Astounding the Human Audience
Posted on June 19, 2008
Until now, the first recorded piece of computer music was thought to have emerged from Bell Labs on an IBM computer in 1957. 6 years earlier and across the Atlantic, the University of Manchester managed to claim the historical event. Maybe even more interesting than the recorded music, is the reaction of the human audience as they hear a computer sing for the very first time. Skip over to the BBC and have yourself a listen.
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Filed Under film, sound, history, computer music, Bell Labs | Leave a Comment
Goodbye Ollie
Posted on April 16, 2008
One of the “Nine Old Men”, Ollie Johnston has died at the age of 95. He is a classic animator responsible for films like Cinderella and Fantasia. He was a master of movement, and he will be missed.
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Filed Under storyboard, film, history, Film History, animation | Leave a Comment
Film History: Futurist Films
Posted on April 9, 2008
11 August 1913 - first noise concert given in Milan
“Weird funnel shaped instruments … resembled the sounds heard in the rigging of a channel-steamer during a bad crossing, and it was perhaps unwise of the players - or should we call them ‘noisicians’? - to proceed their second piece … after the pathetic cries of ‘no more’ which greeted them from all the excited quarters of the auditorium.” (London Times review, qtd. Goldberg, 21)
One of my favorite fascists (I admit there are many) is Filippo Tommasa Marinetti. He spearheaded his futurist movement in Italy by publishing his futurist manifesto on Feb 20, 1909. He wanted to do away with historical references and dive into the future like a frog fired from a cannon.
“Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!
The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.
But we shall not be there. They will find us at last one winter’s night in the depths of the country in a sad hangar echoing with the notes of the monotonous rain, crouched near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our hands at the wretched fire which our books of today will make when they flame gaily beneath the glittering flight of their pictures.
They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl themselves forward to kill us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.”
- excerpted from The Futurist Manifesto by F. T. Marinetti
It was not uncommon for riots to break out during futurist plays. They incited powerful audience reactions, and many of those reactions were either dangerous or fraught with food stains. Marinetti quickly attracted creative minds and set to work reinventing every art-form. They wrote plays starring emotional airplanes. They delivered monologues in uncooperative restaurants and cafes. They even had pro war protests on the street. They included the audience as part of their performance, and used them selfishly for the sake of art. Or unselfishly for art depending on how far you want to go defining an artist.
They are a powerful source of ideas, but unfortunately it is very difficult to find the original Italian futurist films. What we have are eye witness accounts and plenty of manifestos.
“At first look the cinema, born only a few years ago, may seem to be Futurist already, lacking a past and free from traditions. Actually, by appearing in the guise of theatre without words, it has inherited all the most traditional sweepings of the literary theatre. Consequently, everything we have said and done about the stage applies to the cinema. Our action is legitimate and necessary in so far as the cinema up to now has been and tends to remain profoundly passéist, whereas we see in it the possibility of an eminently Futurist art and the expressive medium most adapted to the complex sensibility of a Futurist artist.
Except for interesting films of travel, hunting, wars, and so on, the film-makers have done no more than inflict on us the most backward looking dramas, great and small. The same scenario whose brevity and variety may make it seem advanced is, in most cases, nothing but the most trite and pious analysis. Therefore all the immense artistic possibilities of the cinema still rest entirely in the future. The cinema is an autonomous art. The cinema must therefore never copy the stage. The cinema, being essentially visual, must above all fulfill the evolution of painting, detach itself from reality, from photography, from the graceful and solemn. It must become antigraceful, deforming, impressionistic, synthetic, dynamic, free-wording.”
- excerpted from F.T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, and Remo Chiti
(Milan) L‘Italia futurista, November 15, 1916.
Every film maker should spend some time with these Italians, and possibly even more hours with the Russians, but I will get to their futurist movement in another post.
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Filed Under collage, conflict, film, history, language, marinetti, Futurist, Italian, painting | 1 Comment
From My Cold Dead Hands
Posted on April 6, 2008
Well it looks like Reagan finally got his bridge buddy back to the gossamer card table. I was going to wait until Richard Matheson released a comment on Omega Man’s passing, but then again Will Smith has already filled those pants. Poor Richard. Moses might have lived a few hundred years, but Heston lived too vibrant a life to except those numbers. He was truly an American. I might have just connotated a lot of things, but I’ll tell you straight: I cherish his role on the planet of the apes. So in honor of his death, if you got a right to carry, I suggest you do so today. All of us artists and bohemians will understand… for once.
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Filed Under film, history, Film History, Hollywood, obit, actor | Leave a Comment
Someone Beat Edison to the Punch? HE WAS FRENCH???
Posted on March 30, 2008
It turns out some of my American pride is misplaced (who would have thunkit?). As the freedom frie left our menu, now the honor of the first recorded human voice has taken wing all across the Atlantic. What’s next? Baghdad has the battery, Afghanistan has chess, next thing you know Poland will claim it invented the garden gnome. Either way, the history of sound recording is so short that it’s nice to cheat it up a few more years.
Damn, I had enough trouble dealing with an archaic lease restricting the use of my phonograph, now theres “phonautographs”? I don’t even know if I’m punctuating the question right!
But seriously folks, before I go, I wanted to personally apologize to all of my French fans out there. I realize you have more to offer than prose poetry and creative potato recipes, and from this side of the Atlantic, it looks like you do a far better job keeping Jazz musicians out of the rain. Thank you, I mean that.
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Filed Under film, sound, history | Leave a Comment
As We May Edit
Posted on December 2, 2007
During the second world war many American scientists were compelled to drop their daily studies in order to join the comprehensive war effort. Afterward the technocracy established and the future of sciences held a strong but sometimes uncomfortable alliance. In 1945, an analog computing expert named Vannevar Bush published an inspiring essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled ‘As we may think.“
Within this essay he theorized about a hyper text computer system electronically linked to libraries of information which would later evolve into the world wide web. He called it the Memex in reference to an indexing system modeled after the way human memory worked through associative trails.
Bush believed that the human element of associative reasoning was the best way to organize the collected knowledge of the human race so that it may be shared everywhere. In 1992, Michael Buckland disagreed his point arguing that classification schemes familiar within information science are more effective and just downright sensible.
These days the internet is undergoing several major indexing projects, and the future has not been determined. Perhaps the most important issue of our times is deciding upon the way in which the human race will share its wisdom and knowledge.
As a film editor, I feel very much like an organizer of information. Stanley Kubrick noted that editing is the only phase of film making that did not evolve from another art-form. Walter Murch claims our only reference for this task is dreaming. The layers of connection that work within film can stack up, and how you choose to weave through these packets can be dictated by a million different ideologies. Two to come to mind are the set of rules established by
Edward Dmytryk and Walter Murch.
Rule 1. Never make a cut without a positive reason.
Rule 2. When undecided about the exact frame to cut on, cut long rather than short
Rule 3: Whenever possible cut ‘in movement’
Rule 4: The ‘fresh’ is preferable to the ’stale’
Rule 5: All scenes should begin and end with continuing action
Rule 6: Cut for proper values rather than proper ‘matches’
Rule 7: Substance first—then form
This is a somewhat logical approach that reminds me a lot of the indexing system supported by Michael Buckland. Walter Murch shifts to a whole different perspective when setting his rules:
* emotion — Does the cut reflect what the editor believes the audience should be feeling at that moment?
* story — Does the cut advance the story?
* rhythm — Does the cut occur “at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and ‘right’” ?
* eye-trace — Does the cut pay respect to “the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame”?
* two-dimensional place of the screen — Does the cut respect the 180 degree rule?
* three-dimensional space of action — Is the cut true to the physical/spatial relationships within the diegesis?
Murch then assigned a point value of importance among the five categories, crowning emotion with 51 percent.
I see Murch and Bush in agreement on this. A squadron of helicopters are a swarm of valkeries riding the associative trails in a heart of darkness.
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Filed Under editing, association, history, internet | 1 Comment
