Colleen Claes's Open Salon Blog

Michelangelo Antonioni: Man vs. Manmade

Mon, 1 Aug 2011 22:08:41 -0400

“I have never drawn, even as a child, either puppets or silhouettes but rather facades of houses and gates. One of my favourite games consisted of organising towns. Ignorant in architecture, I constructed buildings and streets crammed with little figures. I invented stories for them. These childhood happenings - I was eleven years old - were like little films.” - Michelangelo Antonioni

The 4th anniversary of Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s death was a few days ago on July 30th. If you have followed my posts, it may be clear by now that I am in love with Antonioni’s work, especially the “trilogy” of the early 60s (L’avventura, La Notte, L’eclisse). These black and white films were incredibly dark, isolated, rich and yet lost, just like the characters inhabiting them. There is a haunting kind of romanticism about all three.

The above quote by Antonioni himself describes perfectly an essential running theme in all of his films: his unique emphasis on architecture, portrayed as always overpowering the people. The director made a point to frame the characters with huge, modern buildings looming over them - maybe menacingly, maybe without any intention whatsoever.

It was meant to illustrate how lost and vulnerable the characters were - man vs. manmade. At some point, each of them appears dwarfed by large structures that are often not beautiful nor remarkable, but overwhelmingly immense and stable. These composed shots reveal the dreadful truth about humans, how small and fluttering we are.

This is Something I Wrote

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:06:19 -0400

Having found my love for writing by the age of seven, I have since gone through many stages of the craft throughout my life. Fads, if you will.

In elementary school, it was dad-illustrated, self-typed (couldn’t draw, but could type up a 10-page document at the age of eight) short stories about girls who found ponies and kept them as pets; or Babysitters’ Club copycat stories; or the occasional “racial observation” piece, where a little white girl befriends a little Japanese-American girl and they get into a fight about Pearl Harbor but then they come to terms with their differences and the past and remain friends. (Yeah, this shit actually happened. I WAS EIGHT.)

That didn’t stick.

In junior high and early high school, it was poetry - pre-emo and post-goth poetry, usually about abusive relationships and drugs and self-inflicted violence and how hard it was to live alone in a big city…None of which I had any, and I mean any personal experience with…Jesus Christ, what the hell was wrong with me?

I think I was just taking the material I was reading in real poetry and assuming it was the only way to go for my own, so that didn’t stick.

In my last few years of high school, it was school newspaper journalism and essays for literary magazines. I thought this was what I was going to do: journalism. I told everyone for about three years straight that I was going to “be a journalist,” and everyone seemed to approve or think it noble.

But that didn’t stick either. In college, only after a few weeks, I realized I did not enjoy writing articles, or conducting interviews, or reporting. It bored me, and I wasn’t that good at it because I didn’t care about it. I wanted to care and I still envy amazing journalists, but I think it wasn’t right for me and yet it just felt like the right path to follow. But alas, I did not want to major in Journalism after all; English it was.

I wanted it to stick. It had to. I had no other options here. Writing was my passion, but I was clueless as to how to pursue it. English and Literature are great majors for writers who know what they can use them for after college, but with my indecision on how to make writing a career, I didn’t have the luxury of knowing that for myself.

“You like movies?” A friend said to me after glancing at my somewhat-artsy DVD collection freshman year. “Maybe you should be a film major. Take the first class and see if you like it.” I shrugged in agreement. It was only the second quarter of college. Might as well.

The first required introductory class for the film major was “Narrative Techniques,” or screenwriting. The teacher was a former improv master and comedy writer, who apparently served as a script doctor for films that were not allowed to be named. Though he was absolutely insane, I felt as though I needed to be around people like this all the time. This was the first screenwriting class of many to come during my subsequent film studies.

It was also the first in a series of gradual building towards something called “Sharing Your Writing.” Yeah, I know, who thought you had to do that as a writer?! I had always avoided it as much as possible until these classes. My teacher said that before presenting your script to someone, you were not to babble on or make excuses or demean the very work by saying things like, “Oh, it’s not that good, but…” or “I still need to change this or that…” Instead, you hand them your script and you say:

“This is something I wrote”

Those five words held so much power for me then, and they form a lump in my throat now. “This is something I wrote.” Not only did I learn a new craft of writing and a new discipline entirely, but I learned to finally take ownership of the things I wrote, to put them out there for everyone to see and to just sit back and listen, calmly and confidently, to the positive and negative critiques. You were forced to face the music for every page you wrote, and by senior year, I had done the read-through process with my teachers and peers so many times that I no longer felt any embarrassment or shame. (Whereas the first few times, I thought that surely I would die Simply die.)

In all honestly, I felt proud. Even if I knew it wasn’t as good as it could have been, I had written something and it was being read aloud by people. Something I wrote was now full of noise and feeling and it was alive, and I felt at peace.

Of all the writing phases and forms, this is indeed my most beloved while undoubtedly the scariest. Without the comforts of an encouraging college environment, I’m now left with a few first pages of about a dozen unfinished scripts, and hundreds of notes and snippets of scenes hastily and haphazardly written in a notebook. I keep trying to find the courage to bring all my stories to life again, and though I will tell my conscience that work or anything else is stopping me, I keep stopping myself. That’s another thing my first screenwriting teacher said to us:

“The only person stopping you from doing this is you.”

He was right.

My own potential staring me right in the face, and I won’t even look it in the eye. Once I finally do, maybe it’ll stick.

'Tree of Life': All I Can Formulate Thus Far

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:06:30 -0400

In the “boyhood” chapter of the film, Jack (the main character) as a child is running around with other neighborhood boys, causing a ruckus, encapsulating the very meaning of “boys will be boys.”

They fling rocks into the windows of (probably) abandoned houses. They find a frog and attach it to a bottle rocket, its tiny arms clinging cluelessly just before being launched into the sky. It feels innocent and cruel at the same time.

A random boy yells at the top of his lungs to no one in particular: “He was part of an EXPERIMENT!”

Once the movie ends, it is clear that we were as well.

New German Cinema: "When we are bad, nobody forgets."

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 01:04:33 -0400

I took a class called “New German Cinema” at the end of my freshman year of college. It was designated as a “seminar” credit, and I enrolled because I knew I was interested in becoming a film major at that point. I think I saw the words “cinema” and “German” and thought I’d get a nice overview of European film, or actually, any film that was ever set in or around Germany.

Those were my naive expectations going into it. What New German Cinema turned out to be was a movement from the 1960s to the 1980s aimed at creating “quality” film, almost like a German version of the French New Wave. What constituted as quality varied, but was predominantly quieter, more challenging, more artistic-oriented, and much, much more “on the outskirts” than mainstream film.

The professor, a wickedly smart but brutally bitter and jaded man, set out to unnerve and stir us with films by Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The teacher being a a firm hater of all things Hollywood (with choice words for Spielberg), the “New German Cinema” seminar took me in as an impressionable 19-year-old who thought movies were generally cool and magical, and then spit me out as a doubtful and suspicious film school kid, scarred for life in ways good and bad, for now movies would never look the same again, would never serve the same purpose as previously believed.

Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) was the first film I ever saw of Werner Herzog’s, shown in this class. I laughed and laughed, and felt bad and crude for laughing, but kept doing so, couldn’t help it, and then there came a distinct moment where I stopped suddenly as it hit me, sucking in air to cease the laughter: Oh, wait, it’s not funny, and it never was supposed to be. In fact, it’s disturbing, fucking frightening.

I cannot think off the top of my head of another film that got this reaction out of me. Whatever you thought it was, you were wrong, and Herzog had the last laugh, as he usually does.

"When we behave, nobody cares, but when we are bad, nobody forgets."

The little people in Even Dwarfs shout this during their rebellion against their ominous superiors. Perhaps the filmmakers of the New German Cinema movement were shouting this at all of Hollywood, to all mainstream audiences, trying to violently shake us awake.

'Melancholia': End of the World as Lars von Trier Knows It

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:04:40 -0400

As a fan of Lars von Trier, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and pretty much any "wedding movie" with a dark premise (don't ask), I'm excited about this. Salon writer Drew Grant already referred to it as "Rachel Getting Married meets Donnie Darko," which seems fair, at least from this trailer.

Either way, von Trier's upcoming film Melancholia looks like a departure in story/plot for him, while still retaining that "beautiful-but-uncomfortable-and-slightly-ridiculous" quality he (usually) pulls off so well.

The Wikipedia page for this movie says:

"Trier has said that he considers all of his previous films to end happily, and that this will be the first with an unhappy ending."

Oh yes, of course, because Dancer in the Dark was basically the Wizard of Oz of our time. I wouldn't expect anything less from this smart ass, insane, and genius filmmaker.