The complete list of Holiday Leftovers Reading - books given to me for Christmas or bought with Christmas money.

Once in high school a friend's dad asked me what I got for Christmas, and I said, "Oh, a lot of books, and a pair of socks." He felt so sorry for me he actually offered to buy me something "fun." I never really saw what the big tragedy was.


And the reading list is...

Ayn Rand, Anthem

The Portable Dorothy Parker

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged: given to me by brother Joe, who is not a huge fan of Rand, prompting him to give me in the same package:
George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories
(I've read Billy Budd, but that's my only Melville so far. I liked it a lot though, and it's also the inspiration for one of my favorite movies, so I thought I'd try his others.)

David McCullough, 1776
From the parents, encouraging my realization that just because high school failed to teach me early American history, I shouldn't sit around and mope about it - I could actually bother to learn it myself.

...and two books on learning the guitar from brother David, who sweetly listened to me talk about how I wanted to pick it up. Unfortunately, I didn't think as far as how I would get Dad's old guitar back to DC with me, so until my parents visit, that gift will have to take a temporary vacation on the Shelf of Useless Reference, between my German-English dictionary and a book of London streetmaps.

Post-Christmas Reading

Beginning with The Portable Dorothy Parker.* Incidentally, the copy I picked up includes the original Portable plus several hundred pages of extra material, all in a sturdy trade paperback edition, making it slightly less than...erhm...portable.

This means I can choose to haul this tome in my purse for commute reading - jettisoning, along the way, high heels and possibly lunch - or I can read a smaller book on my commute and save Dorothy for nighttime reading. The problem with this compromise is I always get more involved in one or the other of the books, so I'll gulp down the traveling book while I'm all comfortable in bed, and then I'll drag the huge book on the Metro with me because I miss it too much when I leave it at home. This is what happened when I tried to alternate America's Constitution with a pocket copy of The Fountainhead. Eventually I ended up carrying Amar's huge book around until I felt like a highschooler between classes. At least I never felt afraid walking home at night. You could kill a man with that hardcover edition. I am not kidding.



*Well, technically it began with Ayn Rand's Anthem, but I finished that on the train. I started it on the train, too.

The Dispossessed

I have a fantastic Christmas haul of books to read, so it's good that I was already so close to the end of The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's the third I've read by her (after The Lathe of Heaven and The Left Hand of Darkness) and like the others, it took a couple of tries before I dove in. Le Guin is most easily classified as a scifi novelist, but her books are more about cultural anthropology than technology or prediction; she uses the plot vehicle of space travel to explore microcosms of human behavior, often posing at least one prominent difference from Earth's reality. In The Left Hand of Darkness, she explored a world with absolutely no concept of gender, split between two nations: one feudalistic, the other, a totalitarian state.

The Dispossessed is a bit more complex, simply for not defining a single difference from ordinary society as striking as the absence of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness. Instead, she begins with two worlds: one resembles an idyllic Earth, with elements of eighteenth-century opulence and nineteenth-century industrial expansion. The second is its moon, which has been colonized by socialist anarchists, self-exiled. Though I'm skeptical as usual of Le Guin's politics, I'm also grateful for her own skepticism, written most plainly in the book's subtitle: An Ambiguous Utopia. Despite the protagonist's multi-world tour of clashing economic models, the book is often surprisingly tender and personal. Le Guin caught me, just as she did in the other two books, with her disarming moments of pure observation. Her own improbable skepticism and ambiguity stems from an understanding of people, the simple understanding that an individual human will always be more important, more complex, and more fascinating than any economic idea.

My now-battered paperback is riddled with dog ears to mark the quotes I liked. This is one of the passages that moved me the most. It reminded me of the feeling of making films, or of losing myself in a story I'm writing. The feeling of doing the work that fills you with passion and purpose.

The wall was down. The vision was both clear and whole. What he saw was simple, simpler than anything else. It was simplicity: and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light.

The spirit in him was like a child running out into the sunlight. There was no end, no end...

And yet in his utter ease and happiness he shook with fear; his hands trembled, and his eyes filled up with tears, as if he had been looking into the sun. After all, the flesh is not transparent. And it is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one's life has been fulfilled.

Yet he kept looking, and going farther, with that same childish joy, until all at once he could not go any farther; he came back, and looking around through his tears saw that the room was dark and the high windows were full of stars.

Holiday Rand

Being surrounded by the happy insanity of my family for the holidays has reminded me of a quote from The Fountainhead: "All love is exception-making." This struck me as one of the most true, and most uncharacteristic (from my very limited experience with Rand) quotes in the book.

I started to wonder what exactly this Randian "exception-making" means. The closest I could come at first was "forgiveness," a term I imagine she recoiled from because of its frequent use in religion (again, based on my so-far very limited reading of her work). But to me, it seems that her concept of making an exception of and for the people one loves is a kind of forgiveness of their faults - and also a forgiveness of one's self for the bend in principle the first half requires. I think that this second half of forgiveness is what makes it Randian - rather than breaking or abandoning personal principle, the forgiveness, the "exception-making," is a conscious, individual judgement on that principle and its worth, compared to the worth of the person in one's heart.

Imagine I, on principle, reject all nail-biters as slaves to a compulsion. But I love you, though you are a nail-biter. My love is exception-making because I have made an exception of you, as an individual, from my cosmic rejection of nail-biters; this is the external half of my exception. I have also made an exception in my principled rejection of nail-biters; this is the internal half.

Roark's love of Gail Wynand is exception-making. Wynand is exceptional as an individual Roark respects, despite Wynand's failures. And Roark - even Roark - has made an exception to his rigid principles to preserve Wynand from his scorn.

This seemed necessary to write out and explain to myself; I'm not sure that it makes a lot of sense. But it seems that especially on the holiday, we're thrown together with a lot of people we love and make exceptions for; and sometimes, many of the proud and stubborn people I know ask themselves why they should tolerate the faults in others. My answer is simply that if love is exception-making, then you must make the exception not just as a charitable act, easily discarded when you get tired of it; true exceptions, the exceptions made by love, are also made to the part of yourself that objects to those flaws. At that point you begin to see the pettiness of the objection in the first place.

Happy holidays - I hope they're filled with art, joy and life.

Vincent Moon:

"The camera was just an excuse to create this, but after the first second they began playing, they forgot the camera and this moment existed. I didn't even need to record it. That's cinema to me. Then, the traces of such moments, in the films, are just dust, sometimes beautiful dust..."

I watched Hannah and Her Sisters again last night. It's my favorite Woody Allen movie. It also contains one of my favorite E. E. Cummings poems. It's one of the surprising moments of sweetness in the film: Elliot is trying to initiate an affair with his wife's younger sister, Lee. Throughout the movie, I find his character the hardest to forgive; he sees his actions as movements in an operatic drama, when in fact he's only a childish cheater. But in his desperate longing for Lee, he manages to make a genuine gesture that pries open her heart, like the little hands in the poem: he tells her to read E. E. Cummings's "somewhere i have never travelled." Below is the poem, and the clip from the movie in which Lee reads the poem (sorry for the subtitles and bad compression - it's the only version I could find online).


somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

At college, we learned how to shoot 16mm film. I've been asked by a lot of people why our teachers even bothered with it.

In our program, the technical skills that we learned, especially in digital production, were those we chose for ourselves. Our instructors answered our questions and gave us suggestions when we asked for them, but our production classes were based more on aesthetics than technique, and more on problem-solving for the one-man-band kind of filmmaking than training in discrete roles like camera or sound.

16mm fit neatly into that kind of teaching, because shooting film is a discipline, and in our classes, we were expected to discipline ourselves. On the first day of Intro to 16mm Production, John Mann showed us the cameras, and the cold boxes that held tight sharp-smelling daylight spools, and before we could begin, he told us to respect the film. Never to waste it. Never to take it for granted. Because for all the decades of science that went into making that film, it only has one chance to be beautiful, and you are that chance. Each frame is counting on you to make it into something beautiful. You can't rewatch it right away, erase it and reshoot it. You have to care about every single shot.

In digital cameras, a lot of the quality is in the technology contained in the body. And it's too easy to assume a better camera will automatically give you better footage (despite your lack of skill or effort). It's also too easy to shrug off errors by assuming the problem is in the quality of the camera.

For 16mm cameras, as long as the body is clean inside and light-tight and the motor is in working order, the quality lies entirely in the optics and the film stock. The filmmaker can't escape responsibility because she consciously chooses which stock and which lenses to shoot with. There aren't any mysterious computer components to blame errors on. And every single shot counts, because every time the camera rolls, hundreds of thousands of cold fragrant frames dash by taking their 1/24-second chance to be beautiful.

Of course we all took the time, around classes, to learn digital production. We took workshops at the digital media center, and weekends just getting to know the cameras. We spent hours compressing the same video different ways until that stickiness or the popping went away. We learned how to shoot on miniDV tapes and on cards and on hard drives. But we had the discipline to learn all of these things because we love film.

Diana finished this film despite terrible weather, unpredictable light, impossible equipment scheduling, and multiple camera failures. She kept working (this is why we are always covered in bruises at the end of a shoot, because we fight the elements) and captured some truly lovely 16mm footage of Wyman Park. Stay to the end of the credits and the film will say goodbye.

Moleque from Diana Peralta on Vimeo.

Work and life have conspired to keep me from the blog this week. For your entertainment, here's a quick video - my second assignment in Lost and Found class, my last year at college: Jimmy Stewart is looking out the Rear Window. Choose what he's looking at.

Jimmy and the Mole from Hannah Sternberg on Vimeo.

And a response to the prompt, "dating."

Girls Beware from Hannah Sternberg on Vimeo.

Lost and Found Film

Lost and found films are created with existing footage - old educational reels, home movies, even other films. Filmmakers take this material and cut it into something entirely new.

I've heard from several people that if you love film and filmmaking, you will love editing. I didn't understand that for a long time, and even found it discouraging, because whenever I sat down to edit, I was so frustrated with my own footage that the process was very painful. But then, in my senior year, I took a lost and found film class. Editing existing footage freed me from the obsession with the flaws in my own shooting technique and allowed me to focus entirely on the heartbeat of the cuts, the ability of shots to speak to each other, and the ways to use flaws to produce beauty. Lost and found is a mental exercise, especially in a class where you have to respond to a prompt using footage that may have no relation at all to your theme - it's stretching out your creative muscles.

After riffling through the Prelinger Archives I started to feel potential even in extremely mundane footage. I started seeing the hidden moments - a genuine smile in a 1950s reel about moral choices, or an off-beat moment of joy in a car commercial. Once I began cutting these together, the footage started speaking. And usually I drifted away from the strict words of the prompt into an idea that was inspired both by the prompt and by the footage, and finally, my own voice speaking through both.

That's how my response to "otherness," a prompt inspired by the philosophy of Satre and Lacan, turned into a reflection on childhood - the home movies I stumbled across are soft with time and feeling, familiar but alienating. And my response to "hyperreality" (see Baudrillard, Eco and Virilio) turned into...elephants. Both videos are below.

But first, I'd like to link to my friend David Golan's videos, which unfortunately I can't find a way to embed directly here. Dave was one of the first people I remember telling me about the connection between the love of editing and the love of film. He has a few lost and found projects on his site, as well as some 16mm work, one of which Carlos and I stayed up all night to help him shoot. I'd suggest starting with "Blossom" and "A Study of Hitchcock."

Here is my "otherness" lost and found film:

There Was a Child from Hannah Sternberg on Vimeo.

And below is my project on "hyperreality."

Wheels Across Africa from Hannah Sternberg on Vimeo.

Dance for the Camera

Last year, Carlos, Annie Holstein and I took a class that paired film students with students of choreography to make short dance films. It was an extraordinary experience, and I think we all learned a lot from working together. I still like to come back and watch the films we made then; below are two - one directed by Carlos, one by Annie. The prompt for Carlos's project was to create a film using only shots of feet - no photography above the knee. The project by Annie posted below was her final, from the prompt to use the long, narrow space of a hallway.

Carlos's film brings character, cuteness and humor to a seemingly restrictive prompt; Annie's film is chilling and atmospheric, a striking fusion of tension, music and location with wonderfully eerie light design and choreography straight from Caligari. Enjoy!

Dance for the Camera - Feet from Carlos Valdes-Lora on Vimeo.

Chimera from Annie Holstein on Vimeo.

More films from Bedford Square collaborators

Chatterton is nearly complete, and I hope that soon I'll have another piece of it to share here. Currently I'm gathering material for a few motion graphics and lost-and-found sequences, and all the little nitpicky polishing jobs.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a few things that my collaborators on Chatterton have been working on. First up is Aljosa Zovko. Aljosa was one of my cinematographers on Chatterton, as well as the photographer for all the stills used in the film. He and Carlos are in a class together this semester on the application of film theory to production. I've seen work from both of them for this class and it's very exciting stuff.

Here's one of Aljosa's projects, "Searchlight." What I like most about it (after about a half dozen views) is that - like many of Aljosa's films and photographs - it's a poem on optics. As an abstract film, its main character is the lens - the lens that expresses itself through the wide variety of optical "flaws" that actually create beauty: lens flare, soft focus, the vignetting hinted at in the searchlight shots. This was actually an editing assignment, and the soft lyrical pulse of the cutting allows the impression of each optical anamoly drift into the next shot and the next. Enjoy!

Searchlight from Aljosa Zovko on Vimeo.

Traffic in Delaware

For some great music, visit Jay and Greg's radio station, The Spirit Farm. Scroll a few posts down and listen to their band, Traffic in Delaware, playing a very cute song.

There's your slice of Bedford Square for today - now I'm writing, can't stay long.

Nearing the end of The Fountainhead

"Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity. I'll be glad if people who need it find a better manner of living in a house I designed. But that's not the motive of my work. Nor my reason. Nor my reward."

Returning to A Room with a View

The last time I picked up A Room with a View, I didn't get a chance to finish it. Now I'm coming back because, once again, it seems to fit.

There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was queen of much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war - a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.

Chatterton update

It's been a little over a week since a post here - well. Since then, I've crossed nearly everything off my list, except the elements that I've asked friends to do (titles and animation) and the single shot I have to reshoot (a green-screen "college photo"). In the meantime, I've finished the cut, added sound effects, color corrected, and a few other odds and ends.

I also crewed for Carlos's film - he's shooting part 2 of a three-part film about a girl's experiments with a sensory deprivation helmet and the twisted, film noir dream she has. This semester, he's shooting the dream. Scroll down a few posts to watch the first part.

Here are some pictures Diana Peralta took of Carlos's shoot this weekend - enjoy! I loved his set and I'm very eager to see the rest of the film unfold. Click to see larger photos.

Carlos with Ramon, his Sam Spade-esque leading man.

Cesar (left), Carlos's lighting DP, and Greg, trusty crew member, set lights

Lines.

Carlos with Eric Leavitz, an actor (and great comedic writer) who appeared in the first part as well.

Eric's character in the dream had his eyes gouged out by disgruntled capos -

- I had to make him up so his eyes looked bruised under the sunglasses.

Jay sets up for stereo sound

Meet Cesar, from the front this time.

This is the same apartment where we shot most of Chatterton - Josh & Charles's place.

Editing Update

This weekend I started the Chatterton fine cut! This means I finished editing together the remaining scenes in the rough cut, and then assembled all of the scenes together, with music and image transitions between them. After three weekends of shooting and two weekends of editing, almost three hours of footage and about 100 distinct angles, Chatterton is beginning to take its final shape as a 15-minute film.

The bad news is that while I managed to cut together a trailer and some other goodies for the blog, I didn't have time to export and upload them before my train tonight. They will be appearing next weekend. And I'll post a few more pictures from the shoot, as well as some films by other Bedford Square collaborators, this week.

So, what's left: edit foley (sound effects), reshoot one shot, write and record a voice-over for a scene I'd like to alter, create two graphics, then color correction and fine touches. Jay will be working on the animation sequence in the meantime, and then he'll do a final sound mix. I'm also looking for someone to help me create the titles.

A trailer is coming....

...hopefully by the end of this weekend, if I meet my goals for the fine cut first.

In the meantime, Carlos is preparing to shoot his next project. It's the second part of a film he started last semester about a girl who experiments with a sensory-deprivation helmet, and the disturbingly revealing dream she has. Carlos is shooting the dream this semester - from the looks of the script, it's going to be a very stylish, wry modern noir.

Watch the first part of his film here:

Prologue - Student Film from Carlos Valdes-Lora on Vimeo.

Changes 'round the House

Returning readers might have noticed some changes at Bedford Square. The new header font and image were designed by Charles Zhang, who also did the set photography for Chatterton. The house you see in the logo is modeled on the home of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in London; the font is inspired by the signature of one of the PRB painters. And Charles designed it all while hiding in his apartment with the flu! Go Charles.

SNEAK PEEK: Chatterton - The Library

This weekend I finished a (very) rough cut of Chatterton. Check out this sneak peek: the scene in which Daniel researches his next forgery.

Chatterton Sneak Peak: The Library from Hannah Sternberg on Vimeo.

Where am I this weekend? Not in Baltimore. I need some time to rest, catch up with life, cleaning and errands, and do some writing. It was hard, though, to fight the urge to head straight up to Bmore to start editing Chatterton. The last three weekends were exhausting (to the point they actually made me ill) but they also filled me with excitement to keep the project moving. I can't wait to have a scene completed that I can share here, for the people who have been following but haven't be able to see the actual footage yet.

Chatterton: 9/19

Today we have one last insert shot and a quick voiceover to record; but other than that, Chatterton is wrapped like a burrito! Yesterday we shot the last scene of the film, which, because of scheduling oddities, ended up being the last scene of our shoot, too. Step into the morning after the party.

Mostly overhead, handheld work using only natural light to give it a harsher, more real feeling than any other scene in the film - things are coming down in every sense for the characters. Emma Needell was my camera assistant that day - here, she's spotting me and the camera while I stand on a chair.

Emma was around a lot last weekend too, helping Carlos and Al. On 9/19, she was my only and all of my crew. She rolled a few shots herself as well. When she was in Argentina working for a television station last summer, she used the PAL version of this camera (Panasonic HVX)!

Emma also ran sound during the one line of dialogue we rolled yesterday.

George is bemused to find that after closing the bar where he works at 4am that morning, he still doesn't look haggard enough.

"Let's do that again, with more misery this time!"

Tom is not as comfortable as he looks.

Emma's first priority, should I fall out the window, is saving the camera.

Charles asked me to do a little flourish when we were all done.

Well, now I'm heading to the editing lab. I hope to have rough cuts of a couple of scenes by the end of the day. I might be posting test footage or throw-away takes to Vimeo soon, for the general amusement!

Chatterton Third Weekend

Tomorrow we wrap up the last insert shots for Chatterton. Here are some shots of what we did to the actors today...

Chatterton 9/12: THEY BUILT ME A BOOM CRANE.

A week and a half before this shoot, I told Carlos and Aljosa I wanted an overhead dolly shot.

They took it as a personal challenge.

They came back to me with a solution made of two c-stands, a pile of sandbags, and a mayfair clip, then taped it all together with a whole roll of AWESOME.

It was the Night of the Boom Crane. And it was more fun than you should probably be allowed to have on a film set.

"We begin here, and then WE TAKE POLAND!"

End of the dolly. George walks ahead with the light, Carlos pans the boom, Aljosa pushes, and I ride the dolly to watch the shot and hit record/pause.

Carlos and I have identical looks of concentration.

Easy does it.

Crossing the Delaware.

See that camera? It's pointing STRAIGHT DOWN.

The cast, crew and party extras gather around to watch the playback.

The rest of this post is dedicated to the crazy things we did.

Crazy thing #1: Devoting a weekend to 28 hours of backbreaking labor, to make something so good that the average viewer won't be able to tell just how much backbreaking labor went into it.

Making two people run into each other spontaneously on cue every time.

Making night at three in the afternoon.

Al and George took turns stapling newspapers to the ceiling...

...since they were the tallest people around...

So we could get this direct-upward shot.

And do it again in the other room, with a pan down this time.

The Film Department has six cans of smoke. We took three for the party scene.

I approve of the smoke.

Of course, there were some casualties.

Carlos executes a shot from Daniel's POV on the floor: staring at the ceiling, pan down to Brian and Donna, then back up again. I guide him using the display screen. Mike waits for his cue to enter frame and Emma, my spectacular all-purpose crew member, watches.

Aljosa uses a silk to soften the sunlight.

All Pictures: Charles Zhang

Chatterton 9/12: Meet the Cast & Crew

Here's a quick walk through the characters and story in case you missed it...

This is Daniel Chaffee (played by Tom Murphy). He narrates the film.

He's an artist out of work and out of inspiration. Most of the work he produces now just goes into the forgeries he creates with his roommates, Thomas Chatterton and Brian Meegeren.

This is Thomas Chatterton (played by Mike Tanenbaum). He takes the fake historic photographs that Daniel researches and designs and Brian promotes. He rarely speaks, but seems to see directly into Daniel's mind - at least, that's how Daniel feels.

Brian Meegeren with his girlfriend, Donna (played by George Telonis and Cindy Chen). Brian is a washed-up intellectual. Daniel is in love with Donna, which only exacerbates his resentment of Brian's pomposity.

Now, it's time to meet the crew!

Carlos Valdes-Lora, my cinematographer. I tell him where I want the shot, how I want it framed and lit, and where it's going if there's movement, then I leave to work with the actors; when I come back, things are usually more beautiful then I'd ever expected.

Carlos likes C-stands.

This is Aljosa. He's my other cinematographer, and Carlos's key grip. He and Carlos work out all the tricky lighting problems together, and this weekend Al also shot b-roll during downtimes.

Contrary to the impression some of these pictures might give, Carlos and Al actually rolled video on the majority of shots while I watched on the display screen. Here we were shooting what will be the first shot of the film, and I wanted to be behind the camera. Aljosa sets off a can of smoke to fill the frame with party haze.

Jay, my sound man and animator, takes a well-deserved break between scenes.

Steph, my runner, appearing in her second role: Superstar Party Extra.

Left to right, Steph, Kevin and Erin are Passed-Out Drunks 1, 2 and 3 :)

Hi!

Next up: THEY BUILT ME A BOOM CRANE.

All Photos: Charles Zhang