FILMS WATCHED AND FRAMES NOTICED FOR MANY REASONS SOMETIMES VAGUE, SOMETIMES FOR COMPOSITION, OR EVOCATION OF PLACE, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN AND SOMETIMES FOR FURNITURE AND INTERIORS
….such as the yellow folding step stool in the lower right of this frame
I had the same step-stool once, also in yellow. The same stool shows up in Vertigo (1958)
James Stewart’s character tests out his vertigo by stepping up higher on each step
In reality this stool was unstable and prone to tipping unexpectedly.
A variation on the stamped metal kitchen stool appears in this dramatically low angled shot of Joan Crawford anxiously pacing about her kitchen:
I like this frame’s crazed angle also (below). It makes everything in the film unstable but not in support of the psychology of the character’s predicament so much as the sensation of the projector tipping off the table. It is distracting to the plot but in a good radical way.
more rakish angles and tilting projectors in The Ipcress Files (1965)…. see below
A TV dinner packet in the kitchen trash can in Beau is Afraid (2023)
Maybe intended to be eaten while listening to…..Lola O’Brien the Irish Hawaiian
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From wiki: Evil Does Not Exist (Japanese: 悪は存在しない, Hepburn: Aku wa Sonzai Shinai) is a 2023 Japanese drama film written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With a cast of non-professional actors, the film follows a single father who lives in a village that is disrupted by a real estate project and the consequences its development will have to their environment.
I enjoy how subtly minds are changed as circumstances intervene upon the characters. In this shot a rare patch of wild wasabi is found growing in the woods. Wasabi is now hard to find. Horseradish substitutes in japanese dishes. Wanna know my great idea for a recipe? Wasabi + ice cream. I tried it out once but the sodium preservative in my jar of horseradish wasabi substitute overwhelmed the magic of hot-and-cold I was looking for. Adding wasabi to the ice cream in a Baked Alaska would be pretty cool; warm, freezing, hot in sequence.
Interface ( 1995) dir. Harun Farocki
I don’t know why I screen grabbed this frame. I should keep better notes
Buster Keaton is in Film by Samuel Beckett. He also appears in Sunset Boulevard (1950) as one of the poker players. I hadn’t noticed that before I watched the film without sound during a long flight over the Atlantic. All the drama and histrionics performed to the ambient rumble of the airplane, everyone asleep around.
Below: Hard Boiled (1992) dir. John Woo A parallel editing sequence pairs caged birds with restaurant shootout is pretty amazing….
burst flour bags fills the scene with foggy atmosphere
particles flying – a brilliant graphical representation of the blinding effects of chaos in battle; the floury fog of war.
near zero visibility
when out of the haze emerges a ghostly figure
it’s like he meets the raging soul of his conscience
and the matchstick he chews throughout
match sticks taste terrible
The end….(I don’t know if this was the last shot exactly)
I also don’t remember what film this still is from. It is French and this guy is not sleeping
below: In the Mood for Love interior detail, a Mondrianesque room divider
and the rhyming shadow patterns created by light penetrating the window. With jade-coloured mid-century American floor lamp
below: ….and this is the last shot.
extreme camera angles in The Ipcress Files (1965) seem cartoonishly self conscious in the 21st century
clock-driven parking meters in the 1960s had a glass face either side allowing the camera a view through
Off screen key light throws a shadow of the projector on the wall, 3 pendant lights dangle above, the lectern florescent lamp ia incongruously in the frame close-up, All crowd in to create a brightly lit claustrophobic scene. Relevant, since later on a similar projector is used for the projections of psychedelic shapes onto the walls of this torture device set up in a warehouse. The way to not get brain washed is to gouge your hand with a nail. The pain keeps you in the now and also is conveniently symbolically martyr-like. But did our man do this actually? In my memory he did although I could be making it up.
French press vs Pour over (Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)- Chantel Ackerman )
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Total best film by streaks!
Jusqu’a laGarde (2017) (Custody) was really frightening. The young boy is an incredible actor. The coaching must have been intense. The threaty ex is textbook; obsessed and methodical cold and very violent, icily calculating, sobbing for emotional manipulation, all the tricks, but what’s really terrifying is how the family keep getting tripped up and ensnared. The raw emotions of the boy are the audiences view in.
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The image below is a cropped frame from a tv series, Happy Valley which in a best films list ranked at 3 out of 50. , As a hazmat company would do to perform a crime scene cleanup I’ve digitally etched out the blood on the face of the woman in the image to at least symbolically break the cycle of image gore.
Set in rural northern England the landscapes in Happy Valley are unbelievably beautiful and the characters are solid in a realistic way. Events however, are endlessly pitched to such extreme violence so frequently that it eventually dulls all concern. All the women get it. The first five episodes (season 1) sees:
1 (in hazy flashbacks) the rape, suicide of the police sergeant’s daughter,
2 the violent abduction and drawn out rape of the a local business owner’s daughter,
3 The local business owner’s wife we also learn has mere months to live (cancer),
4 the ultra violent beating and then killing of a recently qualified woman PC during a traffic stop
5 the absolute vicious beating of the sergeant herself who plays out the remainder of the episodes with a smashed up face (you know, continuity) The sergeant, being the main character, fills the frame often so blood, stitches and bruises dominates the visuals.
6 For gratuitous bonus misogyny; the business man’s complicit accountant’s wife herself has MS and hobbles around with a cane. She is dependent on her husband for basic physical assistance.
All the while the able-bodied male characters run around, limbs intact, spurring on events with only the burden of their notably pliable moral conscience to shoulder. Their accumulated injuries are mostly of the mental anguish kind as they worry fret and whine about getting caught and doing prison time.
The women, meanwhile, are systematically annihilated.
In the painting below a woman has been pulled from the water and given mouth-to-mouth by a first responder in an effort to revive her. Her rescuer and the woman are both wrapped in emergency foil blankets. It’s not known whether she lives or is dead. The painting shows a moment in time hinged on a cusp.
Afire dir. Christian Petzold
Fire at Sea is a documentary about a boat that searches the waters of the Mediterranean looking for migrant boats trying to make it to Lampedusa , a small island between Tunisia and Scicily
The visual rhyme occurs only by virtue of the packaging the foil blanket is in. It comes folded up in a clear cellophane pouch, about the size of an envelope. There wouldn’t be any artful links to make if the blankets were dispensed on a roll like paper towel.
….TO BE CONTINUED….
