Trend tracker: cinematic screenshot blogs. Here are two fine and varied examples: 1) Michael Crowe’s To e (via). 2) Justin Ouellette’s Screen Caps.

Khoi writes in with more on space and film:

For a great example of effective spatial narrative in film, watch (or re-watch) Soderbergh’s underrated Out of Sight. The last act of the film is about a gang of thieves taking over a home; they’re all split up in different parts of the house, but somehow Soderbergh makes you understand exactly where they are in relation to one another. It’s something very few directors can do.

While we’re on the subject of Soderbergh, I’m reminded of this excellent appraisal A.O. Scott wrote about the director back in 2000, as Soderbergh was preparing to release Traffic. Ten years later, the article remains insightful and fresh. Here’s one of Scott’s takeaways from The Limey:

[The] director uses the plainness of the story as an opportunity to linger over telling details and explore its rich subtext. The movie, with its jump cuts and its forays into fantasy (Mr. Stamp’s character imagines the death of his antagonist many times before it happens), becomes an extended meditation on the puzzling relationship between personal and historical time. Specifically, it’s about the 60’s, a much-mythologized decade evoked not by costumed flashbacks but by the flickering shadow of Mr. Stamp, a young, brash, beautiful star of the period, in clips from one of his old movies.

Geoff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG on Bruce Willis’s John McClane in Die Hard and his exploration of Nakatomi Space:

Over the course of the film, McClane blows up whole sections of the building; he stops elevators between floors; and he otherwise explores the internal spaces of Nakatomi Plaza in acts of virtuoso navigation that were neither imagined nor physically planned for by the architects. His is an infrastructure of nearly uninhibited movement within the material structure of the building.

The spatial dynamics of films fascinate me endlessly. A few other great spatial films: The Shining, North by Northwest, and The Limey. There are surely many more. Also of interest: Steven Jacobs’s recent book The Wrong House. (via)

Wes Anderson, interviewed by Charlie Rose, on the influence of Peanuts:

I always loved the comic strip, but especially the Christmas special, which that one little 24 minutes or whatever it is, is something that’s had a real affect on me. The mood of that program — the writing is so good, the visuals are unique, and there’s the most beautiful music in it.

Transcript here.

Dana Stevens of Slate, whose film columns I always enjoy, had a really moving and spot-on column commemorating the life of filmmaker John Hughes. Her final paragraph is about recreation, or what I’ve dubbed elsewhere as visual karaoke. She writes,

At last year’s Halloween Parade in New York City, a surprisingly large group of young people put in a lot of work to re-create the parade-float scene from Ferris Bueller, dancing crowds and all. And if you search for “Breakfast Club dance scene” on YouTube, you’ll find more homemade recreations than clips from the original. Imitating John Hughes movies is a very John Hughesian gesture. The fact that kids who weren’t yet born when Hughes last directed a movie are now looking to his films for instruction on how to be a teenager makes it clear that his best work will last for many sophomore years to come.

There is so much to quote from this NYT Review of Werner Herzog’s new memoir Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, but here are three to start: 1) “Every gray hair on my head I call Kinski.” 2) “Time is tugging at me like an elephant, and the dogs are tugging at my heart.” 3) “Life seems like a stranger’s house to me.”

Reviewer Mark Harris, whose Pictures at a Revolution I read excerpts from and liked, is somewhat critical of Herzog’s book, but at times I wonder, in his film historian’s quest for more facts, if he shouldn’t have revisited Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration and read the book looking for a more ecstatic truth.

Above, top to bottom: Peter Murray’s poster adapted packaging used for generic milk cartons. Michelle Viau created a color-coding system for an event calendar based on the dual-ring lids of Ciao Bella gelato.

Go to the supermarket and take extensive visual notes on the typography you find there. Purchase any items you might require for further visual research. Sketch, sketch more, and then use your findings to design a poster for an upcoming event at the New School drawn from the University’s public event listings. The poster should list dates, times, prices, and all relevant event information. It should be sized A2 and posted somewhere on campus before class begins next week. Document your poster’s release.

This assignment is from the class Typographic Research. It was inspired by a similar assignment from Paul Elliman involving this scene from Jean Luc Godard’s Tout va bien. For more, check out this poster by Manuel Miranda.

Above: Die Farbe by Johannes Itten, with a cover designed by Max Bill.

The documentary Max Bill: The Master’s Vision screens in NYC at 2pm today with a reception sponsored by the Consulate General of Switzerland. Check your watch, there might still be time to catch it! While you’re at it, see Bill’s cover for Johannes Itten recreated on a low-fi Riso copier here by Sarah Crowner and Duncan Hamilton. Lovely.

Billions and billions… of pageviews. Yes, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, in all its Trooper Roman glory, is up on Hulu and free for the watching (thx, Jonathan).

One of my top five favorite films, The Limey, turned ten this year, and independently of that started popping up on the pop-culture radar again in a few different places. First in January on Elvis Mitchell’s wonderful podcast The Treatment, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh described his newest film, The Girlfriend Experience, as his most “Limey-like” film since the original. It’s about an elite call girl working in the pre-election hubbub of October 2008 and stars real-life porn star Sasha Grey. Then recently on The Onion’s awesome “New Cult Canon” series (which last week canonized another favorite of mine, Eyes Wide Shut), critic Scott Tobias added not just The Limey but also the film’s DVD Commentary track to its stellar lineup of films.

It was watching The Limey’s DVD commentary several times that spurred me to begin thinking about it in relation to another film I love, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. In 2001 I was taking a course on Hitchcock and proposed an extended comparative essay about the two films as my final project. Most of the introduction is dry and overly academic, but the following paragraph cuts to the core of my interest in making the comparison:

Some of the most heated debates of the ’60s/New Wave were Marxist-Capitalist debates, but in these two films Hitchcock and Soderbergh actually visualize these opposing ideologies by consistently placing them in formal opposition to one another and moving their characters between them. North by Northwest, made in 1959, came at a cusp point of the Atomic Age amidst the post-WWII prosperity in America, and its finale, in which both Communism is thwarted (though it’s not said outright) and a marrage is made, wreckons with these twin late-’50s predicaments. The Limey, made in 1999, came after the end of the Cold War and amidst a wave dot-com prosperity in America. That the Marxist is a villan in one and a hero in the other speaks volumes about these thrillers. That both films are thrillers helps determine exactly how. Again and again, Soderbergh and Hitchcock use the idea of exchange over time, and, more importantly, over space to discuss Marxist and Capitalist ideologies. By coupling movement—which is concerned with the formal kinetics of the characters, camera, and shots—with ideology—which is concerned with the social implications of the films’ content—both directors formulate a relationship between the way things move on screen and what they ideologically represent.

The finest parts of the essay, however, are not these broader theoretical constructions but the two sections that work hardest to closely observe how these films move, how their directors work with the camera, and how their editing schemes organize the scenes and story. This is done first on a formal level and then on a more narrative level, as the each of the films’ characters and settings are aligned with different types of transactions, both political and economic. The essay’s methodological cousin is Frederic Jameson’s worthwhile high-wire analysis of Hitchcock’s film, “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest,” available in its entirety on Google Books here. —RG

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