Gravity - A review and examination

Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity was quite an amazing film for a variety of reasons. First of all, one cannot do this film justice without fully giving the cinematography its due. The cinematography is not only stunningly beautiful and impeccably shot, it also made use of the potential of 3D film in ways I have not seen yet and am unlikely to see again in the future. For a 3D film, the motion and movement of actors and objects on screen is ballet like and hypnotizing. I think it would take multiple viewings to completely appreciate the movements onscreen in addition to the camera work – simply put it is incredibly well balanced and has no hint of the cheap-thrill gimmick factor of most 3D films.

In addition to this, most shots are incredibly composed regardless of whether the film is seen in the 3D or 2D format. For example, the scene with George Clooney’s character stating something about how beautiful the earth looks at that moment leads to the camera panning past his helmet from behind, the earth fills the frame and its beauty is accentuated by a silent moment of reflection, which leads to the shot making a full rotation back to Clooney’s character, this time from the front. This sequence was quite a powerful and elegant mix of technique and poetics, to say the least.

This mixture of “awe” factor with an inherent sense of poetry is what made this film so wonderfully immersive and deeply touching at the same time. It is as if viewing Gravity is like having an archetypal spiritual experience.  We could also compare it to taking a psychedelic drug, there’s no getting off the ride until the trip is over. In the same way, there’s no distance whatsoever from Sandra Bullock’s character, there’s no sense of the viewer being an “objective agent” watching the events unfold impartially. We I believe that the reason the film takes place in “real time” is so that we can completely project and template the main character’s experience on ourselves. I personally believe that film is potentially one of the most potent forms of transcendental art, that is, art that conveys that sense of spiritual depth, such as Bach’s fugues or Michelangelo’s paintings. Gravity’s strengths lie in its unabashed reverence and devotion to the universe as a frame of reference to this mind-bogglingly beautiful and frightening reality. The ever looming threat of death, that unbearable dissolution of the self into the unimaginable voidless void – this is the universal struggle that lies at the core of Gravity. Through facing death completely, one is reborn.

Scott Stark - International Film Series

Scott Stark makes experimental films. This very statement may lead one to believe that, like scores of other experimental filmmakers, the content of his films is tedious, and the man himself is both humorless and pretentious. This is exactly the opposite of the truth! The selection of Scott Stark’s films that was shown at his First Person Cinema screening was quite diverse. Several of Scott Stark’s films could be said to belong to the category of Structural Films. That is, these films use “rules” that predetermine the format in which the content will be presented.

 For example, in his film “Degrees of Limitation” (16mm film, 1982), Scott simply places a 16 mm camera facing up a hilled street in San Francisco and progressively winds the Bolex more and more with each take. So the first take is 2 seconds, the next take is 4, et cetera. The content of Scott Stark’s film is what separates it from other structuralist films. Instead of simply shooting something neutral over and over, Scott humorously chooses to film himself running up the hill in each take. About 10 shots into the film, Scott is running up the hill breathless (he has just run up the hill 9 times prior to this shot) as he has wound the Bolex up as far as it can go.  Scott’s choice of content is either humorous (sometimes hilarious) or bizarrely novel enough to warrant our interest in his experiments. 

Another example, in “Hotel Cartograph” (16mm film, 1983), Stark simply points a camera straight down that is mounted on a wheeled tripod as he moves through many floors of a hotel. We see in detail the textures of each carpet, the stains, the trash, the strange patterns – and humorously we see Stark struggling to get in and out of elevators as he bangs against walls fumbling with his wheeled tripod apparatus. Again, the subject matter is interesting and humorous and justifies the structuralist limitation.

Scott Stark also made some very interesting 2.5D (his own description) films, in which he would rig up two MINIDV cameras side by side and record his journey through a shopping mall. What made these films 2.5D rather than fully “3D” was that Stark created an editing algorithm that allowed him to switch between footage from each camera every 24 frames or so. The result is this strange experience in which time is “expanded” as every image is repeated between the two cameras.

Stark used a similar process for making his latest project “The Realist” (2013). For this film Stark simply built a frame to hold two consumer grade digital cameras and alternated between photographs. That is merely the guiding “rule” of the film. The other aspects of its form are wildly unique and creative. Stark photographs mannequins in shop environments but does so in such a way as to completely personify them. Yet the world they live in is surreal and poetic. Shopping windows reflect beautiful blue skies and trees as the mannequins stare into each other’s’ eyes. All the editing is cut to a interesting, playful and somewhat haunting score, giving the film a kinetic and alive feeling. I have to say that overall this film defies expectation and it would probably take me a full essay just to try to describe whatever elements of the film I remember, but I will say that this was truly a groundbreaking experimental film that left me feeling dreamy, inspired, bewildered, and quite glad I was able to enter into this fantastically strange and beautiful world Stark had created.

Brakhage Film Series - December 1, 2013

The Stan Brakhage Film Series selection for the month of December contained an interesting variety of Brakhage’s work. “I… Dreaming” was the opening film, one of Brakhage’s more shown pieces. One of the the few sound films Stan made, the soundtrack syncs and jumps in conjunction with the jump cuts and the scratched-in-frame words. Scenes in Stan’s house are punctuated by flashing words referencing what seems to be his own state of grieving. Eerie lighting pervades many shots, shadows filling most of the frame, usually silhouettes of Brakhage. The daylight comes in starkly blue and while most of the shots are lit to show much brightness, it is melancholic.

“Cat’s Cradle” is interesting in that it consistently uses one to two second cuts largely revolving around the same material. The first parts seem to revolve around the titular cat. Then there are cuts of a female which come in somewhat subconsciously. Quick Brackhage-ian intercutting pervades the film building the familiar rhythmic trance we see in several of his films. Most of the film has a reddish tint –perhaps the underlying passion that seems to be underneath the domestic scene.The film ends on a more overtly passionate note, showing two people coming together. This seems to be a theme in a lot of Stan’s work – romantic union between man and woman.

                “Loving” was the next film. I found this to be the most striking. The film is set in an outdoor scene in the woods. Two naked lovers are suggested to be copulating, but this is not shown graphically. The colors are vibrant and beautiful, the greens exceptionally bright and striking contrasted against the vibrant azure blue skies. In-between the shots of the lovers there are interesting shots of the green trees. Brakhage has an eye for portraying or uncovering the latent transcendental qualities of nature and light. One shot in particular that was interesting was Brakhage rotating the camera on an axis a full 360 degrees in the middle of a densely green wooded area in the middle of the daylight. These scenes that took place outside of the realm of the lovers seemed to serve the purpose of elevating the lovers’ domain as a sort of eden-esque environment solely for their enjoyment. It was quite a beautiful film both symbolically and of course visually.

                Several other films were shown and I will provide my thoughts on the remainders in brief. “Marilyn’s Window” was again strikingly beautiful and eminently transcendental. I believe that this must be a combination of the way Stan shot his films and his keen eye that allowed him to film subjects in such a manner that their underlying majesty could be portrayed. It is mysterious to me that he was able to do this with such apparent improvisational ease, as though he was tapped into the poetic substratum of the mind or of the mind’s interpretation of reality. “The Lion and Zebra Make God’s Raw Jewels”, “Yggradasil”, and “Love Song” were all interesting in their own right and exemplified Stan’s “seeing” films – that is to say his films that focused more on form than on portraying something symbolically. These films tend to have long scenes that contain hundreds of hand painted frames of Stan’s art, usually played back at a rapid-fire pace, and usually alternating the speed with variations on the rhythms.

At these moments I find myself grasping to understand just “how” I’m supposed to be interpreting these sequences, which is inherently absurd, as they are meant to be seen as purely visual expressions. Interesting that by using film to portray something in the most abstract and purely visual sense you point out the inherent symbolic and metaphorical overlay we film viewers are used to projecting onto the screen. I find these sequences challenging as my mind has nothing to latch onto, except racing thoughts trying desperately to pin-down some sort of analysis. In closing, Brakhage’s films ceaselessly stretch the expectations of the movie goer and each unseen work helps us to at least attempt to understand the man behind his highly idiosyncratic art. In other words, the depth of his work requires commitment and dedication to unearth, and yet one will not find this time to be without an end result of immense enrichment and appreciation for Brakhage’s layered genius.