Rich Baiocco

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Posts tagged Film

May9

Plant Life :: Death of an Amaryllis Bloom


hey, im testing out some new mp4 converter software so i put together this little clip from daily photos i took of our amaryllis blooming and withering. at some point the pedals droop to where it looks kind of like a swan.

~rjb

please let me know if it takes forever to load/view? thanks

1 notes #movies #film #home movies #video #plants #botany #botanical #amaryllis #life and death #cycles

Apr7

Mar7

Touch Of Evil (1958) d. Orson Welles.
Breakdown of the Opening Scene

1 continuous shot - {3:18}

  • Close up of a man holding a bomb, turns towards camera to set timer.
  • We see a couple walking in background towards alley on the far side of a liquor store; **at the same time the man with bomb runs towards parking lot on near side of liquor store, puts bomb in trunk and runs away.
  • Welles shows us the movie’s killer in the first shot (though not his face), almost a provocation as the plot develops in front of the viewer.
  • Camera raises up above liquor store parking lot and we see couple enter targeted car, and camera view continues to rise as they drive through alley on far side of liquor store and turn left on street towards viewer.
  • Camera back tracks down street, allowing a distance to develop between viewer and car. allows viewer to see town from a wider view. Many people walking around.
  • Car travels through 2 stop intersections.
  • Turns right after Miguel “Mike” Vargas (Charlton Heston) and Suzy (Janet Leigh) pass in front of them walking. Couple drunkenly hoots at them. Viewer aware that the car is “Danger”.
  • Camera stays with Mike and Suzy as they walk past couple in car that is now stuck in U.S. Immigration line, honking.
  • They walk evenly with the car, now moving, towards the camera which is now placed behind the Immigration officer’s booth. To keep the car driving and the couple walking evenly yet at a natural speed, Welles has a couple of tourists cross in front of the car to slow it down. This is subtle, but shows his master pragmatic instinct. 
  • Vargas and Suzy approach immigration officer booth just in front of car. Viewer is tense because of bomb, doesn’t know if car will offer the walking couple a ride.
  • Both couples and 2 immigration officers in shot, tight
  • Vargas allowed in, we find out that he is known by the officers (perhaps infamously) and works on the Mexican side of the border. Claims he is going to take his wife for a chocolate soda in U.S. Walks with Suzy out of shot.
  • Car couple impatiently want to go through border stop.
  • Girlfriend in car says “I’ve got this ticking noise in my head.” Reference to bomb is an hysterical touch of evil. Officers assume the woman is drunk, and waves the car on.
  • Car passes Mike and Suzy for the 3rd time, last time we see driver and girlfriend alive.
  • Camera closes in on Mike and Suzy. She says “Do you realize it’s the very first night we’ve been together in my country?” to which Mike replies “Do you realize I haven’t kissed you in over an hour?”
  • They hold each other and we hear car explode off screen.

End of Shot. Very next shot is the car exploding. 

People speak highly of Scorcese’s long shot in Goodfellas through the club, and PT Anderson’s long shot in Booogie Nights, but when you watch those 2 after seeing Touch of Evil, it’s impossible not to feel that the former are just showing off. Welles is essential here: In these 3 minutes and 18 seconds Welles sets up the whole movie, the killer, the mystery, the vibe of the border town, that Mike is a Mexican cop and Suzy is American. That the only time we hear them interact intimately, we see them clutching each other, surrounded by danger, foreshadows the danger they will be in throughout this twisted, brilliant cop drama. 

~rjb

4 notes #movies #film #classic movies #touch of evil #orson welles #art #criticism #charlton heston #janet leigh #cinematography

Jan29

FOUND OBJECT POETRY 

I ripped this out the appendix of the great interview collection, Herzog On Herzog

[Text Reads]:

The Minnesota Declaration
Truth and fact in documentary cinema

LESSONS OF DARKNESS
            by Werner Herzog

  1. by dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verite is devoid of verite. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
  2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verite declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. ‘For me,’ he says, ‘there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.’ Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
  3. Cinema Verite confonds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
  4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
  5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization. 
  6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verite resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
  7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue
  8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has only the sage answer to this: ‘You can’t legislate stupidity.’
  9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
  10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.
  11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
  12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue. 

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
April 30, 1999

2 notes #lit #poetry #found poetry #film #movies #cinema #cinema verite #travel #inspiration #werner herzog #minnesota #the minnesota declaration #Lessons of Darkness #truth #truth? #history #manifesto

Nov26

Manhattan d. Woody Allen

So I closed out Thanksgiving weekend all nostalgic for family and friends, and well, mainly my dog, in NY and the movie Manhattan was on television so I figured I’d watch it. Never seen it before. Not really a Woody Allen fan, but I like a few of his films. Everybody tells me Manhattan is the one to watch, to get him, to get it. Did I? Maybe. Woody Allen films have great dialogue, but it was only the first line that his character utters in scene that really stuck with me: 

Isaac: The important thing in life is courage.

And everybody talks about the scenery in Manhattan, the look of the film, the opening sequence to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, of course the Queensborough Bridge, which is beautiful, no doubt. I’ve spent many mornings and late evenings walking past that bridge. There’s an actual Gondola, which gives it a foreign, out of place and time look in New York City, but what in New York City isn’t foreign and somewhat out of time.

But the most stunning sight, the absolutely supreme strike, is a young Meryl Streep, playing Allen’s ex-wife who left him for another woman.  

She is also writing a book about their breakup, and it’s release is a cog in Isaac’s anxiety. Of course, who would want a book released to the public containing any sort of intimate details of your relationship?  It is the narcissistic achilles heel of every writer, right? : another writer’s honest account of the same situation.

And Allen - the director - plays this perfectly, casting Streep who, beyond her beauty also holds this power card in the castle of his ego that he cannot steal back. It’s a great set up. A great look, especially in contrast to Isaac’s new love interest Diane Keaton. I can’t stand Diane Keaton in Woody Allen films. I mean, I just don’t get her. Maybe you’re into her. Most fans are, it seems. I don’t know how one can look at any other woman in Manhattan the move, or any beautiful nightscapes in Manhattan the place after seeing young Meryl Streep though.  A Helen of Troy if ever…

7 notes #movies #film #woody allen #meryl streep #manhattan

Jul24

Sockeye

Hey if you get a chance, check out Frontline tonight on PBS.  My friend Travis Rummel and his video company Felt Soul Media have footage from a documentary of theirs in a piece called Alaska Gold.  The documentary, and the PBS special, explore the fight going on in the Bristol Bay Region of Southwestern Alaska where two industries are colliding.  The Bay is the last great wild Sockeye Salmon fishery in the world, providing livery for an entire region of fisherman, but it is also home to a $500 Billion mineral deposit—Pebble Mine—of Gold, Copper, and Molybdenum, whose wealth two foreign companies have proposed to extract at the expense of ruining the precious ecosystem in the Bay.  Politicians will soon decide. 

Travis and Felt Soul make great fishing documentaries like Eastern Promises and their latest, DamNation, which examines the shifting mindset in river sustainability away from dams. Check them out. And here’s the movie poster for DamNation: an actual photo taken in October 2011 of the one-time illegally dammed Elwha River in Washington’s Olympic National Park, which is now GONE. And rightfully so. Let the Rivers flow…

#Feltsoulmedia #activism #environment #fishing #PBS #Documentary #Film #Eastern Promises #Damnation #Alaska Gold

Mar7

Not Only A Maestro, But A Personality Too

So Werner Herzog’s original name was Stipetic, but he changed it to Herzog because ‘Herzog’ means ‘Duke’ in German and he felt there should be a character like a Duke Ellington or a Count Basie running around in Cinema. 

So who is the Duke in Literature?

1 notes #Chekov? #Hunter? #Tao? #Tolstoy? #Whitman? #film #lit #music

Feb4