Screening of Miss Representation at UNR

Via Joe DeLappe, here's news of a free screening at UNR Wednesday night:

Miss Representation
Wednesday, November 16th, 5:30pm
Theater Joe Crowley Student Union
Followed by a panel discussion including:
Jen Hill, Director, Gender, Race & Identity Program and Chair of Women's Studies
Ann Keniston, Accociate Professor, Department of English, GRI Faculty Associate
Mary Stewart, Professsor of Sociology and Women's Studies

French Film Festival starts tonight on campus

Sierra Nevada College is hosting The Tournées Festival, featuring contemporary French cinema April 6th-9th, 2011. The Festival is hosted by SNC's language program and made possible with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Ministry of Culture. Community sponsors have also added to the French theme with wine tastings, receptions, and discounted dinners for the event. French cultural games, door prizes, and lively discussions will accompany each screening. The films will be free to all students and the public is encouraged to attend for a suggested $10 donation, which will support future programming.

Click on the poster above to see a larger version with readable film titles & time. More info here:

http://www.sierranevada.edu/news/detail/?id=658

Posterization

I've been meaning to do a blog post showing the posters for the films I'm screening in my independent film class, and some recent poster news is giving me a good impetus to close the deal. Chris Ware, one of the most interesting cartoonists around, has created a very distinctive poster for Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the latest film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, one of the most interesting directors around. It's an unexpected intersection of two of my favorite artists. Click the image below to see a larger version of the poster:


I also might as well post a few more links pertinent to the art of movie posters, since I've been collecting that sort of thing in my bookmarks for a while (and it'll provide a helpful jumping-off point for my "Art & Advertising" class, which is starting a poster design project this week). First off, a link to posters commissioned by the Alamo Drafthouse, a famous venue for screening offbeat films; the Alamo is probably the most prominent source for limited-edition artist-designed posters for repertory films. I think of them as film-poster versions of a good cover tune. Below is an Alamo poster for The Shining:


An artist who's done several posters for the Alamo is Olly Moss, who has made several in the vein of the great designer Saul Bass -- here's a Bass-inflected design by Moss:


And to pick up again for a moment on The Shining kick (for some reason, that flick has inspired a lot of great repertory posters), below is a treatment done by Moxy Creative, for a series of redesigned posters inspired by Men's Style (thought in this particular case, it's more like ectoplasmic adolescent style):


Those Moxy posters trade on knowledge of the film -- they make more sense if you've already seen the movie. There seems to be a whole set of designers who make retroactive poster designs based on this sort of inside-baseball visual punning (like the Back to the Future 2 riff below, which I swiped from a blog post on "Minimalist Movie Poster Designs"):


And if you want to go really minimalist, you should check out filmtheblanks.com, a site where you can see movie posters reduced to their most iconic design elements -- The Deer Hunter gets the abstracting treatment here:


Another transformative tack on movie iconography comes from Andrey Kuznetsov, who has drawn images of blockbusters as if they were being advertised via Medieval woodblock print:


Any look at outre movie posters would be remiss to leave out the Polish poster designers who have both managed to create some perfectly poetic images for great films, and even some perfectly poetic images for terrible films (check out the Crocodile Dundee 2 poster at the link):


If you want on ongoing supply of great eye-candy and commentary on movie posters, Adrian Curry writes a Movie Poster of the Week feature for mubi.com. Curry is smart about the power of single images, like this one for Black Swan:


And he's equally adept at noticing trends in poster design -- for instance pinpointing the recent vogue of using title text to obscure the faces of the actors:


And here, finally, is the run of posters for the films in the indy film class. I tried to find original posters (not subsequent redesigns). One thing that becomes apparent is that the 80s were as ugly in movie poster design as they were in everything else; the posters for Before Sunrise and Do the Right Thing are easily the worst of the batch, in my eyes. It's funny how few of the posters actually conjure a flavor of the movie they're promoting -- the one for Persona does it, and that's about it (though several of the other posters are still attractive on their own terms).

There's an interesting story behind the poster for Nothing But a Man, an emotionally intense neo-realist look at a black railway worker in the American South. In listening to an interview with the filmmakers, Michael Roemer and Robert Young, I found out they were angry about the poster. Nothing But a Man was a pioneering film with a largely black cast; the filmmakers intended the film to play in black neighborhoods, but the distributors confined it to the art-house circuit of the time (1964). By making the image a drawing against a white background, you could almost not know the movie stars black people -- the poster actually unwittingly recapitulates a monologue delivered by a preacher's wife, played by Abbey Lincoln, late in the film. She mentions to her husband that she has more latitude than he does, in the white-dominated South, because she's not seen as a physical threat to white men. And there her face stands on the poster, whitewashed and also obscuring the masculine (and unmistakably African) features of the actual protagonist of the film, Ivan Dixon.

Manny Farber, 1917-2008

Many Farber, the painter and critic, died a few days ago, on August 18th. I'm not an expert on Farber, but the handful of reviews and essays I've read really wowed me. His writing style is inimitable, which is probably fortunate: any attempt to really follow in his prosodical footsteps would be bound to end in ignominy. All the same, I consider him a guiding light for my own critical writing. He wrote about film in a really fresh way: he was alive to the (sometimes quite deep) surfaces of film, in a way that seems appropriate for a painter.

He recognized that cinema is a largely inchoate art, at least in the way it works on you. Sure, there's Plot, and Character, and Theme, but there are also all these pictures, coming at you at 24 frames a second, each one of them arriving with attributes of composition, space, atmosphere, color -- and populated by actors full of gestures, attitudes, vocal tics -- any single detail of which might harmonize with the classical demands of the overarching story, but which might as well undermine it, or doodle its own particular details in the margins of What's Supposed To Be Going On.

Farber is probably best known for coming up with two terms for oppositional categories of art: "White Elephant Art" versus "Termite Art." "White Elephant Art" is self-important, self-conscious of itself as "Art" with a capital "A" -- there's a big overlap here with the idea of the "middlebrow." In Farber's own words:

Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago, has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of TV and movies. Three sins of white elephant art are (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.

Termite art, on the other hand, is unpretentious, less concerned with overarching "values" than with what's right in front of its face:

Good work usually arises where the creators seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

These categories are still at work, stomping or chewing their way through the cultural landscape. The main new development in cultural production, between the publication of " White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" and today, might be the self-consciousness that's crept into the creation of material that would have previously sat contentedly in the B-movie burrows of termite land. With the advent of "Grindhouse" and the blockbusterization of the superhero story, perhaps we can start talking about "White Termite Art."

What I didn't know about Farber, until reading through some obituaries, was that in addition to being a critic and a painter, he was also a professor, teaching for a long stretch at UC San Diego. Here is a description of his teaching technique, from Duncan Shepard's fine reminiscence:

Manny's film classes... were the stuff of legend, and it seems feeble and formulaic to call him a brilliant, an illuminating, a stimulating, an inspiring teacher. It wasn't necessarily what he had to say (he was prone to shrug off his most searching analysis as “gobbledegook”) so much as it was the whole way he went about things, famously showing films in pieces, switching back and forth from one film to another, ranging from Griffith to Godard, Bugs Bunny to Yasujiro Ozu, talking over them with or without sound, running them backwards through the projector, mixing in slides of paintings, sketching out compositions on the blackboard, the better to assist students in seeing what was in front of their faces, to wean them from Plot, Story, What Happens Next, and to disabuse them of the absurd notion that a film is all of a piece, all on a level, quantifiable, rankable, fileable. He could seldom be bothered with movie trivia, inside information, behind-the-scenes piffle, technical shoptalk, was often offhand about the basic facts of names and dates, was unconcerned with Classics, Masterpieces, Seminal Works, Historical Landmarks. It was always about looking and seeing.

He would endlessly preview the week's movies on the wall of his studio on campus or his rented house in Del Mar, lugging an anvil-weight 16mm projector to and fro, together with three or four valise-sized boxes of celluloid, and yet throughout these endless hours he felt no necessity to watch every reel of every movie. If you wanted simply to know How It Ends, he might not have the answer. One week he had previewed Kurosawa's wide-screen High and Low without benefit of an anamorphic lens, so that the image was squeezed like an accordion, and all of his prepared comments on narrow spaces and vertical lines, perfectly true to what he was seeing, had to be modified on the fly when the film was shown in class, stretched out horizontally with the proper lens. He was constitutionally unable to make things easy on himself.

I'm not, at this stage of my career, self-possessed enough to teach a class like that; of course, I'd enroll in a class like that at the drop of a hat.

There's a very good collection of links to writings on Farber here, and a generous selection of the man's words themselves (including essays on paintings as well as films) here.