Uh, anyway, Wives is a fun cinema verité piece where three ladies blow off married life for a while and goof off. Columbia professor Jane Gaines introduced the movie by describing the main characters' activities as a "rampage", and I think that's a little strong, but maybe by 1975 Norway standards it was a real barn-burner. The film is sort of a more commercial Celine and Julie go Boating. The humor is less reliant on in-jokes, the men are offscreen instead of totally absent, and it's ninety minutes long instead of three hours. It was pretty fun, but Celine and Julie is still the gold standard.
I guess I'm just stirring up trouble now, so I'll go back to Next of Kin. The centerpiece of the film for me was a long sequence in the house of the late paterfamilias, in which the family argues over who inherits what, then takes everything down off the walls, puts stickers on everything, and carries all the furniture out to their cars. That must have been incredibly difficult to film, and as someone who has lived through that event (minus the arguing) I gotta say Anja Breien nailed it.
Breien attended the screening and after the movie I asked her to talk about that bit. She said she likes "people carrying things" and the "surrealistic piles" you see in Heironymus Bosch paintings. It symbolizes the alienating effect of materialism, you see. She mentioned that it was really difficult to find all those props; it had to be real expensive silver, paintings by big-name artists, etc. Sounds like they didn't insure it, either. The perfect time-travel heist!
I must admit I'm warming to Marilyn Monroe. I also admit that's a weird thing for a heterosexual man to say, but keep in mind that for most of my life I experienced Marilyn Monroe entirely through the medium of cardboard cutouts used as decor for fake 50s diners. Then I saw her in Love Happy, where she's terrible, and Some Like it Hot, where she's not that great. But as I mentioned a year ago, she's awesome in All About Eve, and she's great in this movie as someone determined to get hers out of a sexist society.
Uh, the worst thing I can say about this movie is the plot bogs it down. I don't really care about the machinations or the milquetoast dudes or the tiara; I just want to see Russell and Monroe hit on some more dumb jocks and maybe commit a little light insurance fraud. Plus, we have a French courtroom conducting an inquiry in English, which may be the most unrealistic thing I've ever seen in a movie.
Finally, I'd just like to point out that this movie ends with the two female characters getting married to their milquetoast dudes, but then it zooms in and cuts the dudes out of frame, so it's just Russell and Monroe standing next to each other in their wedding dresses. I can only imagine what this film would have looked like with the Subtext Glasses they handed out during its original theatrical run.
The other problem is that the movie doesn't tell its actual, interesting story--it obliquely tells the space around the story. Which, okay, it's a Japanese film and I'm not opposed to this technique in general, and I liked the way the actual story was told through foreshadowing and implication, but it also means we never see the main character directly struggle with the central problem of the film: the fact that he's designing beautiful things that will kill people. It skips past that part to focus on a cheesy fictionalized love story. I did not consider that a good trade.
The worst offender was Woody
Vasulka's Explanation (1974), a twelve-minute film in which a mesh
is deformed and rotated before your eyes, over and over again. The
mesh is the visual representation of a waveform which is also played
aurally, and which always manifests as an obnoxious droning
noise. Twelve minutes, folks. Explanation beats out Trent's
Last Case to become the worst movie I've ever seen at the museum.
In the Q&A afterwards someone spoke up for the audience and
demanded an explanation for Explanation. The answer actually
made sense! Films like Explanation weren't meant to be screened
in a theater. They were meant to be looped on a television in an art
gallery. The essential affordance of an art gallery being that you can
leave when you get tired of it, rather than sitting it out because
there's an hour of hopefully better stuff afterwards.
It also would have helped if we'd seen the copyright date at the
beginning of Explanation instead of the end, because most of
the time I was thinking "This mesh deformation stuff would be
groundbreaking for the early 70s, but if this turns out to be from
1986 I'm going to hack Woody Vasulka's Twitter account and make him
follow Unicode
Ebooks."
The other big sonic annoyance was that most of the films up to
about 1972 had soundtracks featuring gratuitous sitar/gamelan/Japanese flute music that often didn't even match the animation. With no other point of reference, the new genre of
computer graphics was comparable only to the wonders of LSD, so... toss
in some hippy Eastern music! This interview about the film series puts it more diplomatically:
Gregory Zinman: The influence of Asian music and imagery in early computer films can be traced to a couple of intertwining concerns. Following the horrors of the second world war, many people, including artists, were searching for different belief systems and ways of thinking about humanity’s place in the universe. This resulted, in part, in a flowering of interest in Eastern religions and philosophies, which in turn resulted in a number of cinematic works that simultaneously referenced other worlds and altered consciousnesses.
In a bit of cross-cultural revenge, we
also saw a Japanese film (1969's Computer Movie No. 2), in
which the soundtrack was Wendy Carlos's version of the third Brandenburg from Switched-On Bach, constantly interrupted by modem handshaking sounds. Make it stop!
Enough negativity. Let's cover the highlights, with links to full
video or clips or at least semi-official pages about the films where possible.
First, the abstract stuff. I loved Mary Ellen Bute's very early, good-natured Abstronic
(1952) and Mood Contrasts (1953). Especially the narrator at
the beginning of Abstronic who explains the concept of computer
art and then says "Enjoy yourself!" Here's a page with a couple clips of Mood Contrasts and I also discovered another great Bute film called Dada. Probably the cheeriest thing ever to be called Dada.
The Whitney family--John Sr., John Jr., and James, but sadly not my uncle Jon Whitney--were well represented and seem to have set the standard with films like Side Phase Drift (1965)
and
Lapis (1966) and Permutations (1968) and Arabesque (1975). The standard being "pointilism because otherwise the computer can't handle the math" and "slap some Asian music on the soundtrack."
But the champion of the abstract section IMO was Larry Cuba's work. 1978's 3/78 (Objects and Transformations) has a clear Whitney influence (moving dots + Japanese flute soundtrack), but by 1985 computer power had advanced to the point where he was able to create what ranks alongside Composition in Blue (1935) as one of my favorite abstract films of all time, the gloriously isometric Calculated Movements (here's a 30-second excerpt).
Cuba made Calculated Movements with a
system called GRASS, which I believe he also used to create the
animated Death Star infographic in Star Wars (1977). He was
present for the screening, and in the Q&A I asked him if he still had
the Calculated Movements source code and if there was a
framework for running GRASS on modern computers. He dodged the first
question and said no to the second--someone was working on something
for Windows but the project died. He did mention that he considered Processing to be the successor to GRASS.
Between abstract and representative film sits the surreal, neon candy-colored
demo reel for the computer graphics studio of Robert Abel and Associates. Their work was apparently described as "a psychedelic trip gone straight," and if I'm misremembering that quote, I'll use those exact words to describe it right now. We saw the 1974 reel and I can't find that exact one online, but here are a few later ones: 1981 and 1982
I especially enjoyed RAA's bonkers 1974 ad for 7-Up, which really lightened the mood after a half-hour of the Whitneys, I tell you what. Here's a YouTube playlist of their stuff. Here's a sequel to the 7-Up commercial with a McDonalds tie-in. Outstanding. This studio seems to have driven a big chunk of the late-70s early-80s aesthetic.
And now, my perrenial favorite, representative film. Yay!
Jim Blin, creator of the Saturn flyby film, said, "Our storyboard was the NASA flight plan." (He wasn't there; the guy introducing the films told us that he said this.) The Voyager flyby film was apparently the first time computer graphics were shown on the nightly news as part of the news, rather than just in interstitals and 7-up commercials from Robert Abel and Associates.
I would be really interested to hear about the relationship between the demoscene and the computer film scene. I'm pretty sure there was no connection whatsoever, for a variety of reasons, but I would like to hear some people who came in to computer art through the "art" side talk about the stuff that came out from the "computer" side. I'm talking about the tension between Human Vectors (which is technically very skilled but nothing special artistically) and No No Nooky TV (which is clearly the work of a professional filmmaker but was made using only the programs that come loaded on the Amiga).
I didn't bring this up in Q&A because I figured no one would know what I was talking about, and if they did it would derail the whole Q&A. Perhaps I should have had more faith in computer animators. I guess I'll have to wait for the Jason Scott documentary.
I also think the museum did a good job of showcasing excellent
work by women in a medium dominated (?) by male artists. The earliest films shown were Mary Ellen
Bute's, and my two favorite films of the show were made by women:
Lynn Goldsmith (who co-directed and sang Adventures in Success)
and Barbara Hammer (No No Nooky TV). There was also a whole
discussion with Lillian Schwartz which I didn't attend.
If this has whetted your appetite for old-fashioned computer animation, there's plenty more where that came from (the past).
Well, how about this. My favorite thing about Thomas Pynchon is that each of his characters is surrounded by a protective bubble of literary genre, which colors the way the narrative is reported and even shapes the plot. This is most obvious with the Chums of Chance in Against the Day, who start off having a carefree Tom Swift adventure that, as they grow up, gradually becomes a WWI military novel. The Big Lebowski does the same thing for film.
I admit it took the publication of Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon's own version of The Big Lebowski, for me to realize this, but there it is. Walter is in an action movie. Maude Lebowski is in an arty Eurofilm where people trade wisecracks and laugh about nothing. The Stranger is in a Western. Bunny Lebowski is in an acausal porno. Jeffrey Lebowski is in a biopic of himself, with classical music and a narrator sonoriously recounting his accomplishments. The Dude doesn't want to be in a movie at all, but his decision to get revenge for the death of his And I don't know what else to say. The Big Lebowski is my favorite movie. It's very nearly the perfect fiasco comedy, and since that's the best kind of movie, it's very nearly the perfect movie. But how many times can you watch the perfect movie? How can I laugh at a really funny joke knowing that my laughter rings hollow because I knew the joke's exact timing?
Here it stands, like Shakespeare's Hamlet or Larry Cuba's Star Wars, the source of cliches that will last a thousand years. Can I set down The Big Lebowski and walk away without betraying my love for it? Nay, and yet I must! For this is not 'Nam. This is Film Roundup. There are rules.
Mon Dec 02 2013 09:36 November Film Roundup:
What a month! Mainly due to a huge film festival, but I also got another chance to see my favorite film of all time on the big screen. What might that film be? Clearly you haven't been reading my weblog for the past fifteen years.
Science and Film: Can you discuss the early films’ fascination with Asian music and imagery?
La Faim (1974) used computer animation and morphing to
create a traditional-style (albeit avant-garde) animated short. I'm
surprised the disturbing, grotesque faces on display in this film
aren't used in more memes. (See sample meme to the right.)
partner rug puts him into a bubble of film noir. And Donny is like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know what's going on.
Unlike @horse_ebooks, @pony_strategies will not abruptly stop publishing fun stuff, or turn out to be a cheesy tie-in trying to get you interested in some other project. It is a cheesy tie-in to some other project (Constellation Games), but you go into the relationship knowing this fact, and the connection is very subtle.
When explaining this project to people as I worked on it, I was astounded that many of them didn't know what @horse_ebooks was. But that just proves I inhabit a bubble in which fakey software has outsized significance. So a brief introduction:
@horse_ebooks was a spambot created by a Russian named Alexei Kouznetsov. It posted Twitter ads for crappy ebooks, some of which (but not all, or even most) were about horses. Its major innovative feature was its text generation algorithm for the things it would say between ads.
Are you ready? The amazing algorithm was this: @horse_ebooks ripped strings more or less randomly from the crappy ebooks it was selling and presented them with absolutely no context.
Trust me, this is groundbreaking. I'm sure this technique had been tried before, but @horse_ebooks was the first to make it popular. And it's great! Truncating a sentence in the right place generates some pretty funny stuff. Here are four consecutive @horse_ebooks tweets:
There was a tribute comic and everything.
I say @horse_ebooks "was" a spambot because in 2011 the Twitter account was acquired by two Americans, Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender, who took it over and started running it not to sell crappy ebooks, but to promote their Alternate Reality Game. This fact was revealed back in September 2013, and once the men behind the mask were revealed, @horse_ebooks stopped posting.
The whole conceit of @horse_ebooks was that there was no active creative process, just a dumb algorithm. But in reality
Bakkila was "impersonating" the original algorithm—most likely curating its output so that you only saw the good stuff. No one likes to be played for a sucker, and when the true purpose of @horse_ebooks was revealed, folks felt betrayed.
As it happens, the question of whether it's artistically valid to curate the output of an algorithm is a major bone of contention in the ongoing Vorticism/Futurism-esque feud between Allison Parrish and myself. She is dead set against it; I think it makes sense if you are using an algorithm as the input into another creative process, or if your sole object is to entertain. We both agree that it's a little sketchy if you have 200,000 fans whose fandom is predicated on the belief that they're reading the raw output of an algorithm. On the other hand, if you follow an ebook spammer on Twitter, you get up with fleas. I think that's how the saying goes.
In any event, the fan comics ceased when @horse_ebooks did. There was a lot of chin-stroking and art-denial and in general the reaction was strongly negative. But that's not the end of the story.
You see, the death of @horse_ebooks led to an outpouring of imitation *_ebooks bots on various topics. (This had been happening before, actually.) As these bots were announced, I swore silent vengeance on each and every one of them. Why? Because those bots didn't use the awesome @horse_ebooks algorithm! Most of them used Markov chains, that most hated technique, to generate their text. It was as if the @horse_ebooks algorithm itself had been discredited by the revelation that two guys from New York were manually curating its output. (Confused reports that those guys had "written" the @horse_ebooks tweets didn't help matters--they implied that there was no algorithm at all and that the text was original.)
But there was hope. A single bot escaped my pronouncements of vengeance: Allison's excellent @zzt_ebooks. That is a great bot which you should follow, and it uses an approximation of the real @horse_ebooks algorithm:
And here are four consecutive quotes from @zzt_ebooks:
Works great.
The ultimate genesis of @pony_strategies was this conversation I had with Allison about @zzt_ebooks. Recently my anger with *_ebooks bots reached the point where I decided to add a real *_ebooks algorithm to olipy to encourage people to use it. Of course I'd need a demo bot to show off the algorithm...
The @pony_strategies bot has sixty years worth of content loaded into it. I extracted the content from the same Project Gutenberg DVD I used to revive @everybrendan. There's a lot more where that came from--I ended up choosing about 0.0001% of the possibilities found in the DVD.
I have not manually curated the PG quotes and I have no idea what the bot is about to post. But the dataset is the result of a lot of algorithmic curation. I focused on technical books, science books and cookbooks--the closest PG equivalents to the crap that @horse_ebooks was selling. I applied a language filter to get rid of old-timey racial slurs. I privileged lines that were the beginnings of sentences over lines that were the middle of sentences. I eliminated lines that were boring (e.g. composed entirely of super-common English words).
I also did some research into what distinguished funny, popular @horse_ebooks tweets from tweets that were not funny and less popular. Instead of trying to precisely reverse-engineer an algorithm that had a human at one end, I tried to figure out which outputs of the process gave results people liked, and focused my algorithm on delivering more of those. I'll post my findings in a separate post because this is getting way too long. Suffice to say that I'll pit the output of my program against the curated @horse_ebooks feed any day. Such as today, and every day for the next sixty years.
Like its counterpart in our universe, @pony_strategies doesn't just post quotes: it also posts ads for ebooks. Some of these books are strategy guides for the "Pôneis Brilhantes" series described in Constellation Games, but the others have randomly generated titles. Funny story: they're generated using Markov chains! Yes, when you have a corpus of really generic-sounding stuff and you want to make fun of how generic it sounds by generating more generic-sounding stuff, Markov chains give the best result. But do you really want to have that on your resume, Markov chains? "Successfully posed as unimaginative writer." Way to go, man.
Anyway, @pony_strategies. It's funny quotes, it's fake ads, it's an algorithm you can use in your own projects. Use it! Wed Dec 04 2013 09:14 @pony_strategies:
My new bot, @pony_strategies, is the most sophisticated one I've ever created. It is the @horse_ebooks spambot from the Constellation Games universe.
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