I'm reading John Leland's illuminating book _Hip: A History_, and I came across this very striking observation that, I think, offers the germ of a commentary on our current culture-wave of superhero stories.

Writing about the shared folklore of white and black Southerners, Leland discusses the figure of the trickster, and then provides the following quote from historian Peter Kolchin:

"Notably absent from Southern slave folklore are stories depicting heroic behavior-- stories of dragon slayers, popular liberators, or people who sacrificed themselves for the good of the whole. Rather, the dominant themes are trickery, subterfuge, and securing as much as possible of a desired item (often food) for oneself. Justice, fair play, and compassion for one's rivals rarely emerge as desirable characteristics. In short, surviving in a heartless world assumes overriding importance."

I like this observation. In a sense, superhero stories aren't just nerdy; they are practically the definition of un-hip, of establishment, squarejohn, terminally white mythologies. (It's also amusing that the villain in _The Avengers_ is Loki, and he's not portrayed as a trickster so much as a sociopath.) Fantasies of power versus the fantasies of the powerless. Fantasies of heroics versus the fantasy of just squeaking by. The fantasy of a moral order versus the fantasy of surviving an amoral world. 

Thanks to home video, I get this urge every so often to rewatch Michael Cimino's _Heaven's Gate_.( Read more...Collapse )

Most multi-billion-dollar industries, like oil and shipping and biotech and Big Agri, are best known by their cataclysmic failures. If an industry's doing well, it's just another ongoing system in the background. Their successes may reflect industry, careful work, and even genius (even when they are slowly ruining the planet), but we generally think of them as being part of the background hum of our modern lives. But boy-howdy, we notice them when they fuck up. We can _name_ oil spills, industrial disasters, and invasive engineered seed lines. The White Star line was many splendorous things, but it's known to us for its one major fuckup.

The film industry has its fuckups, too, and _Titanic_ might have been one of them. The budget nearly tripled during production. The film was a period piece, had no name stars and a downer of an ending. The director's career was respectable. He had good commercial instincts, and his first two films were marvels of low-budget ingenuity. But the three films that followed didn't make him a sure thing; one was a famously difficult shoot that ended in financial failure, the next was a middle adventure thriller, and the third was a massively expensive sequel to his low-budget classic.

That's an advantage the film industry has over others: the mythology of Heroic Risk. Think of the major successes and major failures of films, and they're almost always the stories of how filmmakers struggled to commit their visions to film. There are any number of film failures that lost a lot of money, or nearly bankrupted studios (like _Cleopatra_, or the slew of big-budget musicals of the 1960s like _Star!_ and _Hello, Dolly!_ and _Doctor Doolittle_), but those had the stink of corporate directives and committee-made decision; nobody could look at _Darling Lili_ and think of it as an heroic effort.

But the failures, potential failures, and artistic successes we _do_ remember are the ones where a director bent Heaven and Hell and studio budgets to make something wonderful and unique. It's a mythology that's existed since the silent era, with mad geniuses like Fritz Lang and Erich von Stroheim. And even when one of these follies fails, there's always a contingent of enthusiasts who will love it _because_ it's a folly. We can admire the spirit that moved its creator, even when they made artistic choices that just didn't pan out. I don't know if Jacques Tati really needed to shoot _Playtime_ in 70mm, but I love the fact that he did it.

So anyway, _Heaven's Gate_. This was the film Michael Cimino made after _The Deer Hunter_ won a shitload of awards and beat Coppola's Vietnam film to the nabes. And it didn't look like a fluke of the times: Cimino had done some decent scriptwork for other directors. He had a terrific eye for composition, and a mania for visual perfection that made for a heroic director. And he clearly could pick out great actors: _The Deer Hunter_ showcased Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep, John Cazale and John Savage. In short, if you were a studio executive in 1978, in the era of heroic directors, Michael Cimino looked like the next Coppola or Altman. Maybe even David Lean.

When you read Stephen Bach's book on the debacle, _Final Cut_, you understand why he and other United Artists executives wanted to be part of the young genius's career. UA was facing a unique set of problems. Its top tier of executives, led by the highly-regarded Arthur Krim, left the company to found Orion Pictures, and those who were left at UA needed to show that they could continue to meet their previously high standards. Bach details how they worked very hard to accomplish this, including strenuous efforts to retain Woody Allen at UA. Snagging the next Coppola, especially after a spectacular set of Oscar wins, was part of this effort... and to some executive at the time, signing a contract that left the studio on the hook for every budget overage Cimino incurred must have seemed like a reasonable risk.

UA gave Cimino pretty much everything he wanted. They’d wanted a “name” actress for the female lead, but let Cimino cast the as-yet-untested Isabelle Huppert. A great many actors relocated to the Wyoming locations, only to wait for months until Cimino decided to shoot their scenes. (Some loved it, like Jeff Bridges: John Hurt, however, grew more and more irritated, because he eventually had to leave to shoot _The Elephant Man_.) Cimino built a massive set for Casper, Wyoming, requiring an antique-gage train… and rebuilt it to make the street six feet wider. (No, they didn’t simply move one side of the street six feet away—Cimino insisted that both sides be rebuilt three feet further away from each other.) Scenes calling for a hundred extras would, under Cimino’s need for perfect compositions, suddenly require three hundred, or six hundred… all requiring costuming, makeup, and coordination. Costumes and sets were built with authentic materials. Camera crews were dispatched to shoot landscapes, take after take, until the clouds looked right. A field selected for the final battle scene had to be reseeded with grass… and the scene was shot with tons of fuller’s earth blown around, turning the place into a dust bowl. Some scenes required dozens of takes before Cimino was satisfied: part of the film’s legend was that he was five days behind schedule by the end of the first week of shooting. (Accounts other than Bach’s mention epic amounts of cocaine consumption.) And Cimino asked for prints of all of his takes, which incurred thousands of dollars in lab and processing fees.

A lot of what Cimino did wasn’t unprecedented. Stanley Kubrick was famous for requiring dozens of takes of scenes. And Kubrick wanted all of his takes printed, too. But Kubrick had a track record of artistic and financial successes. Reports from the set were giving UA fits: they’d send representatives to Montana only to have Cimino snub them, but free-lance reporters who’d infiltrated the set were publishing stories of animal abuse, poor treatment of extras, costly set rebuilds, and more. The initial budget of $15 million was skyrocketing past thirty. UA was trapped. If they shut down the production, they’d lose the massive costs Cimino incurred; but if they continued, there was a chance that the film might make some money back, or even be a success. So they pleaded with Cimino to hurry up, stick to schedules, and prayed for a break in the weather.
Cimino handed in a “final cut” of five and a half hours. He eventually met a contractually-mandated length of three hours and 45 minutes. After the first wave of reviews called the film an “unmitigated disaster,” in terms that surprised even UA executives, Cimino tried to pull the film back for an even shorter edit. It didn’t work. The film became an even greater notoriety than _Cleopatra_.

The film has benefitted from the legend of the Heroic Director. In the years that have followed, some people want to see _Heaven’s Gate_ as an example of a potentially great film that was crippled by its notoriety: critics couldn’t avoid thinking about the production tales, so their reviews were more about the money than the actual film. In fact, the term “director’s cut” came about when the Los Angeles-based Z-channel asked to run Cimino’s three-hour-plus cut, so that viewers could see what he’d originally intended. It is a film that’s not often attempted these days; a mix of lyricism and historical realism, very unlike the comic-book blockbusters of today. And a lot of people have come around to seeing _Heaven’s Gate_ as a great film, full of great performances, gorgeous cinematography, grand and sweeping scenes, and even a point-of-view that challenges our notions of America as well as offering a sad elegy to the American West…

It sucks.

Every so often, I sucker myself into watching _Heaven’s Gate_ again. It is gorgeously photographed. The sets, costumes, and some of its set pieces are breathtaking. It really does look as though David Lean decided to make a Western. But it is a terrible movie, made at a cost that can never be justified, but only explained. (By Stephen Bach, actually.)

This is the story. We start off in 1870s, where Jim Averill (Kristofferson) is graduating from Harvard. The commencement address by the Reverend Doctor (Joseph Cotten) about duty and service is undercut by another student, Billy Irvine (John Hurt). The graduates get their degrees, dance on the lawn with their girlfriends, and that’s about ten or fifteen minutes of the movie right there.

Twenty years later, a train pulls into Casper, Wyoming. The roof is packed with immigrants, most of whom will speak in angry, confused, frightened, unsubtitled gabbles for the rest of the film. The only passenger is Averill, who’s some kind of Marshall in Johnson County now. He steps off the train and speaks with the stationmaster, Cully (Richard Masur), an Irishman; Cully tells Averill that things are getting’ right nasty with the immigrants and “the Association,” a coterie of ranchers and Republicans who are cracking down on immigrant cattle rustlers. A brief scene depicts this cracking-down: Walken, as Nate Champion, is the cattle enforcer, and we see him murder an immigrant who’s butchering stolen beef. Averill kills some time in town, watches some immigrants wail a bit, and decided to shoot some pool at the Association’s meeting house.

By coincidence, the Association is meeting there. Among them is Billy, who’s become a mournful, drunken sot, but humane enough to express some doubts about their next big initiative: massacre the immigrants. Giving his proto-Powerpoint presentation is Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) who is pretty much the sort of villain you’d expect: strutting, self-important, well-groomed, contemptuous of anarchists and the lesser breeds, and swollen with government-given authority. He has a list of 125 names of people who must be executed. Billy slinks off and tells Averill. Who goes right to those evil, murderous ranchers, stands talk in their drawing room, punches Waterston out, and makes his Ultimatum: every name on that death list _had better have a legal warrant attached_.

Now, you’d think that this was one of those cute technicalities that heroes use to trip up and forestall the villains. You know: Hero asks, “You got a warrant?” and the evil cop has to leave and lobby a judge, and the hero has some extra time to prepare a defense. Not so in _Heaven’s Gate_ .
So Averill rides his buckboard on out to Johnson County, where the immigrants are really suffering. (For example, he passes an immigrant woman pulling an overloaded cart. He talks to her. And then rides on, without helping.) In Johnson County, he touches base with the local bartender (Jeff Bridges, playing a guy named John Bridges, who really was an ancestor). They commiserate a bit about the sad state of the immigrants. I forget whether Averill even _mentions_ this death list to Bridges.

Averill rides on to visit Ella, a local madam, who’s played by Isabelle Huppert as the most glowingly lovely woman in the world. He gives her the new buckboard. She runs around in the nude a bit. After lovemaking, they ride around town at breakneck speeds. Later, they attend a massive roller-skating waltz dance event in town. Afterward, Averill suggests that Ella leave town because things are getting rough up here: again, he doesn’t mention this _death list_ or the upcoming _government-mandated mass murder_ that might give her an incentive to leave.

At this point, I checked the TiVo’s timeline to find that _ninety minutes_ has gone past. I’d sat through an hour and a half of absolutely gorgeous scenery, of Kris Kristofferson looking iconically handsome, of smoke-belching trains and crowded Western streets and ugly gunmen in dusters and caterwauling immigrants. And while Isabelle Huppert in the nude was wonderful, the only thing of note that’d happened was that the Heroic Lawman wasn’t doing his fucking hero job. He knows that a mob of well-armed men are coming to his county to murder 125 people… and he does nothing beyond ask that the paperwork be filed properly.

The plot thickens a little as Champion—played by Walken, remember?—rides in. Turns out that he’s fucking Ella as well, and he and Averill have this genteel rivalry going. Then we’re back in Casper, as Cully sees the train full of mercenaries go by. The telegraph lines are cut, so Cully decides to ride out to Johnson County and warn people.

Intermission.

Back to the movie. The mercenaries kill Cully. So that’s that.

Averill finally does something. He speaks to an army commander (a very young Terry O’Quinn), and obtains the death list, because you can’t warn people about mercenaries unless you know who they’re going to kill, precisely. Averill is shocked to find that Ella is on the list, and you’d THINK that this might motivate Averill just a little bit. Well, it does. He goes to a town meeting at the dance hall, faces down a roomful of yabbering foreigners, and tells them that an army of mercenaries is coming to murder 125 of them.

He then proceeds to READ THEM THE LIST, so they can wail at each and every name.

At this point, events seem to happen without much of a connection. The immigrants, after satisfying Averill’s need for drama, organize a defense. A group of men—theoretically, part of the posse—rape Ella, and the only reason for THIS scene is to show how _Champion_ is now suddenly motivated to fight the posse. Because Ella doesn't seem much worse for the experience afterwards.

Well, the Posse kills Champion in a shootout. The immigrants fight the mercenaries well enough to send Canton to go get reinforcements. Averill seems to do some stuff. Canton returns with the US Army, who rescue the mercenaries. All of this happens in massive clouds of dust and smoke. (And while it seems to take the mercenaries days to get from Casper to Johnson County, it seems to take Canton only a few hours to ride off, get reinforcements, and bring’em back to Johnson County.)

It’s all sad, and capped off when Averill, Ella and Bridges make to escape: Snidely Whiplash, aka Canton, shows up abruptly to kill Bridges and Ella, leaving Averill to cry over her.

Cut to about ten years later. We see a luxury yacht. Averill’s on board. He’s older. He’s married to a rich woman—possibly the girlfriend from the opening sequence-- who asks him for a cigarette.

And that’s that.

It’s not as if the film doesn’t have a lot of sterling things in it. Vilmos Szigmond’s photography is a high-water mark for cinematography—sure, he was given more money than God, and that scenery’s breathtaking, and he could have done an equally good job for another film, but it’s excellent. There’s a fine discovery in David Mansfield’s soundtrack, which is a gorgeous, period-authentic arrangement of folk music and ballads. A lot of good actors got early parts here, like Terry O’Quinn and Mickey Rourke and Tom Noonan.

There are things about the movie that lend themselves to inferring a greater artistic content. Take, for example, Averill, our Harvard-educated lawman. His dithering _could_ be seen as a conflict, between his respect for the Rule of Law and the desire for Justice… but Kristofferson’s photographed in such heroic terms that it’s hard to accept this. There’s a sense that Averill’s caught between his high-class origins and his low-class life (Champion says that Averill’s rich, but playing poor), but this isn’t reflected in Kristofferson’s performance at all.

But nearly every argument I’ve read pushing _Heaven’s Gate’s_ quality relies on reading greater significance into things that either aren’t in the film, or are downplayed or tossed aside, or read into it. The fact is that _Heaven’s Gate_ is a terrible movie. It’s beautiful, but dull. Its characters are uninteresting. The story is muddled and pointless. It’s a folly, but without the joy of folly. The overwhelming feeling one has after watching this movie is that we’ve been watching Michael Cimino try to sweat himself into artistic significance, like a man who has to show that he can do a hundred push-ups because a hundred push-ups is impressive.

I've posted before about how my Panasonic GH2 can do some spectacular video in the right hands. And part of that ability rests in the ability to hack the firmware, and get the camera to use very bitrates-- which means that it can use less lossy compression techniques. Result is video that looks a little nicer.

Anyway, the hack that does this stuff is very tricky, so people have worked up various "patches" that achieve different things. Some go for insanely high bitrates (like 140 mbps), and use sophisticated compression strategies; others go for modest gains in this area. The ability to "span" is important: the cards use FAT file formats, so the files are limited to 4 gig in size, so for continuous shooting you'd need to "span" the video over several files, and this can be difficult with slow cards and high bitrates. But they're temperamental-- even to the point where one might work fine on a Sandisk Extreme pro64gig card, but NOT on a Sandisk Extreme pro 32gig card. (Yeah, I know.) So I spent the weekend testing out various patches, so I'd know which ones work well and which ones fuck up for my hardware. So if you've got a GH2 and want a little roadmap, here ya go.

So. There are three ways I can shoot video on my camera. There's the standard video 30 fps, which is the "high bit rate" (HBR) mode. I can also shoot at 24 fps, at a high bit rate (24H) and low bit rate (24L).

The best overall patch is Cake 2.3, which spans in all three modes, even with my slower Class 10 memory cards, at decent igh bit rates (40-60mbps).

If I need to shoot a live event -- requiring storage space and long takes-- then Sanity and Flow Motion work, but they span _only_ in 24L mode. But they give me two hours of recording time on a single card (thus making it better than Cake in this regard).

If I need to shoot really, really high bit rates, then I'd use Intravenus... but that doesn't span on any of my cards, so I'd be limited to takes of three minutes in length. But that's workable.


Now, if you want to see what this camera is capable of in the hands of someone with genuine skill, enjoy the following by Paul Christopher:

Shelter Point Distillery {From Field To Flask} from Paul Christopher Films on Vimeo.

First of all, have a look at this:

Choros from Michael Langan on Vimeo.

It's a lovely piece of work. The original idea comes from _Pas de Deux_, a film by the great Canadian filmmaker Norman MacLaren. And that strobing effect can be done very easily with video editing software: I used the technique for a Curio promo that never got finished. But these guys came up with some astounding variations on the technique, with breathtaking results.

Originally posted by kylecassidy at Madville Photo Shoot at Curio Theatre

Just a draft, but I like it so far.

This is how I spent some of my free time at work. I wrote an FAQ on the crowd-pleasing topic of video data compression.

I bought my Panasonic GH2 camera mainly because it offered terrific video quality at a very low price. One "feature" came by way of a Russian programmer named Vitaly Kisilev, who hacked the camera's firmware to enable people to change certain video settings, in order to get really high-quality video from the thing. 

But, a lot of people didn't really understand what Vitaly's hack actually did. And asking over at Vitaly's website, personal-view.com, was a little dangerous: Vitaly and friends are brilliant programmers, but they'd frequently reply with angry "Read the forums!" notes if people asked questions that weren't up to their level of sophistication. 

So I spent some time researching the topic, in order to write an FAQ to educate other GH2 owners. Vitaly and others have replied with compliments and corrections, so I think it's in decent shape. I don't know if it's made me a better cameraperson, but at least I understand things a bit more than I did before. 

It's at http://briansiano.com/?page_id=340, if you want to read about video data compression. 

You're welcome. 

This is a big one, friends. Circulate this, repost it, get the word out, because this is a project that deserves support.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/866122280/i-aint-marching-anymore-soldiers-and-dissent

My housemate, Chris Lombardi, is a journalist of considerable ability and passion. For the past decade or so, she's been working on a book that will be the first comprehensive history of political dissent among American soldiers, "from the Boston Massacre to Bradley Manning." The book has a publisher lined up, and this year is the Home Stretch where Chris shall refine the final draft, consult with consultants, and generally, make this the project she's devoted a lot of her life to. She needs support for this, and I hope you can give her some consideration on this-- or, at the very least, circulate the word far and wide to others who may be able to contribute.

At the very least, click on the link above. Chris provides a fuller description of the project:

"Questioning authority, as a soldier, is not easy. But it can, at times, be honorable." Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

“Soldiers.” “Dissent.” Those are words we don’t usually hear together. Years ago, when I was on staff at a nonprofit that founded the GI Rights Hotline, I talked every day with active-duty servicemembers: soldiers, sailors, Marines Air Force personnel. Answering the hotline with me were many veterans from the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. I came to believe, and said as a joke: “If we’re gonna have a revolution in this country, it’ll come because of veterans like you.” I Ain’t Marching Anymore is about such brave women and men throughout history.

What does “soldiers who dissent" even mean? Dissent = disagreement, which is why that word is used frequently in arguments from academia to the Supreme Court. Expressing that discontent is our constitutional right — but for people in the military, that right has its limits. Orders are orders. For over 200 years, there have been Americans in uniform who served their country by speaking out against its government's policies, sometimes disobeying orders. They’ve spoken out against injustice even when military authority told them not to — sometimes at great risk. In 1779, people were starving in Philadelphia — so on October 4, soldiers marched to confront the nation’s top moneyman, James Wilson. As a result of what came to be called the Fort Wilson Riot, bread prices eased.

In the War of 1812, the U.S. tried to invade Canada. Some some troops refused to cross the border; others deserted, sometimes whole platoons at a time. Every war that came after has had its dissenters — some private, others making quite public acts of conscience.

Even the Civil War and World War II had those who refused to fight — and produced the most passionate critics of the wars that followed. Frederick Douglass’ son Lewis, of the famous Civil War unit the Massachusetts 54th, 30 years later spoke out against the Spanish-American War.

Fr. Philip Berrigan, seen here burning draft cards in 1966, was in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II.

In World War II, William Kunstler was an army major in Asia — long before he was the top lawyer for anti-Vietnam War protesters. The soldiers who helped end the Vietnam War were among the first to question the wars after September 11, 2001. And those wars have produced their own greatest generation of dissenters, both active-duty soldiers and veterans. The latter are busy making change as we speak.

Aimee Allison, Gulf War resister, speaking on behalf of Pfc. Katherine Jashinski, the first woman to openly resist deployment to Iraq.

From each of these eras there are hundreds of individual books and testimonials on the shelves. But there has never been a single, comprehensive history of soldiers and veterans brave enough to question authority when the truth demanded it.

Until now.

One of my video projects is a promo for my housemate Chris Lombardi. She's an accomplished journalist who's spent several years on a book about the history of political dissent among American soldiers. It's titled I Ain't Marching Anymore, and this year will be her final grind to get the book published. 

The website for the project is a http://aintmarching.net/, and I'll probably be helping with the site design later on. For now, I'm reading the manuscript and drafting cover designs... and I made this video. The Kickstarter will be active Real Soon Now, and I'll let y'all know when that happens so you can toss cash in Chris's direction.