Sunday, May 26, 2013

THAS: Hooper Challenge #3

[in response to the question: "Do you have a favorite of your catalogue?"]
"Oh, I don't... oh, you know, it changes.  I mean, I do and I don't.  And there's films I've made that have now become favorites that, years ago, were not my favorites.  And so, you know, it's... I just think things get better with age."

Or distance!  Perhaps it's not improvement with age, but the warm ochre brilliance that comes through when letting go of the pettier worldly baggage, such as the overall success of your picture, and approaching it from a different vantage point of recognizing the genuineness and the painstaking artfulness with which Hooper treats onto, like a gleaming lacquer, every inch of his works. 

Coupled with a vague quote I recollect reading from him (but unfortunately cannot place right now) in which Hooper speaks humbly about Invaders from Mars and then says he watches it every six years or so and is reminded it's not so bad, it becomes clear there's minute artistry meant in the existence of everything he puts out.

Being currently in a spell of being overwhelmed by the unifying consistency of brilliance found throughout Hooper's filmography (one must blame a recent re-watch of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is so clearly at one with his career, a wilder antecedent to a career developing his ways of intricate staging and angular visuals), here's another entry of "The Hooper Challenge" (the title at this point a misnomer):


T.H.C. #3
(1)  (2)

"How minutely expressive are Hooper's visuals...


... how rhythmic...


... structural...


... and lean...

 

 ... is Hooper's scene-building.
 
 

 How ambitious are these attempts to manifest, through the cinematography...

 

... the emotional filigree and dramatic vigor he senses within his stories.


Shots follow shots for reasons...
 

They interlock in sequence in a way almost algorithmic...
 

... the efficiency of his rendering of space...

 

... perspective... 


... and the syncopated beats of actions and interaction seeming uncommonly computational in its artful preciseness.



Furthermore, his camera is an entity unto itself...



... an aesthetic eye...

 

... bound by the continuity of dramatic staging...
 
 

... and by a never more-than-human, always perspective-informed observational restraint.



As some filmmakers create great art by emphasizing an inorganic, clinical eye...

 

... Hooper and his brand of aestheticism embodies a very organic and emotive camera...
 

An actor-and-camera ballet exists in his blocking of his players...
 

Shots are rich with textures...
 

... and painterly artistic principles...


Pause his films at random...

 

... and you will see a shot framed to a maximum of elegance.


Hooper's films are pure "works of art" - astounding marathons of inspiration...

 

... and solemnity towards the serious aims of cinema...

 

... of elegance and compassion and creation...
 

... idea and thesis...



... and presentation.


Choked of the loftiest ideals of story as rich, woven tapestries of character, drama...


 ... metaphor, and commentary...

 

... rich abstractions effectively superseding...


... filmmaking of literalism.

 

Every motion a direct, modest act in realizing his film suffused of pure and warm artistic-humanist ends."


Wednesday, May 22, 2013

THAS: Comparison

 




   *
   

Scene from Eaten Alive                                                  Scene from Queen Christina,
Rouben Mamoulian, 1933

A shot from Eaten Alive and one from Rouben Mamoulian's Queen Christina give off roughly the same effect.  In each scene, a character's entrance into a room is endowed of a cinematic-human-spiritual rippling effect by a camera that suddenly jerks in the direction of the suddenly opening door.  

The jerking movement is both reactive and premonitory: the jerk is reactive to the entrance, but the fact that the camera places itself or dollies back (as in the Queen Christina shot) to its particular spot, within berth of the door, makes it premonitory.  

The doors swing into the frame in their opening wide, the camera jerks but in the effort of creating cinematic song, and the great import of human beings acting in relation to each other - caught in a ripple of both character and camera reaction - becomes clear.  In Eaten Alive, an accosted whorehouse girl calls for her Madam's help and the door rips open, only for her to not receive the help she was counting on - her patroness is instead one cruel and vulgar, and her bursting through the door retroactively proves a decisive moment of the girl's tragedy.  In Queen Christina, a kindly servant's entrance interrupts Christina's un-Queen-like reading habit and has her hearing once again the fact that she is a very different sort of leader, which is a positive corroboration by this servant (so, unlike the Eaten Alive scene, this entrance is of a positive nature).

Asterisks in each column mark the moment in each scene that the swerve of the camera occurs.  In the Eaten Alive scene, the girl's calls become hoarse before her mistress finally responds (to our relief).  In Queen Christina, a knock at the door catches us by surprise, and waiting is not a factor (outside of a latent wondering if the camera dollies back for some ulterior reason, and it does: a premonition of the door).

The scene's are somewhat inverses of each other when matched along the shared factor of their cameras' swerves towards opening doors:

* In Eaten Alive's scene, the camera is stationary in the beginning.  The girl's pleas then bring on the Madam's entrance.  Then, as the old woman enters, and the camera jerks left to harshly alight upon her entrance and to finally reveal the door, the camera launches into a sweeping pull back motion.  

* In the Queen Christina scene, the camera begins with the sweeping dolly movement backwards from Christina in the bed.  The sound of a knock then causes Christina's head to turn - simultaneous with the camera's jerk right, to reveal the door, just as Eaten Alive does - and then the camera comes to a stop.

In both, the door becomes a poetic device, an allegorical thing: a thing that is not there, but is always there, and a thing that so often drives the happening of drama.  So important to both great filmmakers: the import of the nature, of the allegory, of the occurrence, of characters entering in on one another.

Both are highly impressing and delicate moments of visual prosody and an emphatic interest in humanity seen as one with cinema.  A poetry of our existence.