R.I.P. “Modern Prometheus”… maybe

I can hear Purcell’s “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary” playing in the background. The lights are dim, faint yellow, soft. Someone is crying.

Modern Prometheus, the film I have been working on for four months now, is dead.

Well, perhaps not, but it is for now. Due to various hardware, software, and financial problems I’ve encountered in the past few weeks (i.e. broken computer, broken files, broken wallet), I have no choice but to indefinitely postpone the project’s completion until such time that I am able to resurrect it.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m terribly upset about this, but it is certainly disappointing. Aside from the intangible, artistic frustrations involved with having such an ambitious undertaking fail, there’s also a practical side effect. I had planned on using Modern Prometheus as a part of my application to RIT’s film school, the bulk of the portfolio needed for me to even be considered for acceptance. Alas, I’ll have to think of something else to submit, or a different graduate school.

Sorry to all those who have been involved with this project, though most of you have already been told and/or figured it out on your own. I’m also especially appreciative of Abr Miller, who was not only the star of the film, but also an invaluable asset in assisting with all sorts of on-set technical issues. He doubled as a camerman many a time and was willing to put himself through frozen hell just to get a few quick shots during a February blizzard.

Good night, Modern Prometheus, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Focus On: David Lynch

Though I haven’t kept up with his post-eighties work the way I would have liked to, David Lynch has probably influenced my sensibilities regarding the relationship between horror and surrealism more than any other filmmaker. This is quite bizarre, in a way, because I’ve never been certain as to whether or not Lynch actually makes horror films. His 1977 masterpiece Eraserhead disturbed – and continues to disturb – me more than any mainstream horror film of the period, but its tone is too lilting, its aesthetic too absurd for me to shoehorn it into the same category as Dawn of the Dead or The Amityville Horror. The fact that Lynch supposedly made it out of a semi-autobiographical impulse just complicates things further.

Lynch’s second film, The Elephant Man, is usually seen as a step-up from the arthouse musings of Eraserhead – and a step towards the arthouse blockbuster of Blue Velvet, which is apparently his studio-approved masterpiece – but, in terms of theme, The Elephant Man is Lynch’s weakest film. The story of the titular deformed young man was tragic enough without the screenwriters watering it down into so much Oscar bait, and Lynch’s unique eye for psychological subversion actually seems a bit out of step with the rather mediocre story.

The baby in Eraserhead

The Elephant Man shines, though, in its imagery (well, sound and music, as well, but I want to talk about the imagery, damnit). Freddie Francis was such a well respected cinematographer and did such a fine job with the black and white film that people sometimes forget that it was Lynch who decided to make the film colorless to begin with. Eraserhead was a student film that was forced into being black and white due to budget constraints, but The Elephant Man had plenty of opportunity to be in color.

A lot of critics have waved this off as Lynch going for a “period feel” – i.e. any time before 1939 supposedly having to be shot in black and white for audiences to believe it – but, if Eraserhead’s almost Beckettesque tragicomedy of horrors is any indication, the reason is probably closer to Lynch’s instinctive sense for mental unease. In most black and white films, the audiences is guided by the director to ignore the colorlessness, to fill in the blanks, so to speak, by imagining the colors that should be there. Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, however, present worlds so completely devoid of pigment and hue that color would seem more out of place in them than black and white would in real life.

The key is understanding what black and white represents: it’s not just a simple symbol, but a subconscious indicator of an alien atmosphere. It’s also telling that most people do not dream in color, and, whether we have conscious memories of them or not, black and white films have at least the potential to tease out some old dreams from the backs of our minds – and, judging by the fact that they’re in the back of our minds in the first place, they’re probably not all that pleasant. The lack of color, then, is not a lack at all, but the presence of colorlessness, a useful – and practical – artistic tool for the low budget filmmaker.

The laptop returns

I just got my laptop back from the repair shop today after a grueling three weeks of having to drive to the library every time I wanted to check my Twitter. The repairman claims that he had to replace the keyboard, which I really have no reason to doubt, I suppose, but I can’t help but wondering if he simply chose to not clean the old one because of the three years’ worth of shedded beard hair that had accumulated under the keys.

In any case, my post-production work can now continue, and I shall resume my weekly rampages of neo-Luddite frustration as soon as I actually get around to editing some more footage. The only thing worse than not having a computer is having a computer – at least the computer you don’t have can’t piss you off on a daily basis with how efficiently it manages to not do what you want it to.

Camcorder blues

Filming a feature-length film with a digital camcorder is like writing a novel with a Speak & Spell. I realized before I even attempted it that it would be difficult, but I didn’t realize how much of a bona fide pain in the ass it would be.

I’ve filmed probably a dozen short films with my camcorder – animated, live action, comedy, drama, all kinds of things – and it’s never caused too much frustration. The real bitch has always been the editing: in the bad old days before I had Vegas Movie Studio or Final Cut Pro, I had to edit all my films with a Little Rascal-esque cutting station I built myself out of two VCRs, a few RF modulators, a CD player, a television, about thirty or so feet of coaxial cable, and a jerry-rigged remote switch that I slapped together using a few parts I got at Radio Shack and the innards of a remote controlled toy car. With all that mumbo jumbo behind me and the 21st Century at my fingertips, all I had to do was connect my camcorder to my computer, upload the video, and tinker with it to my heart’s content.

And then troubleshoot the video uploading software.

And replace the transfer cable that came with the camera.

And wait for my computer to get back from the repair shop so I can actually get on with my life.

Computer problems aside, it’s still much easier to edit now than it was, say, five years ago, before I had my computer. However, this new-found ability has made me cocky, it seems, because my overly ambitious artistic demons have forced me to tackle a 90-minute film project using equipment designed for suburban dads who want to edit home movies of their kids falling off the swing set and slopping baby food on the kitchen floor.

For those unfamiliar with film equipment, this is the Sony HVR-A1U, a professional-grade digital video camera made for amateur filmmakers.  It’s not what the real moviemakers at Paramount and Universal Studios use, and it’s not even one of the top-of-the-line models available on the market, but it’s ideal for student filmmakers like me who are starting out in the business. In other words, this is what I’m supposed to be using.

Now, this is the Sony CCD-HRV138, what I currently own and am attempting to make a serious, artsy fartsy horror film with.

I am doomed.

Actors are the worst actors

I used to fancy myself an actor. Not to boast, but I’m very talented at it: every acting instructor I’ve ever had declared me a prodigy, and predicted I would win Oscars and Golden Globes and all that bollocks someday. I can mimic any accent I hear, adopt nearly anyone’s mannerisms and body language, and when I get into character, my personality alters completely until I shift it back into my normal mood. People even said – if you can believe – that I have the coveted “it.”

However, I eventually gave up on my dream of being an actor when, after immersing myself in the world of theatre, I realized that talent wasn’t as much of a prerequisite for acting success as pure, unbridled egotism is. Nine out of ten actors I’ve ever gotten to know personally thought the sun shone out of their ass, and the other one was only meek and timid because of an embarrassing lack of thespianic skill. Disgusted with the lot of them – save Kevin Kline, who is charming and humble in person – I abandoned the trade altogether to pursue a career in journalism, film, and comic books.

Those of you with IQs about 80 have probably figured out where this is going by now: “But what a second,” you mumble, trying not to insult me, “how can you make films if you hate actors so much?”

Short answer: I can’t.

Long answer: I can’t, but I do anyway.

The trick is to hire people who’ve never acted before in their life. They’re so tickled pink to be in movies that they generally do whatever you tell them to. None of that “can I take a moment here?” or “I’d really like to try this” from amateurs – they’re pliable, trustworthy, and good-natured about it. Maybe it’s just the failed actor in me tag-teaming with the control freak in me, but I just have no patience for 99.9% of “real” actors.

More than that, however – as my somewhat unfair post title implies – they frequently give inferior performances to their non-professional counterparts. Modern Prometheus is a silent film, more or less – all voices and sound effects will be put in after filming, so all on-screen acting is done with the face and body. Stripped of their ability to speak, actors, naturally, try to compensate with their facial expressions and body language. This is known in the industry as “hamming it up.”

That doesn’t happen with amateur actors. Not to compare myself to someone as brilliant as him, but Robert Bresson never used professional actors in his films, but the performances feel so rich because people in real life don’t perfectly enunciate, don’t clearly express their emotions with their eyes, don’t move their hands in calculated and extravagant ways while speaking. Tell this to an actor, and they’re liable to snap back with “well, I have to give you something.”

They then proceed to ruin your film.

P.S. Here’s a little something for the Kevin Kline fans out there.

Focus On: Stan Brakhage

This is the first in a series of posts in which I’ll be discussing the filmmakers that have had the most influence on me during the production of Modern Prometheus, with a new post up every Friday.

Stan Brakhage, one of the most revered figures in American avant-garde film, was a goofy, pretentious genius, and, of the thirty or so of his films that I’ve seen, all but a handful made me want to either drop some sleeping pills or hold my eyelids open with a wire apparatus a la A Clockwork Orange so I could pay attention. However, his 1962 short, Window Water Baby Moving, is firmly in my top twenty favorite films of all time, and it creates a lot of inner tension for me when I try to reconcile my deep disinterest for the bulk of his oeuvre with my even deeper fascination with his peculiar breed of visual poetry.

Now, “visual poetry” is a rather high-falutin’ phrase to just toss about without qualification, but even the most Philistinistic viewer would understand the metaphor if they saw more than two of Brakhage’s films. Brakhage himself fancied himself a poet at heart – and some of his (bland) verse can be heard in 1974’s The Stars Are Beautiful – and he uses images and cuts the way a pen and ink poet uses words and line breaks. Superimposition becomes visual metaphor, juxtaposition becomes verbal syntax, lens focus becomes enunciation, and abstract painting directly on the celluloid becomes whatever you’d call that gobbledy-gook gibberish e.e. cummings and the Beatniks were always banging out.

Take, for instance, his magnum opus, Dog Star Man, a four-part film made between 1962 and 1964. Using the non-narrative story of a man climbing a mountain (in Part I, at least), Brakhage ties the man’s struggle to Norse mythology, American folklore, cosmology, and Homeric epics by using shots of trees, sunlight, dead branches, and dogs as metaphoric commentary. What I’ve tried to do with Modern Prometheus is take Brakhage’s sense of epic metaphor and apply it to a more traditional narrative – a running analogy I’ve included, for instance, dies the image of a leafless tree to diagrams of human blood vessels and electric wiring. I would never call myself a poet – both because I have a profoundly plebeian preference for prose and an embarrassingly amateur affiliation with alliteration – but Brakhage’s high-brow lyricism to my own, less abstract purposes.

Of course, die-hard Brakhage fans would call this dillusion at best and plagiarism at worst, but maybe they should take a look at the works of Andrew Wyeth, Germaine Dulac, Jackson Pollock, and William S. Burroughs before they pretend that Brakhage himself wasn’t equally guilty of appropriating other artists’ aesthetics for his own purposes.

Broken computer

I apologize for the lack of updates here, but my cat apparently thought it would be hilarious to jump up onto my computer desk and spill eight ounces of hot Earl Grey into my keyboard. Thus, all current efforts on the home front concerning work, school, filming, writing, et cetera are concentrating on un-breaking the very broken computer that is currently sitting lifeless and inert in my office. The really cute part is that, while all my filming activities – all of them – have to be put on hold while this is remedied and that I have to do all my word processing and online research at the library, my cat has taken my absence from the office as an opportunity to transform it into her own personal lounge, with my plush computer chair functioning as a fine bed and sofa for Her Royal Highness. Why dog people think that cats are stupid, I’ll never know. They’re the most conniving creatures this side of a Senate chamber, and I’m considering making a short film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat to express my constant worry that felines may, in fact, be physical manifestations of The Dark One.

Re-thinking of re-shooting

It’s the middle of March, the day between the 2055th Anniversary of Julius Caesar’s assassination and St. Patrick’s Day, and the week-long schedule of hard shooting I’d planned on commencing this afternoon is looking to be largely scrapped. Much of what I was going to do was re-shooting of previous scenes, to try them again with this new thing they just came out with this month called “sunlight”. However, after grinding away in the editing room – by which, of course, I mean my home office where I keep my laptop computer – I started to change my mind. The griminess, the darkness, the sloppiness, the blurriness – it all seemed to fit, somehow.

I always have been more interested in the process of filmmaking more than the end product, and this project is turning out to be a fine experience as far as that goes. Taking all these found shots, dirty frames with bad lighting, and trying to stitch them all together later to bring life to a single film. I feel a bit like… Victor Frankenstein.

Hmm.

Anyway, there will still be shooting done this week, but it will fortunately not be as repetitive and grueling as had been the original plan. Up next on the agenda is a series of scenes involving plastic bags, gas masks, blood, and top hats.

A random act of virus

Nobody likes being sick – well, almost nobody, but the people that do enjoy it are often sick in the head, as well – but it’s especially inconvenient when you’re trying to shoot a movie. An actor with the flu can destroy an entire day’s filming. A trembling cameraman can ruin a shot. After spending a week and a half grappling with the Russian roulette that is Western New York’s climate, I finally got the right combination of sunlight, dead trees, fog, and actor availability that I needed to shoot the opening of the film. Naturally, I got sick.

It’s not one of those sexy illnesses where something really crazy happens and everyone’s impressed by your casual acceptance of it. It’s just a nasty cold, or something like it, and all my symptoms have been rather run-of-the-mill: coughing, malaise, head aches, phlegm, et cetera. There was some blood in mucus briefly, some stomach pains, and even a moment of slight vomiting, but nothing to write home about. I was just sick enough to not be able to go outside for any extended period of time, which was the exact opposite of convenient because that’s where the filming needed to take place.

Now the snow’s melted. St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner, and, even on Lake Ontario, we don’t often get much snow after our annual corned beef and cabbage. I’ll either have to find another way to shoot those particular scenes, pray for snow, or wait until next winter.

Damnit.

So, my old nemesis, we meet again

Nothing – and I do mean nothing - will get in the way of an independent, low-budget filmmaker more than the weather. It is completely unpredictable beyond a three day time span or so, and it doesn’t help that here in Western New York we have some of the most schizophrenic climate shifts anywhere in the country. It can snow on Monday, rise up to 57 on Tuesday, rain on Wednesday, re-freeze on Thursday, and by Sunday morning a blizzard will have come and gone and your front lawn will be covered with brown slush and mud.

I have been attempting to shoot the opening and closing scenes of my film for a week and a half now, but Mother Nature has not been cooperating. The two scenes are halves of a frame device, bookends that bring the story full circle to where it started. It requires four things: the actors, the camera, me, and snow. Having lived in Western New York my entire life, snow in early March did not seem to be an extravagant expectation, and, indeed, there has been plenty of it, but so far there’s been a major thaw before every planned shooting day. My actors are not available at all times of the week, and neither am I, and, apparently, neither is the snow.