Archive of February 2010
11:47 PM
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( four frames in sequence from “The Hurt Locker” )
“oh KB you’re so…”
The image of the exploding bomb man.
A forbidden telesma for the beginning of the 21st Century. The action is described over and over in the news. Almost all suicide bombers make the news. Yet we almost never see them. On occasion an unexploded vest is found strapped to some sad dolt or occasionally the media filters don’t work and there is a glimpse of final carnage and gore; the before and the after. But Kathryn Bigelow brings us the image of the moment. Four frames of the unwatchable–the unseen. That which film was made for.
In doing it she acts out the truth of the act of filmmaking; the desire to see into the darkness of the human animal and to visualize the experience of death.
Here she (our hero, KB) reaches into our darkness with a 200 frame per second video camera in the glare of High Noon. Giving us only three frames of the obliteration of the body of a man chained to a bomb before it is over taken with the replacement footage of the explosion. 0.09 of a second stretched out into 0.125 of a second: a precise smearing of time of a very unseeable event. The precision is important, the replication of the moment of violence has cost thousands of dollars, days of work of many people. The human eye and brain can not see something that fast, we can only see the before and the after, but our brain smears reality and tells us we saw the cause and the moment. We didn’t, we couldn’t; the film or better yet the act of making film brings forth the image of the perceived and grants some false memory of the invisible.
In this story a man who against his will has become a man strapped to a bomb, KB has made him a sympathetic character, his explosion is not filled with hate or the willful desire to kill and destroy that comes with the average representation of the “Anonymous Suicide Bomber”. No, we are told in a panicked enumerated countdown, the clock tics, he is a “family man”, tock, a dupe, tic, an innocent. The explosion only kills the hapless man. Causing the main protagonist to experience a hackneyed visual epiphany of a kite floating in the sky. It is a trite message. There is no understanding of where the bomb came from, it is a bomb with out backstory. But the better story is the bomb. It is the story of success, the mix of chemical and electronic and the hard work of creation and planning. KB only gives us the motive of the chemical reaction, not the men who made it.
She is reminding us to glory in the power of the bomb.
The power of the reactionary explosive moment.
In a broader context Kubrick is unclear–”…or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”. It seems it is his statement or his own assessment of the film-watching public. More likely it is the filmmakers’ bloodlust he is speaking of, agreeing with Bruce Conner. KB has learned well; Kubrick was wry in his assessment, Walter Hill would be proud, and Joel Silver would have asked for more architectural glass to shatter from the blast. We do love the bomb.
It is the moment of death that becomes the hero. The bomb: the motivating character and the expanding flower of shrapnel and dust the epiphanic conclusion.
The slowly arching movie returns and re-envelopes this tiny four frame film. We are told, in the context of the narrative, this moment is a failure. But our adrenaline craving bodies tell us something else. We have seen a perfect movie, everything we need; we will wait for the next one.
KB you really are so…
11:26 PM | projects | 0 Commentsdogfood tastes good
well day two here
and so far I am liking the Chryp
I have been able to modify and customize well, with few major fuckups
now
get the header to hold the catagories
attempt an addition of processing
and a little HTML5
and maybe we are good to go
(fingers crossed)
A Detacher : Show Video : Spring Summer
shot and edited
01:54 AM | work | 0 Comments | Tags: video editing, cinematographerdogfood
So one must eat dogfood some days
In this case I am talking about web sites
after a few days of searching for a system for building web sites
I have settled for now on Chryp
I am not happy that it is PHP based but everything else was either too complicated or too simple
I wanted something that I could use for both myself and for clients
indexhibit was very nice but inflexible (and also PHP… sigh)
and I could not find something that was developed enough but dead simple developed in Ruby which was something I really wanted
sadly it’s also MySQL based and I had really wanted something flatfile based
better to move forward
12:36 AM | research | 0 Comments | Tags: design, webTraining in Star City Russia with Tavares Strachan
shot and edited by Garret Linn
produced by Chris Hoover