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Re: 1, I didn't specifically set out with this in mind, but there's certainly an element of Blade Runner within my SciFi novel, Precipice. (https://slake.substack.com/s/precipice)

These pieces dip in and out of the story as fragments (for anyone who may click through).

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That's a great connection and use of such a fantastic film. I guess Bladerunner is both iconic and its play with space is likewise fascinating. The way you give us fragments, rather than serialization, also mimics the postmodern element of the film (and other films).

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😊

I do like to feel that my blundering, feeling-out-of-things method has a deep underlying meaning and process 😉

But seriously, there was actually some thought process that went into the decision to make Precipice fragmented in its storytelling (for now, anyway).

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It’s a great space to play until you make it into a whole book (?)

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I hope it gets to that point. If and when it does, I'll have to employ some form of defragmentation 😉

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And have been an inspiration for me in my new serial, Lamb. 🩷

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🥳🥳

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I took a course in storyboard, and another in acting. Storyboarding is a fantastic way of learning to infuse your fiction with a sense of space, and other sensorial information. Acting was my way of learning how to giving detail to my characters.

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Camila, that's a great connection! You must have a lot of knowledge from your course and use of storyboarding, especially related to actually acting yourself. I imagine that would work really well. I used to use storyboarding with students during a fiction unit. (Also to breakdown some texts and think about adaptation, especially with Shakespeare.) We either worked by hand or used StoryboardThat online. Also, it gets me thinking about using things like tableaux.

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Yes, the more context you provide the more realistic the scene, but that's also where economy of means has to kick in.

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I'm going to skip questions 1 and 2 because I'm a filmmaker and writer, so the answers are basically my autobiography. But I'm going to answer 3 because it's another opportunity to pontificate on one of my favorite subjects:

"How do local filmmakers create a dialogue of the place they inhabit? I spoke a little about Hong Kong cinema; you might be more aware of New York or Paris filmmakers, for example. Where does your story take place and what are the films set there? How do they change denizens’ experiences in the spaces depicted on screen?"

One of my biggest drums to bang is that we should not call major Hollywood studio films "American cinema" and we should not call American cinema "American independent cinema." Major Hollywood films are better called "corporate films" and if where they have meaningful American cultural cues, they are largely an accident or unconsidered element of the production's background and quickly stripped when and where it doesn't 'play' with international audiences, particularly Chinese censors. United States audiences attend less movies per year individually and are already smaller than many other big markets (India, Turkey, Russia, China) so Hollywood movies have long since lost the 'soft power' American POV (Independence Day et al) and went all in on, well, multiverses. "Anywhere USA" became "some cityscape... among the stars."

Independent cinema isn't always about localized settings but a I ADORE American movies with specific localities. One of my favorite movies from this year was The Unknown Country, starring Lily Gladstone (from Killers of a Flower Moon, also an American story), which heavily invested its storytelling in the communities of South Dakota. Kelly Reichardt makes movies about Oregon. And being from New Mexico, I can attest that Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul feature a lot of New Mexican and Burqueño-specific flourishes that give it a verisimilitude beyond it's overall story.

Things get weirder when you're in New York and Los Angeles both because of the corporate cinema produced there but also because many of the filmmakers aren't from those places even when they make independent films. I live in New York currently and there are TONS of indie movies shot here that I wouldn't necessarily call New York movies. The Safdie brothers make New York movies. Eyes Wide Shut is famously, painstakingly a New York movie despite being filmed in London!

Because of my interest in this, I oftentimes watch films from other countries wondering how they contend with the culture versus location element. For instance, even Cronenberg's early and very Canada-located work doesn't strike me as specifically 'Canadian', but even Guy Maddin's wildest fantasy movies strike me as very Canadian, well before he made My Winnipeg. Many European countries and a few Asian ones (like Japan and South Korea) specifically support their own 'national cinema' as a cultural institution, which makes most American independent filmmakers envious but has its own drawbacks (find the French movies that are actually superly negative on French culture or history as a whole, less ones that make it out of France for international audiences. Movies like La Haine are extremely rare there. Whereas American movies confront American history or culture all the time). National cinemas are specifically designed to showcase local cultures, but even there the 'local' tends to magically 'locate' to internationally recognized urban centers, not entirely the accident of money and resources. Much of actual local production in almost any country tends to be soap dramas, domestic comedies and crime procedurals: you know, genre fare.

Anyway to me that creates a useful breakdown: there's corporate cinema, national cinema, and local cinema. All three may be 'set' in any given location, but attention to setting and its citizens is a fairly strong tell of local cinema and helps support national cinema. Some of the local or national can trickle through into the corporate — Shane Black is clearly an Angeleno even when making an Iron Man movie — and of course local productions can be made with hopes and dreams of corporate release in mind. But overall the strength of local cinemas is to tell the stories of communities that are overlooked by corporate and national cinemas.

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You add a lot to the story :) Thank you!!

I'll pick up on a couple things and let others have a go. This idea about American-local...YES. The Cohen brothers also do it well I think. Many do. But the idea that outsiders also depict NYC/LA is likewise interesting. I don't think it's always bad to be an outsider looking in; you gain a different perspective. It's just good to be aware of the distinctions perhaps and posit these views in conversation.

I'm always looking up shooting locations. I never trust where the characters say they are! Sometimes it's money, right? Like, when I lived in Vienna, I knew that there were only a handful of shoots because of the high cost the city placed on filming there (they see it as an inconvenience to tourism). Vienna was recreated in Bratislava or Budapest at times. Not really the same thing. How can we be tricked and what layers of the original setting remain? These things really interest me. With natural landscape as well, I find this fascinating.

In any case, I like your 3 level breakdown. I think it makes a lot of sense. It's complicated when we're talking about HK cinema, as I would argue that often filmmakers are working within all 3.

As for French v American cinema, we could discuss all day so I'll see what others say. The French philosophical angles and embrace of melancholia also do something. But then there are the local but international successes like Amelie..however, Jean-Pierre Jeunet is someone quite unique. And there's also a persistent embrace of isolation in that film as well. But I enjoy your observations on it. Thanks again. Love all the examples and you added a couple to my view list.

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Hi, it's taken me forever to get back around to this comment, but it sparked a few more thoughts:

"the idea that outsiders also depict NYC/LA is likewise interesting."

There's actually a sub-genre of sorts of film essay that contends with the ways in which New York in media is far more the construction of people in LA than the landscape itself. The easiest form of this is the whole "No one that young and broke would own an apartment that big." Sure. But New York was not a great place to make movies until around the 70s for all the reasons that film moved to Los Angeles in the first place: lack of dependable, non-seasonal light, lack of space, lack of open areas and permitting for exteriors. "New York" filmmaking didn't really take off until the Golden Age of Hollywood died and these punk kids with smaller cameras that ran faster film, using cinematographers used to few lights and accepting of deeper shadows, were able to nudge in after the Easy Riders took off. People like Scorsese and Kubrick and Romero.

The result is that New York has a long tradition of being _imagined_ by Hollywood. Production designers who never even visited the city took notes on key monuments, and often lumped them together. Location scouts in New York often struggle to communicate with LA based production companies about _things in New York that don't really exist._ One of them is dark alleyways. There are one or two really thin roads here and there, but alleyways aren't really a thing.

Another is the Chinese restaurant with the big golden dragon -- a complete invention of Hollywood, but often shown in classic New York set movies. This is a location I'm surprised hasn't come to exist by sheer force of available market. And that's where we enter territories where 'place' in Hollywood can have some dark effects.

To wit: "'There always comes a time when history erases itself,' in favor of art but more often in favor of imagery. I realized exactly why this observation is so terrifying during a trip to Krakow, in the old Jewish quarter renovated after the release of Spielberg's film, while looking at signs offering 'Schindler's List trips' through the old streets of Kazimierz to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In this neighborhood, renovated for those who come to see a 'Potemkin-like Judaism,' cinematic imagery was slowly replacing history; in filling the voids, it ended up recreating its own version of reality."

--Sylvie Lindeberg, from the introduction of 'Night and Fog', p. xxii

Visual culture has a stickiness that causes a profound hauntology around our conceptions of place and time. Jurassic World has never updated Jurassic Park's dinosaur designs the way Jurassic Park updated from previous dinosaur movies. We still imagine Ancient Greece full of towering white blocks when it's been made clear in recent decades that those structures were painted many different colors. And "New York" doesn't really exist.

There's a metropolitan area of 9million residents each with their own city, and then there's the people who come to that geography and look for a city that isn't really there. In my literally ten years here, I've seen the actual mental health toll taken by many people who have come expecting things that aren't around. It's easy enough for them to blame gentrification or whatever, and that's also part of it -- but there's also lack of recognition of what is there. They come to find "Studio 54" and ignore the actual new pop artist collectives, for instance. They come to find punk Bohemian Greenwich Village and then lament that they can only afford to live in some outer Borrough where the other punks and bohemians like them travel by train to find the scene instead of set up shop. And those sorts of examples are just the areas where this conversation can be rational and analytical. It actually goes deeper and stranger than that, in strange associations of projected pasts that become increasingly unclear what they have in mind or where they're getting the information from. This is how memes like Dimes Square suddenly appear, spectres amongst the hauntology.

And, of course, the rich can afford to craft their own world anywhere in the world, so they get on Instagram and project the Hollywoodized city that doesn't exist to keep the illusion running.

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So much to think about here - thanks for all these ideas and references, DB!

Thinking a lot about this: "mental health toll taken by many people who have come expecting things that aren't around." YES. I mean, how is the image of a city created through art (and media) in a totally unrealistic way at times? or how/when are certain layers of the city accessible or not? I'm thinking about that also as I look at income gaps this week.

Crazy to think about NYC set designs in Hollywood...something that is easy to forget when you watch these films. Very disorienting.

Also the Lindeberg quote - really fascinating. I'm thinking about this in Vienna a lot recently. I recently finished a manuscript that's a response to The Third Man. Vienna has been reinvented many times and holds layers of traumatic separation and occupation (during/post WWII I'm thinking about mainly, but also before). One can witness these stories through both the city itself (architecture, art, streets...) and the cinematic city created.

THANK YOU for so much thought. I'm going to be compiling some extra reading/viewing related to the weekly topics in Jan and will be sure to add some of these references you've mentioned here.

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As a local filmmaker, I think focusing on the day to day life of the people that inhabit the space matters a lot. And trying to capture as much of the everyday as possible.

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Sounds great, Taegan. Couldn't agree more. Where is your 'local' and what parts of that space are most interesting to you? Thanks for your comment!

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Toronto and Southern Ontario. It’s the sort of hub of Canada’s economic and cultural community. There’s an endless amount of local stories to tell here. I try and showcase the ones that cross paths with mine.

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Sounds great.

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Very true. Lots of ‘everyday’ is fascinating.

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Hello Kathleen. I've always considered my stories to be cinematic, in that, when I write them I seem to see them play out as movies in my own mind's eye. I don't, or try not to, let myself be influenced by movies I watch, or have seen, but I think that's always going to be something that creeps into your work. I tend to write stories that take place in foreign cities and locations. I see the Cornish coast, or a tiny Italian hilltop city, but I see it as I imagine it, not as it really is. I see the ivy on the wall, smell the mud on the river bank, hear the geese. You're the only other person I've come across who believes in "layering" a story. I use location, and atmosphere, but I also tell myself to use my five senses so that the reader smells the wet pavement drying in the hot Tuscan sun after a sudden rainfall. But I like to address my characters with complicated layers as well. I give them traits, and faults. I urge you to loo at some of my stories: https://benwoestenburg.substack.com That's my about page so you can pick and choose what interests you.

I'm sorry that we never connected earlier -- I've been around for a while -- but some times I feel that I'm out of my depth. I haven't read a lot of the Classics; most of the movies I've seen, I've seen once or twice; I have a limited education (grade 12) but a shitload of lived experience. But none of that matters when I write. When I write, I do get lost in the fantasy of the reality I've created, if that makes any sense. I am aware of plot, and structure, and even theme, but I write to entertain myself first and foremost. There is no audience, there's just me. The audience comes when I hit post and send my work out for others to look at. I'm not politically correct; I don't care if what I write triggers you emotionally. I've got my own triggers, and if I can deal with them. so can you. (Mine's in the Scribbles section of my page...It was an accident, Steve.) We all have triggers. I'm retired, and set in my ways. The language that I use is colourful, in both my prose and my dialogue.

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Hi Ben, Happy to connect with you now! I'm flying early but will be checking out your work. The way you use layering sounds fantastic, really immersive. I don't think it has to be about texts (or classics) though that is one way to layer. I think it can also be with many other elements and often people do it unaware -- it's the stuff that the writer is also interested in or has observed and is playing around with in their fiction. Does that make sense?

I really enjoy the way you talk about your writing with such joy and personal purpose. Thank you!

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It makes a lot of sense. I think, like most writers, I bring a part of me to every story I write. But I like to write things that challenge me. I think it has something to do with my Blue Collar life. I like to look at life from different perspectives. Have a safe flight!

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Challenges are the best!

Thanks so much.

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