey, and asked him to wait a few beats of silence between one word and the next. The silence, Beckett told him, would be all important for the audience to understand.
Who but the author has the last word on interpretation? Some would argue that answer. Especially when you take into context the fact that Beckett made changes to his originally published text for those 1985 performances. We’re talking as much as 30 years between publication (and first performance) and these new productions. What had Beckett seen? Did that come from hindsight, or just a practiced (practical?) sense to squeeze the most out of the language for better effect? No one knows for sure. Beckett didn’t enlighten anyone, although the change to his plays will undoubtedly contribute to an answer, as insufficient as that may be for some people.
What is clear, I think, is that Beckett never lost his sense of the absurdity of life—or life’s absurdities: take either for what they say. And in Beckett’s vision, there was silence.
December 12, 2011 at 12:20 am · Filed under Ways of Seeing
(not revealed)
Virginia Woolf played with identity in her fiction—what is/is not known about people, and what those people cannot tell. She got these ideas from the way she lived her own life, and from the lives of those around her. In fact, the early Bloomsbury group talked about these very things: how much can be divulged about one’s life before (a) embarrassment veils the story, or (b) ridicule from others shows from the revelation of those facts (stories); and, likewise, how much should be told to friends or anyone else (including, perhaps, physicians).
The Bloomsbury group led open lives—much more so than their Edwardian society around them would indulge, and scandalously so compared to their Victorian roots (and living relatives). They talked about every subject, including debates on the moral solvency of suicide. They were a close-knit group, but their evenings together became famous (some might say infamous) in contemporary society for that very openness. How the information came to be known around London did not come so much from the Bloomsbury gang themselves, but through the impressions they made on the visitors who came and went on those famous Thursday night gatherings. Yet … not everything was revealed about their lives. Not in public (even among friends), and not even in their diaries.
Woolf’s novels possibly expose the most intimate details of any Bloomsbury members, deftly folded into literary stories, characters, and settings she chose. She took from herself, her friends, family, and enemies to build those worlds within the word. Her diaries also tell a story, perhaps the most intimate of all details of the interior life she led. By interior, I mean life within one’s mind. Woolf used her inner life as models for the interior story that revolutionized literature.
The diaries are fascinating reading. Woolf writes entries where she battles with herself in deciding what she could write in the diaries & what she must leave out. Somehow, she felt the need to keep secrets from the private journal. You might wonder, How odd to censor oneself even in the most intimate of privacies. Perhaps.
A wider issue needs to be considered, I think, in Woolf’s instance, and, for all diarists. VW wrote her diaries for herself. She reread them often, to retrace her thoughts and the processes by which she came to her thoughts, ideas for stories, and conclusions on people, friends, and life. She often argued with herself in these pages. Just as well, she learned something about herself and her capabilities. Likewise, she was not afraid to contradict herself, notice the contradiction, and wonder where that all came from (or would lead her).
This is good stuff. Of course, we all do this from time to time. But few of us (and fewer as a whole, perhaps) commit these thoughts to paper (or today, the blog???) for later reading. How Woolf must have understood herself so completely! And in all her flaws and contradictions. I’m not sure I’d have the guts to do this so consistently, and brutally, as VW often did. (But it must also be said that VW just as easily could fool herself, at least for a single entry…as human beings are wont to place themselves in the best light.)
But as Woolf wrote her diaries, she came to understand, and had the idea firmly planted in her mind, that someday her diaries would be published. By that notion, she felt she had to exercise some prudence in divulging certain information. Mostly these came from her personal life. She could be brutally honest and cutting about her family and friends, as her descriptions and assessments of people show. Those of you who keep a diary likely understand the need to “hold back” some information.
When I write in my diary, I often find myself (or is the term “catch” myself) holding the pen above the page, wondering-if-and-what-or-how-much I can or should write about me or someone I know. “What if…” I ask myself, “the diary ‘falls’ into the wrong hands before I’m dead?” Yes, self-censorship. Yes, secrets. Yes, they would not be SECRETS any longer!
And…we all have secrets. Mine are…
I’m not telling.
These secrets we carry are likely nothing momentous to life, liberty, or the outside world. At least I don’t think mine are. Nor are mine illegal secrets (perhaps). They are, nonetheless, information, events, thoughts, that to no one in this life I would want known.
Vanity? Embarrassment? Something else? Oh…maybe. Whatever the case, they are my thoughts, unavailable to any other. Of course, I doubt very much if my life will be written after I die. Nor shall my diaries be published.
In Woolf’s case, she held back her final thoughts of suicide, but only until just before she killed herself. Her last diary entry was six days before she drowned herself in the Ouse River, outside London. On that morning, she left a note to her husband. The beginning reads: “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.”
Virginia Woolf’s life has been dissected by dozens of literary historians, feminists, misogynists, cranks, and sycophants. From the straightforward, to the intrusive, to the respectful but truthful, to the outright bizarre, VW’s legacy has been a pincushion for writers. (And, I suppose, I’ve now weighed in.) Whatever your own reading of Woolf is based on — the biographies and her writing, the rumors of her life, those surrounding her childhood, and possible sexual abuse — the factual mental breakdowns she suffered (and the ridiculous treatments for those, including a milk diet) must be taken as a whole to her writerly life. All of her life contributed to her vivid insight to human nature and her revolutionary literary imagination.
That writerly life, I think, is the real treasure we find when reading VW’s diaries and letters (there are many volumes of both). The rest seems all so post post-modern tittle-tattle when weighted against many people’s drive to learn about “the dirt” of someone’s life — not to mention schadenfreude.
That we do not know every thought Virginia Woolf had is good. What there is shows how Woolf established that the interior mind was not only valid as subject for literature, but vital to the evolution of character-centered story.
