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.