Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
Errol Morris' first film Gates
of Heaven, a study of pet cemeteries, their
owners, operators, and human clients, began with
a long series of long talking head shots, the
camera anchored just a few feet off his subjects'
noses. If the artful capturing of movement and
mood without dependence on verbiage makes
"pure cinema," as cineasts like to
speak of it, this was practically pure anti-cinema,
its clear ancestor the motionless torsos of TV
anchors. He abandoned this technique as action
shifted from rehashing of a defunct cemetery to
analysis of a newer, extant one, and when the
camera suddenly moved as thought shaking out a
cramp, revealing among other things that one of
the most outspoken and controversial protagonists
used a wheelchair, the new element was positively
shocking after I'd spent half and hour or so
acclimating myself to talking heads. Something
simple as slow pan left to right, showing a
shaggy-haired caretaker bouncing guitar blasts
off the tombstones, loomed like a case of iced
Perrier before a sand-choked Bedouin.
Fast
Cheap & Out of Control, Morris' sixth
film, fifth documentary, is a well-made film that
doesn't add up. You get four men with unusual
occupations--lion tamer Dave Hoover, topiary
sculptor George Mendonca, naked mole-rat
specialist Ray Mendez, and robotic scientist
Rodney Brooks--then throws in footage from a
circus (Hoover's?), and an old jungle serial. And
talking heads. Lots of talking heads. In a recent
interview for Seattle's Stranger, Morris
enthused over the new meticulous technology
leading his subjects to address the camera
directly (rather than himself, behind the camera)
and also offered the cognizant explanation for
the film that he seems to have left out of the
film itself. The fourth men, he says, are
Frankenstein's grandchildren, each obsessed with
creating an arena in which he can exercise
absolute control, each blind to the folly in that
idea.
Well
and good--well, mostly good, because I think
Morris got caught in a blind spot himself. Control
is a dense but above all else intricately
constructed film, with very little camera
movement, at least in the original footage; new
technology lets Morris roam through cuts,
dissolves, and fades while keeping most
individual shots static. These are the hands of a
control-seeker no less than Hoover, who says
"You go in that cage and you're not scared
silly, you're in big trouble," and I can
only hope he doesn't snicker at his
"subjects" behind their backs. Unlike
the Cohen brothers, who conjure their grandly
dressed stick figures purely out of their own
narrow-minded brains, the people in Morris' movie
have real lives and real feelings. He should plug
in his sophisticated straight-at-the-camera
equipment and then sit down in his own hot seat.
Blob
Dept.: The Blob, a Seattle
building at 14 Roy Street shaped roughly like a
block of melting cheese with portholes, met its
maker recently at the hands of some earth-moving
equipment. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer thought
the story monumental enough, or perhaps the news
day slow enough, to put the story on their front
page, and as I skimmed it this morning it seemed
that nobody cried for the non-Euclidian
monstrosity, and a many people in fact applauded
the expunging of an eyesore. Me, I find the
Blob's destruction one more flame licking the
corpse on classic Seattle's funeral pyre, and
suspect that those cheerleaders spend most of
their time at real city institutions such as
Niketown and the inescapable Gameworks. But I am
avenged. Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim in Spain
opened to rave reviews from Time and
other megamedia, slickening the slide ever
further for his design for this city's Experience
Music Project (which used to be about Jimi
Hendrix, but that's another story.) Dig out your Time
and read Robert Hughes' epistle to the free world
on the joys of Gehry, by all means--but then take
a good look the the Bilbao Guggenheim, and, if
you can find one, a sketch of the proposed
Experience Music Project. If you can't find a
picture of the late Blob itself, just take my
word for it: the dead "eyesore" is
alive and throbbing in the veins of 21st century
indispensibility.
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