CollisionWorks

Jim Henson created the Muppets. Sesame Street began airing a few months after I was born. Around the time I outgrew it, The Muppet Show started up. I've grown up loving the Muppets and Henson's work.

Henson died the day before I graduated from NYU -- actor Ken Schatz, a fellow Muppet fanatic, came up to me that morning, as the Tisch School of the Arts group gathered to walk to Washington Square Park. and broke the news to me. Gradually, the news filtered around the room, and in the midst of the happy day, all of us had a sadness hanging around us now -- we were, almost all of us, exactly the right age to have grown up with Jim Henson's Muppets as they grew up.


My favorite works of Henson's now are the odder, more experimental pieces he would occasionally do on various variety and talk shows of the 60s and 70s. Like this one, which I found on YouTube through a BoingBoing link this morning, Limbo - The Organized Mind, a live performance with backing film and tape from 1974 on The Tonight Show (Carson seems to have confused Henson with a beloved NYC local CBS news anchor, however). The soundtrack is by Raymond Scott, best known as the composer of many of the classic melodies heard in Warner Bros. cartoons, who was also a pioneer in electronic music (the soundtrack to this film is featured on the great collection of Scott's electronic work, Manhattan Research Inc.).





Henson made a number of non-puppet experimental films in the 60s. His films do have a bit of the light-liberal-National Film Board of Canada-style to them at times, but at their best they are quite funny and/or moving.

I wanted to find and include his great short film Time Piece here, but it doesn't seem to be online anywhere. Darn.

Here's a shorter piece he did (again with music by Scott) for the '67 Expo in Montreal:





And here's a 10-minute excerpt from a TV special he created in 1969 for the NBC Experiments in Television series (and could you imagine a series like this today? or an appearance like the above on The Tonight Show?) -- a film called The Cube. If you like it, more about the film (including a video of, I believe, the whole show) can be found HERE.





Enjoy.

I saw 300 last Friday up at the IMAX theater near Lincoln Center.

I didn't expect to really like it much, if at all. It was more an excuse to see a friend and see my first film in IMAX, and on those points, it was more than worth it (any film I even vaguely want to see that's playing in IMAX, from now on, I'm there). I wound up mildly disturbed and extremely angered by the film.

The anger was because, despite my expectations, I thought the first half of the film was terrific, smart, and amazing -- and then the second half was like a different movie, stupid, predictable, full of Hollywood cliches, and a complete betrayal of the characters and world of the first half. I went in with low expectations, was stunned and pleased by its initial brilliance, then watched as the film fell apart and became worse than I had thought possible going in. But discussing why it destroyed itself as a cohesive work is another post . . . maybe tomorrow.

So I was angry about it falling apart as a film, but I was disturbed by the potential political readings that could be put into the film, even when I was enjoying the first part.

The other night I discussed this a little at a tech for a show at The Brick, and the next day one of the actors, who I've worked with often, sent me an email asking me to discuss some of what he had heard about the film that bothered him, its possible pro-war and homophobic aspects. He writes, and I respond (with some editing for clarity here):


I was curious as to your thoughts on that, particularly the latter of the two points [that the film is "pro-war" and homophobic]. I mean, considering the movie is supposedly very faithful to the source material, and the graphic novel was written before the Bush administration, I have to wonder how much of that is just contextual interpretation. On the other hand, although I haven't seen 300, I have to admit that all the "Death in battle is AWESOME!" stuff I see in ads and promos for the movie kind of rub me the wrong way, especially considering there's a war on, now.


Yeah, I read all that [the specific online criticisms he had mentioned] -- and a lot otherwise going on around the web now saying this.

The thing is . . . it really doesn't hold water. The metaphor doesn't hold true for very long any time you try to see "our heroes" as standins for the Current Administration. If anything, it falls more true the other way, with a small group of determined fighters fighting off a large, more technologically advanced invading superpower that makes empty promises about how independent they will be as a state, as long as they allow themselves to be ruled by the Empire.

But again, none of it holds in any way true metaphorically to our current situation for very long. For a large part because it is made clear that this is also a battle between rationality and mysticism (those are the terms used, but it does come off quite a bit as Atheism vs. Theocracy) - which, in our current battle between two theocratic points of view, doesn't work (and our heroes in the film are on the "Fuck Mysticism" side). You can find bits and pieces here and there that may suddenly seem to have "topical meaning," but they can be read so many different ways from so many points of view that it might as well be a Rorschach test. If you are a right-winger and you want to see it as confirming your point of view, you could; if you want to see it as an example of Hollywood liberalism, you could. From the left, you could see it as confirming your point of view as well, or you could see it as an example of the right-wing propaganda machine (an attitude I've seen far too often from fellow lefties - that any Hollywood movie must automatically be a right-wing statement if it's big, and expensive, and popular, when more often then not it's merely stupid and ignorant).

That said, even if the film doesn't work as any kind of metaphor (through non-intention or confusion or whatever), is it OKAY for it to come out in the current climate? That's a harder question. No matter what the intentions of the filmmakers (or Miller in the original comic book), context DOES matter. Even if not meant in any way as any kind of comment on current events, and even with the metaphor not really working properly for any kind of commentary, it comes off as one. As I said last night, I LOVED the first half of the film, before it suddenly, amazing, went entirely into Stupidland (I haven't seen a film go so much off the rails so suddenly since John Carpenter's They Live), but even as I was loving it, I couldn't help but be disturbed by it. My feeling has been for years that The Artist has no responsibilities to anything but his or her vision - if it's an irresponsible Vision, well, hell, that's just part of what Art IS.

But I kept looking at it and really feeling, "Is this responsible in this country right now?" And not feeling good about what I was feeling. "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is not a universal truth for all times and places (nor is it a universal falsehood), but that seemed to be as close to an idea as the film had in it's pretty little head, and it bugged me. I don't necessarily demand ideas in art (which teeter dangerously close to BIG MEANINGS), but I demand a point-of-view -- a consistent eye or attitude that wants to show me something it is interested in, and, hopefully, with more of a reason to show me something than "Isn't this COOL!"

I know Berit and I (and other people who wrote about it elsewhere) were somewhat similarly disturbed during the battle sequences in the last two Lord of the Rings films for many of the same reasons, and you certainly can't say that when Tolkien wrote any of this, or, as Jackson was really being as faithful to the books as he could, that it was intended as any kind of commentary on the world today -- but the spectacle of our mostly Nordic/Anglo Saxon-looking heroes fighting the evil darkie monsters was at times unpleasant. Wrong time, wrong place.

Of course, given the lead time on how long movies take to make, who the hell KNOWS what the world will be like when it's time for your project to come out.

But, even if you are not intending a STATEMENT, certain choices MAKE one, whether you like it or not. And if you are making one, it's best to be in control of what that statement is, rather than ignoring it. This actually carries over into, as I think I mentioned last night, my current production of Hamlet, where I cast Rasheed as Horatio (in my head) based solely on his qualities as an actor many years ago. Then, I did have to consider what having a black Horatio "meant" in the context of the play. What it really "meant" for me at the start was "uh, black people exist?" But whether I liked it or not, the choice was going to have MEANING, so I had to use that meaning and carry it through as a meaningful decision throughout the text. It became crucial to the play for me, and even if Rasheed had not been able to play the part (and I'm SO glad he's going to), I would have still felt the need to cast the part with a black actor.

As for the homophobia . . . well, to me it comes off about on the level of schoolkids using "gay" as a pejorative. I don't think it's MEANT, again, but it's there, and its bad, though Snyder et al would probably be stunned if you called him on it, as many kids would be about saying something is gay being homophobic. They'd just think you were a spoilsport and WAY-too PC. The fact that the pretty, effeminate Persian god-king also has a harem of half-naked women, talks like Geoffrey Holder in an echo chamber, and looks like he could crush a normal-sized man with his bare hands just confuses everything, too. It just feels more like Snyder and company fell into the "powerful yet effeminate villain is creepy" cliche that's been going around forever. It's not great, but it comes right at the time when the movie goes from being really good to being nothing but a pack of Hollywood cliches, so the casual homophobia just feels like one more stupid Hollywood bit that's just been thrown in. The potentially pro-war attitude, intended or not, is deeper, nastier, more insidious, and more dangerous.

So I was disturbed, and I was disturbed about feeling disturbed. I wouldn't want any kind of suppression of points of view, no matter what, but . . .

Maybe if the film actually HAD a clear point of view (not a MESSAGE, a hit-you-over-the head thing, just a point-of-view), even an awful one, it would not be such a problem.


IWH

Okay, this has been frustrating.


My intention WAS to tie into the "Lynch Mob" bloglink-a-thon going on over at Vinyl Is Heavy by rewatching ALL of David Lynch's film/video work in chronological order, and jotting down a few notes for six posts this week, one-a-day, Monday through Saturday. Just some notes, what I see, what I feel, what I think, what connections I've made over the years of looking at these things.

Two things got in the way. First, other writing I had to do, as well as personal life silliness. Second, the notes got out of control, as I added synopses and biographical stuff about Lynch that I "needed" to explain the notes, until I wound up with something closer to essays than notes. Also, there were serious problems getting the damned photos in the post and at the right size (please let me know if they come out all farblondjet on your browser -- I'm importing them from a new photo server - my flickr account is full - and they just kept going all haywire).

Whatever, at least I got the first one done before the Blog-a-thon was over -- the rest will show up as soon as I can get them together (probably faster, as less bio and synopsis will be needed in future, I think). Enjoy.



DREAMING OF DAVID LYNCH #1a (of 6): Philadelphia


1. Six Men Getting Sick (1967, aka Six Figures Getting Sick)


All of Lynch’s early (pre-Eraserhead) films are included on the Short Films by David Lynch DVD originally available only from davidlynch.com, now available commercially elsewhere. The original edition came in an 8”-square box with inserts that was an art object in itself (but held the disc in a tight cardboard sleeve just perfect for damaging it), and the films are presented in as good video versions as you could imagine (and probably, with Lynch’s painstaking restoration work, better than any of the film prints out there).

Lynch was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts when the chance incident of wind moving a painting he was working on in his space at the Academy (a black painting with some very dark green grass) and the sound of some distant music from another student’s studio gave him the desire to see his paintings move.

With the help of his childhood friend Jack Fisk, he created a 6’-square plaster “screen,” featuring three distorted heads, rented a 16mm camera (with single-frame capacity but without reflex viewing), and began animating.

The result is a fifty-second long film that was shown on a loop at a year-end “experimental painting and sculpture” competition at the Academy. For ten minutes of each hour, in the gallery where the student work was being shown, they would turn out the lights and turn on Lynch’s film for several minutes, accompanying it with the sound of a siren on tape. Lynch and Fisk constructed a mechanism out of pieces of three erector sets to take the film loop from the projector up to the ceiling and back down to refeed in.




We see six heads. The three on the left are three-dimensional – plaster casts of Lynch’s head, two of them looking pained, one – all the way on the left – looks peaceful, asleep, leaning his cheek on a hand. Perhaps this head is dreaming the rest of the work. Or maybe it has a toothache. Three more animated ones are added to the right, abstracted, distorted (one looks like “the Bufferin man”). Frames are drawn around some of the heads. All six heads grow esophagi and stomachs (one grows an actual chest x-ray). Words flash: LOOK. SICK. There is fire. Everything goes red for a moment. The stomachs fill with bile. The figures grow arms that jump around jerkily. Then all the heads vomit.




Six Men Getting Sick is probably the lightest film in overall visual tone of all Lynch’s work, as it has to be in order to work as a projection on a sculptured surface – so, for a good deal of it, a lot of white space. The animation is fluid (except for the deliberately jerky arms) and precise. As with all of Lynch’s animation in his next few films, it appears he actually animates every single frame – most animation is shot with changes every 2 to 6 frames, for the sake of time, materials, and sanity.

The speed with which things move, change (and sometimes flash for a frame or two) somehow expands the strictly defined world of the frame, the sculpture, into a larger mental space. Some things flash and are barely seen, other things are held and can be looked at clearly, and the timing of which is which seems perfectly right.

The animation stops twice for brief live action shots, one of fire passing under the lens and one in which paint drips down the animation surface, which was obviously tilted or vertical – for years, I’ve been convinced the animation was actually done at a vertical on the sculptured screen itself, as it would be very difficult to make some of the precise lineups between animation and sculpture happen otherwise, but in looking for images for this essay I found stills of the animation without the sculptured elements (and discovered it can also be seen that way in the documentary Pretty as a Picture), so Lynch is, of course, just being amazingly organized and precise as usual.

The video version is, naturally, not really the work. The animation is superimposed on the screen, but also blocks it out at times in ways it wouldn’t as an actual projection. Lynch repeats the film loop six times on the video, with siren noise (the siren sounds like an old recording, so if it isn’t the original one that Lynch used in ‘67, he’s done what he could to simulate it), basically creating it as a new video work, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) as it’s now called onscreen. It’s an interesting bridge between Lynch’s paintings and film, as it resembles both, but is not quite either. Though he became interested in film as a means to make his paintings move, he knows that film cannot just be moving paintings, and adjusts his style accordingly. But he still has a ways to go.

Lynch won the competition, but the piece cost $200 to make. This was too much money to spend on one work, as far as he was concerned. He went back to painting.



2. The Alphabet (1968)





Another student at PFA, H. Barton Wasserman, seeing Six Men, and having some money, commissioned Lynch to make a sculpture-film for him – something where the sculpture could hang on the wall and be interesting on its own, but with a flick of a switch, the lights would dim and a film loop would project on the sculpture-screen. He gave Lynch $1,000 to make it. Lynch spent almost half that on buying a used 16mm Bolex camera ($478.28 to be exact - he includes a still of the receipt, which he still has, on the DVD). He intended to make a split-screen film, with two-thirds of it animated, and one-third live action. He shot the film.

The camera was defective. What he got back from the lab was 100’ of smeared colors, with no frame lines. For some reason, he says, he wasn’t depressed about it (how, I don’t know, as I assume he spent an insane amount of focused time and effort on the animation), and Wasserman told Lynch to use the rest of the money to make whatever he wanted as long as he got a print.

Lynch’s wife Peggy had told him of seeing her six-year-old niece thrash about in a nightmare, repeating the alphabet over and over in an agitated manner. This struck a chord with Lynch, who was still in what his then-wife calls his “pre-verbal” phase, using sounds and gestures as much as words in everyday conversation.

From Lynch on Lynch: “Painters don’t have to talk. Every idea was in another language, down, deep inside. I never had to bring it to the surface. So things were pure and, you know, better that way. I didn’t have to justify anything. I could just let it come out. And that’s why talking about things isn’t a totally satisfactory thing . . . It just struck me that learning, instead of being something that’s a happy process, is turned around to being almost like a nightmarish process, so it gives people dreams – bad dreams. So The Alphabet is a little nightmare about the fear connected with learning.”

So he had ideas. Lynch painted the inside of his house (2429 Aspen Street) black to shoot the live action sections, then animated the rest, even tighter and more obsessively than in his previous film.




Children chant “A B C” ominously as the film begins. A male voice sings a song about the alphabet as abstract animation fills the screen gradually with color, the letters of the alphabet emerging in order as part of the composition. There are flashes of a woman’s mouth, once with strange groaning, once saying, “Please remember, you’re dealing with the human form” (almost certainly a quote from one of Lynch’s teachers at PFA). Abstract shapes coming from uppercase letters give birth to lowercase letters, with blood and distorted cries (Lynch’s newborn daughter Jennifer, recorded on a broken reel-to-reel tape deck). Letters jump into the head of a distorted, hermaphoditic figure, which gasps and bleeds from the eyes. A woman’s voice recites “The Alphabet Song” in a childlike voice as Peggy Lynch pixilates around on a bed, reaching for the letters, then vomits blood across the sheets.


The Alphabet is incredibly tight and well-made, and that it was made as a first film by someone teaching himself the technical aspects of filmmaking is incredible, especiaslly when, say, compared to the early contemporaneous films of say, David Cronenberg – whose Transfer (1966) and From the Drain (1967) I was lucky (if that’s the word) enough to see some years ago, and which are amazing in their near-incompetence.

Every beat of Lynch’s film falls naturally into the next, and the rhythms are naturally cinematic in a way it usually takes years to learn. I know at least one person who thinks this is still the high point of all Lynch’s work, and there’s almost a case to be made – it’s pure, effective, without a wasted moment. At the same time, it’s missing one of the most important elements of Lynch’s work since, a dense overlay of sonic elements – the sound is interesting, he’s already thinking about it, but not quite yet where it needs to be, and the film does not quite cohere the same way as his later work, where sound works as the mortar holding the bricks of his images together.

Still, The Alphabet gave Lynch, as he says, “the bug” for filmmaking, and he began writing a script for his next film.





3. The Grandmother (1970)


A friend told Lynch about the American Film Institute in Washington D.C., and their grants for independent filmmakers. All you needed to submit was previous work and a script, and Lynch had both, so he sent them in. Soon after, the first group of grant-winners was announced by AFI, and Lynch was unhappy to discover that they were almost all people far more established in the world of experimental film than he, such as Stan Brakhage and Bruce Connor.

Unknown to him, after The Alphabet was screened at AFI, there was some confusion about what pile to put it in – screened films were put in piles by “category.” When they were done, The Alphabet was in a pile all by itself, so the powers at AFI decided that no matter what they may think about his film, Lynch had to get a grant.

With the money, he made The Grandmother, a complex mix of two-dimensional animation, pixilation of actors, and live action. He painted the inside of his house black again (to make the actors and set pieces the only important things in frame), adding chalk lines here and there to delineate doors and corners, found a cast of friends, neighbors, and co-workers from LaPelle’s Printing (where he worked), and got to work.




In an animated prologue, a brutish, grunting, whining couple produces, through their rubbing, an elegant boy in a suit, who is tormented at their hands. In their home, he repeatedly wets the bed, and is punished for it by his father (though the puddles are bright yellow, it is emotionally and thematically treated more like wet dreams). He finds a bag of seeds in the attic, pours dirt on a bed up there, plants the seed, waters it, and watches as a tree grows from the bed. The tree gives birth, noisily, sloppily, to the Grandmother, a comforting, whistling presence. The boy spends as much time away from his barking parents and with his grandmother as he can, growing closer to her, eventually having (animated) dreams in which he murders his parents and lives with the grandmother in a paradise with pools of yellow liquid. His mind has (as Lynch says) “got putrefied through some bad thinking.” The relationship sours, and the grandmother whistles herself to death. The boy tries to save her, and then to dream her up again as he wants her, but is unable to.





The Grandmother is an advance for Lynch over his previous film in some ways, but a big step back in others. His camerawork, precise and controlled in Alphabet, is too often handheld and rambling here – very “early student film” in a way that The Alphabet is not – it’s interesting to compare Lynch’s early handheld work here to his recent work in INLAND EMPIRE to see just how differently “controlled” apparently uncontrolled camerawork can be. If The Grandmother’s handheld work suggests a voice saying, “Uh, wait, here you go, look, uh, over here – wait a minute, let me set this up for you, just a sec . . . there you go,” then INLAND EMPIRE’s camera says, “Look here . . . now look here . . . watch this while I move . . . over . . . here . . . isn’t that interesting?”

The Grandmother is also frequently boring, a charge often leveled at other films of Lynch’s, perhaps understandably. But while I have been occasionally bored at parts of Lynch’s other films on rewatching them (occasionally), this film is the one that always bores me in a couple of spots – I just want to yell “get ON with it” far more during this 34 minute long film than I ever do during the nearly three-hour INLAND EMPIRE. It is often, as opposed to the perfectly dark levels of The Alphabet and much of his later work, just too damned dark – the final shot of the film, a live-action/animation combo, is almost impossible to read. Things are missed in the murk that should be seen.

But it is here, working for the first time with soundman Alan Splet, who would be his close collaborator for the next 16 years, that Lynch uses a dense soundscape as an integral part of his mise-en-scene, creating the feel that comes to mind when something “Lynchian” is thought of. It’s not as constantly inventive as most of the later work – one particular tone, something like an organ (which also shows up in Eraserhead) is used many times here, almost as a default tone.

The occasional music score by Tractor, a local band, is pleasant, but oddly dated (I don’t know why, can’t put my finger on it, but something in the ambient tone screams “late-60s”). But the voices of the four characters – none of whom speak but make distinctive noises – are beautifully constructed, from the father’s brutal grunts, to the mother’s keening, to the boy’s wounded-bird cries, to the grandmother’s ethereal whistling. It’s not Eraserhead yet, but it’s getting there.

Lynch had applied for a $7,200 grant from AFI to make the film, and had received a $5,000 one. He ran out of money before finishing and asked AFI for the last $2,200 (his budget had been accurate almost to the dollar). One of the heads of AFI came to Philly from Washington D.C. to see what Lynch had done so far, was impressed, approved the extra money, and suggested to Lynch that he should come study at AFI’s new school in L.A.

So in the Summer of 1970, Lynch packed up his car and drove to Los Angeles.


To be continued as soon as I can get it together . . .