FILM 1809: LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF

FILM 1809: LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF 

Los Angeles Plays Itself is a video essay by Thom Andersen, finished in 2003, exploring the way Los Angeles has been presented in movies. Consisting almost entirely of clips from other films with narration, the film was not initially released commercially. The film was only seen in screenings presented by Andersen, occasional presentations at American Cinematheque and copies distributed via filesharing and other person-to-person methods. In 2014, it was announced that the film would finally be released officially by Cinema Guild.

Andersen stated that the film idea occurred to him after a lecture he gave at the California Institute of the Arts, where he talked about his objections to L.A. Confidential, the 1997 Curtis Hanson film adapted from James Ellroy's novel.

In the film, Andersen argues that the influence of Hollywood overshadows Los Angeles and is one of the reasons the city's name is frequently abbreviated. He makes the case that directors have a distaste for modernist architecture, which is regularly used for villain's homes.

(Information from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Plays_Itself)

http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/twin-peaks/news/a832484/twin-peaks-david-lynch-scenes-art-inspiration/

BOOK 152: CAMERA LUCIDA: ROLAND BARTHES

In a deeply personal discussion of the lasting emotional effect of certain photographs, Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind. The book develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum: studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it.

(information from Wikipedia)

FILM 1375: REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG

REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG is an intimate and nuanced investigation into the life of one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the 20th century. Passionate and gracefully outspoken throughout her career, Susan Sontag became one of the most important literary, political and feminist icons of her generation. The documentary explores Sontag's life through archival materials, accounts from friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, as well as her own words, as read by Patricia Clarkson. From her early infatuation with books to her first experience in a gay bar; from her early marriage to her last lover, REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG is a fascinating look at a towering cultural critic and writer whose works on photography, war, illness, and terrorism still resonate today. Written by Question Why Films

BOOK 114: ON PHOTOGRAPHY: SUSAN SONTAG

On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977.

On Photography won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1977 and was selected among the top 20 books of 1977 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review.

In 1977, William H. Gass, writing in the New York Times, said the book "shall surely stand near the beginning of all our thoughts upon the subject" of photography.

In a 1998 appraisal of the work, Michael Starenko, wrote in Afterimage magazine that "On Photography has become so deeply absorbed into this discourse that Sontag's claims about photography, as well as her mode of argument, have become part of the rhetorical 'tool kit' that photography theorists and critics carry around in their heads."

Sontag's work is literary and polemical rather than academic. It includes no bibliography, and few notes. There is little sustained analysis of the work of any particular photographer and is not in any sense a research project as often written by Ph.D students. Many of the lesser reviews from the world of art photography that followed On Photography at the time of its publication were skeptical and often hostile, such as those of Colin L. Westerbeck and Michael Lesy.

In 2004, Sontag published a partial refutation of the opinions she espoused in On Photography in her collection of essays Regarding the Pain of Others. This book may be deemed as a postscript or addition to On Photography. Sontag's publishing history includes a similar sequence with regard to her work Illness as Metaphor from the 1970s and AIDS and Its Metaphors a decade later, which included a revision of many ideas contained in the earlier work.

MY VERDICT: I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  I was annoyed that I’d owned it for so long without reading it.  I loved that it wasn’t academically written and talked directly to you, expressing ideas and putting forwards opinions, I loved that it wasn’t highfalutin the way that a lot of essays on art or photography can be.  Some of the ideas were expressed in a way that was so simple you felt idiotic for not thinking of them yourself.

It does seem like this year has been a Grey Garden’ year for me. 

I watched the documentary again and read the book by Lois Wright about her stay there. 

The documentary ‘Grey Gardens’ opens up to us the East Hampton home of Mrs. Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Miss. Edith Bouvier Beale.

Today I watched the film based on the documentary starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.  It was interesting to see beyond the house, which you don’t see in the documentary (except when Little Edie goes to the beach – which from the accounts of Lois Wright she did infrequently because her mother couldn’t be left alone.)  To see a young Big and Little Edie was something that one had imagined before but never truly known or seen.

I feel sorry for the Edies. Their lives could have been so different, less isolated, and more sociable.  Maybe if they had not been so alike, so ‘staunch’ (as Edie says), they could have taken help or advice from those around them.  A little compromise would have gone a long way.

I see hints of my family in them, the untidiness and the ignorance of it in my sister.  The agoraphobic nature of them both in my boyfriend’s nature.  The hoarding of Big Edie reminds me of my love for collecting the detritus of life, the things that most would throw away.  Little Edie’s talk of travel is like my own, I do go places though, just not as often as I’d like.  Oh I can hear her saying that sentence as I write it.

More than anything and maybe just because it is the first thing that you notice in the documentary I am drawn to the say the Beales speak.  They have such a fascinating enunciation of words that a girl from London has never heard before.  It is both poetic and otherworldly and I would have loved to have gone round for tea (or pate and ice cream) and conversed for hours.

Unfortunately Mrs. ‘Big’ Edie Beale and Miss ‘Little’ Edie Beale are no longer with us.

Most famous previously for being the aunt and cousin of Jackie O, I am thankful that their eccentric and interesting characters were captured on film to live on endlessly in the hearts and imagination of everyone who knew or wishes they knew them.