by studioxadmin | Jul 31, 2011 | Camera Lens, HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
What if the corporate orgy of greed that stains human history was worth it just for putting a few vital tools in the hands of the masses?
Here is proof that the political stage is not being managed by a secret cadre of money-grubbing fascists. If such a group existed, they would never have given us all these cameras. It’s their downfall because the camera equals freedom. It’s development is revolutionary to the evolution of humanity. I’m not even talking about the content of the image in the camera yet. Just use a camera and feel your mind’s eye snap open. The mere act of using it frees you from linear time.
Examine now, what the content in the camera is capable of doing for accelerating evolution. Unlimited cameras in the hands of the masses become a tool for comprehending the deep range of human potential in our global village. I’m talking about information that no one can get a head start on. We’re all looking at ourselves in the multidimensional global mirror now and the image is in a state of continuous development.
Why only talk about the commercial potential of this phenomenon? While government and environment go bankrupt from rapid technological and population growth, the neurological and spiritual dimensions of humankind are experiencing exploding growth. Never has the individual been so free to make so many connections guided by personal choice. The opportunities for the free and fast exchange of knowledge among individuals is highly encouraging to our evolutionary advancement. We need to use this to bring the environment and economy along for this rennaissance. The more connections the better. How much more do we need for these connections to grow into the ultimate connection? Until they outnumber the disconnections
While this new phenomenon is happening to us our understanding is growing so fast that no one can tell us what it all means, or where we are going. It will continue taking us there at the speed of light for the next many generations. This event is historically equal in significance to the evolutionary milestone of when our early predecessor first recognized himself in a pool of water. He finally quit thrashing the thing and realized, “the face in the pond is my reflection.”
At the movies, while we look outward at our reflection, we gaze inward with imagination, to fill in the implied off screen context. The data our imagination chooses to supply is our individual reaction to what is shown onscreen. Our reaction is filtered through our experience. A filmmaker must master his lenses and we, the audience, are his last filter. If we see a baseball player crouching with a bat, a catcher and umpire lined up behind him, the filmmaker must make sure our imagination fills in the ball field with all the players in place and a pitch racing toward home plate.
A movie is a spool of time, literally. Its a rolled up miniature record of exactly what action was taking place in front of a lens in a certain light and speed at a particular place and time. By the time we see it, the action is consigned to the past. When we talk about going to the movie, we refer to the place where the past is rewound and waiting in the future. When we get there, since it will be the first time we’ve watched it, it will belong to our present.
Let’s watch a motion picture of a particular period in the past, a famous event in history, one that we all know about, or not. For instance, Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” an international success. We follow the life of the last emperor of China from privileged birth, to child king, to his overthrow, exile, and repatriation in Mau’s revolutionary republic. The past present and future of these unique characters unroll for us in all their complexity and irony. The story brings the past into high relief, the last emperor’s past as well as our own. Where are you and I off screen, in that historical movie? The audience watching the film, in this case, become representatives of the emperor’s future. The dynasty to come.
Our brains are having such a great time with all this time travel. Lately they’ve figured out a way to become even more involved. Where movies were once the viewpoints of writers, filmmakers, actors and producers, now they are the frontier of common folk. We may just be watching a home movie of someone’s dog saying “ I love you” on You Tube, but whether we are conscious of it or not, our brain goes to work with that lens to delve deeper into big issues. The direction of the lens, the size and shape of its field of view, the sharpness, distance of its focus, the quality of light it refracts, all impact the story but our brain can make use of any lens, professional or amateur.
Anything that can be made with a camera supplies part of the bigger picture for the brain. Films illuminate the most important keys to our survival. They connect us with knowledge we need to bring along with us into the future.
by studioxadmin | Jun 30, 2011 | Americana, HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
In my youth I watched a lot of important films at the drive-in. Prior to moving out of my parent’s house, it was the preferred hangout after dark. When I started going there it didn’t really matter what was on screen as long as it had sex. Ideally, I would watch a little and practice behind my windshield at the same time.
Though motivations have changed for me, my drive-in days remain a sacred movie-watching experience. I can still recall the warm breeze, fryer grease, a girlfriend in my arms, and the erotic magnet of the car’s backseat.
Because I could be smuggled into the drive-in inside the trunk of a car, outdoor cinema allowed me to take in restricted dramas like “Midnight Cowboy,” “Carnal Knowledge,” and “The Godfather” long before I was of age. My eyes, which had seen only fourteen, fifteen, sixteen summers, cherished those films as opportunities to scout adulthood. I also recall plenty of nights filled with juvenile laughs watching silly flicks like “The Pink Panther” “Blazing Saddles,” and “Up in Smoke.”
My hometown did not offer teenagers much to do, so we often took in the same picture three nights in a row. We learned, from years of watching every movie that came through town, that there was occasionally something besides fleeting amusement to be found. Some movies worked like intricate puzzles that came clear only after repeated viewings, stimulating deep discussions among friends and heated encounters with lovers.
The drive-in was a place to party and make-out with girls, for sure, but it was also an informal study group, as close to film school as I could hope for. Watching lots of movies broadened my understanding of, not only sex, but of the larger world, and gave me an enduring appreciation for the actors and artists that create them.
So why didn’t we just stay home and watch a TV movie? Because they were riddled with commercials, and cable TV was not what it is today. Back then, films with adult themes had to be censored before going out over the airwaves. Besides, TV sets belonged to our parents’ generation. It is because they stayed at home watching them at night that we were free to go out, unsupervised, in search of hipper scenes and bigger screens.
Drive-ins captivated us by capitalizing on size. Movie stars were framed by the night sky with real stars and airplanes for a backdrop. Those gigantic onscreen images initiated our culture into the joys of super-sized entertainment. As soon as you’ve seen the gorgeous, young Faye Dunaway in forty-foot tall close-ups, in “Bonnie and Clyde,” or these days, even Anne Hathaway in “The Devil Wears Prada,” for that matter, you’re hooked for life.
We watch movies on the small screen now more than ever, but nearly everyone still likes to sit in a crowd of strangers and take in a good story, preferably on a screen so huge that you have to look up at the characters as if they were gods.
It comes as no surprise that the first IMAX films debuted in the 1970’s, the same time in which drive-ins were closing en masse. However, though the standard IMAX screen is 30% larger, IMAX will remain forever inferior to the drive-in. You can’t smuggle much beer in there, nor can you sneak your friends in inside a trunk.
by studioxadmin | May 31, 2011 | Americana, HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
Thirty years ago, the China Syndrome (1979) and Silkwood (1983), both Academy award nominated films, educated us on one of the most urgent issues currently threatening human survival. It took a mere two and a half weeks for the events in “The China Syndrome” to come to pass in the near meltdown of Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, but we did not stand up then like we should have. Now, toxic nuclear byproducts have fouled the ocean and even come blowing to your hometown a result of negligence and corruption by the energy companies and the governments whom we have invested with the responsibility to watch over them.
Motion pictures engaged the debate on the nuclear agenda with a vote of no confidence, but we seem to have ignored them. They cautioned us not to trust nuclear industry “experts” whose careers depend on strong demand for their electricity and bombs. Soothing statements on the nightly news are calculated to make us feel at ease living in a toilet. Both films point a huge, blinking red arrow up at those energy giants who are currently squatting over us, excreting their dung and assuring us that this is what’s best for everyone.
Pay no more attention to their experts. The unfolding of recent events in Japan are playing out precisely as predicted by filmmakers. Both implicitly and explicitly, those filmmakers were inviting us to assume personal responsibility to prevent this. There must be a limit to the crap we will take. It is well within our power to stop them.
The massage is clear. We have denied the power of movies to instruct us. Will we finally learn by listening to the people of Fukushima, and surrounding prefectures, recently forced to abandon their dreams, livelihoods and property to escape nuclear chaos? They are the real nuclear experts.
If nuclear power provides 20% of this country’s energy needs, we could rid ourselves of it instantly by voluntarily reducing our energy consumption by an equal percentage. If that seems impossible, maybe you’ve been watching too much nightly news. You could begin immediately reducing your energy needs by turning it off.
Good people formerly living in and around Fukushima are now adrift as a consequence of trusting the nightly news and denying the truth in the movies. The Japanese are also presently consuming a great deal less energy then they were before this nightmare overwhelmed them. Why wait until we are forced from our homes by a similar disaster before we undertake drastic reduction? Unless we do, the change we are all bound for is what they’re all waking up to now in Fukushima. With foresight and determination we might still preserve here at home, what they have lost there forever.
by studioxadmin | Apr 27, 2011 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
A new man is being born, fraught with all the fears and terrors and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation. —Michelangelo Antonioni
Apocalypse? Revolution? Paradigm Shift? Are we the “new man” of Antonioni’s mid-20th century pronouncement? He was basically the same man as the old one but with out the church to tell him how to behave. In our time, the self-destructive impulse has become even more supercharged by technology. The studies of modern alienation on which Antonioni focused his lens in the 50’s and 60’s are generations deep in the cinema now, energized by global terrorism, industrial greed, and the abrupt crash of our eco-system.
The new man in the movies gestating this half-century later is, like Antonioni’s man, undergoing technological assimilation, but pressed to such extremes now that a character such as Neo in “The Matrix” must resist, with nearly superhuman effort, becoming hardwired into the battery compartment of the corporate machine.
In “Red Desert” Monica Vitti plays the archetype of the Madonna in labor. In The Book of Revelation, a beast is standing by to devour her offspring the instant it slips from her womb. In that story, the child is swept up to heaven and the woman escapes to the desert. In “Red Desert” there is no heaven. Her family is absorbed by the beast of progress and the Madonna is cast adrift in an industrial wasteland where every relationship succumbs to its toxins.
Though Antonioni said he believed progress was inexorable, he chose to depict someone who was not adjusting well to the new and improved. Why was she more interesting to him than those characters in the film that readily adapted? Is she the part of ourselves we are consigning to extinction? Monica Vitti’s character Giuliana hears sounds that the others in her crowd pay little or no attention to. “My eyes don’t know where to look,” she says. She is exquisitely sensitive and seems fragile as a moth. Does she represent our humanity? No. Can we say humanity is any less incarnate in our insatiable appetite for faster and more?
I wonder if it is the sacrifice of our senses that Antonioni laments. Discernible colors in “Red Desert” occur exclusively in the new industrialized world. Antonioni instructed his art department to paint buildings, trees, and even the ground to look dull and monochromatic.
When the primeval world becomes replaced by a man made one, our sense perceptions gradually mutate and attune to the artificial. Antonioni could be said to be aiming the camera over his shoulder with a sigh for what is lost, and then forward with a nod to the inevitable fire and our moth-like advance toward it.
Red Desert – 3 Reasons
by studioxadmin | Mar 15, 2011 | Harbinger, HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
This month’s blog will take the disaster in Japan for it’s theme. May those suffering the most find the strength to endure and may all of us join together for a solution.
I’m going to let a character named Billy Pritchard from my most recent finished feature film screen play make a statement on behalf of us all. Let’s just listen in without any preamble…
Billy steps forward and adjusts the microphone like he’s done it a hundred times.
BILLY-“Brothers and Sisters, let me have a quick word with you. I’m Billy Pritchard. Some of you may know who I am. It’s not important. I used to have a Sunday morning television show. That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because, well, you’re not ready to go home yet are you? Happy Independence to all of you!”
The crowd answers with enthusiasm.
Billy looks off stage now. The crowd sounds intensify. He’s getting a nod from the stage manager, so he goes on. He looks down at Sallassa who is waving at him with a big smile. Donna is next to her beaming with pride.
Jules is at the foot of the stage with the camera tilted up at Billy shouting directions.
JULES-“We’re live. Go preacher.”
BILLY-“I’ve always believed in heaven and hell.”
He pauses, gathering courage. Some in the crowd murmur their encouragement.
BILLY-“You know, unbelievers liked to make fun, but I ask you, believers and unbelievers alike, what more literal proof of a bona-fide hell does anyone need? As we live and breathe, the flaming bowels of the under world swell with fires from, petroleum and nuclear origins, in which you, me and our dear Mother Nature are slowly roasting.”
The crowd makes a collective groan.
BILLY-“The very air and skies are burning which was predicted by the prophets. You say “But the Lord was supposed to come and take us first.” SORRY! That happened, some say sixty years ago. Everybody knows the atomic bomb was the Antichrist. Stop pretending that you didn’t know that. Do the math.”
Blacky has been standing about half way back from the stage and he’s heard enough. Woolman stands next to him.
BLACKY-“Prove it.”
On a screen in his mind, Billy hunkers down into his familiar crouch. His body remains standing though, stage struck, trembling before the sight of Blacky. Then Billy sees the camera and gazes in to the tunnel of Jules’ lens.
BILLY-“You say, ‘ Well If this is hell, why didn’t God take my God fearing grandma?’”
BLACKY(shouts above him)-“This man’s speech is unclean.”
JULES-No sir. He’s talking about Hell in the bible.
BILLY-“I’m saying we become captives of that place even before we die.”
BLACKY-“That’s foolishness from a fool.”
BILLY-“I beg your pardon sir, but, the Lord promised,’I am retuning very soon,’ did he not? It’s been a long, long time since somebody said the Lord said that. I’m here to tell you the Judgment Day is past and over with and we did not pass over with it. So get over it.”
Woolman makes his very first utterance.
WOOLMAN-“Boo.” A few others join in
Billy cocks his head at him, puzzled, but manages to keep momentum.
BILLY-“We’ll pass with the gas of the underworld now with a grievous longing for the artifacts of heaven, which we gave up far too easily here on earth.”
BLACKY-“Hold your tongue.”
WOOLMAN-‘Boo.”
BILLY-“I know it’s a shock. I’m sorry. It’s hard to believe, but we’re damned.”
WOOLMAN-“Boo.”
A few more in the crowd join in. Jules is rubbernecking now, capturing the confrontation ground zero.
BILLY-“What if it’s true? Think about it.”
BLACKY-“Stop now, Voice of Satan.”
More booing ensues. Suddenly there is a screech in the crowd nearby. It is Bo, the fiddle player, strafing his strings. All eyes go to the noise on which the fiddler capitalizes.
BO-“I’ve never heard anyone talk like this man. I’m curious. Isn’t everybody else? I say let him speak. It’s only his opinion.”
With that his bow strikes fiddle strings once more. The crowd generally goes with him, some even applaud and whistle. Blacky shouts over the noise.
BLACKY-“That one is bogus too. They’re working this crowd.”
BO-“Come on. Let him perform. Everybody else has. Free speech is what 4th of July’s about.”
BLACKY-“Devil speaks in him.”
Jules shouts.
JULES-“Hells bells. It’s show business. Shut up and let a devil work.”
WOOLMAN-“Boo.”
Billy waits. Now the crowd rally’s for him. Billy has their attention and so must speak. He fixes his eyes on Blacky.
BILLY-“What’s your argument with me, brother? I’m not defending opinions, dogmas, ideologies, gossip, none of that.”
Woolman starts making for the back of the crowd.
BILLY-“Whichever way we’ve disagreed about how things ought to be done, there are really only five simple needs: clean air, food, water, shelter, and security. That’s all it takes to make this earth a paradise, for everyone. This is the meaning of the cross. That’s all there is. Don’t you keep asking yourself, how hard can it be? I do. Why are we waiting? Have we abandoned ourselves and fallen so far back that we could not even see the Lord when he came and divided His winners from The Enemy’s losers?”
Billy claps his hands for emphasis.
BILLY-“Boom! The righteous, just, off they went without notice. Nobody bothered to tell the losers. Is that it?”
Crowd answers a resounding “no”.
BILLY-“I hope not either. But, friends and strangers, believers and non-believers, we don’t have to live like this. Heaven exists for us now if we want it. This earth can be a paradise. We could provide the necessities for ourselves, and each other. The command, to love one another, grants us total freedom to achieve that dream. That awful smog in the air is the burning consequence of our refusal to do so thus far.’
WOOLMAN-‘Hypocrite.”
Billy’s look into Jules’ lens lets us know he knows is a close up.
BILLY-“Ladies and gentlemen. That man has followed me for days pretending he did not have the gift of speech. That he is choosing to reveal his voice now, I find startlingly suspicious.”
Blacky-“You are a disgraced preacher.”
To cut it off, Billy quickly folds hands and bows head.
BILLY-“Thank you for your time and attention ladies and gentlemen. From the bottom of my heart, I ask your blessing and forgiveness. May the Lord bless and forgive us all.”
He surrenders the microphone and plunges into the crowd after Woolman.
by studioxadmin | Feb 22, 2011 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
One spokesman for the Chinese, when given the chance to comment to the west about the revelations published in Wikileaks, simply said that they were of no consequence. The politicians in the world understand that their diplomatic counterparts are all presenting a certain image to each other and an entirely different image to their trusted allies. It’s no big deal. Though it was an embarrassment to those who were outed, it should come as no shock to anyone.
Information control is an age-old pastime, older than the good book itself. For every embarrassing secret revealed on Wikileaks, there are a hundred thousand like it buried forever. Fortunately, lies make the truth stand out in higher relief. All attempts to obscure truth only help clarify it.
When leaders spy on people, they wish to know the truth. It slips from their grasp when they try to control it. Spying and truth control are futile. We need not invade each other’s privacy to find the truth because, thanks to the movies and storytelling, we already know each other’s deepest secrets.
No responsible person can be lied to. We lie to ourselves. Those lies are the most dangerous. I only believe the lies of others after I have told them to myself. If I’d stop telling myself lies, all others’ lies would stand out. The truth lives out in the open where anyone who desires to take personal responsibility for it can know it.
Lies do not stand for truth. They do not change the facts. Lies are like gas, invisible, but among the most obvious things in the world. The air we breathe contains a variety of gases but a body requires oxygen. Truth is everywhere mingled with lies, but our survival depends on truth. We can tell pretty quickly when we’re breathing something else.
Popular stories expose the common lies we all tell ourselves, precursors to the kind of lies our leaders feel it necessary to tell us. The enlightened storyteller gives away all secrets because he or she understands that there are none worth keeping. Popular stories contain endless examples of characters coming to terms with truth. Accounts of a hero’s triumph in a story counteract attacks of hopelessness brought on by revelations of cowardly maneuvers such as those exposed on Wikileaks.
Official lies are born of the same denials that we all must confront personally before we can ever expect to transform them collectively. News and gossip are constant reminders of the selfish, indulgent sides of our nature. Stories and movies contain compelling examples of the courage and conviction humans are capable of summoning to achieve their highest potential in service to the common good.
