foggy eyes wrote:Nothing, this is a bit unfair - you wrote that the film "reveals nothing about humanity / the world / life in general" but then went on to complain that I wasn't being specific enough? Seriously?! I thought I wrote enough in that thread to justify why I like Birdsong, but perhaps not - would you like another 1000 words or something (perhaps with a section on how citing the 'Bazinian real' implicitly refers to more than than slack editing)?
I doubt I (or anybody else) is going to change your mind, but feel free to continue venting your spleen...
will do...
foggy eyes wrote:the sensation and affect of duration within the shot assumes a far more prominent presence
That the viewer can feel the length of the takes is not an inherently positive quality.
foggy eyes wrote:Lots more 'cosmic' long shots too. The 9-minute plan-sequence where the Magi trudge towards the horizon, disappear and re-appear atop the next ridge before circling back is extraordinary, and produced nervous/astonished laughter in the audience - the audacity of making us watch this!
It is not a plan-sequence, the camera remains plonked on a tripod (here and throughout the film) and there is no significant adjustment to the composition. They wander aimlessly. It is dull in both action and aesthetic...
A somewhat comparable shot existed in Gallo's original cut of
Brown Bunny. On the salt flats, Gallo gets out of his truck, removes his motorcycle, climbs onto his motorcycle and rides away until he has disappeared into the rising heat (this takes approximately 2-3 minutes)... in the same shot, he then rides back again, puts the motorcycle away and returns to his truck. However, the effect of Gallo's shot is very different:
1/ Gallo's shot has a fully conceived intent and structure to it; because of this, the shot has impact, building from the moment at which the motorcycle begins to return, a genuine sense of comedy and anticipation;
2/ This is also the moment at which the shot clicks thematically, bringing up a number of thoughts with a minimum of action - the impossibility of the Hollywood cliche of 'riding away into the horizon'; the impossibility of escaping oneself or one's past; the absurd and cyclical nature of human endeavour in the face of nature's infinity; etc
3/ The composition combined with the lighting conditions combined with the stark shimmering of the salt flats has a genuine visual appeal and interest that helps to sustain the length of the shot; this also genuinely lends the shot the contemplative / phenomological / Bazinian quality that you are ascribing to Serra.
4/ The shot also invokes the intangible pleasure of physical activity in a way not entirely disimilar to Pharon riding his bicycle in
L'Humanite.
Of course, Gallo removed all value from this shot when, under intense financial and critical pressure, he sheared it in two for the final Toronto/release version, just one of many horrendous mutilations that really encourages one to see the final cut as a kind of self-mutilation, a collapse of self-confidence, that removed most of the edges and risks that made originally the film so engaging.
Brown Bunny is truly the Magnificent Ambersons of the 00s (but that is for another thread...).
Of course, one could still theoretically argue the corner for Serra here - that his
lack of meaning, lack of planning, the absence of "conventional" compositional and formal integrity, the absence of aesthetically pleasing lighting, the tedium, the pointlessness - that somehow this anti-cinema he has created is something newer, something unseen, more modern and therefore more advanced - indeed, franco's musings and your dismissal of
Delta for using 'conventional arthouse techniques' would seem to lean in this direction (I didn't love Delta either, but I wouldn't dismiss it and I feel that the problems resided in the screenplay and not the technique). In a similar vein, and even more depressing - Jonathan Romney's review of
Better Things in S&S this month: he acclaims the film's editing for 'not conforming to the art house cliche of long takes' - as if choping up Dumont-inspired compositions into horrible, televisual, fast-paced Soho-style shot-reverse-shot style montage is preferable and less of a cliche!! And, of course, Romney has long been a Dumont detractor, so this is really just the crowing triumph of the petty bourgeois middlebrow... In any case, returning to Serra, I would suggest that your thinking is clouded by the context. Place amateurish, boring material in the context of Director's Fortnight (or LFF or Palm Springs) and, suddenly, people are 'astonished' - perhaps they should be (at Oliver Pere)... But I'm not looking at the audience reaction, I'm looking for a personal relationship with the material. One could program a whole festival with You Tube entries and this would be 'new' and 'different' too - but interesting? Valuable? Cinematic? I guess I'd rather have 'good' than 'different'.
A question - if this shot were extended to the entire duration of the film, would that be even more 'audacious'? Would that get even closer to the 'philosophical ideal' of the Bazinian real?
foggy eyes wrote:The manner in which the central 'event' of the Magi's arrival is filmed is crucial to understanding the film's mode of de-dramatisation: the 3 men simply shuffle in from the bottom-left corner of the frame in long shot - a very cunning suppression of 'high drama' to maintain the illusion of 'reality' (or, the Bazinian real).
Pasolini did something very similar to far greater effect 44 years earlier. Cunning?
Nb. the suggestion that this (entirely predictable) shot carries any kind of emotional impact is frankly unfathomable.
foggy eyes wrote:The sequence where the Magi lie amidst the bushes and Lluis 1 (Don), quite clearly uncomfortable, encourages Lluis 2 (Sancho) to shift position (with negligible results) is nothing short of hilarious.
Personally I wasn't laughing, but I guess humour is subjective. If you're really trying to argue for the film as a comedy I'd perhaps be more receptive.
foggy eyes wrote:Serra devotes huge slabs of time to their shape, gestures and rhythm - this is deeply corporeal cinema. I could probably watch them fall over, roll down hills or flail about in water for hours.
Returning to the Alonso thread, apologies, but this is bordering into either fanboyism or fetishism.... Casting a fat man and an old man = "deeply corporeal cinema"?? You could watch them for hours? Why not just pay a fat guy to roll down a hill and flail about in water in front of you? All tastes catered for. Pleasure guaranteed.
But, seriously, again, this comes back to the question of the gaze. When Serra looks, he just looks. And he looks for loooong time.... Unlike Alonso, to whom you made a comparison, who makes a great effort to ensure that every camera position, every camera movement, every blocked action, every frame is in the right place. Serra's gaze is much closer to Herzog, I think, fairly unadorned, a belief in 'truth' of things, in placing 'truth' in front of the camera - the difference being, again, that Herzog has a genuine filmmaker's sensibility - he might equally show us a fat man flailing in the water or rolling down a hill, but he would know how long to hold the shot and he would place the shot into a wider context; he also has an inate sense for homing in on unusual and striking subjects that can transcend his lack of form.
foggy eyes wrote: both films are full of dilatory wandering, but there is a much keener sense of purpose here.
Yes, the three kings must find the baby jesus and offer up their gifts... there is indeed as much purpose and excitement as... a primary school nativity play.
foggy eyes wrote: quite a bit of effort is required to keep it in focus. This means that the rest of the frame becomes strangely 'negative' (or 'de-activated') when focussing on the Magi, and (whilst zoning in and out) I started to create graphic patterns of the entire image that weren't quite there but might well have been.
I saw this on a fairly large screen on another continent and didn't experience this effect at all (nor were the Magi ever 'tiny dots' during the afforementioned 9 minute shot). Perhaps the bulb at the BFI Southbank was in need of replacing?
