Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Just last night I watched the movie Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind directed by Michel Gondry. Although it wasn’t a movie I would suggest all watch, it was a beautiful film with fascinating editing and camera work. The movie is basically a story about losing the love of your life, and permanently erasing the memory from your mind. All memories of said person are erased, but it seems that even with these memories gone the people find their way back to one another. Now it’s while the protagonist is getting the memories of Clementine erased that the most interesting footage is. The thing I loved most about how this film was shot and edited is that it really does give off the dreamy feel. It’s like you feel as though you’ve literally been sucked into his memories, and in a way it makes you feel like an intruder. One of my absolute favorite parts is towards the end. It’s the furthest memory he has of her which means that soon all memories will be. They’re in a house in Montauk and she’s trying to get him to stay the night. But soon the memory begins to fall apart, as does the house in which they’re standing. The surroundings of the couple begin to crumble to the ground and sand begins filling the rooms. All the while they’re discussing why he hadn’t just stayed the night in the real life version of this event. I like it so much because it’s really well done how they’re carrying on their conversation while everything falls apart around them, and it’s just a perfect representation of their whole relationship. Also the use of dark lighting where only he is in what looks like a flashlights light is brilliant. It gives the illusion that we are fading away from the memories as well, makes you feel closer to him and more sympathy. You’re trying so hard to see what’s going on because she is also in fact starting to feel more blind to the memory. To watch it click here. The protagonist is continuously trying to sabotage the whole erasing process because he realizes he doesn’t want to lose his memories of her. He does this by escaping into other memories, which the whole sequence of this occurrence is also beautifully done. The way they have the memories become one another is perfect. Click here to watch an example of this. There are also a lot of closeups to add to the intimacy. The closeup shots bring you closer to their love, and closer to the fact that you’re in his memories. It allows you to feel as close as he did. If you pay close enough attention every little detail of the film is symbolism. There are so many details to this film that I could watch it multiple times, and still discover something new. For instance in one memory of them in Barns and Noble they’re standing amongst the isles of books, and as they talk all of the covers of the books begin to turn white. That is how you know she’s about to disappear from the memory. The details of the background change and shift. Click here to see that scene. Every camera shot and every cut and edit is so perfectly timed in this film that I’ve fallen in love with it. There’s so much thought that went into every shot, I mean from those two clips alone you can see how they worked out the lighting, and the camera shots to make you feel more personal. Most of the shots are on her, to make you see from his perspective more. Or shots from places where it almost feels like your spying on their intimate moments…which you are. 

Metallica - Enter Sandman [Official Music Video]

Aside from being the Metallica song most people know about, the video for it is just as famous. The editing purposefully uses jump cuts to create a sense of disorder, chaos or anxiousness. The rapid transitioning between the choreographed story, the elderly sand man and the still shots of the band further intensifies the experience. The song's contents are of nightmares and the editing in the video is an editing professor's worst nightmare. The jump cuts get progressively more erratic and seizure inducing as the vocals kick in. It almost becomes impossible to distinguish who is the subject of the shot as the stills transition rapidly and the transparency varies from frame to frame. In regards to the main plot of the video, it is edited to follow the normal sleep cycle. The closeup of the child praying before tucking into bed transitions to the nightmare under way where the boy is drowning. As he is running out of air, the story fades to a medium shot of the character running on a mountain road. The video quickly transitions between this and the still shots of the band members before focusing solely on the guitar as the solo begins. Building to the climax of the solo, the running man transitions to an establishing shot of a roof in the city. From the Point of View of the subject, it appears they are running along the edge. It appears the character believes they are Spider Man as they try to jump to the next building. Upon realizing they are doomed, they look down to see the bed in the alleyway and the POV shot continues on the trip downward. The falling continues as the solo gets its second wind and transitions between the fall and shots of the boy having the nightmare weave in and out of our attentive gaze. As the breakdown of the song begins, we are given a shot of the sandman having his own nightmares in bed. The video continues this rhythmic pattern for the remainder of the song's duration. I would find plugging this into Avid will prove to be very insightful and fun to analyze frame by frame.

I love this scene because it is filmed in such a way where you feel as if you are in the battle right besides hector and a chillies. The music after hector dies and the faces on his family members and wife that couldn't look when hector fell really shows the grief and huge loss that all of troy felt.

Sound

Sound plays an important aspect in film. Throughout the history of film sound has played a part one way or another. Even in the silent era films had some sort of backing track. Music plays a huge part in sound. Music stimulates emotions through either lyrics or the composition of the instruments. Using music to help convey the emotion of a scene is a technique that is both effective, and has been used throughout the history of film. Along with music sound effects and dialogue are an essential part of making a movie both interesting and believable. Imagine watching a movie with a car speeding by and you didn't hear anything. It would take away from the drama of the scene, and it would make the scene far less believable. Film is about taking a viewer into another world. They follow the lives of another human or creature, and through the film are taken away from their reality. If you didn't make the film realistic enough to convince the viewer of this other world then you have failed the audience. We paid extra attention to David Lynch in our last class. He just so happens to be a director I am quite fond of and had studied in a class the previous week. David Lynch believes that sound is 50% of a movie and is well known for his excellent sound. He uses the perfect mix of all types of sounds. He pays special attention to ambient noise in his movie, which is was usually helps set the tone of his films. He has an ambient noise play throughout Eraser Head which helps give every scene an unsettling tone. Even in his college days Lynch paid close attention to sound, and had his creepy fascinating way of filmmaking. There's a video he made called The Alphabet when he was in college. It was a statement piece about his disliking for the educational system and how he felt they forced education down your throat. If you haven't seen it I suggest you do so. The Alphabet .It's a very terrifying piece, but it's the sounds in the piece that really make the whole thing come together. From the strange moans, to the children's voices wording the alphabet, and the very windy ambient sound in the back. I feel without any of these sounds the piece would lose a lot of the emotion it’s trying to convey. I feel if you can close your eyes and get at least the gist of what the movie is about from the sound alone, then it's been done right. It's important to know when there are too many sounds going on though. Which is why there is the 3 worlds of sound. Non-diegetic, on-screen diegetic, and off-screen diegetic. If while you edit the sound of a piece together you keep these different worlds in mind it's more likely you won't overdo or under do it. Keep in mind what you're seeing on screen and add sound accordingly. But don't forget what could be going on to the right of the screen, to keep the realistic flow I spoke of earlier. Then of course your music to increase the emotion of the scene.

Memento

Matthew Guarnieri

            The film Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan, certainly challenges the conventional methods of storytelling. Most plots unfold in a linear fashion going from A to B to C. However Nolan told his crime drama in the less conventional, C to B to A manner.

            The way I see the film, is not in the juxtaposition of clips and scenes, but rather in the form of acts. Each act separated by scenes that divulge information about the mysterious main character.

            The first scene of the film is essentially the end of the story and the rest of the movie operates in this fashion, slowly working its way to the last scene but the beginning of the story. Through the use of unique editing, Nolan was able to make this abstract form of storytelling work. The inattentive viewer may not be able to adequately follow the story but the engaged viewer would be able to put the “puzzle” together to make sense of the story.

            After reading up on the film, I found out that the editor, Doty Dorn, was asked to read the script multiple times before beginning the actual editing process, so that she would know the relationship between each scene to the plot.

            The film is interesting because of the way the scenes coincide with each other. Through the juxtaposition of scenes in reverse order, the viewer becomes somewhat of a detective, having to compile the information they are given, and draw their own conclusions. When a scene begins, the viewer has absolutely no background information pertaining to what is going on. The scene unfolds; the viewer absorbs what has happened, all without context. The next scene then provides the background information for the previous scene, allowing the viewer to come to an understanding as to what is going on.

            In regards to the scenes in-between the “acts” that provide background information, they are displayed in black and white. This visual queue somewhat allows the viewer to know that this isn’t necessarily happening in “real time”. However he does act upon these scenes in the “real time” sequences. For instance, when Lenny (the main character) receives a phone call in the black and white scene he clearly becomes paranoid. Then when it cuts to “real time”, Lenny goes to the front desk at his motel and requests that they block his phone calls. To refer to the scenes as “real time” may not be the best way to describe them but it was the best way I could think to convey my point.

            There is a video on YouTube that plays the scenes in Memento in the “correct” order. It’s interesting to watch this video because in doing so, you come to realize that the plot actually made more sense in the reverse order. For example, when the scenes are played out in the conventional order, the relationship between Lenny and Natalie doesn’t really make any sense, in that Natalie is mean to Lenny for no apparent reason.

            Memento is another example of a film that employs unique editing in order to enhance the story telling process.    

Birdman and the use of the Tracking Shot

Matthew Guarnieri

            I was watching a rerun of Conan, and he was interviewing Edward Norton about his new film Birdman. Norton quickly mentioned the fact that in the film, there are no cuts or editing. This caught my attention considering the fact that I was looking for a new blog topic. It was at this moment that I looked up show times, hopped in my car and made my way to the theatre.

            For Edward Norton to say that there are no cuts or editing is a little bit of an overstatement. There are in fact cuts in the film, however you could probably count them on one hand and they are at the very beginning and very end of the film. As far as the primary story line is concerned, it was essentially shot with one massively long tracking shot. This was definitely an interesting way to tell the story and it was refreshing to see something less conventional.

            The film opens with the image of an asteroid hurling through the sky, and then it cuts to Michael Keaton sitting in his dressing room. This is essentially one of the only cuts in the film. Once the camera is on Keaton in his dressing room, the tracking shot begins. The viewer will notice throughout the film that the plot never really goes too far beyond the Broadway theatre in which most of the film takes place. There is a scene in which Keaton and Norton walk a block down the street to a bar, and a scene in which Keaton is gliding through the air (which is shot from the roof of the theatre). Aside from these two scenes, the film follows a tracking shot throughout the theatre, cleverly transitioning from one character to the next.

            I think the use of the tracking shot was an excellent way to convey emotion. It is pretty clear from the beginning of the film that Keaton’s character is battling an enormous amount of inner conflict. He is trying to direct and act in a Broadway play that is undergoing an overwhelming amount of turmoil, he is dealing with some serious family issues, and he is constantly struggling with his sense of self-identity. It seems as though his head is always spinning. The tracking shot somewhat instills this feeling in the viewer. It makes the viewers head spin and kind of makes it difficult for the viewer to completely get a grasp on the plot, which reflects the fact that Keaton’s character can never fully get a grasp on his life or what’s unfolding around him. I am not, however, saying that the film is hard to follow. For the most part it was pretty straightforward.

            One might ask how you tell an entire story with one long tracking shot. How do you transition from scene to scene, and more importantly how do you represent the passing of time (from one day to another)? I personally thought the director did an excellent job of this. For example, Keaton and Zack Galafianackis would be in the dressing room discussing how they have a rehearsal that night. After the dialogue is over, the camera would glide out of the room, through a couple of hallways, and end up on the stage with Keaton now performing the rehearsal. It may seem confusing at first, but the viewer then realizes that time has passed and it is essentially a new scene.

            There was one cut in the middle of the film that was very well hidden, and could easily go unnoticed. There is a scene in which Keaton and his daughter are in his dressing room and his daughter is showing him a video on her phone. The camera slowly gets closer to the phone screen until the screen takes up the entire picture. When the camera begins to pan out, you can see that Keaton is now in the bar down the block and he is in a completely different outfit, once again representing the passing of time. This was obviously done through the use of a cut and editing, however it maintains the illusion of a tracking shot.

            The soundtrack was also very interesting. It was basically done only through the use of drums. There are no other instruments employed. As for the song the drums are playing; it has almost no rhythm whatsoever, possibly representing the chaos of the main characters life. We recently discussed the diegesis of sound. At first it appears as though the soundtrack was non-diagetic, like most soundtracks. However in the scene when Keaton and Norton are walking down the block, you can hear the drums, and all of the sudden you see Keaton toss some money to a drummer on the sidewalk who is basically playing the soundtrack. This instantly made it diagetic. Throughout the rest of the film, you can hear the drums and it once again seems non-diagetic. However later in the film Keaton is walking down a hallway past a room, and in this room you can see the same drummer from the sidewalk playing the soundtrack beat, once again making it diagetic.

            

Inland Empire

   David lynch has always been one to dance on the side of insanity as anyone who has seen his films might attest. It would seem that as the years went by his style degraded over time collapsing into to veritable nonsense, to the untrained eye. While Inland Empire appears to be a mess of incomplete and incoherent ideas, every character and narrative was rafted to specifically come to a point, figuring out that point is the trick. Although everything about Inland Empire tells it is not a horror movie, the film is still horrifying as the world in which it takes place is a normal one, albeit following the sense and logic of a fever dream.  You could arguably compare Inland Empire and David Lynch's film style to the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, is there anyone one definition? Or is it more to be appreciated as an art form. This is a reassuring theme in Inland Empire, there is something there to be had but you can't quite reach it, this is akin to the lead character's reach for success.

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A painting by Wassily Kandinsky, while abstract there are, like Inland Empire, still recognizable aspects like a crescent moon and several book forms

   Inland Empire, amongst the heady imagery, embraces the classic tale of a damsel in distress. In this case and actress, Nikki, struggling to find a foothold in the chaos of Hollywood, much like the views struggle to find a foothold in the film. Nikki is offered a role in a film and quickly becomes entangled in an affair, and struggles to deal with a slow descent into madness. This seems to me indicative of David Lynch's frustration with mindless and mainstream Hollywood fluff. Similarly, Inland is infused with scenes of three larger than life rabbits who drone on with dull tasks. All in all, I think Inland Empire is a film to be experienced rather than interpreted, although the latter certainly compliments  the other.

Editing In The Tree of Life

  The Tree of Life contains some of the most seamless editing of subject matter and continuity that I have seen to date. The films editor, Mark Yoshikawa, frequently convened with director Terrance Malick in order to bring forth the final product. In this case it seems that the film's cinematographer took most of the control from the head editor, which allows for a more ethereal cut rather than a direct cut.  "I think it was a really interesting way to go, because that's what lends the film a flight of thought or a memory––something that you can't put your finger on,” Yoshikawa says of the film's editing style in an interview.“You can't piece it together in a linear form. You can just remember bits of young Jack…stealing a nightgown and then having to face his mother after that. What are these feelings?" But this is not to say the editing is completely devoid of traditional cuts and edits. Particularly, in one scene, every cut seems to be a reaction to the one before, if a bird flies in one direction a human moves in the same fashion. All in all the motion never stops, an effect achieved by coalescence of the mastery of continuity editing and the director and cinematographer's creative vision.

Matix fight scene

I found the use of motion in the gun fight scene was very cool. The editor used slow motion and fast motion to show how different characters use the matrix. Also I like how the editor uses jump cuts to make it feel fast pace.

Wall-E

            The movie Wall-E has many underlining messages that the director uses. The first underling message is being kind to the environment. You don’t know what you have until its gone. The next message the director uses is to not be lazy, do for your self. If you let others take control of you, then you wont be happy.

            The movie shows that the earth is filled with garbage. Wall-E’s job is to clean up the earth. He makes skyscrapers and buildings out of the garbage that is on the earth. He ends up finding the only plant that is left on earth. This shows the audience that it is important to take care of the environment. Eva’s mission is to find life so that the humans can come back to earth. Which in the end of the film they do.

            The second message the director is trying to show the audiences is to not allow some one else to control you. The people on the spaceship have become fat and lazy. They never have to get up and move because the robots serve them food and drinks. They are always following a straight line. Even the robots follow a straight line. That’s why the cleaning robot freaked out because Wall-E didn’t follow the rules. He just wanted to stay with Eva. When Wall-E bumped the man off of his chair and disconnected the lady from her screen, it seemed like they had woken up for the first time. Towards the end of the movie they are the only two people actually enjoying themselves in the “pool”. The movie also refers to the movie 2001:A space odysseys because the Hal 9000 is similar to Auto in the movie. They both are in charge of the ship and both have secret classified missions from earth that the captain doesn’t know about.

Trying to Make Sense of Inland Empire

Matthew Guarnieri (Double Blog Assignment)

            Going into Inland Empire, I expected an extremely convoluted story line due to that fact that it is a Lynch film. Most of Lynch’s films do not follow a traditional story line, which leads to a lack of understanding and confusion. Never the less, Lynch’s films are very interesting and unique.

            On the surface, the film is about a somewhat washed up actor trying to resurrect her career. She gets a part in an upcoming movie and is a paired with an actor with a shady reputation. They are told that the film they are making is not an original script and that it is a remake, however the original was never finished. Supposedly the original two leads were murdered and the script was cursed. Nicky attempts to conform into her role as much as possible and in doing so she begins to lose her self-identity.

            We were told to try and make as much sense out of this movie as possible. When told to do so I thought to myself that it wouldn’t be that difficult. After watching the film, I now realize it’s easier said than done. I’m not going to lie, there wasn’t a lot about the film that I actually did understand.

            What I did take away from the film however was that it was a story of character evolution. Throughout the film, the viewer can see Nicky slowly losing her sanity. I believe that when she was told that the film was cursed, this notion had a significant psychological impact on the star. This is seen when she is talking to the man with the glasses and she is saying the “F” word every other sentence. Earlier in the film when the old lady visited her and used profanity, Nicky was deeply offended and uncomfortable. This shows that her character is clearly going through psychological changes. It is also very difficult for the viewer to distinguish what is a part of the film and the film within the film, which makes it difficult to follow the story. To me, it seemed as though the crying woman in front of the TV screen was spectating everything that was going on with Nicky, in and out of the film within the film. I believe that this woman was the main character of the film, and everything that unfolds in Nicky’s world is just a representation of the woman. There seems to be a prevalent theme of infidelity in this film and primarily in regards to Nicky, so I was assuming that this also applied to the crying woman. When I checked some online blogs pertaining to the film, this was the general consensus. As for the rabbits in the television; supposedly they are homage to Alice in Wonderland, suggesting that Nicky is having difficulty distinguishing between reality and her “dream world”. This correlates to the psychological effects mentioned earlier due to the script being cursed.

            There are certain aspects of the film that I couldn’t quite get a grasp on. For example I couldn’t quite follow the story line of the crying woman’s husband. However when he found their son it became clearer. I also did not understand the relevance of the prostitutes. Maybe they were a symbol of what the crying woman did not want to become. Perhaps a consequence of being unfaithful.

            Inland Empire is one of those films that people could talk about for hours because there are many aspects that can be interpreted differently.