Leonard Cohen - First We Take Manhattan

How and Why

Why - means why do I want to make movies. Why? What else would I do - I don't want to do anything else. My movies are thinking in pictures and words - intelligent, delightful and enjoyable. And where can you see them? Nowhere because they only exist in my head. Why? I don't know - the reality doesn't respond to my attempts, at least my attempts to get money for productions. When your words mean nothing and your attempts to get your company going are like wind in the willows what can you do? Call the police - yeah, never did much good to use law for love. Unite with some guy who has got it working - means not doing your own thing and that is death to me... Rather a sad situation. 36 years is a long time to weave your dreams to stories and never get any support... I never wanted those screamers or great pathos, political or other. My world is a bit  hazy as are my characters. Nothing is too certain and letting live is more important than power. But I still have ambition. Shall have as long as I live...

How - With people who don't oppress you. Different people because difference is healthy, but not too different because that tends to crave too much energy. With people you can trust, at least to some extent. Most of my life I have done things with the taste of blood in my mouth, and I do not like that. The results have been best both as work and economically when I have been calm and assured and the process has been light and easy.
I don't like gangs even if I understand their point. Through these years I have kind of gathered people, those, that make me feel warm and creative and with whom I like to be. Unfortunately those people are scattered round the world... But if I would have money and a possibility to create a surroundings optimal for working together, I believe that they would join me.
The modern digital technology is great - I do not long for the days of film. For decades I developed my films and made pictures, and yes, it was great, but it was also a lot of work, and when I consider the essential which to me is contents, the message in a way, the digital form does exactly the same but a lot easier and better. Yes, I do paint with oils, an ancient and slow technique, and I do like it, but for cinema I prefer digital. One should not hang rigidly in the old ways and technologies. Think about medical practice: would you choose an old technology rather than modern, f.x. ether instead of new anesthetics?

People who can play together,and  have the same wavelength, get better results in a better atmosphere...

Every Picture is Important

A cinema has 24 or 25 pictures in each second, and sometimes a scene can be having many pictures lasting only a second or a few secs.  For each of these pictures there is composure, lighting, action and meaning. Also they have their points of attention - don't know about the term but meaning the point in the picture where your attention is drawn, and which in the next picture is in about the same point. If you have a film of 120 minutes how many pictures there can be to light and compose...

LE CORSAIRE (Sizova-Nureyev, 1958)

Light, Color and Rhythm

During the Christmas days I saw some films among which was a historical drama, just some hundred years ago, which happened in a city... a beautiful city and beautiful places but not seen in the film. Why? Because the time was harsh and poor... Maybe there is a trend that favors dark shapeless cinematography without proper lighting and colors... Personally I think it is only mental poverty and laziness.

What about Middle Ages? Dark and deadly! And yet I do remember through years a film from the mid age that had light, gorgeous scenery, delicious colors and light that might be called heavenly! And it was of tragic and dramatic development. This film is 'Kristin Lavransdatter' (1995) and the cinematography is by Sven Nykvist (1922-2006). It must be nearly ten years since I have seen this film - several times - and I still remember vividly the jewel-like colors of clothes and textiles, the light in churches and monasteries, and on the streets! The candlelight had magic and the sun was sparkling in the air. Even the twilight in the dormitory had tones... It was a world seen through  real masters eyes.

As life and drama are colorful so should the pictures be - death and depression should be built in another way, so that the texture gets richer, not poorer. I know I am using the absence of color in the funeral scene in 'Chambers' but I intend the pictures still to be regal in their graphic forms and composure, and not dull and smudgy. And the black and white just emphasizes the pale shades of faces and some objects making them come out of the surrounding world. And it is not really black and white, no - it is color but the scenery is bw, and there is a spot of color every now and then, fx green or blue eyes, yellow flowers...

to be continued...

Chance Conversations: An Interview with Merce Cunningham and John Cage

Madison & Kohlhase: A Painting by Jacob van Loon

Nice...

Most romantic I ever seen

The Beginning - sketching love

Sketching Love - my first try in over 30 years! There is something of the making in the blog posts of June 2006, when we did the shooting. The footage shot in Helsinki was done on the 10th of June: we started early in the morning and drove 350 km to do the job. It was sunday and great sunny day and all went extremely well - we even got a parking place just by the park! And then back by the night...

I woke up at 5 am and went downstairs, and saw a lynx slowly hulking by the house. It was a large lynx, because I at first thought it a fawn of an elk, but it was a lynx. It made me joyous as I regarded it  a presage of good fortune.

I collected the others at the village - there were three: Saara, Jere and Jarno, all my students. Jarno did the shooting, Saara was  the female lead and Jere the male. With Jarno we had done some stuff before and he had been wielding the same size camera in the army so he had some experience. Saara had been modeling for me both on runway and for the camera so she too was quite used to it. Jere was a new guy, but as he was clever and curious I trusted him to clear the day - and the next days, too. I had not told them what it was they were required to do and they trusted me to know what I wanted. On the whole trust is the most important ingredient of a process like this - if there is no trust it won't hold  together. But we had it, the trust!

My idea for this film was to portray a feeling that kind of goes through time and places and is threatened by psychological  more than concrete.  As I was working with youngsters it was different than with more experienced people, had both pros and cons! The great pro was undoubtedly the eager curiosity of my companions and also their sincerity. The con was that extra load of work it put on my shoulders both as responsibility and as real doing like driving and so. But I had been waiting so long!

The feeling begins by chance as they do, and is allowed to take root and grow. Then come the doubts and nightmares created by former experience and disappointments. At the end hope is portrayed by blowing soap bubbles... The different phases are marked also by different colors - green in the beginning, trees and water, - then white, all painted white and white clothes, - and then appears black and red, the white drowns, and black wins the stage - just to deteriorate to rainbow colors of the bubbles at the end.

sketching love





Sketching Love was meant to be a glass of dry champagne or should I say mead because of their youth - coincidental, innocent and optimistic in a light aquarelle kind of way. I was not explaining or lecturing or preaching but just sketching with simple strokes... There is no tightly spun plot but just a feeling to carry on the film, with nothing extra to neither drag nor support. Mere light weight bones...

The film starts from the streets and walking people - the girl and the boy, light and dark. Both are walking alone and they end to the same place, a park, where he takes photos and she lays on the grass reading. The boy takes photos of things - the church, flowers and trees - not of the colorful people walking and residing in the park. Is he afraid of people or is it just a habit in a city not to pay attention to others?

I am rather proud of the scene where they meet: he steps on her! I am not good with situation comedy and this is quite top for me! So he takes another look and starts to take photos of her. And they also start talking. The first steps are taken and she even smiles while being photographed.

The ice cream... there is the garbage bin and the sound of traffic...  close-ups of her face... and the view opens to include the trees - the music begins, idyllic scene while they are chatting and laughing. We can not hear what they are talking but it must be funny!  And then they are on the bench kissing...

My cameraman took footage of treetops and I used them to change scene - clumsy maybe but so usual in finnish cinema! And I  think it is quite appropriate in this situation: the scene sifts to another location and another time, when he is waiting for her, doubting himself and the sincerity of his feelings. The waiting and then the steps when she is walking towards him, steady steps sounding from the concrete! And then the first conversation - the words and short sentences are like swords, like fighting! He is more matter-of-fact, but she accuses him of being stagnant. Finally he seems to take a protective stand! And the next scene via water - there is also the chain, symbolics!

Obviously it is morning in the next scene, a morning together after a night together - the smiles and atmosphere of intimacy makes it obvious that it was enjoyable. This is the white phase, state of innocence still prevailing, good will and pleasure. They are very close and realize how vulnerable it makes them - the conversation is fractal and leading anywhere. Both listen and feel their way - this time she is more aggressive: - What are you staring at! But agrees to let him take photos. The music is with flute and piano, the softer version.

The next scene starts with him talking to phone somewhere outside the picture frame: there is life outside this bubble! Them he views copies of old photos and reflects about women in them, and comes to a conclusion that he knows nothing, they are an enigma and life is impossible to control, - which of course is true, but should not depress him as it does! Still white and the angles of the camera support his feelings.

The same table but with a comic book and black clothes. And we still see it from up. Enter she in a red dress, and she looks at the photos laughing at the dragonfly mixed between pics of herself. She also looks at the photos of his female lineage identifying with them on general level. Then his phone rings and the situation resolves to laughter! Looking closer one can find some underlying meanings fx the comics are Bilal's and  that can open some lines of thinking connected with the dragonfly...

The dream, his dream of her wading in the water in white clothes - projection of his fear of losing her like he has lost his mother maybe... or does he think all women are self destructive? She obviously drowns in her whites to resurrect in black. Maybe he just realizes that the idyllic state wont last forever and the 'black' greyness of everyday life lies waiting... The waking is slow and thoughtful.

The guitar joins the music in the next scene, candles and some sort of festive atmosphere. Both are dressed in black, glasses of wine, cigarette - but he is talking of the dream, telling her and she even jokes about his mom... It ends with close and warm hug, safe and alive.

'





















The final scene shows them blowing soap bubbles with deep red creeper growing on the wall in the background: it is autumn, the summer is gone and they are still together. There are children running after the bubbles - is that a promise? Maybe - who knows...  The music has grown darker but it is not threatening, just deeper - yes, a kind of happy ending, I think!


 And why did I do this? And with a bank loan? Well, I felt it was due to become real and there hardly was any other possibilities concerning the funding - now looking it at retrospect when I have for five years tried to get funding for writing the manuscript of my next movie I'm certainly happy I did that!  So slow and impossible it seems to be to get money to do something one has wanted to do for 35 years that I don't understand... Is it really so criminal to be an ambitious woman and to take risks?? Can't be... =D

The Beatles - And I Love Her

the beatles- girl

Flying and blood

Morningsky is a music video. There were pictures and there was music, and then they were put together - so both had different origins. I was flying with my eldest son on a little 2 seater Cessna in the beginning of september and took some footage above Helsinki and the coastline to west. It was a beautiful day and some is pretty tidy =D!

And later in the autumn we had a class in school making a video - Fucking virgin Maria! - and some of the girls wanted to make a scene with blood. Maybe they had seen the IT'S MY LIFE! done with Saara and thought it exiting. So I made up the scene of a girl and doll. It was made in the showers of school with some spot lights and 1/2 litres of blood. The dark girl in white has a big plastic bag under the nightgown and not even all the blood was used!

Towards the end  there are pictures of stone angels, that I have taken in the 70's at Hietaniemi graveyard in Helsinki. They came to mind while I was editing our little episode. And the graves are of soldiers that died in the beginning of 1900.  The flowing water and those silent old graves with a slight frost on them felt to be quite right in the end.

There is a sequence 'washroom: how it was made', that I did for the girls as a memento...



morningsky

Friends had a band...

Why beauty is boring?

The music is the same as in 'a moment' and the girl is the same - here she just is some five years older. We took some photos and she wanted to try something like dancing on the field and so... The shining object is moon - it shows very bright somehow, but moon it is! It was rather cold, just some centigrades above zero.

The name - I just find beauty boring, harmony distressing, just like grave disharmony, too. Just too much of something is, well, too much!



Why beauty is boring?



a moment

It started maybe so that I had some pictures and an idea, and he had some strips of music... os maybe he gave me the music and I got ideas  of pictures? Anyhow that was how this was born... 'Forever gone' - I think we all have an experience  when we realize that something is gone, passed and shall never be again, at least when someone dies. My eldest son came to me when he was nine and had a mandarine in his hand: Mom, see how this bit is perfect, all cells and juice and taste, and (he ate it) now it is gone and shall never be again! It was his perception!

Somehow this 'music video' mixes mystical elements to everyday, like the girl in the woods, and the black cat, and the fire, but the reason is just to play with pictures and meanings... white flower... And that is the way of all!

At that time - or rather before I had also been playing with photoshop and effects, and I used some pictures with numerous different colorings and other effects  - the staircase with the window in more and less color, with swans and without, and the eye changing coloring...



a moment

Old photos - little tales

Both of these short pieces are made of old photos and some music from my friend. The Old Shoemaker did work on Sniperstreet 1977 and I made a photo reportage of him then. Black and white negatives were still in my boxes and as I had some new photos of the same spot I thought 'why not?' Toivo Laakso was a remarkable old man, kind and so peaceful that surely he was worth a little memoir...

The quality of photos is not good but I think that in this kind of work it's not important, on the contrary: shining and glamorous pics would be pretty much out of place!



And the other one, a walk in Tallinna on a saturday morning 1998: me and the boys then 8 and 10 years. I had last visited Tallinna 1975 while working on Ilmatar for Matkayhtymä, travelling agency, that made so called 'vodka cruises', the ship was on international waters for 24 hours and the passengers could buy alcohol tax free. It was a horror story and the city of Tallinn was grey and miserable. 1998 everything had changed and Tallinn was a lively growing modern city with a lot happening everywhere!

Our walk took place in the old Tallinn, where repairs and restoring was done, and also new houses erected, I still had my film camera, Olympus OM-2, and shot maybe six or seven rolls of slides. In the original slides the quality is good, but as these are scanned with a kind of mirror prism... so and so, why to explain something everyone can see! Again I think it is the feeling, atmosphere, that is important, not the shine! It is an idyllic medieval town we see in pictures!





The Old Shoemaker 1977



Tallinna 1998 - old slides

How it was made: Remembrance

My eldest son was born 1978 and when he 2008 had 30th birthday I made this cavalcade of old photographs as a present to him. Cinematically there is nothing of importance in this nine minute piece, but the interest lies in the pictures and their history.

I got my first camera on my seventh birthday, I think, or maybe it was the christmas before - yes, so it must have been because the first pictures are of the snowy yard and garage! So I was just six. My father was a keen and exploring photographer, who in the 50's developed his own films and photos. I have hundreds, maybe thousands  of his negatives still in my keeping. So I started: ordinary pictures of friends on the yard or skiing, stray dogs fighting on the road, my little brother posing here and there... The camera was one of the first instamatics so I did not need an exposure meter. Actually I did use the camera a lot in different situations and got used to carry it with me. Yet there are no pictures of our houses or my grandparent's houses, which is regrettable. I did concentrate on people.

My first single lens reflex camera I bought in the beginning of 70's. I remember pondering the choice with my two years younger brother, agreeing and disagreeing, and finally he bought a Konica and I chose Olympus OM-1. My reasons were simple: it was smaller and lighter, had great optics and was not automatic. It had an inbuilt exposure meter but I chose the time and aperture. I did not like automatics as my brother did.

Actually I chose well. The pictures  my brother took during first years are as good as mine, but then they start to deteriorate - I think the lens did not function so well any more. And the same I discovered when a friend of mine scanned his slides together with mine - he had had a Pentax SLR in 70's and also his pics were not so sharp and clear as mine. Again I thanked the Zuiko lenses.

During the years I acquired two other similar bodies of OM-1 and several objectives with focal lengths ranging from 50 to 200. I did not like wide angle effects so I never got a shorter than 35 objective. And then I had a series of extension rings for close-ups of insects and plants. They were quite useful and the real macro-objectives were just far above my budgets.

I developed the bw films myself using mainly Tri-x of Kodak and the similar product of AGFA. The film was sold in reels of 150 m and you could self wind it on smaller rolls - that was cheap! And I also made the pictures - mainly in different bathrooms of different apartments. It was quite messy and the photos had hairs and dust  on then  - but at least I did take them! I also used some film for slides, but as you could not make anything yourself it was more expensive and --- I did like the beautiful colors on the transparent material...

These pictures have been scanned from slides with a Nikon negative scanner - the friend with Pentax owns this scanner and together we have gone through a small amount of old slides scanning them and making some correction where correction are needed...  Yes indeed. In the seventies and beginning of eighties Fuji had a slide film, that had development included in the price of the roll: you just paid one time! And it was cheaper than Kodacrome or Ektacrome  or Agfa! And it had nice colors... I did use a lot of Agfa and those slides had kept well, preserved their colors! As had also Kodak's material. But that Fuji... somehow the green of those slides had turned to emerald - a turquoise green strikingly non-natural in pictures taken from green nature! And there were a lot of green in all my pics! So I had to correct the colors. Unfortunately changing that emerald affected also to other colors and so the correction in some slides works well and in some does not. Can't help - nothing is perfect! =D

Most of the photos have been taken with the Olympus, but some with varying little pocket instamatics that I used to carry in my bag. Always some camera with me! And some had really small negatives - one, I think had a nega sized 2x1 cm so not every frame is sharp and clear, but as the idea was to conway the feeling and atmosphere it is not so dangerous! I hope =D !

These photos have been taken on our rented summer home, a little old house made of timber! We stayed there of and on during summers from 1979 to 1985. It was a silent little place for exploring nature and dreaming, and I don't think he was bored even if there were no other children. He found so many ways to amuse himself and to play alone with simple things like branches and old rusty ovens...

So all these slides and negatives I brought to the final cut timeline and edited to Remembrance. I have always been very fond of cross-dissolving  and here I just let go! Smile and enjoy!




Remembrance

How It Was Made: Black River, Bleeding Heart

Behind small things there often are long stories... I was six in 1960 when my family moved north to Kemi, a little town by the northern shore of Gulf of Bothnia. My father, a B.Sc engineer,  was working as a process developing manager in the pulp factory. A year later I started school and we moved to the island where the factory was, Veitsiluoto. My school was on another island, Rytikari, where there were also shops and a library.

There I for the first time came to know different homes, different social classes and saw poverty and bitterness while visiting my classmates in their homes: poor farmers with a few cows, small houses with no central heating and toilet, workers lodgings - many small apartments in big buildings with no privacy. In the school we had latrines outside in long buildings by the beach - one side for girls and another for boys. And there were rats... But as I was a child I felt no prejudice or disgust or fear, just wonderful curiosity! And a kind of envy... because even though the families were poor and lived in lousy conditions there was warmth and a feeling of closeness that for me was completely strange. We had always had big houses and fine toilets and a car and everything, but no closeness.

Then came the time when some of my friends in school 'disappeared' and later came letters from Sweden with pictures of them wearing gorgeous dresses and earrings! Maybe the earrings were the greatest mark of the gap dividing us then: no-one in Rytikari or Veitsiluoto had earrings! I had ballet classes in Kemi and never dared to tell anyone. My mother went to draw naked models and once she told me that a brother of my best school friend was modeling there, a really beautiful boy. I never mentioned it to my friend.

There were also different areas, where the workers had their tenement houses - Petsamo, and we our big wooden villas, Aunus. Sometimes we had to run while passing Petsamo, because the bigger boys liked to beat us rich kids. There was hate and bitterness, even violence... but that is another story. The important was the poverty, people leaving for Sweden after better bread and the abandoned houses with sad dark windows.

Then 2004 I think it was - I had a funeral in Vaala, east of Kemi but fairly north too. I drove there on a summer morning and did not pay attention to the scenery because of my hurry. And then I drove back late in the night and as it was summer the sun remained near horizon and it was beautifully light. I stopped by the lake Oulunjärvi, wide like a sea, and the continued slowly south. Along the narrow and winding road there were small fields, endless marshes and bogs and those farmhouses with empty dark window. Big beautiful houses by little black and winding rivers... I felt the hairs raise in my back and a deep agony squeeze my heart. The memory came back like a flood! Many times I stopped the car and looked those houses and yards left long ago, houses that still stood with hanging windowsills and broken roofs...

In september I drove back with a former student and friend Eero, and we found the place I had kind of marked that night. There were three houses by the road, two on the other side and one on the other, all empty, and we chose one to take photographs of. The house was in fairly good condition, and it seemed that people had left like suddenly, leaving everything, furniture and lamps, everything, and no-one ever looked back. Of course I had spun a story of a boy who comes from Stockholm to see the home of his great grand parents, him being a third generation immigrant. Maybe dreaming of a forge there in the old house and a new life...  Well, that never became anything.

Then I did some screen tests with another friend, Hanna, on a very hot summer day. And again time passed... Then one day I felt a need to do something, anything and this idea of still pictures mixed with moving sequences came to my mind. And I did built a timeline in final cut of those photos and the test shoots. With yellow tulips... I tried to make it look like they were gazing each other through time and space maybe seeing something, maybe missing the other.  In this case it is the boy that wants to change things and the girl who wants to be tidy and static. The boy wants to wander to new realms and build his life there. The girl is in the grip of the moment and can't get scope. So she gets depressed and drowns herself. And the boy goes on.

So the timeline was ready - but I had no sound. Then I met some other former students of mine and they told they had a band and had made some pieces of music. Jari, the composer, played them to me and this one was exactly the same length as my picture line. Somehow it seemed like meant and when even the words seemed to fit I just placed the bit of music beneath the pictures and that was it!

The single pictures with faded surface in the beginning are another story: they are prints on silk paper glued to old planks with cellulose lack...

So I give you:

Black River, Bleeding Heart

thinking, motion and time in cinema

It is thinking  in four-dimensional time-space continuum - cinema - how your mind moves in the world. It is subjective - your thinking in your brains! Objective is imagination - define facts? Quite frankly I don't have any notion that something like objective even exists.  As a conversational term, perhaps, it is practical. Subjective, yes. The physical world exists so far as it has been established by science - the character of light, for example, is still not established, but we can manage with existing  practical knowledge. Time-space with feelings and thoughts - where the intensity of both can be measured by the scale of pictures - short intense close-up versus static large scenery. Movement and rhythm binding them together. 

Of course there are the other elements of visual image that also make difference in the meaning: horizon, verticals, color-scale etc. There is this phenomena of 'filmed theatre' - a still standing camera with a steady far-off view of everything is - - what? Abomination, pestering objective? At least it is not interesting. Yes, it is said that 'this way everything is in the picture, we give the audience a perfect  recording!' But everything so often is nothing... like a delicious meal all run through a food-processor: sure it has everything but who wants to eat it! 

Intellectual curiosity needs details and craving them is healthy. Close-ups and camera movements give details and underlinings.   Moving camera at the right place at the right time, brisk editing, different angles and quick rhythm are a tribute to the intelligence of the audience. And watching a movie is  dialogue with another intelligence. So it has always been. At least in my case. Not some mystical collective what-ever! Sometimes the other intelligence is an idiot and the film greatly disappointing, even disturbing ( in not-so-good-way) and destructive. That kind of a film is frightening - stupidity always is. By stupidity I mean hasty conclusions, judging, prejudice and pessimism, specially aggressive pessimism. Concrete example of such a  movie? What was it? A science fiction years ago - I remember the disbelief I felt watching it... with my boys who just told me I was nuts! 'Event Horizon' - yes, that was it! But it was not disturbing - just plain stupid. What I might find disturbing is something like 'Shutter Island' - both the book and the film, unbreakable circle of nightmares - the prospect is so pessimistic and depressing that it is not even human any more: there is no hope in it. And without hope there is only death. That is disturbing because death is the only way out. Hope gives a chance to change, evolve and develop, to escape - 'there is a crack in everything: that is how the light gets in...'  as Leonard Cohen puts it.

Ruffly put in a picture the basics are c. the background - scenery, cityscape or whatever you call it. A cityscape - what you choose of a city... A movie can happen on the streets, maybe some bar or cafe included. Still it can be a distinctively identifiable city like Paris or London or NY. Or even Helsinki. It is a very interesting aspect: the many faces... For example New York in '9 1/2'  (1986, Adrian Lyne )   and NY in 'Taxi driver'  (1976, Martin Scorsese ) or NY in 'Devil wears Prada'  (2006, David Frankel)...  Or the difference of London and Paris in Damage (1992, Louis Malle). Yes, the streets are always alive and give their original atmosphere to the life in these movies significantly by the way of how camera is used to choose. The idea of cityscape is one choice you make while planning a film. It can vary inside the film, too, from one district to another or day and night  giving different faces to it - endless choice of possibilities there!

Closer surroundings, more personal form the level b. in a picture - any picture: photograph or drawing or a movie.  The house, rooms, bars and cars - that personal circle of activity includes other people, too. The personalities of people, their habits and opinions, ideas and ways are the bulk of any cinema. Words are a very clumsy thing to tell about these things - a picture gives the whole tedious description in one view!  And it is more exact - at least to me - than any words ever can be. The meaning of a word sifts and changes - I don't understand them, but colors, perspective etc and the cultural meaning of things like houses, cars and clothes are more exact and as such more acceptable than words. Maybe it has also something to do with the fact that words are used to control and discipline, and as such they tend to be repelling. Yet to some, maybe most people the words are the way to 'break free', or music. To me it is the 'visual music' , the symphony of sifting visual meanings the camera picks and points!

A cinema can function without both of these layers - yes, it can happen in one room or a mountaintop, in a tank or a coffin, as we have witnessed. But  there has to be the layer a., the human touch:  what happens and to whom. That is the point in any work of art finally - that something happens in the picture and in the viewer! The frontline with raw feelings and relations, suffering and joy - that is the main target, it has to exist, it is the essence of drama. Here we get a close look inside the characters to understand or judge and here the picture chosen and the rhythm of different sized pictures is crucial. You can film a city or a scenery in one large shot - in  principle, in practice even that is boring - but human feelings need different approach. 

In the times before technic set some boundaries that now don't exist anymore and the possibilities to move the camera and edit the takes are practically limitless! The long continuous shots where nothing happens are in some rare cases quite enjoyable and necessary but mostly those are boring torture! Thinking needs quick rhythm and close-ups, not imprisonment! And camera tells the thinking: it looks where is necessary in order to find out, to keep on track.  Windows and reflexions  - cinema should be like playing with objects and meanings depicting something of a human being, or should I say that a person without windows and reflexions is a dead end...

A character includes the mental and the cultural by which I mean that the cultural is things like clothes, spectacles, books and laptops etc. The mental is different. It can be a persons ways, words, habits, thoughts and memories presented in different ways. Psyche - you see and yet you do not see: meanings sift and that is change - forward or backward, change anyway. Else depends of other definitions, metamorphosis, parallels, hyperbolas of thinking, the lighter the more enjoyable - but even that can be conveyed in many different ways. And you choose - you choose the area, limits: law and it's meaning, power and wielding it with consequences, cultural symbolism like the sartorialist wandering in a world of outer specifics - yes they all reflect a inner world, the mind.

Dynamics are the continuum with the time given to each piece developing to rhythm. Usually you build the rhythm so that things/thoughts familiar to you need less time, and those stranger need more time and definitions, angles - but not necessarily! Depends also of the amount: one strange thought or many, one that leads to  multiple ways or  one that leads to a dead-end or death - it depends! Again choices!

A person can be a drifter in a steady environment - a steady environment can be culturally old or it can be chaotic but continuous - the time continuum makes it steady. Yes, how is it possible to have chaotic and steady at the same time? Basic! Like the saying that 'you need not do anything in life except die someday!'  Well, if you don't die now you have to  live and do something! Choices again. A continuum of choices, life , cinema. Yes, and if you create order in those choices - so define order... again anything... 

It is a game, game of meanings, layers, colors, cultures, characters - kaleidoscope again, moving, sifting, changing... Smile: it is a consolation! I am small, light, a drifter, chameleon. Yet I have feelings and deeps no-one knows - endless flow... Don't be boring - everything becomes boring by repetition. Change is the key, the crack, the light. Rational binds everything in concrete and thinking is suffocated, imagination uprooted, play forbidden! Yet they are the only really important: denying them leads to depression and death! 

And it is art when you don't compromise: The close, the main concrete theme is emotionally strongest! Meaning of glances, contacts, feelings, restlessness, touch - visual symptoms of things you can not see... and by telling your story right everyone understands something...

layers of thoughts...

So I am illegal... Independence is illegal, has always been. Ever since Robin Hood and before - maybe that was how those heroes were created by the common conscience: a need to sanctify and make change, evolving desirable and wanted. 

And my company is not like other companies - a functional devise! What is it then? I just wanted a tool to work with... and some support! All my life I have been listening talk of the importance of support, both spiritual, economical and as an attitude. The idea is like a dream. In reality I have had no friends - my thinking has always been too dynamic and imaginative. No, that is not quite true, but just a few friends... Somehow i still have managed to do what I have wanted - get a pack, or children, that is, and create ideas to make concrete objects. Lonely road it has been, but I am not blaming anyone. As a poet (Leino?) has said 'no man is bad, just some are weaker than other'. That is a consolation of a kind.

I have frequently come across the term 'fair play'. It has an echo of  a meaning that seems worth striving for: justice. Justice itself is a concept not to be achieved because it is an abstraction and as such nonexistent outside thinking. The practical term is fair play.

Also my company is an abstraction - a concept without concrete. Very clean, legal and ideal. What makes it my company is that I have drafted it, thought out the ways to work and means to do it. The idea itself contains some random creativity, the hot spices of life! And the movement, rhythm, yes. The spasms in time: change and evolvement. The life behind the mask.

Some day it, I hope, shall be a concrete bunch of people, cameras and computers, that makes movies! Of what? Of people, living in moments of decision and choice, of suffering and  love. More lovely abstractions! But it is not so difficult. We all have an image of suffering and of love, of friends and of enemies, right? 

A city, or a house is just a shell: what happens is important! Yet the city can appear as a living, bubbling environment    (9 1/2) or a static postcard-like staging or scenery as so often happens. So how come? Maybe they just did not move the people or the camera - both affect!  And how it happens: people, kids, dogs, cats, light, cars - how they move, live, feel and function. BUT: they can be lively but if the camera is settled in one place and they are kind of 'on stage' it does not work! 

Same goes with the difference between interior and exterior. If exterior is a real place and inside the walls we are taken to a studio is can be sensed from the film and breaks the illusion! So ideal would be to film on real location, real houses and apartments - which creates another problem:  so many series and 'consumer movies' are made this way - how to make a difference? Again the camera, tracking and movements! It is essential to the feeling in the film! That you see out when you are in, that you are seen changing surroundings... 

There is something fundamentally true in the process of  education: like the formal... eh, what is it... I miss the term... you know, when someone has been to a school and at the end gets a paper that he/she has completed that education - yes, graduation! Is it an achievement or a restriction? This is a very important question, because to certain part of people it will be a road paved ready and leading straight to where? I don't know, because I belong to that other part of people who forget and go on with the attitude that each day the sun rises anew.  It doesn't mean you would not have memories or a past or a method - no, it only means that the power of that past is behind in that time gone by, not to be played again and again and again anew - that is conservatism and as such stagnant, preserving and imprisoning. And a method is measured by the existing ingredients, kind of... you can not stop giving birth because you are not in a hospital, no - you just have to do it! 

Life does not like stagnant forms - it likes function and flexibility! If a form is a vessel and function is water in it: water in a vessel is water but does it have any of the great characteristics of WATER like a spring or a river, rain or sea, fog or mist?  No, in a vessel we have some liquid, transparent and wet. But water - it is somewhere else...

11.6.2011

Pirates of the Caribbean 4

Saw it with those glasses in 3D in our top modern 'Old Cow House' cinema theatre last saturday eve. Didn't go on wednesday when they had the world premier because 'Game of Thrones' - three episodes - came from Canals and I wanted to see that, too. I have spectacles and the other glasses on top of them are inconvenient, but  not unbearable. They should have a model developed for spectacled customers.

The 3D was not so impressive as I had heard: swords strike straight out of the canvas and ships sail to the auditorium! No. It was quite usual and the only really titillating feature was how mist and smoke drifted out of the picture. Wonder how it would work in a snowstorm...

The movie was full of everything: different places, crowds of people in different groups, all happening in chaotic way... In the beginning - London - it was interesting. The audience with the king and Sparrows escape with finally landing on Judy Dench's bosom in a carriage got me laughing out loud. Sparrow meeting his father was even conversational, a slower  moment in between, but then it got to running and jumping... The dark interiors and steadily same kind of camera-work are not so interesting... With a quite expensive picture like this one might expect some ambition - other than 3D - in cinematography and lighting, but no - same movements and same cuts follow and give the same stuffy impression of everything. F ex by lighting the faces differently in different pictures due to fire or some explosion or just swinging lamp would give depth and insight to the characters... Now everything is up to make-up and clothes! And acting of course - but even that seems to be somehow monotonous and recurrent. And this is of Jack Sparrow and the girl Angelica, Penelope Cruz and Johnny Depp - one might expect nuances, not just large scale...

And then the fighting with swords in hand - they are not sword-fights, no. They are messy bits and pieces with no real choreography - and that is needed if a fight is supposed to work like a fight. It is the same as with space -  how do you perceive a space containing different rooms and floors? It is easy only when you know how to do it, otherwise it is just making a mess...

Well a deck of a ship is a deck of a ship. Blackbeard is a new character - with some strange powers -  and daughter Angelica. B needs the fountain of youth as do many others, too many. It might be interesting to follow one or two parties galloping to the fountain, but three... Everything is kind of rhythmless rampage from one complex surrounding to another - must have given work to many, really, if one tries to find good points!

Of course they find the fountain, all parties find it, and then there is fight and destruction and spectacular stuff... but sadly it is not interesting... except the old lighthouse...  There are the nicely made mermaids that have vicious appetite, and there is the pure, innocent priest, and the love between the priest and Syrena mermaid who'll cry of joy and thus provide the tear needed for the ritual...

I truly like Johnny Depp - he has an expressive face and a lot of energy. I like Penelope Cruz - she is passionate and soft at the same time. And Ian McShane is wonderfully exhilarating! But it is just too much...

I don't think I want to see the next Pirates.... neither normal nor 3D...

passing

I don't really like flying.   I like stenches and scents,  train stations and trains, places where people are forced to stay and wait.

All stations have the same smell: old cold piss and detergents. Before there also was the scent of diesel, metallic and strong, but no more. Electricity is kind of faceless. No character. Just some oil and vaseline.

And the voices, sounds, all of it: people, machines, echoes, pigeons. You sit there somewhere with a coffee and close your eyes. Somewhere. Anywhere. A woman laughing. Some boys heating each other. A fay man screaming and a child running away after a sparrow.  Everywhere, too, there are the birds inside the buildings, station halls.

And the announcements echo... You can just and just figure out the message, half guessing: departure of a train is due in...  People are rushing to the platform and others rush out of the train towards the station and taxis, underground and trams. Or just to get an ice cream from a kiosk.

Thousands of people. Every day. Each with a life, coming from somewhere and going somewhere, with a goal or just aimlessly wandering - amazing puzzle of life... never ending kaleidoscope...