Anyone seen 300 yet? Has there ever been a movie so obsessed about the physicality of the body even as the performers float through an entirely immaterial digital world? Talk about paranoid overdetermination.
At the same time, almost every other shot was like a tableau filmed in slow motion, as if we were supposed to admire every meticulously burnished and fussed over pixel. I don't think I've ever seen a movie so resistant to actual movement. Every image seemed to slow towards stillness, like the whole thing just wanted to be a series of gorgeous slides.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Yes, 300 was awful. A couple of points:
* Clearly, the film places the burden of its visual design on composition, not the sequence of shots.
* This is in part, no doubt, an attempt to capture comic book format. Yet, it's curiously self-defeating: 300 is static, whereas comics - which I don't read - would seem to create a dynamic interaction between "frames" on the page.
* More broadly, one may conclude that digital cinema entails a shift from temporal montage (editing as normally understood) to spatial montage (compositing of various image files within the frame). Both temporal and spatial montage are, for someone on a computer, simply alternate forms of "cutting and pasting" - thus the distinction between the two is leveled. (Not my point. Lev Manovich's.)
Ya, I was sorely dissapointed by 300.
I don't know about the leveling of the distinction between temporal and spatial montage. One could argue that temporal and spatial montage are now two totally different fields, handled by two totally different professional crafts. Even their software is organized differently.
The organizing metaphors of the software are so different: Final Cut, Avid and Premiere Pro all emphasize linearity as clips are dragged and dropped on to a timeline. Most compositing software that I've seen tends to diminish the timeline in favor of branching nodes that sprout from shots in the timeline, with each node representing a different element -- lighting, atmosphere, various objects, colors, etc. -- in the final composite. Here's an example: http://www.apple.com/shake/
Each element then can be tweaked and adjusted independent of the others, and must be, in order to achieve the desired look of the final composited image. There's far more of what you might call fine tuning involved in compositing for it to be reduced to simply cutting and pasting.
As someone who does read comic books on occasion, much to the chagrin of his Highbrow fiancee, the apparent staticness of 300 might stem from a possible influence from a particular "school" of comic book art.
Rob is right, that typically comic book art is sequential, with each panel leading into the next and the aggregate telling a coherent, in some sense meaningful story. However, in the early 1990s, a group of artists -- including Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane -- began to push comic book art away from sequential storytelling towards one that was dominated by posed figures or tableau action shots. Continuity was unimportant -- weapons would appear be moved from one hand to the next from panel to panel because the artist was too lazy to "choreograph" the action ahead of time -- as was any sense of anatomy -- characters had muscles on top of their muscles, women's waists began immediately beneath their perfectly high, perky breasts, etc. Because it is pretty or enjoyable to look at it, this style of art -- known as the "kewl school" was the prime influence on the next generation of comic book artists. While Lee in particular and to an extent McFarlane and Liefeld had some ability/interest in storytelling, the likes of Chris Bachalo, Michael Turner, Salvador Larocca reveled in poses and incomprehensible layouts. The relationship between panels of a comic book was effectively severed, and some have argued that comic book storytelling is dying, as storylines are dilated to allow issues to feature larger panels of "spectacular" looking art. What might have taken one issue to tell in the late 1980s now takes two or three in order to have more one- or two-page splashes of impressive spaceships or muscly adventure.
Ironically, one of the terms for this new style is "widescreen," a nod to cinema.
Frank Miller generally is not considered part of this kewl or widescreen school, but he does have a tendency to oscillate between heavy fetishism (Sin city) and cartoonism (DK2) in his art these days. Nor is he particularly coherent in his politics, as DK2 uses Batman to assault mindless post-capitalist America, while his upcoming graphic novel, Holy Terror! is to feature Al Qaeda attacking Gotham City, only to fall before the Caped Crusader.
I haven't seen 300, by the way.
Paul, I like your response to Manovitch's arguments about editing. Although Manovitch is one of the better new media theorists writing today, he has a tendency to collapse distinctions between "old" and "new" media, and between various styles or techniques. He has suggested that cinema is nothing more than an early form of sampling, done at 24 fps. One wonders what he finds so compelling about new media if he's so interested in making it just another iteration of electronic media in general.
Mookie,
"on occasion"? :-)
BTW, my friend Chester drives Sherry Lansing and she told him 300 was the best movie she's seen in a long time. She said it is revolutionary and sets a new standard for filmmaking.
Post a Comment