The Chris Marker exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery is unwieldy, disorienting and a bit bleak, which is probably what one should expect from someone who was prolific for decades and had an obsession with war and the ravages of time.
This French filmmaker, born in 1921 had made over 60 films by the time of his death in 2012. He is possibly most well known for La Jetée, a 1962 sci-fi work made up of still images, which formed the basis of Terry Gilliam's movie Twelve Monkeys.
Gallery notes say that his main themes are: The Museum, Travelogues, Film and Memory, War and Revolution. Marker was fascinated by how time, history and memory interrogate practices of collecting, archiving and displaying images and objects.
On arrival, we see some collage work, but much bolder and more intense than Hoch's. It has a stronger futuristic feel to it, reinforced by the typographical/fonts image next to this set.
Marker has captured glimpses of people all over the world - his lens being an "inquisitive snake" in the crowds. There are many faces beautifully frozen in a millisecond, often sad, thoughtful, distant. Often the photographs are very dreamy with soft focus, heavy grain, natural light and velvety dark contrasts.
One of my favourite parts of the show was Zapping Zone (Proposals for an Imaginary Television - 1990-94) - a dark room chock full of TVs and old computer monitors displaying a variety of footage. This is a strong sensory experience but not as manic as I feared it might be at first. There is a mixture of colour and B/W and some pleasant sounds (eg slot machines which we associate with leisure time, even in this intense environment). There is a lazy cat alongside clips of war and civil unrest. On the back wall, small images are displayed like contact sheets on a light box. The whole effect is unusual, thought-provoking and very effective.
Next we watched a black and white film where stills of wooden and clay masks are shown to an edgy soundtrack of drumming. The overall impression is of a build up to war. The light is harsh and the contours of the masks are in high contrast. Different cultures are portrayed with slightly different features and sculpted approaches reinforcing the sense of conflict being global and eternal.
The differences in faces around the world (which I am fascinated by) was then echoed in the Petite Planete covers from various countries. Very strong graphical design - surprisingly timeless. The images worked beautiful alone as and a set - I could have stared at these for ages.
The section which really caught my attention were the The Hollow Men set (Owls at Noon) and the photogravures along side the monitors. Creepy but strangely compelling and very haunting.
La Jetée was the highlight of the show for me, despite there being a lot of screaming children in the vicinity, but there are many other haunting images and ideas to explore. It feels very multi-media, with multiple screens bombarding us with scenes of the world we have made.
I suppose I was a bit disappointed that there was not more of a sense of Marker's quirkiness in the exhibition. It was mostly rather pessimistic narrative spliced with documentaries which force the viewer to go into dark and haunting places. Even the set which explores the post Cuban missile crisis euphoria, he concludes that he is just seeing "the everlasting face of solitude". My husband said "I would not want to be inside this guy's head". And there were not enough photographs of cats, imo! Lots of intriguing ideas and images though that would warrant many hours of exploration.
Here is a proper review of the show.
Ideas to explore:
- The Photo Roman is very appealing to me - both as an art form and a documentary approach (as sometimes used by duckrabbit to such powerful effect)
- Creating more dreamlike images - some of Marker's work really succeeds in forcing the viewer to slow down and drink in the imagery. He famously said "I compare dreaming to cinema and thinking to television."
- Using disintegrating photos, damaged by time and neglect (this was always powerful in the Saatchi exhibit of items found after the Sumatran tsunami) - would need some context/anchoring
- I need to do more research on the Nouvelle Vague
- 'Silent screams' - capturing intense moments but in a quiet, still way
- There is a wonderful juxtaposition of two images of protesters. He urges us to focus on the young tree in the background rather than the faces of the people. The second picture shows how the tree has grown. "Within these few inches, forty years of my life." This is great device to show "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" - would be a great social documentary project
- Images of animals from travels...
From Immemory:
"And always the animals
From each trip
You bring back
A gaze
A pose
A gesture
That points
To the truest of humanity
Better than images
Of humanity itself
This recording is glorious...
TW: "It sounds like a choir, it sounds like angel music. Something sparkling, celestial with full harmony and bass parts - you wouldn't believe it. It's like a sweeping chorus of heaven, and it's just slowed down, they didn't manipulate the tape at all. So I think when Wilson slows people down, it gives you a chance to watch them moving through space. And there's something to be said for slowing down the world."
Interesting piece here about sound effects. It reminded me of the Berberian Sound Studio, which I wrote about six months ago and has stayed with me for all that time.
scraping dry ice across a contact microphone and combining it with a woman's high scream recorded backwards... the sound of dog food being slowly sucked out of the can... a pistachio nut being destroyed by metal plating... the cries of the pigs, slowed down to sound unearthly
In a more cheerful/less traumatising way, it also put me in mind of this, which always makes me smile...
When Tom Waits released the album Blood Money in 2002, the pre-release notes mentioned a mouse tambourine and a journo asked about this in an interview:
"Instruments utilised include piano, cello, pump organ, hand bells, circular violin, spring drum, marimba, calliope, timpani and mouse tambourine. l ask about the mouse tambourine and he laughs. 'Oh, you know what,' he says, bending over and rolling up his right trouser leg 'See these boots here, they have this buckle,' He wiggles a small silver buckle at the top of his black motorcycle boot. 'Well, during most of the songs I was tapping my foot and there was a lot of room mics in the studio, and so when we listened back to all the songs my wife's going, "What the hell is that?! That *tsk tsk tsk...*"' We just couldn't figure it out. Finally, she said, "Dammit it's those boots. I told you not to wear those boots. It's on everything!" And she got so upset!' He laughs. 'We tried to get rid of it and couldn't, so finally we just had to call it the mouse tambourine." ("Conformity is a fool's paradise" Time Out London (UK) by Ross Fortune. February/ March. Published: April 24 (- May 12), 2002)
Sourced from the Tom Waits Library: http://www.tomwaitsfan.com/tom%20waits%20library/www.tomwaitslibrary.com/percussioninstruments.html
I also love this: "On 'In The Colosseum' we used the Conundrum. This was an instrument that was built for me by a neighbour of mine who's a sculptor and a welder. It's just an iron cross with a lot of metal hanging off of it. it sounds like a jail door closing behind you."
Matt said he has video of our friend Pascal, who is a wizard with stringed instruments, tuning our ukulele. Just down the street there were some construction workers smashing a lot of glass and it created a great effect. I would like to explore this idea but with more subtlety - and a point to it - so I will have to think about that more.
A friend recommended this video on Facebook and I am linking it here because I thought the non-linear approach to the editing worked really well.
That said, it is rather bloated for a film that the makers presumably hope will continue to go viral on social media. I reckon they could have got this all across in five or six minutes (maybe with a link to a full length version?). The meta fluff at the beginning filming the filming equipment was a bit off-putting and will guarantee that they lose viewers. Some people I know only managed a few minutes and then gave up.
What I thought worked really well was how the sequence of clips, grouped by content rather than speaker, allowed for the capture of the interviewees mulling over their answers - these silent contemplations would have been painful if all the segments had been presented as intro-question-consideration-answer for each individual.
A simple strong idea and quite inspiring - good job Kamil Films! I would love to see how this would have turned out if it absolutely could not run over 5.59 mins!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP7pdAn3foE
I was really disappointed by Shutter Island (dir Martin Scorsese, 2010) - what a heavy-handed waste of cinematic technique! I get that this is supposed to be film noir and I am happy to make allowances for the dialogue being a bit stilted as this is set in the 50s but do we have to endure 138 minutes of this contrived, corny nonsense?
DiCaprio is compelling, as always, and the other A-list celebs add some cachet, but I found the writing to be extremely laboured and the storyline lacked the necessary punch.
Visually it was great - lots of moody cliff shots and dark corridors in the asylum - and there were some powerful moments; a couple of the dream sequences worked really well and Michelle Williams was effective and convincing. The story had enough potential interest to carry me along to the end but only just - the exposition and edgy direction became tiresome really quickly.
I am sure a director with Scorsese's chops was very deliberate about every element of this movie but the jump cuts etc did not work for me. Surely he could have created tension and the idea that all was not as it seemed in other ways?
The scene in the cave with campfire flames leaping in front of the actors' faces drove me mad! And when use of lighting matches during the conversation with Noyce... good grief! There are dozens of continuity errors (some deliberate, I know). Kingsley and von Sydow were weak and cartoonish. There was hardly any chemistry between Leo and Ruffalo (who was also totally unconvincing as a psyche doctor, imo). The music was ridiculous.
I also found the use of the holocaust flashbacks to be a very trivialising - it seemed like a cheap device. Totally unnecessary.
People say that this movie is much better second time around but I suspect life is too short for me to justify giving it another go. The story could have been much more compact and fast paced and there are many ways this could have filmed more effectively. It raises an interesting philosophical question about what is acceptable in filmmaking. If a movie keeps secrets from the viewer right up until the end but this makes it a less than stellar experience on the first viewing (to the point of being clunky and annoying)... ? This seems like a failing of the director to me.
Even though I do not agree with his star rating here, Roger Ebert puts it beautifully:
"The uncertainty it causes prevents the film from feeling perfect on first viewing. I have a feeling it might improve on second. Some may believe it doesn't make sense. Or that, if it does, then the movie leading up to it doesn't. I asked myself: OK, then, how should it end? What would be more satisfactory? Why can't I be one of those critics who informs the director what he should have done instead?
Oh, I've had moments like that. Every moviegoer does. But not with "Shutter Island." This movie is all of a piece, even the parts that don't appear to fit. There is a human tendency to note carefully what goes before, and draw logical conclusions. But -- what if you can't nail down exactly what went before? What if there were things about Cawley and his peculiar staff that were hidden? What if the movie lacks a reliable narrator? What if its point of view isn't omniscient but fragmented? Where can it all lead? What does it mean? We ask, and Teddy asks, too."
Maybe I have missed the subtlety of Shutter Island. Maybe I should read Dennis Lehane's novel. Maybe I should give the film another go. I just feel let down that this could have brilliant from the sum of its parts but, in the end, the whole was just a bit crap.
