I was meeting a friend for beer and ended up having about half an hour to kill before. It was yesterday and an unseasonable 17 degrees or so, a last blast of warmth perhaps. It was to be the Sugarbowl which sits just atop the river valley so I walked down to the river and back.

I had not been down for about a year which is strange. This part just below the high level bridge is almost elemental for an Edmontonian. Over the years, I’ve spent time there cycling, running, dog walking, in altered states of consciousness, and this was probably the first time ever with a camera. But I realized from now on, when the weather is not bad I am going back down there. Preferably some days with sun.

There’s more than just these bridges down there; forests, river, grasslands, winding leave strewn paths and more.

In the meanwhile, songs lately on my mind are:
Tragically Hip’s Coffee Girl, almost sedate for this band but rich.

And Anjulie’s Boom

which is kind of like Sade if you made her down a few espressos. I am usually more of an album kind of guy but did not really like all that much more by her; the other stuff seemed kind of run of the mill urban but this one is cool cool cool. Check it out here.

Thanks to CH for passing this on to me…

Love and Honor is a most unusual film.

I’ve always enjoyed sword films of all sorts from classic Japanese samurai films such as Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to even such genre busters such as Chinese Ghost Story (the only movie I know that features both swordplay, vampires and a tongue as big as a house) but I do treasure most the fairly traditional variety.

Love and Honor is both traditional and not.  The story is of a low level samurai who serves as a taste tester for the local lord.  He happens to eat shellfish out of season and ends up blind.  Naturally this happens just before he was going to resign and open a fencing school for children.

His wife who is absolutely loyal and will stand by him whether he is sighted or blind, rich or poor, ends up sleeping with a local bigwig in the hopes that this will restore her husband’s stipend so they will not be destitute.  He of course finds out and swears revenge but as a blind man this is not so easy.

What makes this film so different is that though the hierarchical structures so familiar from this period in Japanese history are evident, the people remain human and quite expressive within those strictures.  The distancing you so often see in these kinds of film is absent and this is incredibly refreshing.  There is little doubt that the couple love each other, that they care for the old man who does chores around the place; no doubt that the doctor is sad about the loss of the vision.  There is humour throughout and a lightness of touch that indicates that these people are living lives quite authentic despite the constraints of their time.

This one is worth seeing.

Steve Martin’s Shopgirl is not what you would call an epic film, more something along the lines of a little treasure.

Its one of those small films where everything is done just right. My one small hesitation would be the casting of Jason Schwarzman but that probably is more just a quirk of mine than any real criticism. Just don’t cotton to the fellow though I must say that there were a couple of scenes of his in this that were just brilliant. But Steve Martin and Claire Danes were great.

Martin has never been quite as low key and focussed and Danes, well, has she ever been bad ever since she started off in My So Called Life?  She has matured into an elegant but highly expressive presence.

Its a smart relationship film. Danes plays Mirabelle Butterworth in New York but fresh out of Vermont. She starts up an odd and awkward sort of bond with Jeremy (Schwarzman) who intrigues her when they meet at the local laundromat. He ends up falling for her, and she kind of likes him, but fate has it that he ends up becoming a roadie for Red House Painters and being gone for months. In the meanwhile Ray Porter (Martin) an older well off man woos her at Saks where she works (hence the title). To take it down to essentials, she ends up with Porter for a while with Jeremy popping up every now and then, and the ending is for those who see the film for themselves.

Apart from the performances and great script (adapted by Martin from his own novella) this is beautiful film; color coded in a number of ways but just overall beautiful to look at.

How the film stands out though is that it is that rarest of creatures, the realistic and wise relationship film. All too often these films follow a set of expectations, using a clutch of cliched characters and scenes, and the moral lessons are on the level of hallmark cards. This is a wonderfully balanced film with a lightness of touch but a depth of worldliness that makes you think as well as feel.

Martin has also managed to portray a older-younger relationship with much more grace than Woody Allen has. Though Manhattan is one of my favourite films of all time, the scenes between Allen and Mariel Hemingway make me cringe though they are miles above the inanity of his Whatever Works with Larry David having it off with Evan Rachel Wood. But Martin and Danes work. And it really is not about age differences at all but about two people meeting. The differences are not ignored, they simply cease to be the focal point.

The one thing that clinched this film for me though was the voiceover. I’ve always been a sucker for the narrative voiceover (possibly because it then resembles reading to me) and this style which was Porter speaking was reminiscent of the way that Truffaut used it, and that is in the way of making sure you get the story, that you see what it is really all about. This is not in the sense that the filmmaker was not competent enough just to show it but this was a film to some degrees about what people are thinking to themselves and this was a nice way to do it as well as to add that narrative feel of a story being told.

I guess I am still a little more astonished at interstellar comparisons of the scale seen in this earlier post. but this is very cool nonetheless. Going now in the other direction...over at learn.genetics.

I’ve heard often enough that a photographer should be chasing the perfect light, and while I appreciate the contributions of that perfect light to a scene, its seeming primacy I find just a little limiting.

To me, though you can argue without any light at all there can be no photograph, and that all vision comes to us on the basis of how the light falls and how much of it there is, there are many times when the light is less than it could be. And I get the impression that I should not be taking photographs then.

I have two arguments against this.

The first and most important is that nature, and I am speaking mostly of outdoor photography, appears in varying conditions of light and some of those days or times with substandard lighting are beautiful, and even if less so, are still representative of a true essence. Those times still deserve to be captured, or better put, paid homage to.

Secondly, in regards to the photographer’s essence, to not take pictures just because the light is not perfect is like a cook not cooking when certain ingredients are missing. Taking the picture nonetheless not only can deliver something pleasure but can also using that art principle of working with restrictions, deliver some new strange and wonderful image.

Ultimately you can get a great picture without great lighting and you can definitely take a bad one with the best lighting in the world.

Light. Its major but its just another tool.

Again, a picture unrelated to the issue at hand other than it is one of the places I walk through or around every day, and at least some of those times, thoughts are in my head.

Been watching and mostly enjoying Flash Forward. For those who have not seen it, the concept is that almost everyone on Earth blacks out for a few minutes and has a vision of the same day in the future. Networks are set up to gather these visions and form a picture of that future.

Our main character played by Joseph Fiennes a typically self obsessed and tightly strung leading man, had a vision of being in his office under attack, and drunk. He is a self described alcoholic and has not had a drink in seven years. His vision has been particularly fruitful in providing leads as to the nature of this worldwide event but he has not let anyone know about the fact that he was drinking.

Now it is understandable that for him this is not something he wants to either come true, or to let anyone know. Yet once it comes out, all his so called friends and colleagues turn on him. Suddenly those productive leads are considered potentially worthless because he had been drinking in his vision.

This seems to be a common figure in contemporary melodrama; the alcoholic, the modern whore/madonna image in that he or she is pure as driven snow as long as they are not drinking but then as worthless as mud if they slip. They cease to be human but are mechanisms under complete thrall to demon rum; no will power at all once one drop of that magic potion hits their tongue; and as non drinkers they tend to be puritanical bores whose suffering is only matched by our own in having to put up with these ridiculous figures.

Thank god, there has been criticism of the whole concept of alcoholism, and that for most every problem drinker, moderate drinking is an attainable state. For a good read about the recovery movement and the history of this tiresome idea, take a look at Stanton Peele’s Diseasing of America.

But where I was going with this, and will have to continue on the next post, is that it seems to me that in this modern culture, at least in popular films and television (I would not venture to say this about people in real life), personal issues seem to override the good of society or of saving the world.  In Dark Knight, Batman is considering hanging up his vinyl suit because he is conflicted.  What seems to happen is that the world is hanging in balance as the hero risks it and every other life on the planet to save one special person.  Somehow I think this just was not happening in the old days.  The old heroes got their priorities straight..first you save the world, then you take care of yourself.  Superman in Superman Returns was a throwback in that respect and might be a big reason on why I found that to be a stronger film than Dark Knight.

To be continued…

Woke up to a very misty morning. Though we’ve had snow a couple of times, and just a week ago windshield ice and sleet, and then tshirt afternoons again, this was back to a seasonal cool.

Later, in the day, driving to work, I was listening to someone rave on about the latest version of the iphone. I should confess that I do now own a cell, and just barely manage to raise the dust on my landline. I am an emailer first and foremost.

I do have a couple of philosophical concerns with all portable devices, even some non electronic devices. I do not like any devices with the potential to intrude when out and about. I like my reality straight up and find portable music, or work, or conversation from someone not there, a malformation of my reality.

I also dislike the infantilism of devices to meet my every need as it arises as though I am a mewling child who cannot wait. This is why I detest travelling mugs. Not only do they again detract from the world as I walk but they draw my attention to my needs rather than keeping it focussed outwards, where I believe it better serves.

Finally, I dislike how portable devices create new fears. Even though I do not own a cell, it seems more dangerous now to drive out in the country without one. What if my car breaks down; then what? Well, that what was everyday life less than a decade ago.

All these seem to fall under the rubric of becoming more childlike. Increasing fear, instant gratification and self absorption. Growing up was trying to lose all that and I’ll be damned if I’ll go back to diapers.

One of the real pleasures of taking up photography is perceptual. You seem to gain a number of cognitive overlays that add dimensions to seeing the world around you.

One of these, which could be called “looking for a shot” is a kind of framing template. You grab parts of the world that seem to come alive within a particular frame….you compose a shot.

What is interesting about this is that there are times that the world as a whole appears beautiful but even if it is drab it is almost certain that some part of it is not. And not only is the subset sometimes more pleasing than the whole, there is a peculiar energy that obtains within the frame. Simply bounding visual elements give them not only a power but introduce a kind of vision. You are your frame. Your frame is one of the main ways in which you express yourself.

The world is the world, and I have always loved about photography that there is part which is utterly independent of you, and declares the ultimate fact that reality is primal, that it is basic, and that it exists outside of cognition or impulse. No matter what sort of person I am, that cloud will always look that way. But the synthesis comes when I compose the shot; my impulse is evident in the frame. The tension between reality or nature and my desire creates the photograph.

Yes, my photograph has no connection with this post….I am still into my Scandinavian film excursion (and now is a good time given that the latest weather forecast has us below zero for the next week or so, with possible flurries).

First back to Lars Von Trier. Watched Element of Crime (1984). For some reason I had thought Zentropa was his first but no. If I was putting together a list of top 10 films for photographers, this would definitely be on that list.

There was just such a list on Luminous Landscape a while ago, and though I agree with most (such as Barry Lyndon, Days of Heaven, Raise the Red Lantern), the list did have a feel of someone cribbing together an article from among the films they just happened to own. But anyway, if I had to put such a list together, this would be high up on that list.

Element of Crime is a strange film in that near every frame is in fact frameable and many are simply astonishing in their originality but the film as a whole is rather languid. Our main character returning to Europe after many years away takes up an old investigation into a series of murders from when he was a policeman so long ago. Its one of those mixed identity sort of films but it really does not matter what this film is about at all…it is a visual masterpiece.

Below is a trailer, low def of course, with Radiohead accompaniment.

This is serous film noir (think Touch of Evil serious) crossed with early surrealism (one feels the Bunuel/Dali in here), touches of David Lynch in the roughly textured sets, tips of the hat to Apocalypse Now, and quite a bit of the double exposures which seem to be quite common in the rest of his work. On the basis of this, I would say that Von Trier has the kind of film obsessiveness of Tarantino but with a European twist.

After this, I rewatched Zero Kelvin (1995), and was again struck by the performance of Stellan Skarsgaard. It seems that most American actors, even those with considerable range, never quite abandon their personae in quite the way that European actors do. I defy anyone to watch Skarsgaard in this, then as Raoul Wallenberg and then as the Saxon leader in King Arthur, and even his more typical roles as the dissolute modern European male. He is physically the same person but so inhabits another skin as to truly become another. Though there are a few American actresses like Meryl Streep who manage this, few leading men seem to.

I have a certain fondness for films shot in winter so this already ranks in my books but Skarsgaard has the best performance I have ever seen of the “human” evil man, the near psychopath who opens up occasionally and is truly vulnerable at those times, careening between despondency and villainy, between self sabotage and murder. Watching Skarsgaard makes you reconsider your notions of American “acting”.