Saturday, January 21, 2012

Wardrobe inspiration


Wardrobe inspiration-Jil Sander for Uniqlo, Helmut Lang, Jil Sander, Giorgio Armani, -Kingdom of  Style, an Ungaro pantsuit Melinda thrifted. Still pondering...


Thursday, January 19, 2012

Style Within Style


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It’s important to me that there is a clear story and defined characters in my screenplay. I’m writing a Science Fiction Noir, and as I work on the technique and story construct, I’m also mulling over aesthetic choices. Noir & Science Fiction genres can be very stylized. I find working within a genre can be helpful because it feels as if there's a compass for your course as a writer and filmmaker. There are components for a style and I am going over them with my own brush. I'm trying to step away from some of the old conventions. Science fiction can be very polished, cold and...masculine. I want the woman protagonist in my film to be warm, approachable. I want the setting to be urban, lived-in and familiar. 
I've been thinking about costume. The characters are professionals so they will be wearing suits but we're going to try to stay away from the 1940s. Melinda Snyder, our wardrobe lady, has some great ideas about where we will go for suits. We're looking towards 1980s and 90s cuts, dark greys. This is going to be fun.

Image-Steven Klein Vogue Italia

Dystopian Noir

 

images- Steven Meisel for Vogue Italia, Blade Runner, Blade Runner, Brazilian cover of Neuromancer, Brazil, Brazil, Alphaville, Theirry Mugler by Helmut Newton

Monday, January 16, 2012

Am I deceived or did you sigh?




Image- Steven Klein Vogue Italia March 2009

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Linda's Film on Menstruation


A couple years ago I came across Linda's Film on Menstruation. An educational film on menstruation directed by Linda Feferman. It was an interesting and delightful find (yes I was delighted to find this period film). If memory serves, health films usually were not that interesting, well-written or (intentionally) funny. Linda's Film on Menstruation feels comprehensive and progressive. The film centers on Judy, a plucky teenager who has a few headaches. She gets her first period and and she's got a dopey boyfriend, Johnny. But through watching 70s style cartoons, a rap session with some feminists in a park about tampons, and a nightmare about cultural menstruation myths-Judy comes through a confident woman. It's fun a movie.

Since a narrative element in KICK involved menstruation, I showed a portion of Linda's Film on Menstruation as a part of the shorts program that ran with KICK. It always got an amused response. So when I screened in LA, I had a thought. A lot of directors live in LA right? I wondered if director Linda Feferman possibly lived there. Well I found her contact through the DGA, and I invited her to the screening. SHE CAME and my friends and I were able to meet her. She still works with science and informational films. Linda was an interesting woman director to meet. We were all inspired. It was awesome. The end.

Wilson Bentley's Snowflakes


In 1885 Wilson Bentley developed a technique to photograph snowflakes by attaching a camera to a microscope. He also photographed and studied clouds, fog and raindrops. He died of pneumonia after prolonged exposure during a blizzard. He had been photographing snowflakes.

Gadajace Glowy (Talking Heads)



Krzysztof Kieślowski's short documentary of "talking heads", wherein people of different ages share their hopes and opinions. The subjects are emotive and articulate. The tone ranges from cute, bitter, resigned, and then optimistic. A little boy states that he hopes to paint horses, a middle aged man sarcastically infers that his occupation is drinking and a 100 year old woman states that she hopes to live longer. I've always enjoyed Kieślowski's documentaries. They share the same spirit of his later films. There was a naturalism and emotivity to his work; the characters would convey, or try to, or look for an emotional truth. Sometimes in the most quiet and simple ways, even when the film itself was romantic and surreal, like in the Double Life of Veronique. Kieślowski is my favorite, always.

Friday, January 13, 2012

* Winter *
















Sketch of a snow crystal by René Descartes

Thursday, January 12, 2012

BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot


I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.



II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.



III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.



IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.



V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012





Quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude