It’s Barneypalooza (cringe) at the Walker these days: we’re screening Cremaster 2 the last Saturday of the next three months; the sculptural and photographic elements of the film are on view in the galleries; and plans to screen all five movies (in numbered sequence, not the order of production) are in the works for October. So the announcement of Barney’s next work might be of interest to Walker visitors: his new film premiered earlier this month at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. A sibling to Drawing Restraint 7 (in the Walker collection), the new Drawing Restraint 9, is “a 135-minute epic shot in Nagasaki Bay on a Japanese whaling ship and starring the artist himself with his exotic consort, the Icelandic pop music star Björk.” Said chanteuse does the soundtrack, a mix of electronic and traditional Japanese music. The film is geographically far-flung from his other recent projects, including a Walker billboard and Carnival float, that linked to the indigenous religions of Salvador in Bahia, Brazil.
With the price of DV creeping downward and the cost of film transfer still sky high, digital video has emerged as a real democratizing force in not just Hollywood but world cinema: filmmakers who can’t afford shooting or editing on film can get a relatively cheap DV camera, and, if they’re outside of traditional distribution channels, their work can feasibly find an audience via satellite or the internet. Which is why digital projection has been a hot topic in the Walker’s film/video department. This morning Wired reports that a digital standard has been agreed upon in Hollywood, which could mean an end to film reels:
Studios spent more than $631 million in 2003 on film prints for the North American market alone, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. Subtracting reels from that equation could reduce total distribution costs by as much as 90 percent, according to U.K. digital cinema analyst Patrick von Sychowski. Add in costs for overseas distribution and exhibition, and the move from prints to digital files could mean an eventual annual savings of up to $900 million.
Advocates of the shift to digital exhibition say theater owners also would benefit from new flexibility: If a movie sells out in one theater, an owner can quickly switch other screens to that feature to accommodate the unexpected demand. And if a supposed blockbuster turns out to be a bomb, it can be yanked from screens just as instantly — no new prints from the studio, no reel swaps.
Proponents say there’s something in it for moviegoers, too — digital in-theater display means no out-of-focus projection, no out-of-order reels, no scratches and pops on film that’s been played too many times on old projectors. And digital systems could make other kinds of content possible in theaters, including live, high-definition coverage of sports events, Broadway plays or group games…
Click here for a pdf of the DCI Digital Cinema System Specification.
Update: Xeni Jardin, author of the Wired piece and BoingBoing blogger, has more.
“If terrorists have seized control of the world narrative, if they have captured the historical imagination, have they become, in effect, the world’s new novelists?” The New York Times‘ Lorrie Moore wrote this in 1991, but, with suicide bombings happening with alarming frequency–nearly daily in Iraq or the Middle East–and, in the cases of Egypt and London, in places rarely rocked by such explosions, her question is timely. It’s a notion culled from the Don DeLillo novel she was reviewing, Mao II, which has its protagonist musing:
There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence…. Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.
While many people now are pondering what makes suicide bombers tick, from Time reporter Aparisim Ghosh’s rare glimpse into the mind of a bomber-to-be in Iraq (his pseudonym, Abu Ubeida al-Jarrah, uses the name of a 7th-century general who overthrew Syria for Islam) to Hany Abu-Assad’s film Paradise Now, which will screen at the Walker in October (details to come)–others are wondering how these tactics are rewriting our narratives. Douglas Rushkoff, author of Coercion and Media Virus, blogs:
Suicide bombing is a media virus with very real effects. The sticky outer shell is the event itself – a suicide bombing gets covered on the news. It’s huge news, especially if it occurs in a white western nation. Currently, it’s the fastest spreading kind of news story there is.
The code, like that of any successful media virus, challenges the unarticulated confusion over the relationship of the west to oil, Arabs, Islam, and post-colonialism. Actually, the virus fuels itself on rage going back as far as the Crusades, or certainly since the imposition of CIA-sponsored dictatorships.”
And Harper’s editor and author of the new book Mediated, Thomas de Zengotita, wonders aloud:
I’ve been thinking and writing about performative self-consciousness in a mediated age for the last five years or so, and I have this question which I’ve scarcely dared to formulate so unlikely does it seem. I’m wondering if “playing a starring role” could be part of the motive for suicide bombers, not the whole motive, obviously, but part? At first I recoil from the thought–nobody needs attention that much! But then I remember Columbine and I remember the video record of themselves that the shooters compiled–I saw some of those tapes, and this is my native culture, and I’ve taught High School, and I know those kids were starring in their own show. So I’m asking…is there anything like a culture of performance at work in the worlds of suicide bombers?
Discuss.
“Spectacular!” I’m always wary of the one-word blurb on film ads, suspecting that the real context presents a different reality: “It’s a spectacular mystery how this abysmal attempt at filmmaking ever got made.” Gelf Magazine confirms the suspicion, comparing film blurbs with the original reviews they came from. A few examples:
Los Angeles Times review of Be Cool:
“…Travolta is as smooth as ever…”
Actual line:
“[Travolta's character Chili] Palmer is back in Be Cool, and although Travolta is as smooth as ever, the picture is a bust, a grimly unfunny comedy with no connection to reality, and worst of all, running on and on for two dismal hours.”
Daily Star review of 16 Years of Alcohol:
“Trainspotting meets A Clockwork Orange!”
Actual line:
“This glum, violent drama about a Scottish thug ruined by drink is written and pretentiously directed by Richard Jobson whose approach–Trainspotting meets A Clockwork Orange–is bad enough to drive you to drink in no time.“
[via]
In the “war on terror,” it’s pretty easy to tell the good guys and the bad buys, right? The BBC’s documentary series The Power of Nightmares, produced last fall, suggests it’s not so easy. The film looks at two groups, American neo-conservatives and radical Islamists, arguing that the notion that we’re “threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion… a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media.” Here’s a plot summary from the TimesOnline:
[Writer/narrator Adam] Curtis’s argument is so neatly structured that you don’t want anything to threaten its symmetry. It goes like this: Washington’s neoconservatives, who had President Reagan’s ear and now have George W. Bush’s, start scouring the world for a new ideologically flawed, power-hungry bogeyman following the demise of the Soviet bear; and they find an ally for their despair of incontinent liberalism in America’s Christian fundamentalists. At the very same time, various Islamic fundamentalists, repulsed by Egypt’s slide into secularism, resolve to restore Islam to its rightful place as the religious, political and cultural backbone of the Middle East.
Winner of a 2004 British Academy Television Award, the documentary has apparently never been shown in the US.
‘Til now: the amazing, nonprofit Internet Archive is offering The Power of Nightmares as a free download.
Wayback lawsuit: The 10-year old Internet Archive, which also runs the Wayback Machine, a site where you can search an archive of 40 billion web pages as they appeared when first published, is getting sued. A company called Healthcare Advocates has filed suit against the organization “saying the access to its old Web pages, stored in the Internet Archive’s database, was unauthorized and illegal.”
Greetings. I’m Paul Schmelzer, the managing editor of the Walker’s magazine, a freelance writer, and a part-time blogger. As long as I can get away with it, I’ll be a floater here at Walker blogs, posting willy-nilly in Film, Performing Arts, Education, and other blogs that’ll be starting up soon. Pleased to meet you.
So, let’s get things started…
