#his contributions to the traditions of dramatic storytelling conventions | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

infectedworldmind · 6 years

Text

On an unseasonably warm Saturday morning in early February, my wife suggested that I take a break to go see the new Black Panther movie on our way back from a local Chinese New Year parade. We were having a very good day after an exhausting, impossible week. At the time, I did not know that this pattern would repeat itself over the following four months. We had a great breakfast at one of our favorite local spots (Zoi’s, which makes terrific breakfast sandwiches) and I successfully convinced my son that the colorful dragons marching in the parade were fun and not frightening (“See? They’re not real dragons, they’re just costumes!” <man under dragon costume gives a friendly wave to skeptical son>).

We discussed the Black Panther phenomenon while we munched hash browns and sipped coffee – it had premiered a few days earlier and was already a giant success at the box office and in the culture. I was curious and she was ambivalent – while the concept and creative folk involved piqued her interest, she mostly checked out on Marvel movies after the underwhelming Avengers film in 2010. When she made her offer later that morning, I thought about declining until I realized that if I didn’t accept, I probably wouldn’t see Black Panther until it arrived on Netflix (or whatever over the top digital service Disney comes up with). So I accepted her offer and was surprised by how excited I felt.

I found an amazing seat at our local theater (a spot that made up for its lack of modern features with decent screens and pleasant staff). I was surrounded by a representative sample of New Haven – earnest college students from a wide variety of backgrounds, excited African Americans from the local community and pleasant Yale/Yale New Haven Hospital retirees. There was a lot of conversation in the room that died down when the trailers and commercials and PSAs ended. Everyone focused their attention on a dark screen and heard a boy ask his father to tell him a story.

A few hours later, another curious boy asked a man who he was, and the screen faded to black. There were two more scenes tucked in a seemingly endless scroll of credits, but they felt like post-film trailers for future Marvel movies, a reminder that Black Panther takes place in a larger (and quite lucrative) narrative and a suggestion that the cinematic Wakanda will play a much more prominent role in the Marvel movie universe than its comic book counterpart. Some stayed for the scenes, and others did not, but it was clear that the boy’s question was the end of the story that Ryan Coogler spent 200 million dollars to tell. Some people were energized, others were talking about their favorite scene or which one of the many attractive actors in the film was the most stunning. I saw a few people with tears in their eyes, a few repeating Michael B. Jordan’s last line in the film.

Black Panther is an excellent film, possibly the first Marvel movie that feels completely engaged with our world. Coogler sustains an emotional resonance throughout the entire film that can only be found in isolated sequences in other Marvel films – a glance from Jeff Daniels, a provocative question asked by Cate Blanchett, a moment of intimacy between Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan. These genuine, emotionally honest moments are as important to the Marvel Studios storytelling formula as all of the third acts filled with expensive digital effect sequences and schematic plots. Black Panther departs from this formula by grounding these moments in a personal story with meaningful stakes. The stakes of the story matter because all of the artists involved in the movie – from the director, writers and cast to the costume designer, the makeup and hair people and the experts who helped with dialects – worked to make all the characters feel fully realized, with hopes, dreams and flaws independent from our hero and his journey. We care about the fate of Wakanda because we care about the characters who inhabit it – and T’Challa’s family turmoil matters because the love, joy and resentment expressed by the family members feels real.

Coogler reminds us that the desire for representation in the African American community isn’t just about seeing black faces on a screen. We want to be taken seriously, to feel like our gaze is as valid and important as the white gaze that we are accustomed to seeing in Hollywood films. We want to see a dramatization of the kinds of debates and tensions that exist within the black community without an explainer for everyone else. We want movies where dark skinned people are properly lit and stories that aren’t mediated by the perspective of outsiders (even the very well meaning ones).

Coogler uses a familiar hero’s journey framework to tell a story about community, societal boundaries and black liberation. Black Panther dramatizes the discourse within the black community about identity and freedom in mythic, larger than life terms without sacrificing the black perspective. He invites the audience to view in-group conversations without translating anything for them. It’s a mainstream movie about black lives that cheerfully ignores the urge to reassure or defy the “little white man deep inside all of us” who wants to limit our freedom to imagine and create fictional worlds.

Coogler trusts his audience. He trusts them to tease out the distinctions between and within the liberal and radical visions for black liberation presented in the scenes and layers the narrative with allusions to events and ideas relevant to the African American experience.

There are limits to the scope of ideas explored in Black Panther. The film is set in Africa and is filled with images and items that we associate with Africa, but its narrative is driven by the concerns, dreams and dilemmas of the members of the African diaspora who were brought to America hundreds of years ago. In one sense, there aren’t many African American characters in Black Panther, but in another, we are everywhere. We are asked to reflect on the obligations that a privileged black community owes to less privileged black communities and while the characters do reference the struggle against white supremacy (not named, but you know…) in global terms, the visual reminders of oppression and that struggle are all tied to America, and the African American civil rights movement (in the early nineties) serves as the catalyst for the story.

This dynamic is not confined to the film version of Black Panther. In the late winter, I planned to (and may still) write about Black Panther and Wakanda as incomplete afrofuturist projects. Here’s the gist: Black Panther and Wakanda were created by two Jewish American comic book creators in the 1960’s, and while a number of Afro-diasporic writers and artists have helped shape our understanding of the Black Panther’s world over the years, almost all were telling stories from a perspective that was both African and American. They explored African American hopes and fears about empowerment, colonialism and intergroup conflict, but rarely incorporated the viewpoints of other members of the diaspora, particularly those who remained in Africa. I found great value in exploring the dreams and possibilities of the African American experience through a story like Black Panther (and a nation like Wakanda), but wondered if the absence of non-American perspectives (particularly African ones) blunted its potential impact. I also wondered how much sharper – and more transformative – the story would be if we were reading/watching a story that Africans were telling us about their world.

Black Panther is also a Marvel Studios movie, and cannot escape the positive and negative associations of that corporate relationship.

It shares the basic plot structure as many of their films centered around a solo hero, from the role of the two villains in the narrative (and how they are introduced) to the hero’s fall from grace and eventual triumph in a CGI fueled battle.

I wonder if that relationship contributes to the intriguing tension between the radical and conventional elements in Black Panther. The film’s visuals shake mainstream (at least in the world of blockbuster commercial Hollywood filmmaking) assumptions around beauty and power, with a diverse, nearly all-black cast presented as larger than life figures and shot in a manner that highlights the richness of their individual skin tones.

We are shown pieces of culture from all over Africa in a way that makes them feel modern and vital (and not ancient or exotic). But while the story gestures towards quasi-radical politics, it ultimately delivers a full throated defense of traditional monarchy that would’ve seemed downright reactionary in another film. The dialogue that evokes a long history of black nationalism/radicalism is delivered by a character presented as a violent faux populist tyrant. T’Challa’s plan to reengage with the world felt audacious on my first viewing, but upon reflection, it sounded pretty vague. My wife (who watched the movie with me when it was released on Blu Ray) remarked that she expected T’Challa to announce an initiative that would improve the material circumstances of the people of Oakland – a housing or education or employment program.

The Africana spread throughout Black Panther highlights this tension. The visual look of the scenes set in Wakanda is thoughtfully considered and creates a distinctly non-American context for the story. The interviews and profiles surrounding the movie make it clear that the visual aesthetic for the film is intended as a celebration of a wide range of African cultures, a rare thing for mainstream American films. This celebration is complicated by the film’s narrative, which is mostly set in a fictional isolated African nation. In this context, the blend of different African cultures in a single place without any in-text explanation becomes a reminder of our troubling habit of treating Africa as if it were a single location. A cinematic Latveria (the fictional Central European home of Fantastic Four villain Dr. Doom) that just combined elements of Greek, Czech, French and British visual and physical culture wouldn’t seem authentically ‘European’, it would feel artificial, the product of an outsider unfamiliar with the diverse cultures and societies on the continent.

Latveria, from a bad Fantastic Four movie. This needs some Greek columns and a couple of domes. Maybe a circuitry covered henge in the background.

The mix of conventional and radical elements make Black Panther feel less satisfying and more substantial. I would have wholeheartedly welcomed a mainstream Hollywood funded full throated meditation on dismantling white supremacy and the pain caused by colonialism, but I know that Americans – that we – have a limited appetite for blockbuster films that unnerve or threaten. I still want to see a movie that shows the non fictional black community – my community – through a non-tragic lens. Many countries in Africa still face huge challenges, but there have been a number of meaningful improvements of social and economic conditions in nations throughout the continent over the last two decades. African Americans still face a wide range of disadvantages relative to European Americans, but there has been (some) progress (particularly in the areas of education and wages). We are more than nameless youth at an urban basketball court. The scenes set in Wakanda are triumphant and transporting, but I couldn’t shake the thought that there are also happy and prosperous and successful (in the broadest definition of the word) black people who live in actual neighborhoods in real countries.

Coogler’s Black Panther is a piece of entertainment, a commodity owned by a multi billion dollar corporation that has a mixed history with black people and social justice and which is unlikely to green light a blockbuster with radical politics or that challenges viewers. It’s also a thrilling and thought provoking work of art made by a promising young African American director who has successfully infused social commentary and emotional honesty in a series of mainstream films of steadily increasing size and scope. Black Panther’s success is a win for films made by and starring black people, but it’s also a big win for Disney shareholders. It’s a story that excites by centering the perspective of African Americans (even in allegorical terms), but leaves one hungry for more that reflects the experiences of people from other parts of the diaspora.

It’s a movie that entertains and inspires, but as Yasiin Bey might say, it can’t save us. Thankfully, no one promised that it would.

Next Week: Second Take (Four Things).

Black Panther: First Take. In which I finally put some thoughts about a popular movie into writing. On an unseasonably warm Saturday morning in early February, my wife suggested that I take a break to go see the new…

#Afrofuturism #Black Panther #Ryan Coogler

2 notes · View notes

scriptmedic · 7 years

Text

Anatomy of a Medical Drama: House, MD

This post is part of a series on the Anatomy of a Medical Drama.

The first thing to know about House, MD is that Dr. Gregory House is One Cranky Jerk.

The second thing to know about House, MD is that it isn’t a medical drama.

Oh, sure, it pretends to be. We get all the furniture of a medical drama: the dying patients, the worried family members, the gruff attending physician, the compassionate and sensitive younger doctors. We get death and we get life and we get medical miracles.

But that’s not the true genre of House.

House is a detective show. In fact, it’s a medical adaptation of the classic Sherlock Holmes.

Instead of a doctor, I want you to consider Greg House to be a detective. (Even the name House is supposed to get you to think of Holmes.) He’s arrogant, he’s rude, he’s problematic — and he’s brilliant.

Instead of a disease, I want you to consider whatever improbable virus, condition, or disease to be a criminal, a devious mastermind out to do harm. The symptoms, the actual disease process, are thus its crimes, and the patient is its victim. The loving family members are witnesses to the crime with valuable information for our detective, while the junior doctors, House’s intrepid fellows, are the junior detectives.

Lisa Cuddy, the hospital’s chief administrator, plays the role of obstructor and leader. She’s the less-than-brilliant chief who’s supposed to see things done the “right” way. She is the Lestrade to House’s Holmes; she’s there to get in his way.

And what would a Sherlock Holmes be without a Watson, or in this case, a Wilson? A best friend who enables and supports our main character not because he doesn’t see his flaws, but because he loves him in spite of them?

House, my friends, is a crime drama.

Thus we’ve discovered House, MD‘s Content Genre: Crime Drama (Medical), also known as a Diagnosis Drama.

The Reality Genre of the show is aimed to be Realistic, grounded in reality and the cutting-edge medicine of the day. The rules of the world are ostensibly the same as the one you and I live in: magic, elves, and science fiction take no part in this show. That said, the show’s connection to actual realistic medicine is tenuous at best, as we’ll discuss below.

What Makes House, MD Great?

There are a number of things that contributed to House, MD‘s success over its eight-year run.

First, the acting was great. Hugh Laurie brought depth and a tremendous amount of weight and poignancy to the character of Greg House. The supporting cast, including Lisa Edelstein (Cuddy), Robert Sean Leonard (Wilson), Jennifer Morrison (Cameron), Omar Epps (Foreman), and Jesse Spencer (Chase) made the first few seasons absolutely riveting, and adding in talent like Olivia Wilde (Hadley / “13”), Kal Penn (Kutner) and Peter Jacobson (Taub) in later seasons only improved things.

Second, House’s mindset is absolutely fascinating: Everybody Lies. (The question that makes things interesting is how they lie, to what degree they lie, and, most fascinating of all, why they lie; this is part of the fun of House, MD as a show.)

House has been criticized for being formulaic, and I can definitely agree that it is, and yet something in the formula that drove the show was incredibly compelling. House was always doing something absolutely crazy that we knew was wrong (because the episode was only half over), Cuddy and his staff were always trying to keep him on the sane and level path, and what’s even better, the show recognized it. It was acknowledged in multiple episodes, and even by House himself, that his colleagues were the reason House could stay sane and keep from killing his patients.

In fact, House and Wilson fall into (or at least adjacent to) the “Buddy Cop” trope, what Roger Ebert called a “Wunza” relationship: one of the pair is a calm, competent, mild-mannered oncologist, while the other is a dramatic, abrasive, neurotic, brilliant critical care doctor. It doesn’t contain all aspects of the traditional Buddy Cop relationship — we don’t see them hate each other in the beginning like we do with most buddy cops — but the relationship is there; we see it after it’s stabilized.

And that drama, that tension between the egomaniac with a syringe and a helpless patient and those who want the best for both of them, made House an incredibly tense show. That tension carried us through to the inevitable end — that House would solve the case, the patient would get better, and because the patient got better, all would be forgiven.

House also had consequences for the character’s actions that played out over multiple episodes. At the end of Season 1, House is shot because he was such a jerk — which resulted in his getting a certain kind of anesthesia (ketamine) which eliminated his pain and gave him the ability to walk and run pain-free again for a limited time at the start of Season 2.

House’s unorthodox treatments (such as prescribing cigarettes for Irritable Bowel Syndrome) landed him in hot water with Medicare, which threatened to pull his license. His constant abuse of drugs, a cornerstone of his character, landed him in rehab more than once, and addiction is a theme that plays its tune throughout the show.

All in all, House was a very good show with a lot of strong qualities.

Where Does House, MD Fail?

First, we need to get something out of the way: we get a lot of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. from House himself — he is, in a sense, the show’s social villain. He’s portrayed as a man so offensive that the only reason he keeps his job is because he’s too brilliant to fire for his childishness and gruff exterior.

That said, hearing some of the awful and offensive things he’s said come from a “medical professional” and the show’s protagonist is damaging and hurtful. There were ways the showrunners could have made House a jerk without resorting to insults based on someone’s identity.

(It’s also worth considering its place in time; the show ran from 2004-2012, an era in which minority voices were far less recognized in TV than they are even five years after the show’s end. )

The show fails the realism test on several fronts. In fact, speaking as an ICU paramedic, the medicine is often laughably inaccurate or hyperbolized. Things progress at a pace that suits dramatic storytelling, not reality; diseases layer that are astronomically unlikely; hell, House’s entire specialty — “Diagnostic Medicine” — doesn’t exist, because all doctors diagnose and all doctors treat.

But that’s not the big problem with the show. The biggest problem with the show are its ethics.

The number of unethical and outright illegal measures House takes to “get the job done” would have gotten any real doctor fired in their first year. They are, frankly, a scary thing to normalize in the minds of non-medical viewers.

Speaking of getting fired, fun fact: while medical staff who come to their employers and admit addiction to a substance are generally treated well — [estimates of substance abuse among nurses run from 10-20%] — they’re not allowed to practice stoned. Many employers will give time off for rehab, but staff must be compliant to practice.

Moreover, the repeated displays of unpunished bad behavior lends itself to a mindset that “the ends justify the means,” which is incredibly dangerous. A great many awful things have been “justified” in this manner.

Is It Good TV?

This is the most irritating part about House. Because with as many inaccuracies and flaws and mixed messages and damaging representations as the show has, as many bad stereotypes as it engaged with — it was still damn good TV, at least for the first 4 seasons. Characters changed, at least a little; the stakes were constantly escalating; House the Bully was often, let’s face it, hilarious in his cruelty.

House might have been bad in a great many senses, but it was damned compelling TV, and for all its faults, that fact is undeniable.

In short: House is great to watch, but don’t try to be a Greg House.

How Can We Write Like House?

If you wanted to produce a book, movie, or TV show along the lines of House, MD, my first suggestion would be to get very, very comfortable with the genre conventions and obligatory scenes of the crime drama, and consider how they can translate into medicine.

If we truly want to classify House, MD, we would likely call it a diagnosis drama to differentiate it from a crime drama, though really all that’s changed is the furniture.

Here are some of the Obligatory Scenes and Genre Conventions for a diagnosis drama, and the parallel scenes in a crime drama:

The Disease Strikes. (The Crime) Whether something has been building up for a while or comes to a head, we need to see a character felled by a disease or injury. This must occur early in the story/plotline and is essentially the Inciting Event.

The Doctor & The Team. (The Detective & Sidekick(s)) We must have a lead character, usually a doctor, trying to solve the medical puzzle, usually working with a team. The interpersonal dynamics of the team are crucial to establishing drama and hooking the audience.

Gather Symptoms and Information. (Interviewing Witnesses; Red Herrings.) The doctor must try to gain as much information as they can to solve the case. In House this often involves burglary for reasons not entirely clear.

Diagnose / Treat / Fail / Repeat. (Red Herrings & False Accusations) As the drama wears on, the patient gets worse, often by the hands of the doctor treating them. The team iterates over their work, trying new approaches that must get riskier and more dramatic as time goes on.

It Gets Personal. There must be some reason the doctor (and thus our audience) becomes closely entwined with the outcome of the case. Either the patient and doctor or team must form a personal bond, the doctor’s reputation must hang in the balance, or the rising tension between the team (who must think differently from the doctor) can only be resolved by solving the case and helping the patient.

The Final Diagnosis. (J’accuse!) The doctor must make a final diagnosis that will either save or kill the patient.

A Life Saved or a Life Lost. (The Justice Theme) Our story must end with either the patient’s life being saved or their life being lost. This may come with an ironic twist: the doctor may save the character at the expense of a relationship they value dearly.

If you’d be willing to take a piece of advice, though… check the misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. at the door. Take the best things from this show, not the worst.

For more reading on genre conventions and obligatory scenes, I recommend Shawn Coyne’s excellent guide to editing, [The Story Grid], and Blake Snyder’s [Save the Cat!], both of which are excellent books on storytelling from wildly different, and yet similar, perspectives.

What Medical Drama Should I Analyze Next?

Drop a comment or reblog and let me know!

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

[disclaimer]

[Free Email Course: Injuries in Storytelling]

Anatomy of a Medical Drama: House, MD was originally published on ScriptMedicBlog.com

#anatomy of a medical drama #content genres #genre conventions #genres #medical ethics #obligatory scenes #reality genres #masterposts #crossposts

446 notes · View notes

falkenscreen · 4 years

Text

Resistance

Those famous aren’t always known for their greatest achievements.

Marcel Marceau (Jesse Eisenberg), upon the furtherance of Nazi aggression, joins the French Resistance years before his later notoriety as a performer. Charming children through mimicry and mime, his and others’ efforts soon turn to ensuring their wards’ safe escape from the German and Vichy forces.

This genre of narrative, for which there remains no end of true, fictionalised or semi-fictionalised retellings to capture, remains a reliable staple of any given film year for good reason; they’re compelling, relevant and enduringly important to so many and especially those of particular backgrounds, this author no less.

Crucially, Resistance exists primarily within the Shoah (Holocaust) genre of film where there is a reliably lesser emphasis on fictionalisation, though this feature does venture more heavily into the World War 2-centric, action-thriller driven style of storytelling in its second and third acts. Edward Zwick’s Defiance too addresses the significant distinction and is analogous in its balance.

Those sections that do emulate thrillers resplendent throughout the sixties and seventies similarly fall back on very conventional structures with the narrative here bookended by needless flash-forwards. Fixating passingly on the essential dynamics of any given strategy which fall by the wayside in of all things a war movie about the French Resistance, much greater focus is granted to the in fairness very strong dynamics between the main players.

Eisenberg delivers another consistently good performance, subverting his traditional lithely detached, outwardly wrought persona typically deployed for comedic ends in the service of more darkly dramatic content. Matthias Schweighofer excels as Barbie; outlining his character as overtly charming while maniacally-motivated in a searing turn emblematic of the most extreme contradictions and true to life tendencies of the Nazi leadership with which film rarely tackles; Inglourious Basterds too doing so to great effect.

Clemence Poesy navigates the more greatly difficult material with aplomb while Game of Thrones’ Bella Ramsey, well-depicting the most developed character among the various orphans featured, shows just how far her dramatic potential reaches beyond Westeros within several sequences including a particularly tense stand-off with senior Nazi officials.

Given the action-driven subject matter the film is absent a necessarily faster pace ill-achieved in light of its two hour length. Resistance, in addition to covering two genres, is expansive for covering many tangents throughout; emphasising a familiar if singular guerrilla-driven story in its three final quarters. Less minutes are allotted to two advents this film is most memorable for and could just as well have permitted much greater run times.

The idea of performance art, mockery or pantomime as catharsis for dealing with trauma is not unique to this movie, being evident throughout for instance the works of Mel Brooks, various satires of the Nazis including Charlie Chaplin’s contributions (to which Resistance acknowledges a debt) and moreover Marceau’s oeuvre. Covered at the beginning, while the film too later highlights Marceau’s unique stylings his especial talents largely give way to a much greater focus for very significant lengths on more conventionally-driven episodes.

The conception of resistance through art or art as resistance relayed to some extent through Eisenberg’s physical performance and the childrens’ reactions, it is otherwise teased out via discussion which like much of the local, national and international ramifications of the film’s events are laboured by some expository dialogue as distinct from the more naturalistic interplay accompanying the art-centric scenes.

Moreover, Marceau, and miming more generally, connote the approach that great emotion and understanding can be better pursued through movement or action, rather than words. The idea that pure physical expression absent vocal (or as is the case here musical) articulation can better convey understandings of loss, suffering or indeed kinship, as captured by a beautiful early scene between Eisenberg and Poesy, in the context of the Shoah genre of cinema is notably powerful and underexplored.

Further and significantly so, Resistance addresses, through Marceau’s wordless conveyances, as many implicitly or explicitly accept, that the nature of trauma and dimensions thereof suffered due to this era cannot necessarily be verbally articulated but may be better imparted through more fundamental gestures of universal recognition as encapsulated by Marceau’s so accessible and translatable art. Something so worth exploring, it is covered movingly, if sparingly.

Resistance has its Australian premiere online as part of Classic, Lido, Cameo and Ritz’s ‘At Home’ streaming platform which in collaboration with the Jewish International Film Festival (JIFF) are hosting a live online Q&A with Jesse Eisenberg at 9:30PM on June 10

on Festevez

#xl #festevez #reviews #festivals #film festivals #australian film festivals #jiff #jiff 2020 #jewish international film festival #jewish international film festival 2020 #ritz cinemas #ritz at home #jesse eisenberg #edward zwick #defiance #resistance #clemence posey #marcel marceau #matthias schweighofer

1 note · View note

s0021858a2film · 7 years

Text

Post R. Collated Quotes

Style:

Jim Jarmusch: “A career overview? I’m not a ‘big looking’ back guy, but I’ll do my best. I don’t even watch my films. Once I’m done with them they’re gone for me.” (Post E)

GA: “ It is entirely made up of discreet shots - every scene consists of one shot interrupted by black film - which is quite a formal or experimental way of telling the story. Why did you decide to do it and what is your interest in those formal things?’’ Jim Jarmusch: “I think it comes from really liking literary forms.” (Post G)

Jim Jarmusch: “The intention was to shoot short films that can exist as shorts independently, but when I put them all together, there are things that echo through them like the dialogue repeats; the situation is always the same, the way they’re shot is very simple and the same - I have a master shot, if there’s two characters, a two shot, singles on each, and an over-the-table overhead shot which I can use to edit their dialogue.So they’re very simple and because the design of how they’re shot is worked out already, it gives complete freedom to play; they’re like cartoons almost to me. And it’s a relief from making a feature film where everything has to be more carefully mapped out. So I like doing them and they’re ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don’t have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They’re really fun, I want to make more of them definitely. Sometime I will release them all together, but I don’t know when.’’ (Post G)

“I’m talking about a very particular, all too common response to his work – usually from fans, though also in some cases from detractors. It’s the notion that the main thing to say – indeed, perhaps the only thing to say – about Jarmusch and his films is that they are ‘cool’.” (Post I)

Peter Keogh “ You’re often referred to as a minimalist. Do you agree with that label?”Jim Jarmusch: “I think of minimalist as a label stuck on certain visual artists. But I don’t really feel associated with them.”Peter Keogh: “There are also literary minimalists - Raymond Carver, Anne Beaty”Jim Jarmusch: “I think maybe what they’re saying is that the films are very light on plot and therefore minimal stylistically as well. My style is certainly not Byzantine or florid or elaborate. It’s pretty simple. Reduced.” (Post J)

“Jarmusch can’t be easily pinned down to any cinematic wave or category. “I don’t know where I fit in. I don’t feel tied to my time.”He is certainly not on the same time scheme as the rest of cinema, or indeed, the rest of humanity – which is perhaps why Only Lovers Left Alive is one of several of his films, including Night on Earth and Mystery Train, to take place after dark. Tilda Swinton has said: “Jim is pretty much nocturnal, so the nightscape is pretty much his palette. There’s something about things glowing in the darkness that feels to me really Jim Jarmusch. He’s a rock star.” (Post K)

“As a director, too, there are recurring elements: a minimalist aesthetic, laconic but lovable characters (often played by musicians), a cool compositional remove that invites humour without sacrificing sincerity.” (Post L)

“The second premise of auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value. Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurrent characteristics of style, which serve as his signature. The way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels.” (Post M)

“…postmodernism reevaluates tradition and openly plays with its rich heritage, often in the form of pastiche.” (Post N)

“…modern American independent film,with Jarmusch as one of its leading representatives, presents us with stories that disrupt the clear unified and causal structure of Hollywood films, thus resembling the pattern of Lyotard’s “little narratives” . While Hollywood films fall into specific genres and strictly adhere to its conventions, the leading representatives of the modern American independent cinema (Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, David Lynch) breakup the generic structures, overthrowing the need for closure, one of the main characteristics of classic Hollywood. The temporal structure is distorted, as can be seen in Mystery Train or Pulp Fiction, while the focus of the films is not on the active, goal-oriented protagonist, but on the people from the fringes of society, outsiders who oppose the accepted social norms.” (Post N)

“The underlying tendency of Hollywood films is to present the world as ultimately presentable and knowable, but a more thorough analysis reveals the realism as only partly rooted and clearly distorting external reality. Mark Cousins labels the Hollywood style closed romantic realism, emphasizing the fact that actors seem to live in a parallel universe (494). Emotions are heightened, main characters idealized and able to over come any obstacle. Although presenting a parallel universe, Hollywood tries to create an illusion that the events shown on the screen correspond to the world around us, thus creating a falsified reality.” (Post N)

“Foucault’s and Baudrillard’s analyses are even more detailed, providing the useful concepts of hyperrealism and simulation. Illustrating his concept of the third-order image, Foucault claims that “Disney land is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal” (Post N)

“The concept of time has similarly been disrupted. Hollywood has always concentrated on kairos, the significant time, while completely abandoning the presentation of chronos, the ordinary time. The difference between these two concepts summarizes the inherent difference between Hollywood and the modern American independent film. While Hollywood has concentrated on action and dramatic aspects of storytelling, modern American independent films have explored the moments in-between, the events devoid of dramatic tension, which explains why Jarmusch chose not to present the most dramatic element in Down by Law, when the three cellmates escaped from prison.” (Post N)

“His second feature Stranger than Paradise, gloriously shot by Tom DiCillo in black and white cinematography, is divided into three parts and separated by fade-outs, whose function is to destroy the illusory nature of the Hollywood invisible style.The post-industrial and scapes of modern America are similar to those in Tarr’s Satantango , providing an anticipatory cultural link. The main protagonists come from Europe, which plays a vital role in many Jarmusch’s films, signifying the impact of the Other.” (Post N)

“All of this transpires at a pace that may admittedly prove frustrating for some viewers, but for me Only Lovers Left Alive it as its best during such sequences; in fact, it enters far more problematic territory precisely when it deviates from this rhythm.” (Post O)

“It also points to another significant aspect of the film, which is its use of music; this includes original contributions from Jarmusch’s own band SQÜRL, and a diverse list of other artists and tracks (including Charlie Feathers’s rockabilly classic ‘Can’t Hardly Stand It’). The music within the film functions as a soundtrack to persistent musings about the nature of art and the artist, and their resilience (or otherwise) with the passing of time” (Post O)

“In the end, Only Lovers Left Alive is exactly what you’d expect from a Jim Jarmusch vampire film: meditative and unhurried, wryly humorous and culturally allusive — and utterly beguiling. In fact, it turns out that the vampire makes for a curiously appropriate Jarmuschian figure, isolated and out-of-time. Its pair of undead lovers may have (quite literally) seen it all before, but they’ve ultimately provided a fresh take on the vampire genre.” (Post O)

Themes:

Jim Jarmusch: “Adam and Eve are sort of outside type characters, bohemian types, and they probably already were hundreds of years ago. They’re not exactly a representing the square world to start with. They’re kind of eternal. I hate the word ‘hipsters’, but they are certainly on the outsider’s side” (Post E)

“I guess most of my films are road movies’’ (Post E)

“His characters tend to be losers, drifters and strays.’’…’’His films are about communication, or crippled communication. People who love each other (or who will grow to love each other), but who can’t talk to each other. Often, foreigners can communicate more easily than fellow Americans, despite the language barrier.’’ (Post F)

“GA: The film has certainly got a serious side to it, but it is also very full of humour and that’s something that’s coursed through all of your work. Why is an element of comedy so important to you in your movies? JJ: Laughter is good for your spirit’’ (Post G)

“Nearly all of Jim Jarmusch’s 12 feature films to date are centred around a leading man, often playing a character in the midst of an existential crisis, whose sentiments and actions come to define the spirit of the movie.’’ (Post H)

“Now, it’s true that filmgoers hadn’t seen many movie protagonists like the slightly lazy, generally unremarkable Willie” (Post I)

“Time and again, Jarmusch seems to be telling us that love, friendship, respect for others, and an open, imaginative mind are key to answering that question.” (Post I)

“What fascinates Jarmusch in the vampire myth is less the usual blood-guzzling, though there’s plenty of that, than the educational opportunities afforded by supernaturally extended life.” (Post K)

“His films consistently flout the conventions of American screen storytelling. For one thing, their subjects are not always primarily American, and Jarmusch often shows the US from the perspective of foreign visitors: Italian, Hungarian, Japanese.” (Post K)

“The director’s seriousness is often underestimated, says New York critic and festival director Kent Jones: “There’s been an overemphasis on the hipness factor – and a lack of emphasis on his incredible attachment to the idea of celebrating poetry and culture. You can complain about the pretentiousness of a lot of his movies, [but] they are unapologetically standing up for poetry. [His attitude is] ‘if you want to call me an elitist, go ahead, I don’t care’.” (Post K)

“It’s hard not to see the theatrically suicidal Adam as Jarmusch in disguise, the director’s neuroses in almost human form.” (Post L)

“The third and ultimate premise of the auteur theory is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. Interior meaning is exploited from the tension between a director’s personality and his material…It is not quite the vision of the world a director projects nor quite his attitude toward life. It is ambiguous, in any literary sense, because part of it is imbedded in the stuff of cinema and cannot be rendered in non cinematic terms.” (Post M)

“Only Lovers Left Alive is Jim Jarmusch’s latest foray into genre filmmaking, after the equally idiosyncratic ‘psychedelic Western’ Dead Man (1995) and urban Samurai thriller Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), and casts the vampire as a typically offbeat, world-weary Jarmuschian outsider.” (Post O)

“Shot for shot, Only Lovers Left Alive is visually stunning, and nothing embodies this more than the sight of Adam and Eve standing back-to-back, his black hair and clothes contrasting with her platinum hair and white clothing, as they gaze up at the former glory of the Michigan Theatre.” (Post O)

“With unassuming casualness, Jarmusch’s soundtracks and cast lists have created a cumulative portrait of the US musical underclass, much of it African American, that reflects his films’ interest in the marginal or overlooked – the drifters, dreamers and beatniks who give that troubled nation its artistic character.” (Post P)

Collaborators:

“Joie Lee, the actress who features in one of the early Coffee And Cigarettes shorts, says Jarmusch is the only film-maker she knows who owns his own films. “Very few directors own their own films - Spike [her brother Spike Lee] doesn’t even own his own films. This pretty much puts Jim in a league of his own. What it means is that he doesn’t have to do things for the studio - he’s autonomous and can realise his artistic vision."’’ (Post F)

“‘’Right!’’ says the Coffee and Cigarettes cinematographer, Fred Elmes. ‘’He always asks my advice, collects the information and then makes the decision himself’’’’ (Post F)

Jim Jarmusch: “I’m not a director who says, “Say your line, hit your mark”, that’s not my style. I want them to work with me and everyone I choose to collaborate with elevates our work above what I could imagine on my own. Hopefully, if not it’s not working right. I’m like a navigator and I try to encourage our collaboration and find the best way that will produce fruit.” (Post G)

“The multi talented John Lurie worked on Jarmusch’s first three films as both actor and composer.” (Post H)

“Hiddleston presents viewers with a character who retains a small inkling of affection for the world, but his own skepticism has become an infectious poison” (Post H)

“It may indeed have at least something to do with Jarmusch’s good looks and his musician friends, but it may also be a consequence of the fact that he first caught the attention of many filmgoers (after his 1980 debut Permanent Vacation) with Stranger than Paradise, in which the protagonist, Willie – played by John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards – might be seen as someone at least trying to appear ‘cool’. Willie is keen to conceal his Hungarian roots (not to mention his Hungarian name), reluctant to play host to his visiting Hungarian cousin, and generally appears happiest with a way of life that’s fairly solitary, slacker-like and self-centred, save for his friendship with the more outgoing Eddie (Richard Edson).” (Post I)

Jim Jarmusch: “Usually I write for specific actors and have an idea of a character. I want to collaborate with them on. The story is suggested by those characters.” (Post J)

Jim Jarmusch: “We do a lot of improvisation in the rehearsal process”…”Then while we’re shooting, how much improvising we do depends on the actors. Obviously I prefer to improvise in rehearsals because you’re not burning money. But some actors need a longer leash.” (Post J)

“The more Hiddleston and Swinton share the screen, the better, because the film lives and breathes through their elegant interactions with one another, and in many ways it presents a portrait of a relationship that is as intimate and low-key as Richard Linklater’s triptych of films Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013) — just with more blood-drinking.” (Post O)

“The version of Detroit that is featured in the film is shot through a lens that implies it is the ideal landscape both to engender and reflect Adam’s ennui. In this, it clearly recalls the work of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre in their hauntingly beautiful photography series ‘The Ruins of Detroit’, and the film as a whole boasts similarly striking cinematography by Yorick Le Saux (collaborating with Jarmusch for the first time” (Post O)

“From the start, he used musicians as actors and looked to music to provide the animating vitality that he resisted visually. Songs say what his characters cannot. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s throat-abrading scorcher I Put a Spell on You blasts from a tinpot cassette player in Stranger Than Paradise, in which the characters scarcely do more than grunt and glare. That film starred the stringbean-thin, cucumber-cool jazz saxophonist John Lurie alongside Richard Edson, the original drummer from Sonic Youth. It made Jarmusch’s reputation in 1984, back when “indie” really did mean “independent” rather than “the boutique arm of a major studio”. (Post M)

“You could assemble a musical supergroup from his casts since then. Lurie and Tom Waits sashayed through New Orleans in Down By Law, with Waits going on to score Night on Earth. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins played a hotel concierge in a spiffy tomato-red suit in Mystery Train; Joe Strummer and the ghost of Elvis also had walk-on parts. Iggy Pop (the subject of Jarmusch’s recent documentary Gimme Danger) showed up as a trapper in a bonnet in Dead Man, and the White Stripes discussed Nikolai Tesla in Coffee and Cigarettes, where RZA and GZA, both of the Wu-Tang Clan, could also be found knocking back the joe with Bill Murray. The RZA also lopes down the street in Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, a Jarmusch film he scored. (Post P)

Auteurism:

Jim Jarmusch: “A career overview? I’m not a ‘big looking’ back guy, but I’ll do my best. I don’t even watch my films. Once I’m done with them they’re gone for me.” (Post E)

Jim Jarmusch: “I don’t read good reviews of my films, I love negative ones. Maybe it’s a little masochism, but more of a matter of, ‘’What do they think? They must be very different to me…’’ (Post E)

“Is he a control freak? Yes and no, he says. He loves to work as a team, but ultimately he makes every decision. "Every tiny detail of a film - the design of a cup on a table, all that. I have the ability to create that world, so I’m very fanatical about it. My films are made by hand. I write the script, I’m there to get the financing, and I put together the whole crew and production. All my films are produced through my own company, then I am in the editing room every day, then I’m in the lab, then I’m out promoting the film, so that’s about three years’ work for each film.” (Post F)

Peter Keogh “Since ‘Stranger Than Paradise’ your sensibility and style seem to be dominant in American independent film-making, and also in film-making around the world, such as the Kaurismaki brothers. How do you account for it?Jim Jarmusch “It’s hard to respond to that. I don’t know if my early films have influenced those people or wether it’s a simultaneous reaction to things being glossy and quick cut.” (Post J)

“Of his generation of US independents, Jarmusch has stayed the course, and stayed weird, while others fell by the wayside (Hal Hartley) or learned to work with the mainstream (Spike Lee, the Coens).” (Post K)

“Another thing that makes Jarmusch distinctive is his genuine independence: he is extremely rare in that he has made a policy of keeping control of his own negatives. But his refusal to play the industry game has not made things easy for him. When Harvey Weinstein pressed Jarmusch to cut his 1995 western Dead Man, the director stuck to his guns – later claiming that his refusal had resulted in the film being half-heartedly promoted on release.” (Post K)

“Jarmusch’s unique sensibility doesn’t always appeal to the market. It took seven years to finance Only Lovers Left Alive, with the film finding no takers in the US. In the end, the project was adopted by European producers, Reinhard Brundig in Germany and British veteran Jeremy Thomas. Thomas sees individualists like Jarmusch as an endangered species. "He’s one of the great American independent film-makers – he’s the last of the line. People are not coming through like that any more,” he said.” (Post K)

“Auteur theory is, unsurprisingly, anathema. “I put 'A film by’ as a protection of my rights, but I don’t really believe it. It’s important for me to have a final cut, and I do for every film. So I’m in the editing room every day, I’m the navigator of the ship, but I’m not the captain, I can’t do it without everyone’s equally valuable input. For me it’s phases where I’m very solitary, writing, and then I’m preparing, getting the money, and then I’m with the crew and on a ship and it’s amazing and exhausting and exhilarating, and then I’m alone with the editor again … I’ve said it before, it’s like seduction, wild sex, and then pregnancy in the editing room. That’s how it feels for me.” I tell Jarmusch that I always likened the process to preparing a meal. I see pre-production as listing the ingredients, production as shopping for them, and the pivotal step of post-production as the actual cooking. Jarmusch thinks this over for a moment, his eyes falling back to his empty plate. He stands, abruptly, and extends a big hand beneath a bigger smile: “Cooking is good too, but I prefer sex.” (Post L)

“I will give the Cahiers critics full credit for the original formulation of an idea that reshaped my thinking on the cinema.” (Post M)

“The three premises of auteur theory may be visualised as three concentric circles: the outer circle as technique; the middle circle, personal style; and the inner circle, interior meaning” (Post M)

“…the first premise of auteur theory is the technical competence of a director as a criterion of value. A badly directed or an undirected film has no importance in a critical scale of values, but one can make interesting conversation about the subject, the script, the acting, the color, the photography, the editing, the music, the costumes, the decor, and so forth.” (Post P)

“This creates the illusion that the music is emanating from inside that footage, which feels exactly right. Jarmusch came to prominence in the early 80s, when movies were first being used as tools to sell soundtrack albums, but his were different. Music wasn’t there to shift units; it lived in the fibres of the celluloid.” (Post P)

0 notes