.

Ok so my main post is below this, “Holy—” but after my morning shower and breakfast, I need to get down a couple more ideas before class.

How about the way it would cut to the circus crowd/performers while someone other than the lion tamer spoke?  Robot guy or mole rat guy would be describing robots or mole rats and the people in the stands or stage would be fitting the description.  Brutal, Mr. Morris.

And that robot guy, he wants to be the father of a race!  Was it him or Molerat who said people tend to let everyone die rather than save the one they can save?  I think it was Molerat but it goes together.  Robotguy is like the ancient monkey-father whose child was the first ape.  He’s looking at it and understanding it will replace his whole race and way of life- and is kind of proud.

 Topiary guy was the first guy I thought was God.  It was a shot of him pruning, in black and white, shot from below… and the monologue was about tending his creations.  At one point he said something like, “You remember what a bear looks like, then you make a bear.”  At first, I thought he was Death or Damon the Mower.  But he’s definately a deity.  Inspired by that old lady to keep the garden in good condition.  It doesn’t take an all night Milton reading to make a garden important.

Ah, I have homework to do before my next class.  Goodbye.

Ok, so we finished Fast Cheap and Out of Control eight minutes ago. 

As Robyn said one minute ago: “There are no words.”

But I’m going to try anyway.

 So, things the movie does, it talks about humanity.  It talks about God.  It talks about souls and consciousness.  Art.  Death.  Levels of being.  I’m not going into all of it right now, but let’s start with God.

The four men were all versions of God. 

The topiary man, he is the bumbling elderly gardener, who cannot quite control what happens to his creations in bad weather, and doesn’t have the seasons of his youth to repair the recent damage.  And there will be no replacement, when he finally dies. 

The mole-rat man, he is the housebuilder, the anthil-watching deist sort of god.  He builds the habitat and gets a kick watching his little mole rats scurry around, their squeaks help him sleep.  Their brutality fascinates him, their adaptability, their interaction.

 The lion-tamer is the institutional god.  Organized religion.  The snapping of the whip and fire of a blankloaded revolver that keeps the mighty beast docile and dominated.  He has had close calls, but he has survived.  Even he is a degraded version of the old God, the movie star God, the God who could make a lion and tiger fight for film and entertainment. 

The robot maker, the clockworking god.  He is some fascinating mix, a Pandora and a Prometheus.  Willing to give life and mobility to machines that will eventually end life as we know it.  Wideyed, brilliant, godlike, a creator who embodies a sort of inspired recklessness.

 And all the people.  We are robots, mole rats, topiary, and lions.

There’s some funny elemental thing happening here, too.  Four artists.  One works in metal, one wood, one earth, and one in flesh.  Strange crazy stuff.

 I don’t know what to think.

I’ve been thinking about our Truth vs. Subjectivitiy debate in class.  I think that the two need to be understood together, a synthesis rather than one or the other.  Maybe that means I’m for subjectivity, but I don’t think I am.  Rather, that truth is too big for people.  Like Emily Dickinson says in this poem:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

Which isn’t exactly what I mean.  But it’s close.

I don’t trust people who claim to know truth but are complacent, nor people who claim truth but are militant.  I guess I don’t trust many claims of truth.  Any claims of truth.  But listening to them, something begins to take shape that might be real. 

 Like, we are trusting Errol Morris in this movie.  We only see two hours of carefully selected and sometimes staged footage.  But we trust Morris’ portrayal of the case.  What if Adams told him he had buried treasure, and if Morris got him released, he could have half of it?  Morris might be clever enough a manipulator of people’s words to make that happen.  After all, we didn’t see the court documents or evidence.  Just testimony made by people years after the fact.  We don’t even see Harris’ confession on video. 

 But we do trust Morris.  Perhaps because we’re sheep and screen-dazed grazers of whatever is put before us.  Perhaps because we trust Dr. Campbell.   I don’t really know why. 

I haven’t got a lot to say, so I’m just going to think about The Thin Blue Line for a few moments before class.

The most interesting thing, for me, was the way that Morris shows the policeman being shot again and again and again, he shows everyone’s story.  That’s exactly what happens in a courtroom, I guess, and in the mind of a prisoner. 

It’s simply amazing how just talking to those people, showing us two hours of monologue, was worth weeks of failure in the courts.  Justice by documentary. 

Isn’t the lying lady really freakin’ weird?  The way she ratted on the innocent man for money, then had the guts to look at the camera and say “oh, I always wanted to be a detective” etc. etc… crazy.  Morris definately shoots her without mercy.  All her nasty makeup and mannerisms seem to shout right through the screen.

 It’s too bad we never got to see the partner of the police officer who got shot.  I suppose she wouldn’t want to talk to the documentary because she would be guilty of not backing her partner as she should have.

So the thing i most noticed about the old lady on her front porch, like I said in class, was the way the scene was set so perfectly.  The art of the shot was like some kind of lonely old lady version of American Gothic.  I really want to know if it was staged, or arranged, or found. 

 If it was staged, then it is pure art, I guess.  It was created by an artist, an author.  But I don’t think it was staged, exactly.

 If it was found, then it is pure luck.  It would indeed take hours and hours of footage to stumble across somthing like that. 

 It was probably a combination.  I bet that Morris talked to everybody in the neighborhood, filmed a few of them.  But when he found Ms. Rassmussen, knew he’d found some art.  So he asked her to “please sit on the porch, no ma’am, don’t bother shutting the door, no, I insist… please just put your cane right there.  Now, what were you telling me about that pet cemetary?”  Rather than creating or finding art in the world, these shots were probably a heightening of the art ever-present in life, through the actions of an artist. 

I am afraid the only movie I watched over break was You and Me and Everyone you Know.  I didn’t like it much.  I mean, it was lovely- but I cannot stand movies where children are threatened.  In real life, horrible things happen to children all the time.  I guess I like to forget about that.  When a decent movie puts a kid in danger, I get tense and sweaty and worried and it doesn’t matter what happens to the kid anymore- I am mad at the movie.

 But I didn’t mind Beth dying.  Perhaps because my mental-Beth is so different from any of the actresses playing her, I never felt that Beth was truly threatened.  Or maybe, I don’t connect with poor little Beth like I should.   Am I just callous? 

What do you think?  Kids being hurt in movies- does it make you mad?  Glad that it raises awareness?  Do you really like it because you can’t stand the little buggers?  I don’t know.

My theory of matching as the basic art of cinema (I don’t know a damn thing about the art of cinema):

 So, to make a movie you need lots of people.  Hence, we watch credits for a really long time.  But to make cinema, you need lots of artists.  I’m not into film enough to know the great costume designers or computer animators etc, and only have a superficial understanding of great actors, directors, producers.  But it seems to me, that a great movie will happen when either a bunch of artists work together or an artist coaxes the best out of a bunch of technicians.  We’ll concentrate on the bunch of artists.  We’ll need a writer/screenwriter who doesn’t stink.  Maybe a few.  The words usually come first, I bet.  You need someone to shoot the movie in a meaningful way, an interesting way.  If you don’t have decent actors, it will be very hard to make a good movie, so we’ll say some good actors too.  For some music we’ll recruit a whole sub-bunch of artists, someone to write the score and people talented enough to do it justice with thier instruments.  I think it’s easy to forget that it takes talent not only to write a score, but to play it, too.  Then there’s all the details I don’t know about, lighting, makeup, costume, etc.  But you can have all these things and still flop, if they don’t cohere.

 The coherence comes through ‘matching’ as I understand it.  The power of the cinema is the ability to convey the same emotion through several coextant forms of art, making a greater art.  The actor, the camera, the dialog, the music- when they all come together, cinema happens.  Like a good band, they will each have their solos, while the other parts step back for a moment and provide the rhythm section.  But the overall effect is bigger than the parts. 

 Maybe that’s obvious, reading over it.  But the matching, that’s what I wanted to point out.  There are so many forms of art happening, and they are each carrying the same narrative, the same film.