It's almost shorts weather where I live, and the first day of summer is only a week and a half away, so the idea of gathering together little bits of stuff we've talked about in a column of miscellanea seemed like a good idea. After all, when I'm finished, I can go out and enjoy the sunshine!

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Let's start out with some actual good news. I've covered the crisis at the Timbuktu libraries extensively here, including the daring rescues of some of the private archives during the worst of the radical Islamists' occupation of the ancient city.

via Wikipedia

I recently came upon this crowdfunding site, which is calling for donations to help preserve these precious items, and I got suspicious. After all, if David Mamet's overprivileged daughter, an actress on the hit TV show Girls, is asking for a buttload of money so she and her sister can record a song featuring their ukulele stylings, the whole crowdfunding thing deserves scrutiny every time it comes up.

Thus, I did a little research, and wound up at Boston University's West African Research Association,  whose director, Dr. Jennifer Yanco, assured me that this money (of which $28,695 of a proposed $100,000 has been raised as I type this) is actually going to the people who are doing the preservation. She also said something I find very important, and I hope she doesn't mind my quoting her directly:

If lost, we lose a very precious part of the human memory and a source of significant historical information on this part of the world and its relations with other peoples over time. This latter is of particular importance,  given that much of the ‘known’ history of this region has been written by outsiders, and that this and the rest of Africa often described as “illiterate”,  “pre-literate”, or having a strictly “oral tradition”.

Very much true: as a teenager, I stumbled upon the bronze portraiture of 9th to 12th century Ife, Nigeria, and was brought up short by the fact that this "primitive" part of the world was making these items hundreds of years ago by a technique that we can only guess at. I later discovered that the whole continent was home to societies of considerable sophistication, sometimes rivalling their European contemporaries, and Timbuktu was where a lot of its learning wound up. The barbarians currently claiming to be Muslims want this stuff destroyed because a lot of it challenges their conception of what Islam is. The rest of humanity has other ideas, I'm happy to say. I'm going through one of my "broke, not poor" cycles at the moment, or I'd throw some bucks at these people, but that doesn't mean you can't click the Indiegogo link above and do something, no matter how small, to stem the tide of idiocy that's threatening us all.

via Wikipedia

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Which leads very nicely into my next topic, that of the Detroit Institute of Arts. This thing here:

via Wiki Commons

I've never been there, but I was vaguely aware of it as one of the five or so best museums in America, back in the days when the Detroit Symphony was a force to contend with and money was rolling into the city from its automotive industry. A quick check on its Wikipedia page shows an impressive list of artists, but I've been in enough museums that I know that all of those artists listed have substandard work with their names on it. Still, another quick check shows a lot of art I wouldn't mind seeing next time I'm in Detroit, whenever that is.

Detroit currently has two almost insuperable problems. One is a load of debt that just won't stop: it's no secret that the city is a wreck, its property-tax base destroyed, its residents long ago in flight from the decaying mess. That debt, it seems, has to be paid. But that's nothing: just as the shuttered buildings give shelter to rats, Detroit City Hall has given shelter to a Republican administration. These are not the Republicans of old, who gloried in the names of their colleagues and ancestors on the donation plaques in the DIA, either. These are rapacious, acultural, greedheads. And if you don't believe me, read this astonishing recap of recent events (which, admittedly, have been reported often enough that I can sympathize with the spokesperson's unwillingness to comment to some blog she's never heard of). In case you've developed palsy and can't click the link, here's the money quote: “'My goal is not to see the art of the DIA disappear,' [Michigan Governor Rick] Snyder said. 'But it’s also important to recognize that as fiduciary of the city, that the art is an asset of the city. We want to try and do the best we can to maintain it in a proper way.'"

In other words, he -- and a lot of others -- are okay with selling off the art in the DIA to pay the city's debts. And who'll buy? No doubt some of the squillionaires who made their money gutting the Detroit auto industry, as well as some of their brothers-in-arms. (Or, most likely, their wives, who tend to be a bit more interested in this kind of thing). I mean, who wouldn't want a Cézanne on their walls? And have you tried to find a decent one for sale recently?

To the people of Michigan, though, I suggest that before you start an Indiegogo appeal to save the DIA, you might think about voting these morons out of office.

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Last week's DON'T WORK FOR FREE screedifesto on Rock's Back Pages, as reported on here, has gotten itself some legs. It went overground with a Guardian column by Suzanne Moore, and quickly turned into a Facebook success. Imbued with the spirit of the moment, I, too, turned down a request that I work for free (in return for profits after expenses were met, har har, can I have a word with your accountant). Of course, there's also a thin line there: some people really do benefit from giving their work away, musicians in particular. It's just that there are ways to do it and ways to do it. Bob Ostertag, a contemporary composer of some worth, has a very good article about this entitled "Why I No Longer Give Away My Music" on a website that I believe is connected to the Creative Commons folks.

I use CC on my other blog, not that it stopped one particularly unscrupulous person from retitling my posts and publishing them as "by" his client, a vendor of mail-order "supplements" hiding in Canada because of his many arrests for fraud, the records of which this guy was hoping to obscure by loading these "blogs" (he took from many others) with SEO terms. Had I had the time, though, I could likely have done something about this, thanks to CC.

People are still trying to figure this stuff out, and I think this psychologist is way on the wrong trail: if it's true that we enjoy free music more than paid music (and I instinctively believe that's not true), it's largely because the emotional value of music is so degraded by music's ubiquity these days that its monetary value is irrelevant. As someone who's gotten free records since 1968, I've always been in the position to dislike one and like another, since I had no financial stake in the end result: it wasn't like I'd gone to the record store, handed someone ten bucks and been disappointed.

As it is, I wonder why people bother to experience music at all these days. It would be real nice if people put their goddam phones away and just listened, and I have to say I understand the reaction of this pianist, who stormed off-stage because someone in the audience was more interested in filming his show on an iPhone than paying attention to it in the moment. And the record company's comment, too, is worth noting.

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Finally, a techncial request. I understand some people can't access this blog at all, while others see a long unbroken paragraph. We'd like to fix this, but we need some details. If you can write a comment below if you've had or have a problem, giving the browser and OS you're using to access The Ward Report, we'll sic our highly-trained crew on it and make the experience much better for you. Thanks, and see you next week.

Du grabuge dans le cinéma français

par Julien MARSA

Depuis quelques temps, les esprits s'échauffent, la situation est tendue, les acteurs de la production cinématographique française sont fébriles. Cette impression est renforcée par un contexte social perçu actuellement comme impitoyable, et que le gouvernement de François Hollande, élu depuis plus d'un an, ne semble pas capable de renverser. Les incompréhensions se multiplient, le fossé se creuse. Et le cinéma – en dehors même de ce que les films ont à dire et qui revêt une importance capitale – n'échappe pas à cette tendance.

A gauche, Vincent Maraval et l'équipe du film "La Vie d'Adèle"

Tout a commencé avec une tribune de Vincent Maraval, distributeur et producteur, fondateur de la société de distribution de films Wild Bunch, dans le journal Le Monde du 29 décembre 2012. Ce texte fut le cri de colère d'un homme qui voit le cinéma et son activité dénaturés par un système de financement à la dérive, mais constituait également une prise de position en forme de défense de ses propres intérêts. Pourtant, l'origine de ce texte provient de la polémique autour de l'exil fiscal de Gérard Depardieu, contexte social encore une fois prédéterminant. Devant la mise en lumière de cette affaire, Maraval s'offusque, en démarrant par un argument volontairement provocateur dans le but d'attirer l'attention, que l'on ne fasse pas tant de cas des salaires exorbitants touchés par les acteurs bankables français.

La vindicte populaire n'aura retenu, des mois plus tard, que ce traitement de choc, alors qu'à la relire de plus près, cette tribune contient tous les germes du débat qui agite aujourd'hui de manière encore plus large le milieu du cinéma français, et qui a rapport à la création d'une convention collective pour protéger les techniciens. Le fait que les acteurs soient trop payés ne constitue finalement qu'un symptôme de problématiques plus générales, liées au sur-financement de certains films au détriment d'œuvres fragiles, qui peinent à rentrer dans les clous du budget qu'elles s'étaient fixé. Entre des acteurs sur lesquels repose tout le financement d'un film, et qui leur donne droit de vie ou de mort sur un projet, avec à la clé un cachet mirobolant, et des techniciens qui, s'ils sont correctement payés sur des gros films, se trouvent forcés d'accepter de travailler parfois pour un salaire inférieur à la norme, se dessine non pas un écart – des acteurs peuvent très bien travailler eux aussi pour un cachet moindre – mais tout un panel de questionnements sur la possible refonte du système de financement des films français.

Aurélie Filippetti et Michel Sapin, ministres de la culture et du travail

C'est le nerf de la guerre qui agite le débat autour de la convention collective, lancé par Aurélie Filippetti, ministre de la culture, et Michel Sapin, ministre du travail. Débat retors, car à choisir un camp on condamnera chez l'autre des éléments tout aussi recevables. Que le cinéma français se dote d'une convention collective afin de protéger les conditions de travail et les salaires des techniciens, on ne peut que le saluer. Cela constitue une avancée sociale déterminante et nécessaire, qui empêchera les coups fourrés de quelques acteurs du système de production français, certains oubliant un peu vite que leur capacité à faire aboutir un projet de film tient aussi aux artisans qui, chaque jour de tournage, mettent les mains dans le cambouis. Cette convention réglemente donc le travail sur le plateau, au niveau des salaires minimas garantis, sur la durée des journées de travail, la possibilité de faire des heures supplémentaires, etc...

Mais le fait de réguler un système qui, jusque-là, se faisait de gré à gré, par le biais d'une négociation basée sur des tarifs syndicaux entre producteurs et salariés, provoque des effets pervers à un niveau plus général. Car les films qui, faute de budget suffisant, se voient obligés de réduire leurs dépenses, notamment au niveau des salaires, pourraient bien se retrouver hors-la-loi. Pour ceux-là, le texte proposé par le gouvernement prévoit une annexe dérogatoire, qui exempte de ces obligations tout film de moins de 2,5 millions d'euros de budget, mais dans la limite de 20 % des films produits chaque année, sur une période de cinq ans. Cette annexe, même si elle donne un peu d'air à des projets fragiles qui ne pourraient se faire sans la bonne volonté des gens qui y participent, et qui acceptent de revoir leurs salaires à la baisse, fait l'effet d'une rustine sur une crevasse.

Remise du rapport de Pierre Lescure à François Hollande

Car la source du problème se situe ailleurs. Tout le système de financement du cinéma français doit être repensé. L'argent qui circule dans le milieu par le biais des mécanismes de redistribution va de plus en plus aux gros projets sur-financés, soutenus par des chaînes de télévision qui prennent de moins en moins de risque, car soumises à la pression de l'audimat. La participation des acteurs du web aux mécanismes de redistribution, notamment les fournisseurs d'accès à internet, va se révéler, dans les mois qui viennent, déterminante. C'est par exemple un des volets soutenus par le rapport de Pierre Lescure sur la « Contribution aux politiques culturelles à l'ère du numérique », remis en mai 2013 au gouvernement socialiste. Espérons qu'il sera suivi d'actes forts dans cette direction.

Et les cinéastes dans tout ça ? Beaucoup d'entre eux, notamment les jeunes pousses, travaillent dans un anonymat, et parfois une précarité dont le système se moque éperdument. Mais en navigant en dehors des eaux territoriales, ils produisent des gestes cinématographiques d'autant plus forts, nouveaux, et audacieux. Ce sont aussi à ceux-là que la convention, ou du moins le système de partage des richesses au sein du cinéma français, devrait s'adresser en priorité. C'est un peu comme en sport : lorsque l'on possède un centre de formation qui suit les jeunes joueurs et les aide à progresser, à gagner en maturité, on fait un pari sur l'avenir qui s'avère très souvent payant. Parions donc sur l'avenir, soyons audacieux : c'est le seul moyen de sauver un système qui déraille, et que pourtant le monde entier nous envie.

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par Julien MARSA

Produit par une chaîne de télévision nippone nommée WOWOW, « Shokuzai » marque le grand retour de Kiyoshi Kurosawa, cinq ans après « Tokyo Sonata ». Diffusé sous la forme d'une mini-série au Japon, « Shokuzai » est sorti en France (début juin) scindé en deux parties, l'une intitulée « Celles qui voulaient se souvenir » et l'autre « Celles qui voulaient oublier ». Un peu à l'image de la carrière de Kurosawa, qui débuta dans les années 1980 comme réalisateur de « Pinku Eiga » (films érotiques) chez Nikkatsu, avant de claquer la porte du célèbre studio et de se retrouver placardisé pendant une bonne décennie.

Malgré qu'il n'ait jamais arrêté de tourner pendant cette période, il réalisera principalement des épisodes de séries télévisées et, ponctuellement, quelques longs-métrages (« Sweet Home » en 1989, « The Guard from the Underground » en 1992), qui lui permettront de continuer à explorer un sillon singulier. Kurosawa revisite le film de fantômes nippon, mais en lui donnant une texture bien particulière, utilisant les spectres pour mettre en avant les défaillances et le refoulé de la société japonaise. C'est ainsi qu'il perce sur la scène internationale avec « Cure » (1997), polar surnaturel qui met en scène un Tokyo à l'opposé du grouillement incessant que l'on connaît. Toute la « seconde partie » de sa carrière est traversée de figures surnaturelles qui occupent une place prépondérante dans son œuvre (« Charisma » en 1999, « Retribution » en 2007, et surtout « Kaïro » en 2000), et répondent à un besoin de faire transiter un propos critique par le biais du genre.

Mais depuis « Tokyo Sonata » (2008), Kurosawa semble avoir entamé un virage dans son approche du genre. Les fantômes ne sont maintenant plus désignés comme tel, comme s'ils avaient tellement bien réussi à se fondre dans l'univers du cinéaste qu'ils ne servent maintenant plus de catalyseurs mais de toile de fond. C'est le cas avec « Shokuzai », qui relate le parcours de quatre jeunes femmes qui se trouvaient sur les lieux de l'assassinat d'Emili, quinze ans plus tôt, alors qu'elle n'étaient encore qu'à l'école primaire. Devant leur mutisme, Asako, la mère d'Emili, condamne alors les jeunes filles à tenir la promesse de l'aider à retrouver le meurtrier, les tenant sous le joug d'une culpabilité sous forme de malédiction.

Ce sont donc ici les fantômes du passé qui opèrent en silence. Le film traite les trajectoires des quatre jeunes femmes une par une, ce qui donne lieu chaque fois à un chapitre qui exposera comment cet événement a pu influencer la vie qu'elles se sont construites. Kurosawa n'a pas son pareil pour faire surgir les fantômes avec une inquiétante tranquillité. Dans la grande veine feuilletonesque – avec laquelle le cinéaste japonais joue – ce sont donc des secrets qui refont surface, des pulsions refoulées qui s'agitent en chacun des personnages, mais aussi un travail de mise en scène qui orchestre des apparitions avec une grande douceur. Le passé se rappelle de manière discrète aux personnages, car il est toujours là, en sourdine.

Les apparitions d'Asako viennent alors titiller une blessure restée ouverte chez les quatre protagonistes, avant de lui consacrer la dernière partie du film, qui va révéler en quoi cette culpabilité qui portait sur leurs frêles épaules, c'est avant tout celle de la mère d'Emili. Une sorte d'ascendance aux conséquences désastreuses pour les nouvelles générations, qui payent et reconduisent les fautes de leurs aînés. La peur n'est maintenant plus physique, elle réside dans la façon dont Kurosawa figure un portrait parfois effrayant de la société moderne japonaise. Pas un récit qui ne fasse cas du fossé d'incompréhension et d'incommunicabilité qui se creuse entre les êtres, et qui pèse plus particulièrement sur les relations entre femmes et hommes. Kurosawa joue beaucoup avec une certaine distance qui pourrait parfois paraître comme désabusée, pour mieux faire surgir des affects violents, qui n'ont plus de but véritable, qui s'adressent plus aux personnages eux-mêmes qu'au monde extérieur. Un repli qui rend caduque la recherche de la vérité. Car même si, in fine, la promesse est accomplie et la vengeance exécutée, elle n'est plus un plat qui se mange froid : elle devient tout simplement un plat sans goût.

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A couple of weeks ago, I took note of Barney Hoskyns' essay on his Rock's Back Pages site (and managed to spell his surname wrong: sorry, dude) about the increasing tendency of large corporations to ask freelancers to just donate their work. Not just large corporations, either: start-ups and independent projects seem to think it's fine to ask people to help them out by donating work, with no discussion of compensation involved. "We're just starting, and if you are, too, maybe it'd be a good idea for you to be associated with our real cool project." Funny thing: I don't seem to remember Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, or even Mark Zuckerberg doing that (although in the latter's case, he's made his fortune monetizing the free content Facebook members post, a slightly different matter). Nor, usually, is there a promise that these startups will, once funded, hire you for actual money.

At any rate, the response to Barney's original post was so overwhelming that he's started a Facebook group called Stop Working For Free. Membership is restricted to professionals, or "creatives," a word I hate, and everyone has to be approved by the administrators. At the moment, there are 1,432 pissed-off members on deck, and the group is mushrooming daily.

I joined as soon as I found out about it, and it's been fascinating watching it grow. Initially, it was mostly British people who knew the name Barney Hoskyns and/or learned about it through the RBP grapevine. Then the occasional American showed up. As far as professions go, one gratifying thing was watching the number of photographers and photographers' agents and other photography pros start to participate. These people have it worse than writers, although writers often don't believe me when I say this. Let me show you why.

I just stole this photo from a blog. It's not a particularly interesting photo, and shows Korsörer Str. in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood. But this is every pixel of the original photo. Okay, I cheated: it's my photo, I took it, it's from my Berlin blog, and as such, is covered by a Creative Commons license, and thus my use is perfectly legal. But one big problem with the Internet is that it's easy to steal these images without credit, which people do all the time. I'm not a professional photographer (or could you tell?), but if I were, I'd be far more circumspect about how I uploaded my work.

And although the Facebook group's participants haven't moved much past writers and photographers, issues involving other professions have made their way into the discussion. For one thing, there was a very interesting spin put on Vice's recent fashion spread showing female authors at the moment of their suicides. I've been watching Vice with some skepticism for years, and Lizzie Widdicombe's recent New Yorker story just amped that up a few dozen notches. A world where there are no boundaries between advertising and editorial erodes some of our basic freedoms, it seems to me, especially in a world where content is more and more produced by the 1%, who are the only people who can afford to work in a non-paying industry. Read the article, you'll see what I mean. Of course, it was no surprise that Vice did this provocative fashion spread: the predictable (and salutary) howls of outrage ensued, and no doubt fists were bumped at Vice world headquarters. But then a most curious story appeared on Jezebel, in which one of the models, who wasn't made aware of the exact nature of the shot (but, at 26, was grateful for some work), revealed that not only was she blindsided by the content she was portraying, but also that she wasn't paid. Think about that and ignore the pictorial content for a moment: a fashion shot for a huge international magazine, and they're not paying the models. Finally, having made their point and gotten people to look at them, they took the spread down from their website, although anyone who can get their hands on a copy of their print magazine can ogle the fake corpses all they want.

The other work-for-free issue, which has been in the news a lot this week, is that of interns.

Now, what is today called internship has been around for centuries. It was once called apprenticeship, and under that name continues in a number of societies in Europe in trades like building, baking, and cabinetry. Many of these trades are dependent upon the transmission of manual skills over a period of time, and, at least in Germany, some of these apprentices become literal journeymen: they take to the road and find unpaid work in various places, where their brotherhood helps them find food and accommodation. Next to what today's college kids go through, it's virtually paradisical.

I say "college kids," but the first stirrings of this came from a lawsuit filed by two people, one of them an advanced law student, who supposedly were "interning" on the film The Black Swan, and weren't paid for their efforts despite the film's financial success. The exact details of the complaint and the judge's ruling make it clear that this was just flat-out exploitation. As for the "it's good experience" argument, the Atlantic pretty well shot that down in a recent article that showed that paid or unpaid, interns rarely were offered jobs after their term was up, not to mention that people who'd never interned at all were offered a higher starting salary than people who'd had paid or unpaid internships.  And -- irony of irony -- Gawker, an arm of which ran the story of the unpaid Vice model, is being sued by three ex-interns who are looking to get paid for work they did for the online media giant. Over in the UK, a group called The Creative Society is joining with several other governmental and quasi-governmental bodies to end unpaid internships for "creatives." (Boy, do I look forward to the day that term gets retired, but that's a whole other rant).

I found all of these links on the Stop Working For Free Facebook group, and it's both gratifying to see the level of activism and depressing to see how widespread these practices are. I also can't stress it enough: if you want to live in a society where all creative work is done by wealthy people who don't need to be paid, with all that entails, all you have to do is keep silent. Hell, look at the title of this post: it's inaccurate. If you had serfs (or slaves, for that matter), it was in your interest to see that they were housed and fed, either by their own crops which the master couldn't touch or by handouts (or by a combination of both). Slaves were expensive and, after the first stirrings of anti-slavery crackdowns by the government, a pain in the ass to buy new. Serfs could integrate into the local society, go to church, and so on. Not saying it was a good life, but it's worth thinking about next time someone asks you to work for free.

And, back to my own profession, please enjoy this classic bit from Harlan Ellison.

See you next week, and don't work for free.

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mots et images par Julien MARSA

Jusqu'au 4 août prochain, la Cinémathèque Française consacre une exposition à Jacques Demy, cinéaste disparu prématurément le 27 octobre 1990, à l'âge de 59 ans. L'occasion pour le grand public de (re)découvrir un cinéaste protéiforme, guidé par une idée forte du lyrisme et du romantisme moderne. Petit aperçu d'une visite de l'exposition.

Né en 1931 à Nantes, où il passera son enfance, cette ville sera une des grandes sources d'inspirations du cinéaste, et il y tournera deux films au ton bien distinct, « Lola » (1960) et « Une Chambre en ville » (1982). C'est un fait finalement peu connu, mais Jacques Demy était un très bon dessinateur, et il réalise de manière assez précoce quelques films d'animation en utilisant la technique de la peinture sur pellicule. Élève aux Beaux-Arts de Nantes malgré le refus de son père de le voir s'engager dans des études artistiques, Demy y rencontre quelques-uns de ses futurs collaborateurs (notamment Jacqueline Moreau, sa future costumière). C'est par ce versant que débute l'exposition, avec quelques dessins réalisés par Demy lui-même, et d'autres qui ont pu lui servir de source d'inspiration.

L'exposition est ordonnée en sas successifs – chacun regroupant une œuvre ou une période – et tente d'imiter l'organisation d'un enchevêtrement de rues, à l'image de celles que parcourent les personnages de Demy à Cherbourg ou Rochefort. On trouve pour chaque période des regroupements de photographies de tournage, quelques documents écrits, et beaucoup de vidéos d'actualités de l'époque, d'interviews des différents protagonistes, et du cinéaste lui-même. C'est ainsi que l'on peut observer ces photographies de Catherine Deneuve dans les deux films phare du cinéaste français, « Les Parapluies de Cherbourg » (Palme d'or en 1964) et « Les Demoiselles de Rochefort » (1967).

Comme pour toute exposition de ce type, les organisateurs ont tenté de redonner naissance à l'univers du cinéaste, notamment en travaillant à capturer l'atmosphère qui se dégage des différentes œuvres. On est ainsi pas très étonnés de découvrir la devanture de la Galerie Lancien, qui appartient à l'ancien amant de Catherine Deneuve dans « Les Demoiselles de Rochefort ». Scène mémorable où Guillaume Lancien tente de produire une œuvre d'art en tirant sur des ballons de peinture, et que l'on retrouve au sein même de l'exposition.

Suite à ce film, Demy s'exile pendant plus de deux ans aux États-Unis, où il réalisera « Model Shop » (1968), sorte de prolongement outre-atlantique de son premier long-métrage, « Lola ». Dans cette partie de l'exposition, on découvre avec surprise une vidéo d'un émouvant témoignage d'Harrison Ford, qui devait incarner l'un des personnages de « Model Shop ». Écarté du projet par un dirigeant du studio qui produisait le film, Harrison Ford revient sur ses jeunes années d'acteur pas encore confirmé et l'importance de l'intérêt porté à son égard par Demy. Cette confiance engrangée auprès du cinéaste français lui servira par la suite à ne pas perdre de vue son projet de devenir acteur de cinéma. Quelques images d'archives montrent des essais réalisés par Demy avec le comédien.

Demy revient ensuite en France afin de tourner « Peau d'âne », qui donne lieu à la partie la plus flamboyante de l'exposition. Beaucoup de documents sont notamment consacrés à la création des costumes du film.

Et l'on peut aussi voir, en chair et en os, certains éléments de film.

L'exposition se poursuit ainsi jusqu'à la dernière partie de la carrière de Demy, plus sombre, surfant sur les documents de tournage et iconographiques pour donner à voir au spectateur l'évolution du cinéaste. Si en parcourant l'exposition on n'est que rarement surpris, elle constitue une bonne porte d'entrée pour ceux qui connaissent peu l'œuvre de Jacques Demy. Pour finir, une belle surprise tout de même, puisque la dernière salle est consacrée aux effets personnels du cinéaste, et notamment cette étrange série de peintures qu'il a réalisé.

 
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by Andrew Horn

The other day, I was on the phone with my son who had just seen “Man Of Steel”, and since we had both seen - ie suffered through - “Superman Returns”, together, I was curious what he thought. Let’s just say he was a bit more generous in his opinion than I, but not much. As to what I thought, well there’s enough of that grousing out there on the ‘Net so you don’t need my two cents. I think “joyless” was one of the words I used, but ok, you don’t need to hear it - really.

But he heard me out and finally he said, well how would I have done it? I thought for a minute and I honestly had no answer. When I was a kid, I had in fact made a Superman movie with my 8mm camera - I had my own Superman suit, you see - but when I actually started making movies, this was not something I thought about. So my reaction to the film was more as a dissatisfied customer, not a so-called professional who says, “I can do that better”. And that’s what I told him.

But then after I hung up, it struck me that this was not exactly true. I remembered that there was indeed a time when I did want to make a comic book superhero movie. I was in my early thirties and I had, shall we say, some ambitions. But let’s be clear, I didn’t want to direct it. I could never have handled a movie on that scale, then or now. Maybe I imagined myself to be the producer? But who knows at that time if I could have handled that either. The fact of the matter was, I just wanted to see it done.

George Reeves as Superman, 1950s

By way of some background, I should say that my mother was a child psychologist. Being a mother, she had absolutely no use for comics. Being a psychologist, she considered them superficial wish fulfillment. And one of her sources of entertainment back then was to tell me that I had fantasies of being Superman. I kept telling her I didn’t, but the more I insisted, the more she seemed convinced that I did. Which of course annoyed me no end because it only proved to me that she had never actually read Superman and had no idea what he was about.

In fairness to her, it wasn’t as out of the blue as some of her other ideas. I was a voracious comic book reader and my repertoire included all the variations of the so-called Superman Family: Superman Comics; Action Comics; Adventure Comics - where he appeared as Superboy; Superboy Comics; Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen; Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane and World’s Finest Comics, where he was teamed up with Batman. And Justice League of America, where he was a member, even if he didn’t always appear. Ok, so 10 out of 10 for circumstantial evidence. Fine.

Superman had originally begun as a defender of the weak and oppressed who grew up in Kansas in the Depression and so therefore was very influenced, as were his creators - two Jewish kids from Cleveland - with populist thinking and arguably leftist attitude. He was not above beating up or scaring the bejeezes out of some crook, corrupt politician, or rich guy exploiting his workers. Probably that would have been something I could have fantasized about - certainly the beating up part - had I been around to see it. By the time I got involved, they had sort of toned down his rascally attitude and, while his powers had increased, he had evolved into the archetypical Boy Scout - the epitome of “the nice guy who always wanted to help”. Admirable, but in my selfish little 10 year old brain, this was not really how I saw myself.

But apart from having adventures, saving people, doing good deeds - which often involved strange and elaborate tricks played on friend and foe alike - and entertaining orphans, he was also constantly in some kind of weird slightly sick relationship with Lois Lane. She idolized him and followed him around and was always somehow throwing herself at him and trying to trick him - either into revealing his secret identity or, arguably more importantly, into marrying her. And she was always getting herself into jams and jumping off buildings so he’d have to fly in and save her. In other words, just being an all around nuisance as a means to get his attention and prove her love for him.

And for some odd reason he did want her, but as Superman, he was always too busy or put upon to pay enough attention to her. However as Clark Kent, he somehow felt in a better position to respond to these feelings and attempt to act on them. But of course, as Clark Kent, he was never good enough for her, and she was always blowing him off.

So obviously what she was in love with was not the man, but the alpha male. So much so that  over the years, if any other alpha male would show her attention, she was not above dropping Superman like a hot potato and running off with some other hero from some other planet, or dimension or whatever. Which in turn would make Superman jealous, and he’d be sorry and self sacrificing, until it ultimately would blow up in Lois’ face, after which she would come crawling back, and he would go back to ignoring her.

So this is what I was supposed to be fantasizing about? In retrospect, they were all acting like a bunch of 10 year olds. So I didn’t have to fantasize. Some version of this kind of behavior was going on all around me every day at school. And that’s probably one reason I was interested.

Some years later, I had a job in the office at the adult education department at NYU and one day the editor of Superman - who was teaching some kind of business course there - called up on the phone, and recognizing his name, I got into a conversation with him. He told me that back then, his kids were in a car pool and every day on the way to school he would grill his little captive focus group on what they thought of the comics and what they wanted to see. And he would write down all their suggestions, and then do it.

Which was both a really smart thing in terms of his target audience, but in the long term, very bad for the people who later wanted to put Superman in the movies. Because if you didn’t grow up with it and someone handed you a pile of comics as reference, as an adult it all looked incredibly silly. So your obvious reaction was to say, it’s a comic book movie, it’s supposed to be cartoony and stupid. And the movie people never understood that to the kids reading it, of course it was fun, but it wasn’t a joke. Then when Batman became a hit on TV, stupidity was solidified as the way to go.

Adam West as Batman in the 1960s TV series

I remember in late 70s reading the first announcement that they were going to make a big budget Superman movie. They had a full page ad in the paper with the slogan, “You will believe a man can fly”. I cannot tell you how lame this looked to me. Having grown up, not only with the comics, but also with the weekly Superman TV show, I really did not have be convinced that a man could fly. As far as I was concerned, people were flying around my whole life.

In fact when I was a kid, my above mentioned Superman suit had a warning printed on the hem of the shirt - obviously to indemnify the company from all those kids prone to tying a towel around their necks and jumping off the garage roof. It said, “This costume will not make you fly. Only Superman can fly.”

So the message here, as I look back, is an important one. Yes, a kid should be smart enough to know that dressing up like Superman doesn’t make you like him, but at the same time, Superman is real. And I guess I always sort of took that to heart. So taking him seriously - all kid-oriented goofiness notwithstanding - I found those 70s/80s Superman movies much too self-consciously silly.

Superman cartoon by Max Fleischer

Never mind the “classic” tv series, had nobody seen the Max Fleischer cartoons?!

Ok so with that in mind, in the mid-80s after having made my first feature film I was a bit full of myself and thought I want to make a superhero movie, one that will be full of adventure and fantasy, but that would not be some stupid campy thing talking down to it’s audience. But it never occurred to me to want to make a Superman movie.

Getting back to my mother’s annoying “accusations”, I didn’t want to be Superman. I wanted to be someone called Adam Strange. Adam Strange had no powers but he was really smart. He was an archeologist who, while running away from some hostile natives in the South American jungle, got hit by a ray from outer space and teleported to the planet Rann in the Alpha Centuri star system. There he got a fabulous looking space uniform, a jet pack, a ray gun, and an absolutely gorgeous girl friend. One that not only did not pester him, she went on adventures with him and helped him and they were not only lovers - well, “sweethearts” was the word they used, we were kids after all - but partners in peril so to speak. And every time he would arrive on Rann there was some new danger that would erupt all over the place, and he had to think his way out of it. And of course he always did.

So, contrary to my mother’s professional opinion, if I had a comic book idol, this was it. And, in fact, if you take away the alien planet, the space uniform, the jet pack, the ray gun and the interstellar sweetheart, this is sort of what I am today. A guy that every time he shows up there’s some disaster that erupts all over the place, that has to be dealt with and solved by some heavy thinking. I do it every day.

So Adam Strange was the movie I wanted to make.

Because I was too naive to think I couldn’t, I called up DC comics, got an appointment with the president, and went in to make my pitch. In truth I had no specific idea of the story I wanted to tell, I just wanted to make a great adventure movie that took advantage of all those great elements I loved about the comic, and present it in a way that would do it justice.

I’m not sure how much of that I was able to communicate, but to make a short story even shorter, she told me right off that it was impossible to grant me the development option I was asking for. They couldn’t allow their characters into the hands of just anyone, she explained. These were valuable properties and they had to be protected, and properly treated. She went on to tell me about the new Superman movie currently in production, and how she was carefully scrutinizing the process to make sure it was going represent the property in the best possible way.

In retrospect I don’t know what I was really expecting to accomplish, I can only claim the sincerity of my intentions. But for all you schadenfreude fans, the movie that she was so carefully and lovingly shepherding through, turned out to be “Superman IV: The Quest For Peace”. The movie that effectively torpedoed the franchise for 20 years.

Until “Superman Returns”.  And we know how that turned out.

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Dear President Obama and All the Rest of Y'all* Democrats:

I'm sorry, I really am, that I missed your fund-raising deadline as June turned to July last night. By my count, I received 30 e-mails, spread over three accounts, in the last 48 hours of June, each asking me to contribute a minimum of $3 to help the Democratic Party defeat the forces of evil. So that's a minimum of $90 you didn't get from me. You pestered me to enter a drawing to meet the President at some unspecified event in the future, to which you'd fly me and a guest, although, as you may know (Democrats Abroad do: I get their e-mails, too), I don't live in the U.S. and, thus, would be inelegible if I'd won.

Since I'm registered to vote in Texas, however, a lot of those e-mails were appeals from the Texas Democratic Party, also asking for my $3. For those with a comic-book-level apprehension of Texan or American politics in general, yes, there is a Texas Democratic Party, and yes, it does have quite a bit of support. There's even a good chance Rick Perry, the telegenic but empty current governor and Presidential hopeful, wouldn't be there were it not for the "joke" candidacy of the smarmy Kinky Friedman, who drew just enough votes off of a late rally by the dark-horse Democratic candidate to defeat him. I've always wondered about the Kinkster's campaign funding, although he's quite wealthy himself.

But what really put Texas Democrats in the news was this woman.

In a Capitol Rotunda packed with supporters, Senator Davis filibustered for 11 hours straight, until the clock had run out on one of the most restrictive abortion bills ever introduced in the U.S. The place erupted in cheers and celebration. The Republicans, showing the good sportsmanship they're so famous for, first denounced the "unruly mob" in the Rotunda (as if the crowd in Florida, the famous Republican "Brooks Brothers rioters" who shut down the Bush-Gore ballot-count were models of decorum), and then announced yet another special session to pass the legislation. This is probably not the best idea they've had of late: besides exposing them for the poor losers we've always known they were, they're going head-to-head with an increasing number of angry Texas women, who will have begun action by the time you read this. I recognized a couple of faces in close-ups of that "unruly mob." On a personal level, I seem to prefer them to any other kind of woman I've yet met. This has made me very, very circumspect and respectful around them. If I liked Republicans, I would counsel a similar, or greater, degree of circumspection and respect. Since I don't, my advice is go git 'em, boys! Show 'em who's boss! Heh heh.

But back to the fund-raising. At the moment, I have $29.01 in the bank, so a $90 donation to the Democrats is sort of out of the question. And the only reason they're asking me for it is that I've contributed as much as $15 at a single go in the past. I vote every time I'm eligible to do so and have for years: I'm not one of those cynics who says it doesn't matter. Long ago, I lived in a town that was a tourist attraction. An old man there had a ramshackle nursery which took up a lot of room on a prime piece of real-estate. He owned it outright and I think he and his collection of dogs may even have lived there. A predatory developer had his eye on it, and introduced a motion that would have allowed him to seize it. It was defeated twice, but the town always had something that needed a special election, so one August, when everyone was out of town, leaving it to the tourist hordes, there was another one, with the last-chance seizure motion on it, and not much else. I was home about 6 pm and the phone rang. "Hi," said a voice. "Just reminding you to go vote on Proposition 3 if you haven't already." Well, it obviously wasn't the old man calling. And the polling place was in the church just up the hill a bit. And there was only an hour to go. So I went up there, filled out the ballot, and went back home. The old man got to keep his property by a margin of three votes. One of them was mine. So I vote.

An unlikely place for democracy. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

But something else has come up that has me thinking about those $3 donations. A blog post in the Washington Post last week had the provocative headline "How 31,385 People Fund National Elections." This in itself was a rather superficial summary (necessarily so, I should add) of a report by the Sunlight Foundation, which calls itself " a nonpartisan nonprofit founded in 2006 that uses the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency."

It's kind of a wonky read, but absolutely worth your time, whether you live in the U.S. or not. If you don't, I suspect this sort of thing is in your not-too-distant future. If you do, well, it's already here. The title of the report is scary enough: it's called "The Political 1% of the 1% in 2012," and it talks about the funding of that year's election. It is extraordinarily well-written and well-researched, and has some cute graphics to go with it. Its basic thrust is this:

More than a quarter of the nearly $6 billion in contributions from identifiable sources in the last campaign cycle came from just 31,385 individuals, a number equal to one ten-thousandth of the U.S. population.

In the first presidential election cycle since the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC, candidates got more money from a smaller percentage of the population than any year for which we have data, a new analysis of 2012 campaign finance giving by the Sunlight Foundation shows. These donors contributed 28.1 percent of all individual contributions in the 2012 cycle, a record high.

And here's just one of the charts and infographics. Naturally, being Washingtonians, they use Fedex Field, where the Washington Redskins play, but you get the picture.

The surprise to me is the strong showing of Democrats in that picture. And, as we read on in the piece, it's encouraging how many fairly progressive candidates are getting strong funding, although it's also heartening to see that Elizabeth Warren, the progressive candidate in Massachussets, although she got plenty from the 1% of the 1%, managed to raise the majority of the funds from us Little People.

Make no mistake, the further you drill down into these numbers, the more obvious it is that the Minions of Evil, the people who are intent on not only ruining the achievements of the United States from my parents' teenagerhood, but also those, like the Civil Rights Movement, of my own teenagerhood, are getting bucketloads of cash, and getting them from a very suspicious cast of characters (who are also looked at in this thing, briefly).

So anyway, Mr. President and the rest all of of y'all*, I have to go pluck that last bit of dough from my bank account now so I can make a sandwich for lunch and survive until someone who owes me money cuts loose on a little more. Social Security, which Satan's Cadres are also trying to eliminate, will take care of me next week. And the cycle will start anew. Meanwhile, when y'all start talking change. I think I know a good place to start.

Expatriotically yours,

Ed Ward

(* Yes, as a matter of fact, I do speak fluent Texan).

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par Julien MARSA

Découvert au festival de Berlin il y a maintenant deux ans, « Electrick Children » de Rebecca Thomas a enfin réussi à se frayer un chemin jusque dans les salles françaises. Malgré sa présentation dans de nombreux festivals, ce pari n'était pas gagné d'avance et il reste encore au film à faire sa modeste carrière dans une combinaison de six salles sur l'ensemble du territoire français, ce qui est bien peu. D'où la nécessité de parler de ce premier long-métrage fragile, parfois maladroit, mais animé d'un regard bienveillant et attentif à ses personnages.

Un sujet pas évident à première vue, avec le récit de l'existence austère de Rachel, 15 ans (lumineuse Julia Garner, que l'on retrouvera à l'affiche du prochain « Sin City » de Robert Rodriguez et Frank Miller), jeune femme en devenir au sein d'une communauté mormone du fin fond de l'Utah. La réalisatrice Rebecca Thomas est elle-même issue d'une communauté mormone de Las Vegas, et soustrait de manière bienvenue son film à un traitement doctrinal. À l'opposé du ronronnant « Martha Marcy May Marlene » sorti l'année dernière ou encore du « Ruban Blanc » de Michael Haneke, « Electrick Children » ne s'embarrasse pas de questions sur l'absurdité ou l'aspect nocif de tel ou tel mode de vie. Pas de jugements convenus à l'horizon, puisque le film se consacre tout entier à épouser le regard plein d'humanité et de ferveur de sa jeune protagoniste.

La cinéaste américaine opte ainsi pour un parti pris plus éthéré et penche clairement du côté de la croyance. Elle met également la rationalité du spectateur à dure épreuve, et ce dans la forme même du récit, qui multiplie les incidences et coïncidences dans sa dernière partie, et prend le risque d'en laisser certains sur le bord de la route. Mais revenons à la case départ : « Electrick Children » est le récit d'une Immaculée Conception par la musique. Rachel porte un enfant dont elle est certaine qu'il est issu du sentiment procuré par la première fois où, en cachette, elle a écouté un morceau de pop-rock sur le magnétophone de son père. Une sorte d'épiphanie profane qui l'amènera à s'enfuir de sa petite communauté.

C'est ainsi qu'elle débarque, accompagnée de son frère, dans la ville de tous les vices, Las Vegas. Rebecca Thomas choisit de décrire un Las Vegas interlope et nocturne, où les casinos restent à l'arrière-plan. La confrontation avec le monde moderne a pourtant lieu, avec la rencontre d'une bande de jeunes qui zonent, font du skate et un peu de musique. La ferveur tranquille de Rachel, aucunement prosélyte mais sûre de son destin, se heurte ainsi à l'énergie mal domptée de Clyde (Rory Culkin, frère de) ; chacun exerçant une forme de fascination sur l'autre. C'est de cette union mal fagotée, incitant nos deux personnages à découvrir chacun un univers qui lui est étranger, que le film tire ses plus beaux moments.

Le travail de mise en scène de Rebecca Thomas est principalement axé sur la question de la perception, par l'entremise du point de vue de Rachel, qui s'avère être plus sensoriel que rationnel. C'est ainsi que la cinéaste touche à l'éveil adolescent et à la curiosité naturelle qui s'empare de son héroïne. Plus que de quitter cette petite communauté mormone au sein de laquelle elle est aimée mais empêchée, c'est un désir de découverte du monde et des autres qui la guide. Et même si, dans la plus pure tradition du récit hollywoodien, c'est finalement ses propres origines qu'elle finira par trouver au bout du chemin– point de conclusion un brin décevant – on ne pourra s'empêcher de rêver et revivre ce qu'elle a vécu. Une pure joie esthétique (découverte des lumières de la ville, de la musique) et humaine comme si, sortant du ventre de la mère, on découvrait les choses avec le regard de la première fois.

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By Andrew Horn

Since talking about the Superman movie I remembered that I had done an interview with Alex McDowell, who was not only Production Designer on Man Of Steel for Zack Snyder, but also Snyder’s earlier Watchmen, which had a very different look. While working mostly on major budget films, McDowell could be hyper-stylized as in “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” for Tim Burton as well as “naturalistic” on “The Terminal” for Steven Spielberg or “naturally stylized” like Terry Gilliam’s “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas”.

Like the interview I did previously with Ken Adam this came from material for a much shorter article that I’m glad to be able to use now in a more expanded form. An interesting contrast to the more historical Adam interview, McDowell’s take on the job - though now a few years old - speaks for the current more CGI based world. What remains the same is the sense that this is really creative and fun work. And of course, I’m still jealous as hell.

Q: To begin with, just what is a Production Designer and how is it different from the more traditional title of Art Director?

There are various categories, but it think the broadest possible definition is that the Production Designer is the one responsible for the look of the film, for the visual frame of the film. It is the production designer who hires the Art Director. The Art Director is to the Production Designer as the gaffer is to the cinematographer which means that they generally deal with the logistics - the drafting, construction, the sort of specific day to day running of the art department. But the Production Designer tends to have the direct relationship with the director, the cinematographer and the costume designer and the other key people, so is more involved in the sort of conceptual overview, so the film has a visual coherence. The production designer generally starts before anybody else and it’s kind of the designer’s job to put across the intention or look of the film as all the other key people come in so that it’s all integrated within the director’s vision.

Q: How much does the responsibility overlap with director or cameraman - does it change depending on the person?

It does.  I think each director has their own way of working and you try to conform your practice to theirs.  On the whole, the initial relationship is with the director, to really get inside the director’s mind. And the way I do that mostly is by putting a lot of pictures on the table, just reference material that the director can react to, and then very quickly after that, concept art and location pictures that relate specifically to the film.  So that right at the beginning you can hone and hammer out what the film is going to look like, whether or not the director has a clear view of the film, visually, when he starts.  You kind of hammer out a language for the film that feels right to him, and then even if it’s not specific, you kind of get a direction going.

Alex McDowell

Hein Heckroth, production designer for such classics as "Black Narcissus", "The Red Shoes" and many others

Q: Would you be responsible for actually designing the shots like Hein Heckroth on “Black Narcissus” or Saul Bass in “Psycho”?

In my experience that hasn’t been an opportunity that I’ve had yet. Also I feel that the job of Production Designer now - possibly because of the huge rise of visual effects - it’s so complicated logistically that if it spreads beyond the borders of the art department, it tends to spread more into the visual effects world that any other.

But to talk about the cinematographer, I think it’s an interesting relationship because I do start designing for the lighting right at the very beginning and that’s a big part of my job. I have to be aware of the lighting and I may not have the opportunity to work with the cinematographer in the beginning. I may start a few weeks before them, or a few months, and it’s a delicate relationship because I don’t want to tell the cinematographer how to light the film but at the same time, I’m developing a way to light the film through the sets.

And the other aspect to the early design phase is the tool called Pre-Vis which is kind of becoming a fundamental tool now in production, not only in the art department. Its kind of a 3D computer based environment, which comes out of visual effects planning, and it’s essentially taking a storyboarded sequence and placing that into a 3D environment so you have little 3D characters that represent the actors and you have the full set built in 3D in the computer. You have camera moves within that environment so that in the 3D you can attach a certain lens or a certain camera to a specific track and start planning very specific camera moves.

Although I would not by any means say we are working on the cinematography to the extent of "Black Narcissus", I think that there is an enormous consciousness about how the camera moves in the space and how the light works in space from earlier and earlier time in the pre-production.

It’s very informative in terms of data, it’s telling us exactly how the set is going to look, the scale of it in relation to the actors, it’s telling us what the camera is going to do and as the film progresses it gets more accurate because you’re updating as the set changes, you’re updating the camera moves as the sequences change, and [can indicate] visual effects, special effects, stunts, or any kind of specific events in the virtual production environment. And once you get into the real production environment you can use Pre-Vis as a way of setting up those cameras to match what you pre-designed.

"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" - where production design meets VFX

What has happened in the last few films is that the director, cinematographer and the Production Designer come together in the Pre-Vis room and move it forward as a group and as the film goes further on, Visual Effects takes over that department more and more, because as you get deeper into the production it becomes more and more a post production tool. And then the budget switches from art department to Visual effects and then they take over quite fully.

But to the cinematographer I would always stand back and say we’ve blocked this in, we’ve given you a space to work with and we think you can do these kinds of camera moves in the space. And then the director and the Cameraman come in and they say but we’d really want to do this kind of move or we’re changing the scene this way so it’s a really collaborative environment and it’s not controlled by myself or the DP, it’s just kind of facilitated by the designer.

"The Terminal"

Q: How much do you bring into it?  Do you have a distinct voice or do you bring out what the director wants and you remain anonymous?

It depends on the film and there are certainly films where you can say, if you don’t notice the design, then you’re doing your job.  And that would be true in a contemporary film, like “The Terminal”.  If people just believe that that’s a location that we found, then that would be ideal - it was supposed to have the effect that people have been there before and they recognize it.  But when I’m doing “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” or “Cat In The Hat”, you’re supposed to be in a stylized environment.

I’m not personally interested in imposing my own look on a film. I’m really excited by learning the language of a new world and creating that new world around the needs of a script, and making it a self-contained, insular and distinct world that doesn’t repeat. I try very hard when I choose my next project is that it bears the least resemblance to something before.  There’s no reason why people should recognize an Alex McDowell designed film from movie to movie.

This is part 1 of 3.

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Frank, my brother-in-law, is not widely known for being a wacky guy. He does, however, have one riff I really like. Lord knows where he got it -- maybe from a film, maybe from real life. He stares at you curiously after you've made a statement, and says, in Italian, shrugging, "Chissà?" A beat. The hands go wider. "Chi vuole sapiere?" "Who knows? Who would want to know?" It's all in the delivery, unfortunately, so this is just an approximation, and you have to inflect "sapiere" just right for it to work.

But it's also a legitimate question, one I've been putting to myself a lot recently. There are so many "chissà"s out there at the moment that before chasing down yet another blind alley in search of the answer, you might want to wait briefly and see if you can determine "chi vuole sapiere."

Case in point. I've been kind of obsessed with the Edward Snowden case. Why? Uh, because. (I was going to post a picture, because I like to keep this blog lively, but frankly, you've seen them all, there are license issues, and dude, you need a new photo before we all get bored). Caught up in the media frenzy of the moment, I (and oh, so many more) actually forgot that anyone who's been paying attention knew -- albeit without so many precise details -- that this NSA spying has been going on since, oh, 2006 or so. I mean, I did. And I don' t even live in the U.S., although I was living in Germany and presumably some of my communications got swept up in the dragnet. Oh, noes! Now it's not just my friends, the people who've read my blogs, and various telephone companies, landlords and utility companies who know that I have an irregular small income, don't pay my bills like clockwork, and possibly have the most boring love life in Europe -- the NSA does, too!

Of course, if they were interested -- and for all I know, there was a "person of interest" in one of the apartment buildings I lived in during that period, although it seems kind of remote -- they might have noticed the above and gone on with their work, whatever it is. Not, of course, that I necessarily approve of the scope of it, the secrecy in which it's conducted, or the invisible and unchallengable court that directs its actions. But then, I've had inklings of this since, like, 2006. And, as noted, from their standpoint I'm pretty boring.

Meanwhile, I wonder how this nebbishy guy who basically drew a line under all of this stuff we've known in bits and pieces, if the intel on him is correct and he really is a rabid gun-toting Ayn Rand reading unthinking libertarian, is going to like living in an actual Socialist country for the rest of his life, since I'm currently living in a very mild verson of one and he's headed for places that are much, much stricter. The schadenfreude here is worth savoring.

Thing is, I should stop reading about him. And, given the way the news cycle works, I will. Because eventually he'll be in Venezuela or someplace and the major media will lose interest in him, and lefty websites will finally give us another picture of him, shaking hands with some bureaucrat and maybe posing with his hot new Venezuelan girlfriend, who one hopes will set him straight about the way the world works.

I've already stopped reading about the Asiana plane crash at SFO. Boy, I hate flying, but, like the characters in the first pages of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, drifting to earth after their plane explodes (and surviving), I've always hoped that, like the passengers there, I'd survive if something happened. Reading the details Does Not Help. I must -- and will -- stop. And have.

Here's the deal, and excuse me if I seem to be cribbing from Weight Watchers or Alcoholics Anonymous, because I'm not. I am, and I think too many of us are, taking in too much information. The problem is not so much how to stop as how to moderate the flow, or to (man I hate what's happened to this word) curate it so that we're getting all the necessary intellectual vitamins without the intellectual empty calories. (And this from a guy who loves "fajita" flavor Doritos, which taste nothing whatever like fajitas but still have that appeal).

I think the whole Edward Snowden affair has been mostly empty calories. It would be nice if we could find a way to report the nutritious bits (suspicions from 2006 confirmed and with details added), take in as few empty calories as possible (Hong Kong to Russia to ???, but facts only, no speculation allowed) and avoid noxious chemicals, flavor enhancers like the MSG in the Doritos (omg omg Snowdon is a TRAITOR, omg omg he's a HERO). The Asiana story, too. Something happened, and we'll find out what if we're interested.

Now's when I get to play the Old Guy card. These sorts of stories didn't blow up like this back when people read actual physical newspapers. Reading a newspaper obliges you to put some effort into finding what you want to read, maybe even getting two papers, while noting the totality of what's there in the one you have. It's true that the layout of the page can cause you to miss some and read others, but you can train yourself to be more careful. That brings to mind the day when my roommate, who, unlike me at the time, had actual newsroom experience, was reading the copy of the San Francisco Chronicle we got each morning. "Huh. Break-in at Democratic headquarters in Washington. Page 6. This is going to be a big story." Which was right all the way down the line: there was enough information to report the story and, as facts became known over the next couple of days, John was proven right: the Watergate break-in was indeed a big story, and it got bigger. But that growth was organic and it wasn't surrounded by inept and uninformed commentary and speculation.

Yes, my children, he said avuncularly, it was a different mediascape back when I was a lad. And yes, I realize that in some ways this one is better: the Guardian this week reported that, due to the huge readership they've picked up in the U.S., whose newspapers are by and large dying, they're opening an American edition because people respect their reporting. They found that out from mammoth quantities of hits to their website coming from the States, which nobody could have done in the 1970s.

But overall, remember this. Doritos exist. And you don't have to eat them.

Remember, kids, this could be you!

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by Andrew Horn

Q: So far we’ve been talking about a lot of stylized work - how much does one need a Production Designer for realistic looking films?

I increasingly feel that locations are just an extension of the Production Designer’s palette. I might not have said that 5 years ago as much. You can’t just go out and stumble across some place and just start shooting. The skill of working with locations is that you’re taking a little piece from here and a little piece from here and trying to put it together seamlessly as if it were a set. For example, the house in “The Secret Garden” is put together from four different locations. And there is a great skill involved in making a location film work seamlessly, and making it appear to be a coherent world and consistent space, so the story flows seamlessly through it and it works.

"The Crow: City of Angels", directed by Tim Pope

Q: Are you as concerned with camera and lighting in a location film?

Sure. To the point of going to a location with a compass to make sure the windows face the right way. You do it differently, but in the “The Crow: City of Angels” -which was very much a location based film, though it was very stylized - we made all sorts of decisions, we color coded the lighting according to which part of the world you were in, we removed all the cars from all the streets that weren’t between 1979 and 1983 and we added a ton of broken glass to the streets, we sort of took over the location and made it into a set basically.

Q: How much would a location film be manipulated, being naturalistic?

Again you manipulate all of it all the time. And I think a lot of the look of what you do is controlled by what you eliminate as opposed to what you add. A lot of the time it’s cleaning the frame up and locations are naturally chaotic and even though we are not making a stylized film, films are iconic every environment you used and every setting you use is there to tell a story and so it has a very iconic role. In any film whether it’s Godard or the French New Wave style which is essentially just go out there and grab it, it’s still all working on a metaphorical level at some point, so I’m imagining that we’re going to go into these locations and first of all you’re framing very specifically, just out of frame to the left or right may be something that would completely mess up the frame if you allowed it to creep in so you’re finding very specific views. You may have to build a wall to block a view, or paint a wall, or knock a wall down to control the look, but ultimately what we’ll be trying to do is make a series of icons that represent different characters in the film.

Q: What made Production Design come more forward in recent years?

I’m not sure if it ever wasn’t there. There was a period, even after William Cameron Menzies, where the Production Designer still wasn’t recognized - (even with only an Art Director credit) I think that’s just a matter of semantics, at some point there is always a person who takes that role. I think there’s a clearly defined role now, in that the Production Designer can’t work without an Art Director and the Art Director can’t work without a Production Designer, it goes back to a sort of gaffer-DP relationship and they sort of support each other and are necessary to each other.

In a movie like “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” it’s a very complicated logistic film and rather large, the pyramid within the design department would have a Production Designer and two Supervising Art Directors and then six Art Directors and those Art Directors would have two set designers working for them probably. Things would be split up into sets because there are half a dozen key sets and essentially each key set was assigned an art director. And so my job would be to look to what each of the Art Directors were doing within those sets in a broad sense to make sure things stay consistent and then answering questions all the way down the line, not only the set design but also the colors and textures of the surfaces and how they’re dressed. It filters [down] in an almost military way through the art directors [who are then] supervised by the two Supervising Art Directors who split the job in two and who are more responsible for budgeting.

Ultimately the Production Designer is responsible for making sure that the design can be built for the money, but the maintenance of the money day-to-day, on a set by set basis, is the Art Director’s job. It’s almost corporate in a way on a large film, there are very specific roles assigned to each position.

"The Lady From Shanghai", directed by Orson Welles

Q: Someone like Kubrick was almost already working as a Production Designer or even Welles on something like “Lady from Shanghai” - how different are directors in approaching the Production Designer?

There are two or three directors I’ve worked with who come from a visual background, like Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton or David Fincher - and specifically in the case of Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton, they come from creating their own sets and animation and the way their mind works involves a great deal of control over the sets and the look of the film. Steven Spielberg - working on “The Terminal” - is different, he doesn’t particularly mind what the set is going to look like, as long as the set works for the script or the story. And you get the feeling that you could give him a number of different sets and as long as the story could exist within the set, he’d accept it. In many ways I’ve had a lot of freedom working with him because once you get the ground rules worked out, he’s not that interested in the details. He wants you to do your job and provide a set that’s going to work.

Model of the´set of "The Terminal", directed by Steven Spielberg

With Terry Gilliam I would put a foam core model of what we built in front of him and he would take out a knife and start cutting it up and have a very clear idea of how he wants it to be changed. With Tim Burton, there were some sets he was very clear about and some where he was perfectly happy for me to develop it, and he would get more specific once he was standing on the set. Tim, I think is like David Fincher, his degree of control comes through the lens when he’s standing there, so he’ll move the branch or shift the vase one or two inches or take the bed out and put in a chair and it’s more of a dressing of the set.

"Fight Club", directed by David Fincher

So the Production Designer’s job is to adapt to the director you have on every film and I never expect it to be the same twice. I think my job is to be as adaptable as possible. I like directors who push me and have a very strong idea of what they want, and I can push back and maybe enlarge their ideas or give them more choices that extend the idea.

This is part 2 of 3. Check out part 1 here.

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par Julien MARSA

Pour célébrer les 50 ans de la disparition du metteur en scène japonais Yasujirō Ozu, Carlotta Films a eu la bonne idée de ressortir au mois de juillet deux de ses plus grands films, « Voyage à Tokyo » (1953) et « Le Goût du saké » (1963). Et pour couronner le tout, le distributeur français a sorti de son chapeau un film inédit et restauré pour l'occasion. Ce film – première œuvre parlante du maître japonais – est intitulé « Le Fils unique » (1936) et constitue une nouvelle découverte dans la filmographie très prolifique (une cinquantaine de films en 30 ans !) d'Ozu. Malheureusement, beaucoup de ses films, et notamment des muets, ont disparus.

Avec le recul, force est de constater que le regard du cinéaste n'a en rien perdu de sa justesse, et que moult de ses observations constituent encore un motif de questionnement au sein de nos sociétés. Ces trois films sont largement consacrés au terrain de prédilection d'Ozu – les rapports qui régissent   les structures familiales – et marquent des avancées significatives dans le discours et le ton adopté par le réalisateur nippon.

Le Fils unique

En 1923, dans la province de Shinshu, une veuve travaillant dans une fabrique de soie décide d'envoyer son fils unique à Tokyo afin qu'il puisse acquérir une meilleure éducation. Treize ans plus tard, elle se décide enfin à lui rendre visite et réalise qu'il ne mène pas la vie qu'elle a rêvée pour lui. Sans le sou, il vit en banlieue avec une femme et un enfant en bas âge que sa mère apprendra à côtoyer durant son séjour dans la capitale. La trame dramatique du film tient en un résumé limpide, dont la simplicité n'empêche pourtant pas de développer toute une gamme de nuances bouleversantes. S'intéressant aux plus démunis, Ozu trouve dans ce récit toutes les potentialités qui permettent de mesurer l'écart entre les aspirations de chacun et la fatalité d'une réalité soumise aux lois des classes sociales. Avec une économie de moyen qui restera une constante tout au long de sa carrière, Ozu se fait le relais d'une détresse profonde, d'où surgit parfois la beauté la plus éclatante – celle de la solidarité et de l'entraide. Le film tourne autour de la figure silencieuse de ce petit enfant constamment endormi aux côtés de ses parents, et promis à un avenir des plus incertains. Son silence préfigure le trou noir dans lequel le film s'engouffre progressivement : celui d'une vie passée en un clin d'œil, configurée par l'âpreté du travail et rattrapée par l'espoir d'une existence plus confortable, qui sans cesse échappe aux personnages.

Voyage à Tokyo

Dans « Voyage à Tokyo » – réalisé presque vingt ans plus tard –, le cinéaste jette un regard moins désespéré mais tout aussi lucide sur le comportement de ses compatriotes. Un couple de personnes âgées rend visite à leurs enfants dans la capitale japonaise. Si l'accueil semble à la hauteur de leurs attentes, il peine pourtant à masquer à quel point les deux parents sont considérés comme un fardeau au sein de la famille. Avec toujours cette même finesse d'observation, Ozu construit un récit qui donne toute sa place aux multiples personnages, élaborant pour chacun, par petites touches, un portrait d'une clarté étonnante. Et si l'irrespect des enfants envers ceux qui les ont élevés se développe avec une violente hypocrisie, la supposée bonté naturelle des parents trouve elle aussi sa limite lorsqu'elle vire à l'ignorance béate. Ce sont deux générations renvoyées dos à dos, incapables de se comprendre ou de s'accorder sur des valeurs qui sont parfaitement étrangères aux uns comme aux autres. Une façon de mettre en scène l'usure du temps, qui sépare les êtres de manière parfois irréconciliable. Heureusement, un personnage de belle-fille (interprété par Setsuko Hara, une des actrices fétiches d'Ozu) viendra sauver l'honneur et prêter attention à la discrétion et l'humilité des parents.

Le Goût du saké

Le dernier film réalisé par le réalisateur japonais vient achever une certaine forme de mue, puisque celui-ci revêt les apparats d'une comédie satirique sur l'égoïsme des hommes et leur manque de considération pour les femmes. Narrant l'histoire d'un père veuf (interprété par Chishu Ryu, autre acteur fétiche, qui jouera dans 52 des 54 films du cinéaste !), cadre dans une entreprise, et qui vit seul avec son fils et sa fille, « Le Goût du saké » est une sorte de ballet qui, de bars en restaurants, met à rude épreuve les habitudes masculines dans une société japonaise en pleine mutation. Devant  répondre à un collègue qui lui propose un mari pour sa fille, ce père va d'abord faire la sourde oreille – par peur de se retrouver seul avec son fils – avant de faire volte-face. Mais c'est plus par bonne conscience que par assentiment pour cette nécessité qu'il entreprendra la démarche. Cette comédie grinçante et noire surprend parfois en regard de la filmographie d'Ozu, mais se fait en même temps le témoin de la lente évolution du regard du maître. Car même si c'est finalement la même détresse qui se cache derrière la dureté des existences et la vanité des hommes, il y a aussi quelques éclaircies, quelques beaux moments qui laissent entrevoir la beauté du monde et de l'humanité.

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by Andrew Horn

Alex McDowell

Q: Do you ever go so far as to do the story boarding for actual scenes?

I feel like I’m increasingly doing that, but not physically, I find that I’m putting pencil to paper less and less.  I think my day breaks down into about 1 hour of design and about 9 hours of answering questions.  So the design part of the process gets really compressed because it’s just logistics all day long.  So I work closely with story board artists and Pre-Vis which is essentially 3D story boarding.  And I think a lot of what I do now is that I set up a story board sequence for the director to look at, I give the story board artist information they need about the setting and what’s happening in that setting, make a certain number of suggestions about what could happen in that sequence - in the director’s absence, if you like, which is something that happens quite a lot at the beginning of the production - and then the director makes his changes and hones it and makes it more specific.

Set of "Upside Down" by Juan Diego Solanas, with green screen

Still from "Upside Down"

Q: With CGI having such an increasing role now, does this make more or less responsibility for a Production Designer?

More responsibility for sure.  Then there’s been a period where the Production Designer was sort of cut out of the visual effects process as much as anything because it’s technically very complex. And there was a certain way of working that tended to pick up after the production had finished; the designer traditionally stops at the end of shooting and the director would then go to the visual effects house and start working with them. And then through the 80s and into the mid 90s I think that was the norm in visual effects. What changed, was that equipment, hardware and software, became cheaper and cheaper and therefore more and more accessible.  So you’re  no longer reliant of millions of dollars of equipment set up in a visual effects house before you can even start talking about CGI.

Q: But there’s also CGI that’s very subtle, not creating whole landscapes but might be just manipulation of the image as part of post production.  How involved would you be in something like that?

Generally my job still finishes at the end of production.  But the thing that really changed, and it’s partly that we as Production Designers are driving it to change, is that the post production planning is occurring earlier and earlier and so, what I am really working hard to enable within a production, is that we set up the art department in such a way that the visual effects design is just part of my process.

"Minority Report" by Steven Spielberg

I designed equally with pencil design as with 2D designers and 3D designers and with “Minority Report” it changed - that was the turning point with me. By the end of “Minority Report” we had a fully digital art department and we designed the vehicles, the hovership, the spiders, and all of those things we designed and animated in the art department and passed those on to the visual effects house. And what was more important, we designed the visual effects sets - the look of the city and the big matte paintings were put together and packaged for Industrial Light And Magic and they took it over, but using our design work.

It almost doubles the amount of work for the designer when you’re in an effects heavy film, but the important thing is that I don’t see there’s a difference between a virtual set and a real set for the designer.  And a lot of the time I think designers tended to let go once the physical set is finished, beyond that with the visual effects, it’s like whatever happens happens. And I think that is now in the process of changing fundamentally and Production Designers are now understanding and have the tools to fully design CGI sets.

Q: Is that taking on more responsibility of the director or is the whole picture is just broadening?

I think you’re giving the director more of a full control of his picture.  I think there’s probably been an artificial role in visual effects of having the director say oh I think the set should look like this because there was nobody else to say it. You know, the sort of the George Lucas position on Star Wars. But I think that’s unusual and I think it’s a big drag for the director to have to do that.  It’s not his job.

Q: How did you get into Production Design?

I didn’t have any plan to end up in film, I was a painter in London.  And I left art school in ‘76 or ‘77 as a painter and I started to design record covers because my friends were all in bands, and then those bands started wanting music videos because we were right at the beginning of the music video phenomenon.  And so I started designing those and it was really just a series of sideways leaping accidents where I would go from an art directing a record sleeve to designing a video for the same band.

And then the directors that I worked on the videos with started making commercials and so I started production designing commercials for those same directors.  And I worked with David Fincher for a year doing both music videos and commercials, and then that group of directors started getting head-hunted for movies and they took a lot of their designers with them. I didn’t actually work with Fincher for a little while, but I did end up doing "Fight Club" with him and I did “The Crow” with Alex Proyas, who was a big commercials director, and his first film was “The Crow”.

For me, commercials was how I got to a position of strength in film as far as visual effects because through music videos and commercials I was so intimately involved in planning blue screen shots, planning for 3D, breaking down a 30 second commercial where there’s 45 separate story-board frames for 30 seconds and every frame is analyzed for an hour and broken down into like 3 different elements between live action and miniature and visual effects for every frame. In a complicated commercial you learn a lot about visual effects.  It’s a deep learning, very fast. And so it was fortuitous to go from complicated commercials into less complicated films and have that knowledge, and then develop a relationship with the visual effects department as the films get more complicated with the language already under your belt.

Actually the logistics of film are not that complicated or out of reach, but what’s [needed] is intelligence, the sensibility to make films, where the designer has the language and intelligence to work with director on an equal level and support a director in what they want emotionally from a film - breaking down and visualizing a film in that sort of way, rather than just hiring a set designer who facilitates what a director wants but doesn’t really support a director, or isn’t putting something into the mix.

"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" by Tim Burton - high budgeted logistic design film

It’s very clear to me what my job is, whether it’s a low budget location based film for Anthony Mingella, or working with Tim Burton on a high budget logistic design film, my job remains the same in my view. It’s still about the visual frame of the film, a knowledge of the whole enormous breadth of choices that are out there for the production, and being sensitive to the needs of the story - and really supporting it in the best possible way.

Check out parts 1 and 2.

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Boy, it's hot out there! Hot enough that, if the following doesn't hold together as a unified essay, like I like it to most of the time, I'm going to blame the weather. Well, the weather and the fact that in the summertime there are huge periods when almost nothing happens. I realized this at my first (and last) newspaper gig, when it would be August and nobody was touring, nobody was in town, and yet I still had to come up with two columns a week. Those were the days!

Of course, the music business is always around to do stupid stuff, and this week's been no exception.

A problem the music business rarely has in the summertime anymore.

The big news this week is that a band called Atoms For Peace, which includes Radiohead's Thom Yorke, the band's producer, Nigel Godrich, and Red Hot Chili Pepper Flea, has pulled its catalogue from Spotify. So, depending on which article you read, has Radiohead. Or not. Atoms For Peace called what they did a "small meaningless rebellion," which must be ironic, because more people will read about it than have ever listened to Atoms For Peace, most likely. Me, for one. And apparently Pink Floyd, a band not lacking in name recognition, did the same thing, but were wooed back to the service somehow. Although I haven't been able to listen to them after they kicked Syd out of the band, I do pay attention to the way they treat their music. They were, for instance, opposed to selling their music on iTunes because they didn't want it broken up into iTunes' idea of "songs," and wanted the albums sold as entire works, which, indeed, they are, even if you think they're entirely pretentious works. And their name came up again in Godrich's statement to the press when he said "If people had been listening to Spotify instead of buying records in 1973… I doubt very much if [Dark Side of the Moon] would have been made."

His point, I hasten to add instead of noting that from an esthetic standpoint the nonexistence of Dark Side might not have been so terrible, is that Pink Floyd wasn't exactly burning up the charts with their releases until that record, which established them and made it possible for them to make many more records which also sold very well. In other words, they were, although they had several hits behind them and were very well-known on the London scene, still starting out as a commercial entity, and had enough money and support from their new record company to make another record without starving to death while they did it. And the measly royalties Spotify pays to people in that position today wouldn't have made that possible.

Naturally, Spotify, approached by the website (and apologists for all things tech) Tech Crunch, tried to play things down with a statement that said they were in the early stages of growth, that they were hoping to be perceived as "artist friendly," and that they'd already paid out $500 million to "rightsholders" and were on track to double that by year's end. The key word there, of course, is "rightsholders," which can mean all kinds of things, including publishing companies, record companies, and other entities that may or may not be artists. Way down in the Tech Crunch story, the site admits that "Spotify has never confirmed officially how the full economics of its platform works."

Gee, I hope you were sitting down when you read that.

But one thing I'm willing to bet is that the algorhythm by which payments are determined isn't a one-for-one that says X amount of money for each play. We have computers powerful enough to keep metadata on every telephone call placed on this planet since, oh, 2008 or so, but Spotify, I'm willing to bet, doesn't have one programmed to pay off a low-earning artist with only a couple of hundred plays a year. It's like the joke about performing rights societies and how they work: "Your song gets 1000 plays during the year and Paul McCartney gets a dollar." That's proportional payment for you. Theoretically, this shouldn't happen. Practically, though, it does. And why?

Same problem I've complained about since, oh, forever: overproduction. There's more music out there than anyone has time to listen to. Less of it is worth devoting that time to, too, as far as I can tell. So Spotify may not be 100% of the problem. They seem to be making a lot of dough, though, so my guess is it's enough of the problem that we should be glad Mssrs. Yorke, Godrich, & co. brought up the issue.

* * *

A few more items to round out the week.

Universal Records, the company that owns the rights to most everything recorded before last Tuesday, has announced that it's starting up a vinyl-only reissue label, which, this CMU article notwithstanding, is called UVinyl, not Repressed Records. Unfortunately. Where it really gets wacky, though, is they're crowdfunding it through this website. Yup. I said crowdfunding. Universal. For your financial support, you not only get the record, but rare art prints and other stuff.

* * *

And yet, the Guardian reports, this year is expected to break all sales records for singles. When reading this article, I'd like you to keep in mind that they're only talking about Great Britain, however. And it also verifies the triumph of the iTunes model that (they're back!) Pink Floyd so successfully resisted for so long. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. There was a time when almost nobody bought albums, and the record companies only released popular music on albums as a prestige item or with artists (Sinatra, say) who appealed to an older demographic. There are many who look back on those days as being something of a golden age which the coming of the more expensive pop music LP squelched. It was also the era when teenagers ruled pop music taste, and it's tempting to think that those days, too, are returning. Anyway, as figure-choked as the article is, it's worth musing about.

* * *

And (although it has nothing to do with music) I'll leave you with a sobering article that's nonetheless kind of optimistic. According to the UN, the damage to Timbuktu was a bit worse than reported, with approximately 4000 ancient manuscripts either destroyed or missing (I'm betting the black market in books is humming right about now), which amounts to approximately 10% of what was on hand before the extremists hit last year. The report also noted that damage to and destruction of ancient monuments was worse than had been thought. What's possibly good news is that some of the manuscripts that aren't there now may have been digitized, but we'll have to wait a while longer to find out.

Did you know that Berlin has a swimming pool that floats atop the Spree River? In the early 1900's, the Spree River used to be full of this type freshwater swimming pool known as swimming ships . Today, the 'Badeschiff'  bordering Kreuzberg is the only  swimming pool currently floating on the Spree  in Berlin. It is probably the most well-known swimming ship anywhere.

Berlin artist Susanne Lorenz, who studied in Braunschweig and at the Berlin University for the Arts, conceived this unique city project and carried it out together with the Spanish architects AMP (Artengo-Menis-Pastrana) in cooperation with architect Gil Wilk.

This is the perfect type of art project! It attracts fun-loving people of all ages and is beautiful to look from a distance and up close, AND it promotes healthy activity out in the sun. The Badeschiff Berlin is a stroke of genius!

The ship is open in the summer everyday from 8:00 am nd it costs 5 EUR to get in, but if you go late in the evening, it'll cost you only 2 EUR.

In the winter, the swimming ship becomes a swimming sauna! Surely a first anywhere in Germany. Maybe the world?

« Le Congrès », adapté du « Congrès de futurologie » de l'écrivain polonais Stanislas Lem (également auteur du « Solaris » qui a inspiré Tarkovski), a été présenté en mai dernier en ouverture de la Quinzaine des Réalisateurs à Cannes. L'accueil critique fut plutôt frais et mitigé. Il faut dire que la presse, et les spectateurs en général, attendaient beaucoup du nouveau film d'Ari Folman. Son précédent long-métrage, « Valse avec Bachir », était un témoignage des séquelles laissées par la l'intervention israélienne au Liban en 1982. Séquelles au sein de la propre psyché du réalisateur et de celle de ses compagnons de guerre, qu'il s'en va rencontrer 20 ans plus tard afin de retrouver un souvenir manquant, dont l'absence le trouble et le hante au plus haut point.

« Valse avec Bachir »

Afin d'orchestrer le retour de son souvenir et donner forme à ceux des autres, Folman avait fait appel à différentes techniques d'animation, prolongeant ainsi le sentiment irréel de replonger dans une période qui ne lui appartient plus. C'était donc une enquête documentaire qui se déroulait sous nos yeux telle une fiction policière, et dont le point aveugle – le souvenir manquant – resurgissait in fine sous la forme d'images bien réelles de l'époque du massacre de Sabra et Chatila.

Le mélange des registres d'image et de réalité sont donc des thématiques chères au cinéaste israélien, puisqu'il vient pousser encore plus loin cette réflexion dans « Le Congrès ». L'actrice américaine Robin Wright y joue son propre rôle – ou plutôt celui d'une projection alternative, de ce qu'elle aurait pu devenir, et qui fait pourtant appel à certaines vérités sur ses choix de carrière et son parcours cinématographique. Elle vit retirée dans un décor stupéfiant : un hangar à proximité d'un aéroport envahi par les cerfs-volants de son fils Aaron. Ce fils, c'est le nerf de la guerre du film. Atteint du syndrome d'Usher, ce dernier voit sa vue et son ouïe se dégrader progressivement, promis à une cécité et une surdité totale. Ce qui « empêche » Robin Wright de mener à bien sa carrière, c'est son attachement pour ce fils, le désir maternel de le protéger avant qu'il ne sombre dans une obscurité d'où l'on ne pourra plus communiquer avec lui.

« Le Congrès » avec Robin Wright

Dans le même temps, son agent lui fait une offre étrange qui sonne comme une planche de salut. L'offre ultime, le pacte faustien par excellence, puisqu'un studio hollywoodien lui propose de scanner son corps, son visage, ses réactions, afin de s'approprier l'image de l'actrice. En échange d'une grosse somme d'argent, celle-ci ne sera plus autorisée à tourner, et le studio pourra faire ce que bon lui semble du personnage « Robin Wright ». Toute cette partie est tournée en images « réelles », mais auréolée d'une lumière laiteuse qui en fait la matière première d'un fantasme de cinéma, et qui va se prolonger en un deuxième acte prolifique en visions affolantes.

La bascule se fait à travers une scène remarquable et profondément bouleversante, où Robin Wright, au centre du dispositif de scanner, doit reproduire une séquence d'émotions. Et ce sont les flashs de la machine, comme autant d'appareils photos qui crépitent, qui lui arrachent la dernière parcelle d'humanité qu'elle pourra offrir au public. La dépossession de sa propre image, la transformation du corps en quelque chose d'immatériel trouvent alors un aboutissement logique lorsque « Le Congrès » se mue en film d'animation.

Cette première partie plutôt sobre laisse alors place à un maelstrom d'images nourries de multiples références (cinématographiques ou d'actualité), où Folman laisse libre cours à un déchaînement visuel qui va, par paliers successifs, s'enrichir d'un propos plus politique. Inutile d'aller plus loin dans la description – chacun verra midi à sa porte – d'un univers vibrant de questions métaphysiques sur le devenir de l'être humain à l'ère de la dématérialisation. Mais ce qui fait du « Congrès » un film absolument poignant, c'est qu'il ne prend pas ces questionnements de haut, et les raccorde au désir simple d'une mère de retrouver son fils. Objectif qui nous guide tel un fil rouge à travers les visions terrassantes qu'offre le film. Appuyé par la très belle partition du compositeur allemand Max Richter, « Le Congrès » est par moments tout simplement bouleversant.

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B-Boys in Berlin. Breakdance! Breakdancing as an urban art form is not dead - it is alive, kicking and spinning and making folks happy. We took visitors around to the sites in Berlin Mitte on the sunny, lovely weekend and we came across a FREE show at Pariser Platz. These guys danced their hearts out - much to the delight of the crowd that gathered and filled the hat with coins when it was passed around after their demonstration. At least one of guys is associated with the award-winning Flying Steps crew . That looks like Sebi from Crew B-Town Allstars there in the background with the glasses.

Their show was AWESOME! Thanks guys!

Here's another dancer - they were great personalities and fun to watch.

COLUMBUS, OHIO -- James Jefferson, 42, has been a postman for twenty years, and says it's the first time it's ever happened. As he was delivering letters to the house of the Stone family in the neighborhood he's served for the past five years, Frieda, their 8-year-old German Shepherd mix lunged at him and bit his ankle.

"It was embarrassing as much as anything," Jefferson said. "I've always gotten along swell with her, but I guess I surprised her as she was sleeping. Only bad thing about it was it made me late for the last part of my route." Linda Stone says she was as surprised as he was. "I honestly don't know what got into her. Of course I apologized, but James just waved the apologies off." "Hey, she's a dog. These things happen," said the veteran postman, who was treated for minor puncture wounds at Briarcliff Minor Emergency Center and released with a bandage. Mrs. Stone verified that the dog was current with all vaccinations.

Not Frieda. Source: Wikipedia

* * *

That's the kind of story you never see in the paper, which is why, according to one famous definition, news is "Man bites dog." (Insert your own hot-dog joke here. Millions have.) Of course, unless there's a rabies epidemic about, nobody in the mainstream media pays much attention to dog behavior. Sometimes dogs bite people. Sometimes people get up in arms about pit bulls. I once spent a couple of days with a Doberman that was trained to kill. That was no fun at all; she liked to lean her head on my lap and drool, so it constantly looked like I was wetting my pants.

So that may account for the virtual lack of reporting on a recent story from Norway, home of the notorious Pirate Bay treasure-trove of torrents, that reported that with the introduction of legit services like Spotify and Netflix, piracy of music and films has declined significantly. The attitude in Norway seems to be "hey, for a couple of bucks, you can get all this stuff anyway." There's also the fact that what you're getting is clean: torrents have been a major vector for the spread of viruses over the years, and you can pretty well assume Netflix isn't spreading any, nor is Spotify. Of course, neither is providing downloads, either, which has the added advantage of not cluttering up your hard drive with big movie files -- or small music files.

Nor is it just Norway. The Dutch, like the Norwegians, are notoriously law-abiding, but Spotify seems to have done its bit to bring down piracy there, too. I'm immediately suspicious of a site called Paid Content, but the stats in the story on Spotify in the Netherlands look good. The annotated graph for the One Direction release is particularly dramatic. I also like that they brought the case of Italy -- a much worse economy than the Netherlands -- into play at the end, just to show that maybe disposable income has a role in whether you pirate, stream, or buy. Hey, ya think?

But last week, I gave a lot of room to doubts about Spotify's payouts, and that controversy hasn't gone away, either. The Guardian this Sunday published an interesting conversation between Tim Ingham, who edits Music Week, Britain's top trade publication, and Johnny Lynch, who records as the Pictish Trail. As you might expect, Ingham has managed to drink a certain amount of kool-aid vis a vis the Brave New Digital World, and Lynch, as a struggling minor-league act just getting started, isn't having any of it. And his argument does make sense: when it comes to heavily-promoted, high-visibility acts like One Direction or Rihanna, both of whom show up in the Paid Content article, a service like Spotify is made to order, the equivalent of the big Top 40 station in a major city, only not a terrestrial signal and available in multiple countries at once: a band like One Direction comes out with a new record, and the fans know just where to find it right now, so of course they'll head to Spotify.

But here's the point: they're not going there to discover anything except what they already know. That is to say, they are already aware that they like One Direction, and they're inclined to want to hear the new record. The chances are excellent that they're not going to be shocked by what they find. That's not how the people who put these groups together and guide their careers want them to do. But none of those One Direction fans is going to find Pictish Trail (and what is it with these single artists giving themselves band names? I find it irritating and always have and no, I know about the Durutti Column, thanks, and that annoyed me 30 years ago, too), nor are a lot of other people, people who might actually be inclined to like Pictish Trail (really, is it so bad just to be known as Johnny Lynch?), going to find Lynch's music on Spotify -- even if it's there. In a way, he's more in competition with One Direction than he would have been in the pre-digital era. He's dependent on Spotify's algorithm to drive any listeners who don't already know he exists to his work. Of course, there is one place where One Direction, Rihanna, and Johnny "Pictish Trail" Lynch are equal: not getting a hell of a lot for their plays, no matter how many there are.

One thing's for certain, though: the record business certainly has changed. (Oops! Should have posted a dog-bites-man warning there!) A friend of mine sent me this form yesterday, which is apparently a trial balloon on the part of Sire Records (once the baliwick of the amiable Seymour Stein, now just a Warners brand) to see if it brings in talent. My favorite part is the bold-faced warning, "DO NOT contact anyone directly at the Record Label. Doing so will DISQUALIFY you from consideration." Considering how many A&R guys (talent scouts, essentially) I've known who've had to go into rehab after countless nights in bars looking at bands they were thinking of signing, that's a good thing. Considering that if this catches on, no A&R guy will ever have to leave his desk ever again, and that the sedentary lifestyle is as much a killer as alcoholism, maybe it's not such a good thing.

Oh, and don't forget that the Ward Report is brought to you by one of Europe's few streaming services, in case you've never looked at the other parts of this site. Streaming is catching on slowly here -- mainstream movies are impossible to find on demand -- but places like realeyz are showing that it can be done, and done well.

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« Le Congrès » d'Ari Folman, dont nous avons parlé ici la semaine dernière, partage la même inquiétude que « Paprika » (2006) du regretté cinéaste japonais Satoshi Kon. Presque trois ans après sa mort, l'occasion est donc belle de revenir sur son dernier long-métrage, et de rendre hommage à son génie visuel et métaphorique. Car le réalisateur de « Perfect Blue », « Millenium actress » et « Tokyo godfathers » s'intéresse à des thèmes similaires au film d'Ari Folman : célébrité, image, projection dans le futur, totalitarisme. Si le trait de Satoshi Kon est bien différent de celui de Folman, ils partagent pourtant une même affection pour l'emphase visuelle, la construction de décors oniriques, l'élaboration de récits anticipant la chute de l'homme face au virtuel. Il n'y a qu'à  lire le point de départ de « Paprika ».

Au Japon, dans un futur proche, des psychiatres testent une machine baptisée DC mini qui permet de pénétrer les rêves de leurs patients en vue de les soigner de leurs psychoses ou phobies. Lorsque l’un des prototypes est volé, le docteur Atsuko Chiba décide de s’aventurer dans l’univers des rêves, sous l’apparence d’une alter ego sexy nommée Paprika, pour découvrir qui s’est emparé de la machine. L’inventeur du projet et plusieurs de ses collègues perdent la raison. En parallèle, un policier qui suivait cette thérapie doit se plonger dans l’un de ses propres rêves afin de découvrir la vérité sur son passé.
À travers ce film, Satoshi Kon s’attache à décrire les dérives de la science lorsqu’elle en vient à violer l’intimité de l’être humain. La machine volée finira par prendre le pas sur le ravisseur qui se retrouvera enfermé dans son propre rêve. Peu à peu, tous les hommes se trouvant en contact avec la DC mini seront aspirés dans un rêve qui les amènera à perdre toute notion d'identité : ce qui existe de conscient dans leur cerveau sera envahit par un inconscient qui s’avère être le plus fort. Satoshi Kon assimile d’ailleurs cela à une forme de terrorisme lorsque l’on s’aperçoit qu’il y a bien une personne de chair et de sang qui contrôle cette dérive du rêve.

Le parcours du policier, qui sera le seul, avec Paprika, à pouvoir endiguer ce processus de débordement du rêve dans la réalité, se traduit par une quête personnelle (tout comme Robin Wright, à la recherche de son fils, dans « Le Congrès »). En effet, ce dernier fait un rêve récurrent dans lequel il est poursuivi par un personnage inconnu. Lorsqu'il était plus jeune, le policier voulait devenir cinéaste mais un événement mystérieux l’en a empêché. Depuis, il est hanté par le souvenir d’un ami avec qui il faisait de petits films et qu’il a été obligé de laisser tomber. Le cinéaste devenu policier, voici donc l'une des postures engagées par Satoshi Kon, qui se fait à la fois prophète d'une dérive et gardien d'une certaine forme de l'humilité de l'homme.

Ainsi, dans ce rêve récurrent qui hante le policier, chaque saynète est assimilable à un genre de film : film d’époque, film à suspense, film d’aventure. Étrange mise en abîme du cinéma qui permet à Kon de retranscrire de façon simple et connue de tous un inconscient qui ne l’est pas. Le policier effectue sa thérapie grâce à Paprika, sorte d’entité onirique et à la fois double du docteur Chiba, mais lorsqu’il ne rêve pas il peut la retrouver sur un site internet. Le web est ainsi tissé de la même toile que le rêve, tout comme la réalité se trouve contaminée par des abcès oniriques. Et l'ironie du sort est encore plus grande car elle se traduit par le trait  de Kon – étrangement sophistiqué et pourtant d'une grande clarté – sans avoir recours à deux types d'animation différents qui permettrait de distinguer le réel et l'irréel. On plonge alors dans cette matière comme dans un songe dément et chaotique, un cauchemar sans issue.

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This is Joe King Carrasco's amp. It was stolen recently in Austin.

So far, so unremarkable. Equipment theft in Austin, which prides itself as "the live music capital of the world," is big business.

I'm not sure why equipment theft gets me so angry. Possibly it's because the biggest score I ever made, an original bakelite National double-8 electric lap steel guitar in the original case with the original instruction book I got for $175 in a Cincinnati pawnshop in the early '70s, was stolen from me in 1975 by someone who walked into my house, put on my hat and my jacket, and picked up my tape-recorder and guitar case and walked out the front door with it. A little over a month later I was in L.A. seeing some act at the Roxy, and, in the post-set "jam," one of the Eagles came out on stage with my guitar and demonstrated that he didn't play it any better than me. An attempt to talk to this gentleman afterwards was met by, shall we say, fairly severe resistance by his roadie. I didn't require hospitalization.

I've known Joe King, too, for ages. When I came to Austin in 1979 to interview with the daily paper for a job that I eventually got, my old friend Joe Nick Patoski picked me up at the old airport and jammed a cassette into his car deck. "Here's what Kris is doing now," he said, as a cheesy Farfisa, played, yes, by his long-time girlfriend, was joined by some other instruments and a crazy vocal. As I settled into my job, I went to see Joe King Carrasco and the Crowns at every opportunity. I stayed up late one night putting copies of their first single into plastic bags with tortillas decorated by Billy Gibbons (a fan) as part of their first press kit. They put out an album, and then they signed with Stiff Records in London, amd went on one of the Stiff Tours of Europe. Joe King and Kris posed for a subway ad for Jose Cuervo tequila in London. And, after the band's show in Paris, Joe Nick, who'd been managing them since the start, married Kris on the Pont Neuf. The band returned to the States and got a record deal with MCA. While they were recording their album, a little guy walked into the studio and asked if he could help out with vocals. Since it was Michael Jackson (who was recording Bad just down the hall) Joe King said yes. To the best of my knowledge Jackson never did anything like this with any other artist. It didn't help, though. Joe King remained a live act, and eventually moved to Mexico, the original Crowns having gone their own ways. But two years ago, they reunited and now play occasional gigs together.

Anyway, I don't know what band Joe was using when this theft occurred, and yeah, I saw his post about it, with the picture above, on Facebook. Then, yesterday, there was another chapter.

Joe's friend Mike Blue was, for some reason, inside Mustang Pawn on South Congress in Austin and spotted Joe's amp. He told Joe, and Joe posted the following on Facebook:

After receiving a call that my amp was spotted, I found my stolen amp at the Mustang Pawn Shop on South Congress in Austin, TX. It was on the shelf with a for sale sign on it. The manager quickly rushed it to the back of the store, refusing to allow me to take a picture of it. I called the Austin Police Department and was told to call the office of the detectives and they only answer their phone Monday - Friday. If anyone has any insight on how to get my amp before it heads off in another direction, please let me know.

My lizard brain reached all the way back to my steel and the Eagle, and I posted the picture with Joe's caption and said

This pisses me off from 7000 miles away. The excuses law-enforcement have offered are pathetic. Austin musicians, take note of this place.

And wheels ground into action. I suggested a musicians' flash mob. I also suggested a picket line. I got a lot of enthusiastic support for these ideas.

I was wrong.

Among my couple of thousand Facebook friends is one Ray "Lumpy" Holland, a gentleman without much hair on the top of his head, but who more than makes up for it with a gigantic white crop of it growing out of his face. I don't really have much idea who he is, but he did post something of interest:

I managed a pawnshop for several years..there are rules and laws that tell pawnshops what to do with stolen goods. they take it off the shelf and put it into the back for a reason..until they are informed through the police the amp is stolen the person who sold/got a loan on any merchandise has privacy rights as far as the public is concerned. the police are the pathway to Joe getting his amp back. the cops will retrieve the amp and the pawnshop will forfeit the money they loaned/bought it with. the people who sold/borrowed on the amp had to use a valid I.D. so they know who it was. Pawnshops help a lot of people get their stuff back. a pawnshop in real life is not like the "movie" pawnshops you see where they are always fencing stolen merchandise

Ray went on to detail the laws governing pawnshops in Texas, as well as just exactly what Joe had to do to get his stuff back. Joe had a phone number on his Facebook page to call if you found the missing amp, so, having free phone calls to the States, I dialled it. I got his manager Kim Galusha, and she passed me to Joe. I gave them all the info and they took notes. About an hour later, the number was down, and Joe posted

Fender Deluxe AMP update: The Austin Police Department Detectives have been in contact with Mustang Pawn today. There is a police hold on the amp. I should be getting my amp back - will know more on Monday.

 

But the story's not over. My post had been picked up and spread around. The outrage continued. Boycotts were threatened. I certainly wouldn't like to be the guy who runs Mustang Pawn. I spent some time chasing down shared posts and urging them to check Joe's wall -- or mine -- for the latest. Because the pawnshop wouldn't have been able to take the amp in the first place without someone presenting a valid ID, and since computers make it so easy to check these things, and because Joe and his manager have all the relevant paperwork showing his ownership and the serial number and all, this case would seem to be closed. And it turns out that Joe King once sat in with Ray Holland's band the Sardines. Small world.

UPDATE LATE MONDAY NIGHT: Joe's amp is back thanks to Austin Police officer Todd Myers and Detective Goldman, and he'll be back in action Saturday night at Strange Brew, for those of you in Austin.

Our Hero, Ray "Lumpy" Holland

But there's one more thing to add here, if you'll just stick with me for another minute. In recent months, for good reason, the Internet and the news media have been outraged by the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin verdict, and with good reason, it would seem. In fact, the only people I know who weren't outraged by the verdict were...lawyers.

I once sat on a jury. A young woman had gone into Macy's and walked out with a very expensive dress. She was intercepted as she left and was now being tried. What she was being tried for, oddly enough, was burglary. And, as I found out, on that jury, "burglary" in the state of California means entering a premises with the intent of committing a crime. Now, if you find a stranger in your living room with your silver in a sack and the picture window busted, it's not hard to figure that he's not supposed to be there and entered with the intention of committing a crime. But we had no proof as to what this woman was thinking. After all, lots of women go into Macy's every day. Very few of them leave without paying for the dress they're carrying. Had she been charged with shoplifting or larceny or something, the decision might have been different: she was the very picture of a junkie, and she had a criminal record. She might very well have gone to Macy's with the intention of shoplifting, but she said she didn't and no one could prove otherwise. I'm sure she was back in court not long after that, but we let her walk.

As did the jury in Florida. The lawyers I know looked at the case with interest and concluded that, like my dress shoplifter, Zimmerman had been incompetently charged. There are a lot more nuances, of course, than there were in my case. But essentially the jury did the only thing they could have done, unfortunately.

What I'm trying to say here is that just as social media can bring justice, it can also fan flames of outrage that are misinformed. It may well be that Mustang Pawn is a fencing operation, but we have no proof at all, and, since they've been in business forever, they probably aren't. And I certainly have my opinion about George Zimmerman, as I'm sure you have yours. But we live in a society of laws, and most of the time it's best if we at least deal with them first, and the best way to do that is to filter out the noise and stick to the facts.