Joel Sternfeld

Top photo, Kansas City 1983


photos (c) by Joel Sternfeld

Rennie Ellis

 

Lady Medina, The Ritz 1977 – Image by © 2011 Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

Union Jack, Lorne c.1968 – Image by © 2011 Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

MC, Paradise Club, Kings Cross 1970-71 – Image by © 2011 Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

Dino Ferrari, Toorak Road 1976 – Image by © 2011 Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

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From the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

Is Tropical -- The Greeks

IS TROPICAL - THE GREEKS (official music video) from EL NINO on Vimeo.

The first part reminds me of when I was a kid, playing around in the neighborhood.

The later parts are more like post-collegiate times.

Klaus Kinski vs. the monkey

The Tree of Life

Some experiences you pass over in silence.

On the one hand, it seems like laziness. I had a teacher who sternly told us that if you can’t talk about a subject, you don’t understand it. You can fall back on that position – it’s too big for words; language can’t capture that. And that is often the refuge of the inarticulate or the lazy, or the person who’s reluctant to think. Thinking’s hard work, after all.

But there are other occasions when talk does seem to cheapen a thing. You have the experience. Then you describe it. In the telling, the experience tends to become the telling of it. As you relate it, you unwittingly smooth out the rough edges, buff up the funny parts, exaggerate some of the events to make it more dramatic. Then what you described becomes its own description.

Or, there’s events that call for ecstatic speech. Anything less seems unworthy. Often, the most ecstatic experiences tend to be expressed in clichés, or words so worn they’ve lost their denotative meaning. I love you. I love you so much. It was so wonderful. Between the emotion and its expression lies a gap so vast, it shames the speaker.

Even poets have a hard time with the ecstatic or the holy or rendering awe. Shakespeare, certainly G.M. Hopkins. D. H. Lawrence. Whitman sometimes, but he tried for it so often that those great inventories of his don’t always work. Or the poets get cunning and try to suggest the emotion indirectly – “tell the truth, but tell it slant,” Miss Dickinson said, and so we should.

The Tree of Life is an ecstatic film. If that makes you roll your eyes, or sigh, or cringe, I can understand. But you would miss a profound experience. It’s hard to write about, though, and I don’t want to diminish my initial experience of the film. A lot of it lies beyond what you can, or should, reasonably reduce to language. In that way, it’s like great music, intrinsically beyond language.

Someone, I forget who, said that the only real criticism of a poem should be another poem. I’d say that’s true for this film as well.

And this one seems oddly personal, as if Terence Malick had somehow drilled into my own memory and imagination. My mother, like the mother does in the film, has red hair and blue eyes, and was once slim and pretty in the ethereal way redheads can be. My father took the same brutal approach to childrearing, with similar effects. The aluminum tumblers on the table, the Toscanini albums, the Converse sneakers/jeans/home-sewn shirts are all relics of my childhood, too, even though the setting’s maybe 15 or even 20 years earlier. Things change slowly in flyover country.

Beyond the specifics, the fascination with space, infinity, time, the soul, and, finally, wrestling with the problem of suffering and of the existence of a god preoccupied me almost as much as sex did when I was a teenager. It didn’t make me good company. But it does make me receptive to a move like this, that takes for a launching point the Book of Job. Job, after all,  is the only honest book in the Bible.

So I’m reluctant to break the spell of the movie and discuss, oh, the inheritance of Transcendentalism, the possibly Cabbalistic significance of the Tree, or the use of natural light or how the voice over works.

I’d just like as many people as possible to see it.

Summer nights

First day of summer. Still full of promise.

"It has a long way to go before it can even be called simplistic"

So, at the risk of proving what my close friends and family already know -- that I can be kind of a monomaniac on certain subjects -- I can't resist throwing in some juicy bits of Christopher Hitchens' take down of David Mamet:

This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason. In order to be persuaded by it, you would have to be open to propositions like this:

“Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.”

Or this:

“America is a Christian country. Its Constitution is the distillation of the wisdom and experience of Christian men, in a tradition whose codification is the Bible.”

Propagandistic writing of this kind can be even more boring than it is irritating. For example, Mamet writes in “The Secret Knowledge” that “the Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all.” Whatever one’s opinion of that conflict may be, this (twice-made) claim of his abolishes any need to analyze or even discuss it. It has a long way to go before it can even be called simplistic. By now, perhaps, you will not be surprised to know that Mamet regards global warming as a false alarm, and demands to be told “by what magical process” bumper stickers can “save whales, and free Tibet.” This again is not uncharacteristic of his pointlessly aggressive style: who on earth maintains that they can? If I were as prone to sloganizing as Mamet, I’d keep clear of bumper-sticker comparisons altogether.

Hitchens and Matt Taibbi have a superlatively cruel way of slashing up their targets. They do the awful thing of actually  checking on the facts. They then brazenly point out factual errors. After that bit of wet work they'll pull from Rhetoric 101 to show errors in reasoning that make the subject look like some brain-damaged moron from a remedial literacy class.


My chief issue with Mr. Mamet is that his conversion has left him so completely unoriginal in his opinions. We don't really need anyone else parroting the lines, and not a guy with his smarts. If only he'd come up with something on his own on the topic, that'd be something. Instead of a rehash of very tired cliches you'd hear from any numbskull Rush Limbaugh listener.

Read the full review here.

Thrush

Thrush from Gabriel Bisset-Smith on Vimeo.

Part of the reason I like this is because it uses the same techniques as a digital storytelling workshop -- just straight on photos, a voice over and some music -- nothing else. It is well told and edited, flashy and all, and the movie's clever in suiting its theme to the manner of its telling.

A new kind of script

Movies always belonged to one man — the director — and early movie-makers like Griffith and Chaplin knew it. Then along came talking pictures. Words are something else again, and they frightened the boys who didn’t know many, so they brought out good writers like Faulkner and Fitzgerald. But such people can’t and don’t take, or even understand, fiddling and mangling, and so they were lost or went away. Right then and there it should have been obvious that a new method had to be found…Why not a new kind of script? A kind of outline of action, the sequences in order, the characters loosely defined, the end in view. Beyond that — and that, of course, is a great deal — you would write only the first few lines of each scene, leaving the rest to be improvised, going loose with what is there, or throwing it out if something better came along…That’s the kind of script I’d like to try someday.

- Lillian Helman 

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Badlands

On July 10, 1972, in La Junta, Colorado, a twenty-eight-year-old ex-MIT philosophy instructor named Terrence Malick began filming Badlands, a script based on the true story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, teenage lovers whose 1958 murder spree across the Nebraska plains made national headlines. To finance the picture, Malick had raised $250,000—a pittance even by the standards of the day—and to play the leads he had hired a journeyman TV actor, Martin Sheen, and an unknown, untrained actress and onetime folk singer, Sissy Spacek. 

Badlands tells a classic lovers-on-the-lam story. In a shabby South Dakota suburb, garbage man Kit Carruthers meets thirteen-year-old Holly Sargis as she twirls her baton in her front yard. They fall in love, but after Holly's father deems Kit unsuitable, Kit shoots him dead in the Sargis living room. Kit and Holly flee across the vast, empty badlands of South Dakota, killing anyone who gets in their way.

The action behind the scenes was hardly less turbulent. The mild-mannered Malick brawled with his producer, brutalized his crew (which turned over at least twice), and saw a special-effects man gravely burned in a terrible accident. As the shoot ran on and on—twice as long as it was supposed to—crew members quit en masse. Back home, they would tell their friends Malick had gone crazy. That he had amassed more than a million feet of footage. That he just wouldn't stop shooting. A movie that had begun production in 100-degree heat wrapped amid snow flurries. 

Malick's belief in his picture never faltered, though, and after ten months in the editing room he emerged with what critic David Thomson has called "one of the most assured debuts in all of American film." Badlandslaunched not only his own career but also those of Sheen and Spacek, cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, producer Edward R. Pressman, art director Jack Fisk, and many others.

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The coming mono-celeb

Ryan Oakley dissects Oprah and Lady Gaga:

Watching these two talk the same mumbo jumbo made me think of the always pithy Guy Debord:

Media stars are spectacular representations of human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles.  Stardom is a diversification in the semblance of life – the object of an identification with mere appearance which is intended to compensate for the crumbling of directly experienced diversification of productive activity.  Celebrities figure various styles of life and various views of society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global manner.  Themselves incarnations of the inaccessible results of social labour, they mimic by-products of that labour, and project these above labour so that they appear as its goal.  The by-products in question are power and leisure – the power to decide and the leisure to consume which are the alpha and omega of a process never questioned.  In the former case, government power assumes the personified form of the pseudo-star; in the second, stars of consumption canvass for votes as pseudo-power of life lived.  But, just as none of these celestial activities are truly global, neither do they offer any real choices.

And it made me think that, within my life, we may see a celebrity singularity.
Right now, in a corporate laboratory, scientists are creating OPGAGARAH. They’ve tried before. Tyra Banks was their most recent failure. But they will get it right.

Then, we shall have one media personality who appeals to every demo/psychographic. A monopoly on all culture. A common goal that tells us to love ourselves and our dreams will all come true. A psychic hegemon to cower before while aspiring to be. Someone that both parent and teenager likes. A beautiful monster that eats life and shits profit.

Don’t be surprised if it’s called MOM.