Mike Lim

The hassle of my moving house recently was mitigated somewhat by the pleasure of seeing old books emerge from long-stored boxes. I did a cull as well, gritting my teeth as I sent away books that I’d thought I should’ve read but hadn’t, books that I’d read but didn’t love enough to keep, books I wasn’t sure why I had, books that reminded me of paths I’d started down before I turned elsewhere. I decided that, aside from a few particularly nostalgic items (like Solomon Shag, the earliest book of mine that I still possess) the books I kept would be ones that were a part of my present life and interests. I wasn’t going to maintain an archive of abandoned enthusiasms. But all those stories and ideas! All that untapped thought! Still, too much, must make choices.

I’ve got a few mutually-incompatible shelving systems going now, and one section I thought I’d create was ‘Books That Have Been Adapted Into Movies’. A few observations about my little collection:

• None of them have movie tie-in covers. Last week I overheard a twentysomething couple at a bookstore: “No, not that one, it’s got the movie cover on it”, and I feel the same way (I’ve written about tie-in covers before). The exception is maybe Dracula, though I suspect the image of Bela Lugosi is appealing to the recognizability of the Count rather than to any viewers of the 1931 film.
• I came to most of these books from seeing the movie first (not a great thing for someone who majored in English Lit to admit).
• I’ve noticed that my copies of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and Ways of Seeing are missing (TV, I know, but since I’m forging ahead with fuzzy categories they’d be on this shelf).
• Some of these books are borrowed.
• Umberto Eco is now sitting in about five different sections around the house.
• Only one of these movies has Kevin Bacon in it, as far as I know.
• Of the five nonfiction books, three have been made into movie dramas.

It’s interesting that fewer of the nonfiction books became documentaries. They were also the only books on this shelf written at the same time that the movies were being made. Sebastian Junger’s War was part of the same project that became Junger and Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo, and Standard Operating Procedure was written by Phillip Gourevitch & Errol Morris from the same source material that Morris’s documentary was based on. I could probably place Nubar Alexanian’s Nonfiction next to Standard Operating Procedure as it’s made up of photographs from Errol Morris’s film sets and locations, but it’s too big for this shelf. (In a Morrisonian kind of way, leaving it with the photobooks makes evident the contradictions of book shelving: some books by subject matter, others by form, others by size. And anyway, why don’t I just shelve the DVDs with the related books?)

I guess it’s partly because of the formal differences between books and movies. You can write about something that has already happened, but you can’t photograph it retrospectively. The ‘Based on a True Story’ movie drama is the more common cinematic translation for even bestselling nonfiction writing (think also of Catch Me If You Can and Moneyball; in fact, have a quick glance at this Wikipedia list). Are movie-drama narratives more engaging than documentary ones? I don’t believe this. Plus, I’m not sure how long you could assert that there’s  a difference in narrative styles, since lots of fiction films look like documentaries and vice versa. Is it just that a movie with film stars is still trumps? Or that the most appealing way of conveying a first-person narrative in cinema (aside from filming it as you go) is to reconstruct it as a movie drama?

This weekend I’m in country Victoria to catch the tail end of the Ballarat International Foto Bienalle (about which I’ll write a bit more later). Driving across the border from South Australia means a change in speed limit, the landscape shifting from being a flat brown to a more wooded green, and something I’d not seen before: billboards saying “This is why you’re photographed when you speed”, accompanied with a couple of family snaps of a young woman blowing candles out and looking at the camera. This seemed a little cryptic, though its placement by the highway suggested some kind of road safety message (we photograph/use speed cameras so that you can live to enjoy your twenty-first birthday?).

The mystery was solved a few hours later in the rental apartment though, with the TV on and ads flowing past. One caught my eye. It started with a shot of some family photos on a wall and in other empty rooms. It was quiet and deliberate, with a touch of handheld camera movement, but trying, it seemed, not to be too loud and ad-like. It cut to a succession of ordinary-looking people–a woman in a suburban front yard, a truckie in his cabin, a man in a lounge room–who were looking at or holding a photograph. The subdued music and sombre expressions soon made it clear that the photographs were those of people who were dead. Then the ad cut to closer shots of the people in the photographs, with their names and dates of death. This seemed too specific to be fiction. These must be real people who’ve really lost loved ones (surely whatever agency commissioning the ad would not toy with our emotions so, to actually name someone in full and not have it be true?) Then, the text to close the ad from the roadside billboard. This TV ad is a documentary, I realised.

I can remember a road safety ad years ago which featured a man in a pub having a drink that ended with the final-shot kicker showing him in a wheelchair. It was controversial because it was an actor playing the role. There was nothing telling that audience that it was an actual road accident victim, but people felt cheated that it wasn’t somehow. This current ad depends on this expectation of truthfulness and by giving us the victims’ names it reassures us that our emotional attention to these tragedies is grounded in reality. It also depends on our understanding of photographs as stand-ins for the dead. Photographs aren’t always the only tokens of the departed, but in this case, they serve as an economical way to signal absence and loss. It’s not simply photographs as photographs that do this here–the music and sombre expressions and even tears strongly suggest this, prior to the even stronger confirmations of the names. (I can imagine an ad with a photograph held by a smiling woman, for example, which might indicate a child overseas–when Barthes says photographs hint of death, he’s right, but not always.)

The safety campaign has a website which provides more context, telling us that a handful of families volunteered their stories. These stories, not an abstract set of road safety guidelines, are the main feature of the site. The centrality of the photographs to this campaign is clear: it’s called ‘picturesofyou‘.

[Source Code, 2011. via Video Word Made Flesh]

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[La Jetée, 1962. via The Boston Bachelor]

[Update, 29 August 2011: I've decided to take this idea elsewhere. Hello, Cinememory!]

Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is a puzzle, an enigma of a film. In an grand opulent hotel, the guests entertain themselves with card games, concerts, target shooting and walks in the garden. One man talks repeatedly to a woman, trying to persuade her that they have met there the previous year. She resists his advances and denies that anything has ever happened between them. But the film is elliptical, and it’s soon clear that the scenes cut between different years, though which sequence is the past, which one the future, and which one merely imagined is never clear. The man persistently narrates his version of how they met and the woman persistently rejects it. Sometimes it seems as though the man is narrating the film itself. He describes how she was standing with her arm half-outstretched on the balustrade, and on screen she complies, standing just so. But this is uncertain too: on another occasion he describes the way she walked around her room towards the closed door. But we see on screen the woman walking to look past an open door. “No, the door was closed!” his voice-over protests, to no avail.

[Image: Screen grab from TheReturnoftheSDQ’s YouTube channel, about 7min 25sec]

A one point he brings out a photograph, taken, he claims, the previous year in the gardens. She barely looks at it but later she seems to using it as a bookmark. He talks about how even this doesn’t convince her. It could have been taken by anyone, in any garden, she says. It proves nothing. We then see her sitting in the gardens, perhaps when the photograph was taken. But we never see a camera or a photographer. Later still she opens a drawer in her room to find it full of copies of the same picture. Perhaps the man has put them there in some grand and vain gesture (as if repeating oneself more and more loudly is a way of getting someone to understand something). Perhaps it’s an indication that the movie is a facade, and the character has stumbled upon the props department storage area. In any case, she lays out the photos in the same pattern as the game that some of the men play — putting objects on the table and removing them until the person left with one object loses. The photograph now is merely a prop in a game that can’t really be understood (at another point, with two men playing, the onlookers shout out a host of possibilities: one has to go first to win, or that it’s a logarithmic series, or some other obscure strategy, none of which apply).

Near the beginning of the film the characters chat in the salon and then pause, as if time has stood still. Perhaps the film hasn’t quite begun, the mechanism hasn’t quite warmed up yet. Perhaps the stagey and artificial-looking stillness is an indication that the photograph to come, the photograph that might anchor the man’s entreaties in something real, is itself fake (something the man has faked a connection to? an object about which the woman fakes ignorance? a fake prop in an elaborate pretense of a movie?) and not really proof that anything has actually happened.

Words is a brilliant little film from a company called Everynone that’s an object lesson in montage and paying attention. It accompanies a recent show by WNYC Radiolab, those virtuoso purveyors of rich and beautiful radio documentary. Enjoy it with the “all I care about is the wind in my hair” right side of your brain, or the “ah, that’s clever!” analytical side. Or both: like any good montage, combining the two elements creates something greater.

(via John Gruber and Liz Danzico)

(hmmm, there are two versions)

[WORDS, Directed by Daniel Mercadante & Will Hoffman, Original Score by Keith Kenniff]

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest movie Micmacs is a condensation of many of the stylistic and thematic concerns apparent from his earlier films: warmly desaturated cinematography, an idiosyncratic and catchy soundtrack, characters who construct their world out of the recycled detritus of the industrial age, a concern with lists and calculations and categories. Micmacs is set in what looks like a contemporary French city, but its real location is some anachronistic present, where the characters negotiate the internet and factory junkyards with equal facility.

The most specific place and time in the film is the wartime North Africa of the 1950s where Bazil’s father gets killed by a landmine. We catch glimpses of the watch that the adult Bazil wears: a military watch, labelled specifically for that conflict. Aside from that, the present. Not really modern, not really 21st-century, but some world where arms dealers and powerful men can still be undone by the patched-together ingenuity of salvagers that Bazil finds company with. One of his friends is loquacious African ethnographer, an interesting character given the nostalgic whiteness that Jeunet’s earlier Amelie was accussed of portraying.

[Micmacs: à tire-larigot, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009]

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[I’m going to go right to the end of the story here, so if you haven’t seen the film you should probably stop reading now.]

Bazil has a bullet in the brain from a drive-by shooting, and his predicament is that the bullet might shift and kill him instantly at any moment. On a salvage run one day, he finds himself in the industrial neighbourhood of two rival arms factories, one which has made his bullet, and the other the mine that killed his father. Now he has a mission. By the end, the arms dealers have had their precious collections of cars and historical body-parts (sic) trashed, duped into fighting each other, and finally, brought to face the mothers of the children maimed by their products. The CEOs have been kidnapped, shipped to the middle east, and are given a live grenade to hold and a mine to stand on. The mothers hold in front of them photographs of their children.

This too is elaborate theatre of course, and they haven’t in fact even left the city. The veiled mothers are in fact our plucky band of scavengers and the revenge that they exact is not just the momentary terror of explosive death, but the more lingering humiliation of the CEOs’ confessions posted to YouTube. A friend of mine says that this “is the political triumph of the film – not a sermon, but a viral video.”

I wonder if Jeunet used actual pictures of real kids, now limbless from careless ordnance? It sure looks like he did; the pictures seemed pretty convincing to me, flashed on the screen as they were. Let’s say that there were real. If so, they’re doing something clever and extraordinary. The photographs connect the frivolous tale, the merry film, to reality. Inside the fiction film, and inside the fakery within the film, these photos refer to a troubling reality. The arms dealer motivation is no longer just a plot device, no longer a maguffin that motivates the action but that we don’t need to really care for to jump into the story (corrupt ministers, or secret plans, say). No, here, that short moment of reality reminds us the audience of this real and horrible thing. Like the Micmacs movie posters that appear on billboards in various shots, the presence of the photographs reminds us that it is a fiction film. But now, it’s a film that says: ‘We have these plots and shenanigans. Remember, though, that landmines are serious matters’. Even if the photos are fictions, they still point towards a world outside the film in a way that is more weighty than simply having ‘secret plans’ as a motivating factor.

As P reminds me, something similar happens in Waltz with Bashir: the animation cuts to video footage of the aftermath of a massacre. It’s abrupt and shocking. And it doesn’t turn away. But Bashir is a documentary, after all.

For Micmacs, this whimsical fiction (and I don’t mean that as a criticism), it’s a deft move. The photographs disappear from the screen, the moment of solemnity gone. The characters take their revenge, the foes are vanquished, romance is kindled, all are happy. But I’m still thinking about those pictures.

Designer and editor Liz Danzico argues, in relation to the vast store of material on the web that we navigate through, that “now we’re all ‘editors’”. “Where once editors and curators provided meaning”, Danzico writes, “now we’re providing it.” The tasks of selecting material, setting the pace of how it was experienced, and giving a logical form to it, these are jobs that we as consumers are now having to do. We all have to make coherence for ourselves and as we walk around the web we inevitably do that for others, even if those others are just the four cat-loving friends we email LOLcat links to. What’s interesting is when these impulses get chanelled into something that’s more explicitly for a wider circle. I’m thinking of blogs like My Parents Were Awesome, with its simple and sweet idea of simply showing photos of our parents’ younger selves.

Sometimes the editorial intervention is a little bit stronger, and what results is an experience that’s a bit more contained and directed. I’ve mentioned before how the themed issues of JPG Magazine provide a nice sense of coherence amid the diversity of the collected photographs from a large number of contributors. Pictory (which I ran into via Kottke.org) is a collection of images based on general submissions around a theme. Put together by editor and designer Laura Bruno Miner (who, it turns out, was the design director of JPG), the things that make Pictory exceptional are the quality photographs that she chooses, the thought that she puts into arranging and ordering the photographs, and the extended captions. Each contributor has an individual photograph, and the accompanying words contextualize the images well. They become stories, not just a collection of nice images.

The web enables this more singular control over the process, I suppose, and Miner has created a place for this presentation of work to exist organically on the screen, with a simple navigational structure and plenty of space for the photos themselves. The latest ‘London’ series, for example, takes us from the Tube to Buckingham Palace, to less familiar views, tea and sandwiches, a post-protest crowd, Camden Markets. The diversity of photographs makes for a diversity of views, but the editing gives it a good unity.
Will the iPad encourage more innovative ways of using pictures on the web? The Guardian’s upcoming app looks promising, but it seems to me the barriers to entry are higher in that arena. Pictory is a great example of what’s already possible for an individual with a defined editorial sensibility to do in a maturing and accesible web.

One of the highlights of my very partial wanderings around the visual arts program of the Adelaide Festival has been Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Morakot (Emerald). It’s an 11-minute video projection with long takes of empty hotel rooms. All is quiet, and in the air floats a haze of feathery particles. Maybe these are the souls that we eventually hear, after sitting through a long silence. Because the video is looped it’s hard to tell if my guess about when the piece begins is correct, if indeed it does begin. I quite like feeling that it doesn’t really begin, that what we’re experiencing is merely a fraction of a long moment.

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Still from Morakot (Emerald) (2007)

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The piece is an adaptation of Karl Gjellerup’s 1906 novel The Pilgrim Kamanita, where a couple of old souls tell each other stories until they eventually stop existing at all. In Morakot the voices seem to be of a trio of people reminiscing, sometimes appearing as ghostly heads on pillows, and just talking, making the empty rooms resonate with their memories and the memories of all those others who have passed through them. It’s quiet, and does what most dark video-installation rooms do in allowing us respite from the outside. But it also has us thinking about the histories of the ordinary spaces that constitute that outside world: empty offices, unoccupied hotel rooms.

The images could be stills but for the floating particles; they turn it into something in between stillness and movement. Something like breathing.

All the office cinematography I talked about in the previous post on Up in the Air reminded me of some office photographs I saw a while back, a small portfolio of images from the now-defunct DoubleTake Magazine by Steven Ahlgren. Ahlgren’s pictures were not of recession, so it’s not that general theme I want to make the connection with here. Instead, it’s the question of photographing offices, these most mundane and everyday spaces. How do we look anew at the kinds of spaces that some of us spend a lot of time in? As it happened, I found on Amy Stein’s blog her own discovery of Ahlgren’s work, through a recent find of that 1997 DoubleTake issue. She has a good interview with him, and he talks about his process of shooting these spaces with medium format in order to produce pictures that are subdued yet intense: “The quietness of the images seemed more pronounced. The light and color were much more evocatively described.”

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['Insurance Company, New York City', © Steven Ahlgren]

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There is a clarity to the lighting in these rooms. It’s not a garish, hard lighting, but something that’s flat and even, generated probably by similar flourescent panel arrangements. Even in spaces that look as if they could be all part of some vast interconnected web of similar offices, there are subtle differences that mark out their relationship to the world. An insurance office is decorated with a single whiteboard on the wall and much of the floor space is taken up with random boxes that also serve as a place for the man’s coat. Two mismatched chairs face each other, presumably for passing-by co-workers rather than customers.

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['Investment Bank, New York City', © Steven Ahlgren]

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By contrast, an investment bank office has a bonsai by the window, a polished desk with some fine china on it, while an internet magazine worker sits in what looks like a cubicle set up in a corridor to somewhere else, with a kid’s drawing pinned to the wall and couple of framed photos on the computer. The insurance worker and investment banker both have ties on, but the banker seems more affluent, with his swanky office and tidy hair. The internet guy is untucked and sneakered. They’re all working on the computer, but what’s interesting is these subtle differences that Ahlgren’s careful compositions and consistent lighting allow us to see.

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['Internet Magazine, New York City', © Steven Ahlgren]

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There are other kinds on pictures in Ahlgren’s series too: shots inside elevators, co-workers talking, an empty AIDS organisation meeting room with two tissue boxes as the main props. Some of his other work takes the camera outside the office and beyond; it’s worth checking out his website for a closer look.

Amy Stein notes that, aside from the haircuts and computers, the office scenes could have been shot very recently. I wonder about the appearance of my own workspace, un-corporate as it is, with my desk pushed into the corner between the washing and the spare chest-of-drawers. The environment is quite different, but the work looks the same (though I know I’d be completely lost in any of the offices that Ahlgren portrays), with me sitting here tapping away at a keyboard. But I’ve worked in an office too, and that makes me curious about what the people in Ahlgren’s pictures make of their spaces. If the work itself looks the same from the outside, I know of course that it’s vastly different, all this construction of information. That complex and immense alternate reality that lies behind the computer screens (and the lives of the individuals in front of them) is barely hinted at by the mundanity of the cubicles that house them. And that makes me realise my own mundane thing: that I need, now and then, to get up and go outside for a run. But I’ll keep thinking about these images.