Posts Tagged ‘cinema’
“Film lovers are sick people”*…
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An overview of how film works, the different types of film, and its place in the world of modern digital storytelling…
* François Truffaut
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As we tell truth at 24 frames per second, we might send beautifully-composed birthday greetings to Stanley Kubrick; he was born on this date in 1928. A renown film director, screenwriter, producer,cinematographer, and editor, Kubrick got his start as a teenaged photographer for Look Magazine. In 1950, he made the move to cinema, going on to direct 16 films, produce 11, write 13, shoot 5, and edit 4– among them, Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). most of his films were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, and/or BAFTA Awards.
“TELEPHONE n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance”*…
Christian Marclay’s “Telephones” (1995), a 7 1/2-minute compilation of brief Hollywood film clips that creates a narrative of its own. These linked-together snippets of scenes involve innumerable well-known actors such as Cary Grant, Tippi Hedren, Ray Milland, Humphrey Bogart and Meg Ryan, who dial, pick up the receiver, converse, react, say good-bye and hang up. In doing so, they express a multitude of emotions–surprise, desire, anger, disbelief, excitement, boredom–ultimately leaving the impression that they are all part of one big conversation. The piece moves easily back and forth in time, as well as between color and black-and-white, aided by Marclay’s whimsical notions of continuity…
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More on “Telephones” here; and on Marclay, here.
And as a bonus, this from burgerfiction.com:
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* Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
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As we check caller ID, we might recall that it was on this date in 1922 that Charles F. Jenkins was the first to use city telephone lines to transmit a facsimile photo from 1519 Connecticut Ave in Washington, D.C. to the U.S. Navy Radio Station NOF at Anacostia– a demonstration for representatives of U.S.Navy and the Post Office Dept. (Earlier in the year, on June 11, a photograph had been sent by radio across the Atlantic from Rome to Bar Harbor, Maine.)
Jenkins is better remembered as a pioneer of early cinema and one of the inventors of television– he racked up over 400 patents, mostly in those fields– and as the recipient of the first commercial television license.
“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life”*…
From The Great Train Robbery, 1903
In 1888, Thomas Edison wrote that “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion.” The system was comprised of the Kinetograph, a motion picture camera, and a Kinetoscope, a motion picture viewer, and was mostly created by Edison’s assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. (The system was likely inspired by the zoopraxiscope created by photographer—and murderer!—Eadweard Muybridge to show off his motion photographs.) Early films from the Edison Manufacturing Co. showed off “actualities”: celebrities, news, disasters, and expositions. But later, the company switched to creating narrative films more in line with what we watch at the movies today…
These earliest films, often a minute or two in length, could be purchased for $6.60 (about $169 in today’s currency). But readers can see a selection of Edison’s early essays, streamed for free, at “10 Early Films Made by Edison’s Movie Company.”
* Federico Fellini
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As search for the concession stand, we might recall that it was on this date in 1732 that Louis Timothee (sometimes rendered “Lewis Timothy”) became the first salaried librarian in the American Colonies. A printer and protégé of Benjamin Franklin’s, Timothee served as the part-time librarian for the Library Company of Philadelphia, one of Franklin’s first philanthropic projects, from its founding on July 1, 1731. As the project took hold, Timothee’s position was elevated to a full-time, paid position.
The Library Company of Phildelphia
“He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams”*…
From Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) firmly positioned himself as the finest Soviet director of the post-War period. But his influence extended well beyond the Soviet Union. The Cahiers du cinéma consistently ranked his films on their top ten annual lists. Ingmar Bergman went so far as to say, “Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.” And Akira Kurosawa acknowledged his influence too, adding, “I love all of Tarkovsky’s films. I love his personality and all his works. Every cut from his films is a marvelous image in itself”…
Now one can watch Tarkovsky’s features (and a trio of shorts) online– and for free. Find the links in this chronological listing or among Open Culture’s collection, 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.
* Ingmar Bergman on Andrei Tarkovsky, in Laterna Magica (The Magic Lantern : An Autobiography).
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As we slip into the dream state, we might send mysterious birthday greetings to Robert Bruce Montgomery; he was born on this date in 1921. A respected composer of “serious” of vocal and choral music and of film scores under his own name, he is perhaps better remembered by his pen name, Edmund Crispin. As Crispin (a name he took from Michael Innes’ Hamlet, Revenge), he wrote nine marvelous mystery novels and two collections of short stories, all featuring amateur detective Gervaise Fen, an eccentric Oxford don. Your correspondent’s favorite is The Moving Toyshop— but they’re all a treat: a mixture of Innes**, John Dickson Carr, and the Marx Brothers. After retiring from whodunits, Crispin edited several mystery collections and science-fiction anthologies– with no apologies or excuses for presenting SciFi as a legitimate form of writing– an iconoclastic attitude in the 1950s.
** “Michael Innes” was itself a pseudonym, the pen name of Oxford literary critic and scholar J. I. M. Stewart
Hair today…
This outrageous display of facial hair configurations made an appearance at the 4th Annual National Beard and Mustache Championships in New Orleans earlier this month. Luckily Las Vegas-based photographer Greg Anderson was on-hand to give us a front-row seat as the bizarre spectacle of facial hair paraded in front of his camera lens.
The championships involved some 150 contestants from the U.S., U.K., and Canada who competed in 17 different categories. If this isn’t enough, here’s a giant gallery of 164 portraits from the event.
From This Is Colossal…
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As we think on tonsorial temerity, we might send illuminated birthday greetings to Louis Lumière; he was born on his date in 1864. The son of a portrait painter who added photography to his repertoire, Louis joined with his brother Auguste to pioneer cinema. Their father returned in 1894 from a trip to the U.S. where he’d been enchanted by Edison’s kinetoscope. The brothers (who’d already pioneered new darkroom techniques for still photography) were excited… until they understood that Edison’s display could only be seen by a single viewer at a time. Louis envisioned something different: a projected image that could be shared by an audience, in the same way that audiences share a play. With his brother’s help, Lumière designed the Cinematograph, a self-contained camera and projector that used a clawed-gear to advance sprocketed film. It was the first apparatus for making and showing films to audiences in a way that would be recognizable today as “going to the movies”; thus the Lumière brothers are often credited as inventors of the motion picture. In any case, the principle at work in the Cinematograph was the principle used in movie cameras and projectors for more than a century afterwards.
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