The Warmth #3

Some more of the images I've taken in the past year trying to navigate the world and locations of an unmade film... in this case, The Warmth, a feature about a young man from the Australian wheatbelt who becomes immersed in an unfamiliar world of sensation, desire and loss in the remote north of Colombia while trying to find traces of his missing sister. Following the slow paths of development, keeping the film alive becomes an art form in itself.

"a fever is a secret thing" - Don DeLillo

Suspense and Silence

"Suspense is trying to build but the stillness and silence outlive it."

Words: Don DeLillo
Image: Zoe Strauss

Loud Quiet Loud

I got a crazy thing for novelists who write like guitars. Hammering out, wailing, ripping out solos, then settling back into feedback or quiet strumming or long passages of melody or backing chords. A friend and I used to go nuts for Jim Thompson, trying to find his best possible phrasing, his sentences that kicked you so hard in the guts you had to reread them over and over just to feel their impact each time*. Don DeLillo is, for me, another writer who can lull you into the languor of some deep thought or exploration only to tear you out again with one quietly delivered, heartstopping, clipped phrase that stops you in your tracks.

I think this kind of writing (combined with a long life of listening to the loud quiet loud rhythms of indie and punk) has shaped, to many extents, the kind of editing or film forms that I like. 'Pain is just another form of information' is a sentence that arrested me while reading DeLillo's 'Underworld'. The 'Pain' comes out of the preceding paragraph like a jumpcut, then there is the slow resound of the rest of the sentence that, at first seems like a glib exercise in style and cleverness, but slowly compounds into an idea you can't shake. This, to me, is like a great edit, that throws you hurtling into the next idea, but then follows any visual violence with languour to allow the severance to settle once again. DeLillo even alludes to the visual nature of his language when he says "I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like..." ('Conversations with DeLillo', Thomas DePietro) Or this:

"Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. One one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence."

This approach makes sense to me because as much as there is a grammar of editing, a logic of information, of space and spatial relationship, there should also, always be the pleasure of the way an edit is assembled as a sequence itself. It's rhythm, it's inversions and trickery, and it's overall lilt and lean that encapsulates the indefinable heart of the film. Usually, when I have a 'swoon' moment when watching a film, it is usually because of exactly this kind of thing. When the edit, the assemblage jolts you for a moment, or gives you a moment of pure visual music or pleasure; it can be abrupt or gentle but just enough to startle you into enjoying the way things go.

Edit like words, like language:



Although understated, this relationship-severing edit in this clip from 'Climates', when seen in the context of the meditative pace of this film, was jarring and brilliant. For a moment the world of the film condenses and, in doing so, expands immeasurably. Swoon.

Or the percussive awesomeness (that's the correct film theory terminology) of this well known scene from Tran Anh Hung's 'Xich Lo' (apologies for terrible compression and frame size but you take what you can get on youtube)...



Or the undulating loud, quiet, loud of the riverside house party in Lynne Ramsay's 'Morvern Callar' as you fall in and out of intensity. Severing our intimate perspective, for a moment, the film takes us out to a worker's barge who, by torchlight, passes by Morvern standing by the river, like an apparition, like a ghost, who, slowly raises her skirt then lowers it again, before throwing you back into the scene with a smashing bottle. Swoon.



Some editors strive for invisibility but I'll always be a front row audience for a bit of editorial showboating that reveals the mechanics of film, that riffs on a moment or a piece of action and lets the rhythm do the work.

* We finally had no choice but to settle on the final chapters of 'Savage Night'. Chapter Twenty Six concludes with the sentence "I went over backwards, then down and down and down, turning so slowly in the air it seemed that I was hardly moving. I didn't know it when I hit the bottom. I was simply there, looking up as I'd been looking on the way down. Then there was a slam and a click, and she was gone." before hurtling straight into the final two chapters:

"TWENTY SEVEN

   The darkness and myself. Everything else was gone. And the little that was left of me was going, faster and faster.

   I began to crawl. I crawled and rolled and inched my way along; and I missed it the first time - the place I was looking for.

   I circled the room twice before I found it, and there was hardly any of me then but it was enough. I crawled up over the pile of bottles, and went crashing down the other side.

  And he was there, of course.

   Death was there.

TWENTY EIGHT

   And he smelled good."

Faces

"Show us their faces. Tell us what they said"

Don DeLillo, 'The Names'

A couple of weekends past, as part of the Melbourne Festival, we watched Dean & Britta perform '13 Most Beautiful - Songs for Andy Warhols Screen Tests'. You might have already seen it. 13 of Andy Warhol's screen tests with, for the most part, songs composed to accompany them. At around 3 to 4 minutes in length, each screen test was given a musical shape. What was really incredible however, was just how intense a viewing experience it was. It was moving and immersive and verging on the transcendent. On the way home, I kept thinking about how the opportunity to gaze into a face for that length of time is reserved only for lovers and for the cinema. Someone told me many years ago - and I've never been able to remember who it was or find the source of their quote - that David Cronenberg said that his perfect film would be 90 minutes just following a person's face in close up. I don't know if that's true but I've never liked Cronenberg's films and I wanted to like them a whole lot more after hearing that. Other filmmakers who I do love seem to make precisely that kind of film. I'm thinking of the Dardennes Brothers 'Rosetta' or Hou Hsiao Hsien's 'Millenium Mambo' or Reygadas 'Battle in Heaven' or Zoncka's 'Little Thief' or Bresson's 'Mouchette'. The opportunity to linger on a face as it moves from emotion to emotion or from place to place is that rare privilege. If anything, I think my desire for this kind of film makes it difficult for me when it comes to writing. I seem almost happier to see a character in stasis than to propel them somewhere. I'm curious what will be revealed on the face in those moments of stillness. Just don't tell my script editor.



You can watch the trailer also at the pretty damned nice distributor site for Plexifilm and buy the DVD there. I am curious how the DVD translates. There was something very balanced and right about the projected faces flickering away high on the theatre wall and the haphazard snaking of amp leads and microphone cords on the stage below as the band performed.

We also watched this film/performance only a week before the opening of Dirtsong, which was a vast performance by the Black Arm Band with a background projection of a feature-ish film (80 mins or so of extracted goodness) assembled from fragments that T and I shot and edited for the performance. More on Dirtsong in time, but there was no doubt that seeing '13 Most Beautiful' allowed us, in the midst of a month of daily 18hr edit sessions to settle back, be inspired by this immersive kind of film portraiture and rely on simplicity and clarity and stillness.

Pearls of Wisdom #1

A Fever is a Secret Thing

A fever is a secret thing - Don DeLillo