(images from Michael Wolf's "The Transparent City" series -
The short film Lost Buildings (2003), Ira Glass and Chris Ware tell the story of two men who have an incredible love for architect's Louis Sullivan's buildings, to the point where they will put their lives on the line to save them. In text this sounds almost like an action movie. But the story is true and the style of the short is unique and shows the street level mundanity to the story. It's not even really a film, as Ware's drawings are the only images. Yet its not animation as much as a slideshow, and even then the images divide up the screen when they come and go, rarely sharing the same space. All the sound is done by Ira Glass, including the narration and interviews, which Glass mixed during live performances with music.
Lost Buildings shows our identity can be shaped by architecture, namely through a city's skyline, the power it inhabits, both physically and the companies inside. But the common man is not involved in the shape and style of those buildings. We are often not involved in houses we own. If we are lucky enough to choose or design a house from top to bottom we may be able to put our personality physically onto it, what size and shape, and decorative elements.
The photography work of William Eggleston shows the beauty of everyday life. Each viewer may read a different story into one of his photos, there are no titles to give you explanation, but there is lots of depth under the surface - faces, people, things, emotional connections we have with them. While critics and even other photographers found the mundane subject matter controversial, Eggleston captured reality and made it aesthetically pleasing with vivid color. Filming such normal life also creates a record of history. Eggleston has no irony, no judgement, just a warmth for what is in front of him.
This is comparable with previous films screened in class - Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, a study of a woman in long takes doing mundane chores, leading to larger moral and philosophical questions, as well as Deborah Stratman's O'er the Land, with strong cinematography and long takes capturing intense subjects - war reinactments, football games, nature and gun shows among others - in a normal framework with no commentary.
In the short film Terminal Bar (2002), Stefan Nadelman profiles New York City's "most dangerous bar" according to New York Magazine, through an interview with and using ten years of photos his father Sheldon took while bartending there. An incredible amount of images show the faces of the people who came through the bar, which defined the place that it was. The looks, the lines, the details of all the faces give texture to the place, while Sheldon's talks about each person's background. Its rarely a happy ending. And what a leap of faith for Sheldon - to take photo after photo and document what he saw, while working as a bartender, not as journalist or artist. But he became both of those by default through his own will to tell a story. Stefan's film makes a connection between them, his own family history. When Sheldon first saw the film with a crowd, he told Stefan, "You've made my life."
Info on the film:
Sheldon Nadelman’s photo blog:
interview with writer Luc Sante on New York, criminals and manifest destiny:
Working off a massive archive of his own film footage, Jem Cohen’s projects have no actors yet interesting characters. They are not documentaries but they generally contain no staged scenes. They have no expensive movie shots yet use time-lapse, slo-mo and camera movement to create a rich atmosphere. He regularly carries a camera and films the world around him in a daily routine.
LOST BOOK FOUND (1996) was shot on NYC streets in super-8 and 16mm over five years. A spooky mix of documentary and narrative, telling the story of a push cart vendor’s encounter with a book full of mysterious listings of places, objects, incidents — the key to the hidden city. Cohen uses the notions of documentary to capture reality. He films everything as it happens, by himself, and edits it together to tell a story of "what happened" while he filmed. But he makes it very personal, editing things to simulate memories instead of showing a fact, narration tells the story of a book that has answers to how the city works, but we never see the book, only hear some of the words it contained. Cohen has often stated he is heavily influenced by writer Walter Benjamin and dedicated films to him.
LOST BOOK FOUND (1996) was shot on NYC streets in super-8 and 16mm over five years. A spooky mix of documentary and narrative, telling the story of a push cart vendor’s encounter with a book full of mysterious listings of places, objects, incidents — the key to the hidden city. Cohen uses the notions of documentary to capture reality. He films everything as it happens, by himself, and edits it together to tell a story of "what happened" while he filmed. But he makes it very personal, editing things to simulate memories instead of showing a fact, narration tells the story of a book that has answers to how the city works, but we never see the book, only hear some of the words it contained. Cohen has often stated he is heavily influenced by writer Walter Benjamin and dedicated films to him.
Excerpt from Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Source: UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden 1998; proofed and corrected Feb. 2005.)
By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
