A

ISSUE 01 // WINTER 2021

Cinematic

Odyssey

DAVID LYNCH’S MIND A NEW REALITY THE FIRST FILM TILL DATE MOVIES ARE ART, NOW THAN EVER ... MORE

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Edward’s Warped Time, 1987.

‘A Cinematic Odyssey’ is an independent magazine with the aim of supporting cinema from all around the world. It sheds light upon the filmmaker’s army, and features hidden gems from experimental to avant garde films. Through talks and collaboration, this feature sheds light upon the various aspects of the film making journey. In the magazine, there are also some curious insights that explore the relationship between film, art and music on several levels, from the hidden documentaries to the first film ever made, and poineers of independent cinema making collages for inspiration.

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Saint Maud, 2020.

DAVID LYNCH’S MIND

CHARLIE KAUFMAN JIM JARMUSCH

CHLOE ZHAO SUMMMER OF SOUL

INSIDE TANGERINE

SOUND OF METAL MANK

MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOMS THE HORSE IN MOTION

MOVIES ARE ART, NOW THAN EVER SPIKE LEE’S CANNES DISPUTE

A NEW REALITY GRAZIE MILLE

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David Lynch’s Mind Photographed by Antonio Bavadera.

LYNCH TALKS ABOUT HIS IDEAS, WHY EXPLAINING FILMS IS A ‘CRIME’ AND THE IMPRESSION HIS ART HAS ON HIS LIFE. “I LIVE FOR MY WORK.YOU GOTTA BE SELFISH, IT’S A TERRIBLE THING.” ISSUE 01

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Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business - everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs. 8

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“Stories should have the suffering...”

Lynch sits in a corner, hunched over a lithograph. The tabletop brims with paint pots, lotions, chemicals, gel formula cement, lithographic paper, pneumatic drills, cables, wires and paintbrushes. There is a mug of coffee, a pack of cigarettes. The director wears cracked, ancient boots, ragged chinos and the remnants of a black buttoned-up shirt that looks to have been shredded by a badger. It’s a scene that might be intimidating were it not for a great, largely untold secret: David Lynch is a cheery, congenial soul who rivals the Simpsons character Ned Flanders for howdydoody niceness. “Hey, bud!” he greets the assistant, offering me a handshake and wide smile. He laughs, often, and yearns for peace on Earth. “I love my life and I’m a happy camper,” he says. “It would be nice if we were all able to fulfil our desires and live good, happy lives.” ISSUE 01

The studio is a bunker-like structure of concrete and glass that overlooks a panorama of trees, bougainvillea and villa rooftops. You can feel the morning sun and hear birdsong. “I like it up here, the trees,” Lynch says, speaking with the halting lilt of Gordon Cole, the FBI agent he plays in Twin Peaks (only without the deafness). “It’s a feeling I get in LA, a feeling of freedom. The light, and the way the buildings are not so tall. You can do what you want.” Would he like a coffee, his assistant asks? “Yeah, I’m about ready for a hot one, thank you.” There is no toilet up here, so to save trekking down to the house the boss pees into a sink built into the wall. “See that thing with the handle? It pulls out,” Lynch explains. “You can pee right in there. Then you run the faucet.” A large canvas standing in the middle of the studio, an unfinished work, depicts a tree with children. Closer scrutiny reveals that the boy standing at the base is holding a knife. A girl on the branch above is cowering. Another girl is dangling from a noose. Neither look like candidates for good, long, happy lives. You can find suffering and death anywhere if you look, Lynch says. The other day, a spider’s web next to his desk snagged a bee. The bee broke free, only to get snagged again. “The spider came out, started wrapping him, and pretty soon the spider had him wrapped completely. And I think bit him, too. Then he undoes the packaging and drugs him and drags him.” Lynch smiles at the memory. “Man, that is a violent thing.” LA is glorious, he says, “but you see things.” He is at his most animated when discussing ideas. “They’re like fish. If you get an idea that’s thrilling to you, put your attention on it and these other fish will swim into it. It’s like a bait. They’ll hook on to it and you’ll get more ideas. And you just pull them in.” 9

David Lynch, “Bob Finds Himself in a World for Which He has No Understanding”, 2000.

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David Lynch, “TELEPHONE”, 2012.

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Charlie Kaufman “Directing is a more pragmatic experience, where you have to deal with the restrictions of time and money that force you to make certain decisions you don’t have to make when you’re writing.” 12

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Somebody once told me that a good writer is supposed to read at least twice as much as he writes, otherwise he is not improving his skills. Would you agree?

I don’t believe in rules. I think that there are probably always exceptions to everything. I think reading is a very good thing for writers to do, obviously. I think it’s probably better not to read screenplays if you are going to read because I think they are usually not very interesting and not well written. But I don’t know if there is a formula, something that mathematical like 2 + 2. I don’t know. I certainly write so slowly that I am sure that I read more than twice as much as I write.

You’re one of the few screenwriters who has become a brand. People have an idea of what a Charlie Kaufman film is, there is a kind of stamp on it. Was that not enough or why did you feel the need to direct as well?

I don’t think it was necessarily like I needed it for my ego. I was interested in it. I started out doing that stuff: I went to film school and I made movies when I was a kid and I did a lot of acting when I was a kid, too. I’ve always been interested in theater and actors and it was something that I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a good thing for me to be able to make my work even more personal – to take it from its conception to its completion and to be able to make all the choices myself. It maintains a certain integrity maybe that it might not otherwise have and I wanted to explore that.

How did you find the experience then? Was it like you expected it to be?

Well, it wasn’t all that surprising to me. I’ve been working on movies for a while so I kind of know what it is to make them to a certain extent. Was it everything that I expected it to be? Yeah, it was pretty much what I expected it to be. It was straining, it was intense, it was very concentrated, a lot of people asking me a lot of things, managing a lot of people.

What do you think you learned as an artist from the process? About yourself and your work?

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What did I learn about myself? I think that I can direct a movie, which is probably the biggest thing I learned. “Now I have directed a movie!” It’s like when you write your first screenplay. One of the biggest things about writing your first screenplay is that you actually finished a screenplay. It’s a very important sort of milestone just to have done that – even if it sucks. It gave me a certain confidence to go on and do it again if I can. 15

THE PIONEER OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA:

JIM JARMUSCH 16

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“I want to protect some interesting new filmmakers to make their film and not be sucked away and told how to do it.” ISSUE 01

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Jim Jarmusch’s small, eerie collages are all about faces. And about the bodies attached to those faces. 18

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“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.” Jim Jarmusch.

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What kind of role did cinema play in your upbringing in Akron?

In Ohio, I’d seen Attack of the Giant Crab Monsters and this kind of thing, which I loved, but it wasn’t until I got to live in Paris at age 20 that my love of cinema got a big injection. I was an exchange student there for nine months and I got incomplete on all my studies because I was in the cinema in Paris every day! I would stay in the theater between showings, seeing films from India and Japan and Hollywood films that I didn’t even know existed. I was discovering Edward Dmytryk, Yasujirō Ozu, Mizoguchi, Brazilian new wave… Wow! I didn’t know cinema could have all these things. My head was going around and it has never stopped since.

Do you think that modern cinema can still be as poetic as Ozu’s Tokyo Story, for example?

I have seen films that are incredibly poetic! The kinds of films I see are from everywhere, they are all types of films. But I am not Mr. Mainstream. The problem with Hollywood studios is that they are cowardly.

Has it gotten harder for you to realize that artistic vision?

Well, it has gotten harder and harder to get the films financed and very hard to get a decent deal. I have a little business. I am independent and I have an overhead. I saved some money over the years, and now it is going down because I am financing my own thing. Nobody is going to step up for that.

Is that why you will sometimes step up for other filmmakers, put your name on films that need the support?

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My thing is, if they make interesting films, where my name might help, I am happy to give it to them. But I always tell them: Don’t come to me for advice for your film. I am not going to give you notes nor am I involved in your edit. I am going to give you my name so you can make your film. I have done this with a few films. I want to protect some interesting new filmmakers to make their film and not be sucked away and told how to do it. But at the same time, it’s rough for me because financially I can’t support my own business very well. It used to be very nice. 21

Chloe Zhao THE CREATOR OF QUIET INDIE DRAMAS IS NOW THE MOST-SOUGHT-AFTER DIRECTOR IN HOLLYWOOD.

Chloé Zhao used to say she sometimes forgot she was Asian. It wasn’t something she meant as a statement of racial renunciation or a “We’re all citizens of the world” platitude. Zhao, the filmmaker behind the Oscar-favored Nomadland, is fully cognizant of the fact that she’s 38 and five-foot-six (and a half), with what she impishly describes as the typical traits of northerners in China: “Loud, obnoxious, big bones — I love stereotyping my own people.” What she was trying to articulate was a reflection of her own slippery sense of self, made more elusive by her years spent moving around the globe. Filmmaking was a career Zhao sidled up to. She wanted to tell stories for a living but wasn’t great at painting, photography, music, or any of her other interests. “You don’t have to be a master of anything, just a jack-ofall-trades, to be a director,” she says. 22

“I hire people who are really good at their craft, then put them together.” She enrolled in film school at NYU. Her classmates were what she describes as a lot of people experiencing quarterlife crises. A sample conversation she offers: “ ‘Why did you go to film school?’ ‘I went to a liberal-arts college, and I don’t know what to do with my life.’ We had a lot in common.” She had Spike Lee as a professor, whom she could always count on to be hilariously and brutally honest. NYU is also where she met Richards, a student from Cornwall, England. The two started up a romantic and creative partnership, and he would go on to shoot her first three films. “She was gnarly and extreme — my idea of the collaborator I hoped to find at film school,” Richards says. “Most people I was spending time with were sitting around talking about their projects. Chloé was doing them. And so I jumped on that train.” A CINEMATIC ODYSSEY

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QUESTLOVE’S

(...OR WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED.) 26

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THE DIRECTORIAL DEBUT FROM THE LONGTIME ROOTS DRUMMER FOCUSES ON A SERIES OF HARLEM CONCERTS IN THE SUMMER OF 1969 AND DELIVERS INCREDIBLE FOOTAGE OF PERFORMERS AND AUDIENCES THAT HAVE BEEN BURIED FOR 50 YEARS - UNTIL NOW. ISSUE 01

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“An emotional and enthralling portrait of black music and a radical political and cultural moment.”

A pulsating panorama of “Black, beautiful, proud” people, “Summer of Soul (Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” is a joyous and welcome addition to the documentary subgenre of rock festivals. But this one, which marks the directorial debut of The Roots drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, comes with a most unfortunate history: Its film reels were buried in a basement for 50 years, largely unseen, until now. 28

“The Black Woodstock.” The name stuck over the years not only because the concerts coincided with that other big rock festival upstate. The idea for the event flowered from the ashes of the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, as well as the Civil Rights movement, and was created to celebrate African-American music, culture, and politics, and to promote Black pride and unity. A CINEMATIC ODYSSEY

“This film the legacy of the forgotten ‘Black Woodstock’, featuring stars like Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone, which would have otherwise been lost to the archives.”

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It wasn’t the first time. The initial Harlem Cultural Festival took place in 1967, when Tony Lawrence was hired by the city’s Parks Department to arrange summer programming in the area. Over the following summers, it evolved into an essential crossroads where Black music, culture, and politics met. It was a safe space where stars of the era, like the teenaged Stevie Wonder and the pop group the 5th Dimension, would perform some of the most popular songs in the country. Additionally, white politicians and Black civil rights leaders like felt compelled to appear at the festival. But this one, which marks the directorial debut of The Roots drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, comes with a most unfortunate history: Its film reels were buried in a basement for 50 years, largely unseen, until now.

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Ray Baretto, The 5th Dimension, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, Galdys Knight & The Pips, Abbey Lincoln, Hugh Masekela... 30

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Max Roach, David Ruffin, Nina Simone, Sly & The Family Stone, Staple Singers, Stevie Wonder, and more... ISSUE 01

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INSIDE BO BURNHAM’S

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THE COMEDIAN’S SOLO PRODUCTION, “INSIDE” IS AN EXPLORATION OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A PERFORMER WHEN YOU ARE STUCK TO A SCREEN BUT ALSO STUCK INSIDE YOUR HEAD. A virtuostic portrait of a mediated mind - an incredible accomplishment, a testament to Burnham’s creative genius at directing, writing, songwriting, performance.

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Inside is a staggering work of depressioncore in which Burnham contemplates the inertia of our collective doom. He is, he notes often, a white guy who wants to do comedy, but what good will that do? Why does any of this matter in a digital world where everything collapses into everything else, where influencer parties, police brutality, medical crowdfunding, and the latest Star Wars prequel meme all collide on the same timeline? What has that done to our psyche, that we can take all that in and keep scrolling? It is a rollercoaster, and an eye opener.

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A bevy of glimpses behind the curtain give “Inside” a veneer of authenticity.

Inside frequently features Bo Burnham in a similar state: curled up on the floor, slumped on a stool, or with his head hanging heavily over his keyboard. His anguish is the point, and the tragedy of it all is subtly suggested throughout various songs: He’d probably be isolated and despairing anyway, no pandemic lockdown necessary. “Look who’s inside again,” he muses during one song, and in the special’s most gutting moment, he 34

talks about a five-year performance hiatus that began due to panic attacks and declining mental health. He finally seemed to be on the upswing, until early 2020, when “the funniest thing happened.” Mostly though, Inside is about what happens when a life lived online hits 30, and what years of the human experience reduced to “content” for others to “engage” with has done to us. A CINEMATIC ODYSSEY

Capturing emotions like chaos, disgust, desperation and terror, it banks on a dark sattrical comedy. However, Burnham is quick to tell us that we shouldn’t necessarily trust them.

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SEAN BAKER’S

TANGERINE SEAN BAKER’S BUDDY COMEDY REPRESENTS A MAJOR LEAP FOR TRANSGENDER PEOPLE ON FILM. FASCINATING AS IT IS, IT WAS SHOT ENTIRELY ON AN iPHONE. 36

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Shot along a grubby stretch of Los Angeles, it takes place in the looming shadow of the Hollywood sign, but as far from Industrial Cinema as another galaxy. ISSUE 01

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Shot along a grubby stretch of Los Angeles, it takes place in the looming shadow of the Hollywood sign, but as far from Indistrial Cinema as another galaxy.

Tangerine offers a chance to revisit these issues, and is receiving similar levels of attention. It is filmed on a super low budget using a $8 phone app that delivers a close up, social realist edge to a story that crosses the boundaries of drama and documentary. The script was cocrafted with the lead actors and draws on their own experiences and anecdotes of street work and survival around trade, transactions, drugs, pimps, friendship, betrayal, violence and care. Set on Christmas Eve, Sin Dee is happy to be out of jail after a 28-day sentence and has a secret she wants to share with Alexandra about her pimp/boyfriend Chester (James Ransone). Alexandra mistakenly guesses that she’s finished with him for sleeping around, which sets Sin Dee off on the trail of Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan) the “white fish” (slang for a white cisgendered woman) he has been cheating with.

The final showdown takes place in the Donut Hut, and the subsequent fallout offers a surprisingly tender and compassionate insight into the multiple ways that people live on the margins, their isolation, and the importance of friendship and forgiveness. Tangerine offers a wildly different insight into transgender lives and could be dismissed as sensationalist if it were not filmed in a nonjudgmental way. Importantly, it also draws attention to the most vulnerable, those most at risk of violence, those most likely to be remembered. Seeing this represented in mainstream cinemas is encouraging, making the content of the film as relevant to contemporary times as the way it has been made.

In the meantime, Alexandra walks the streets and picks up Raznik (Karren Karagulian), an Armenian cab driver who is married but frequently pays to perform oral sex on pre-operative trans women.

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CINE

www.sony.in

SHOT ON SONY Cinema Line is a natural progression for Sony, who began their

Movie theaters play your favorite titles with Sony 4K digital

long, two-decade history of pushing the boundaries of digital

cinema projectors. Television image quality has never been

cinema technology with the F900, the world’s first 24p digital

better than with Sony’s Master Series OLED HDR displays with

cinema camera. Indeed, from sensor to sofa, Sony has made

features like Netflix Calibrated Mode. With the recent launch of

great contributions to digital cinema. For example, Sony set the

the Sony a7S III and Xperia 1 II, the DNA of the Cinema Line is

industry standard for reference monitors with their BVM-X300.

now accessible to so many more filmmakers and photographers.

SONY 4K 153

DARIUS MARDER’S

HOW SOUND DESIGNER NICOLAS BECKER INTERNALLY STUDIED RIZ AHMED’S BODY TO CREATE AN ANATOMICAL SYMPHONY FOR ‘SOUND OF METAL’. 42

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How do you create sound design for a film that hinges on silence? To get into peoples heads, that was the challenge for composer-sound designer Nicolas Becker on writer-director Darius Marder’s drama “Sound of Metal,” in which Riz Ahmed plays Ruben, a heavy metal drummer who is slowly losing his hearing. Marder and Becker started talking strategy a year before shooting. The two, experienced 10 minutes of absolute silence — and total darkness — in an anechoic chamber. As the chamber absorbed all noise, the director was aware of sounds he’d not been conscious of. Notes Becker, “When you’re in it, you start hearing the sound of your tendons and the blood flowing through your body.”

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With a stethoscope and sensitive microphones attached to Ahmed’s frame, the designer captured the actor’s breathing, his voice, his muscle movement and even the moment he opened his mouth. “That’s Riz who you’re hearing in the film,” Becker explains. Ahmed had special cochlear earplugs that helped mimic hearing loss, representing the progression of the character’s condition. Becker took the live feed of the boom from the production sound engineer, which was then put into a sound processor and fed into the earplugs. As hearing loss happens, Becker says, the sound of your own body gets louder, which became a metaphor for the isolation Ruben begins to feel. The mix took a total of 20 weeks, as sound cuts in and out, and the character experiences muffling and tinnitus. “When I first started, I found myself a sheet of

metal and put my head on it and tried to understand what I was feeling,” Becker says. What he discovered became the essence that sound plays in the film. “We wanted to give the feeling that it’s not us composing the music, but Ruben’s brain, his memories.” This meant they used echoes of Ruben’s drumming from the opening rock concert throughout the rest of the soundtrack, mixed with other instruments - ghosts of his past life and a constant reminder of what he has lost. In trying to recapture that past life, Ruben turns - desperately - to cochlear implants, which brings the world not, as he expected, into sharp clarity but a distorted muddle of robotic sounds. Becker spoke to people who had experienced the procedure and who could describe just what it sounds like. His response was to manipulate and layer digital sound.

Sound Designer, Nicolas Becker used the human body to generate the sounds he needed, both internal and external movements. 44

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The transition of Ruben’s emotional state as he comes to term with his sudden hearing loss anger, denial, acceptance. ISSUE 01

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“Everything was about creating a physical experience — of playing music, of losing your hearing, of using your hands to speak. We wanted to give the feeling that it’s not us composing the music, but Ruben’s brain, his memories.”

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A cristal baschet — a rare organ made of glass shafts and played with wet fingers to produce a vibrating sound— became the core instrument. “It is the sound of metal,” Becker notes. “That vibration helped represent Ruben’s inner thoughts as his [hearing] deteriorates. “When somebody is losing their hearing, it’s a very similar experience to being under water,” says Becker. “When you are under water, the sound you hear is your tissue and bones vibrating. I was thinking this might be a very direct language for the audience, something deep and authentic.

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DAVID FINCHER’S

MANK THE MINDS BEHIND THE SETS OF “MANK” SHARE THEIR EXPERIENCE RE-CREATING LIFE IN OLD HOLLYWOOD IN BLACK AND WHITE.

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Burt’s own version of the interior of the dining hall in Heart Castle was built at downtown’s L.A. Center Studios, in downtown L.A. where it was easier to control the scenes than on location.

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Burt’s own version of the interior of the dining hall in Heart Castle was built at downtown’s L.A. Center Studios, in downtown L.A. where it was easier to control the scenes than on location.

“ I always tell people my job is being like a glorified janitor. There’s a physicality to it you can’t avoid. I find some film people, it’s easier for them to be esoteric for hours, and have an avoidance to the other side of it - which, to me, is really the filmmaking part.” Donald Graham, Production Designer.

“Any opportunity to work on a period film has everybody in our business, especially those in our department, salivating to hear that we get to go back in time, discovering how society functioned and the nuances of the period: the furnishings, the architecture, the lifestyles,” says Donald Burt, the film’s production designer. “It felt like we were living in the film, and that’s what it’s all about: presenting a story in a format that feels like it was actually made then.” Burt spent much of his design preparation time at the Academy of Motion Pictures ISSUE 01

library, scouring through documents from filming methods to formal letters, sorting out old gambling debts between executives to decipher thought processes regarding films from nearly 100 years ago. “This is not a documentary, so we needed to take some license, but I always say I put research and information into a blender and see what comes out to best help tell the story we are trying to tell,” says set decorator Jan Pascale. “It’s so exciting to not only do a black-andwhite film but to dive into the history of Hollywood and L.A., learning how people communicated back then.” 51

Burt’s own version of the interior of the dining hall in Heart Castle was built at downtown’s L.A. Center Studios, in downtown L.A.

The other half of the movie takes place in glamorous locales—the film studios of old Hollywood and William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon, also known as Hearst Castle. The pair says the secret to re-creating the opulent estate was opting for mostly for simplicity while going big on the right things. 52

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Unable to film at William Randolph Hearst’s extravagant location, so production designer Donald Graham Burt built a replica of the legendary San Simeon on a Los Angeles soundstage.

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GEORGE C. WOLFE’S

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottoms 54

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THE LEGENDARY COSTUME DESIGNER, ANN ROTH - “FROM RUBBER SUITS, CENTURY OLD NECKLACES, GOLD TEETH TO A CUSTOM-MADE HORSEHAIR WIG, WE HAD 10 DAYS FOR IT ALL.

Ma Rainey has given us confidence, dignity, loyalty, and Blues music while representing the LGBTQ+ community as an openly bisexual woman – a bold move for the 1900s that was definitely taboo. Itat ius aut velluptam, tuyiie hgti hgyyt kkc httychf kfgcorectas a velite dolupturia quidisqui blatur ario expellatem et fugiatis rerepel ipidem rem. Ihil inis aut invent voloremporro consectem voloria ntiist moluptiunt lique cullesci doluptat ut quid quiberitium, et pa corem est fugiam eium culparum. ISSUE 01

Os excestis cuptatempor am latur? Quis minus explaceat faciis eium fugitatquunt doloris inullent bet rerum, temposa pernatusa sustincime con parum aliquata que dolorit archil eiunt utessim verum adigenducia sectem reperibus suntore pudist, qui voluptius accus. Itat ius aut velluptam, corectas a velite dolupturia quidisqui blatur ario expellatem et fugiatis rerepel ipidem rem. Ihil inis aut invent voloremporro consectem voloria ntiist moluptiunt lique cullesci doluptat ut quid quiberitium, et pa corem est fugiam eium culparum. 55

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Ann Roth and her team also tracked down real pre-1927 currency to replicate Rainey’s signature $20-coin necklace, which earned her the nickname “The Golden Necklace of the Blues.”

Os excestis cuptatempor am latur? Quis minus explaceat faciis eium fugitatquunt doloris inullent bet rerum, temposa pernatusa sustincime con parum aliquata que dolorit archil eiunt utessim verum adigenducia sectem reperibus suntore pudist, qui voluptius accus. Itat ius aut velluptam, corectas a velite dolupturia quidisqui blatur ario expellatem et fugiatis rerepel ipidem rem. Ihil inis aut invent voloremporro consectem voloria ntiist moluptiunt lique cullesci doluptat ut quid quiberitium, et pa corem est fugiam eium culparum. ISSUE 01

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The Horse In Motion

THE OLDEST SURVIVING FILM IN EXISTENCE, ACCORDING TO THE GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS WAS MADE BY A SERIES OF STILL IMAGES. 62

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In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge would create what was essentially the first-ever motion picture, titled The Horse in Motion. Apparently, the motivation behind creating this motion picture was to find out if horses ever went completely airborne while galloping. Leland Stanford, railroad tycoon, former Governor of California, and the namesake of Stanford University, believed the answer was yes and hired Muybridge to create a motion picture that would serve as irrefutable evidence. Over the span of six years, Muybridge spent around $50,000 of Stanford’s money (which would be over $1 million today) trying to improve shutter speeds and film emulsions. Once the technology was ready in 1878, Muybridge set up 12 cameras in succession that each had an exposure of just a fraction of a second, which was extremely impressive for that time period. As the horse trotted by, it tripped wires connected to each of the cameras and caused them to take photos one after the other. Muybridge developed the photos right there on Stanford’s estate (which was eventually to become the site of Stanford University) and put them on an invention of his called a zoopraxiscope, which is sort of like a vinyl record with a bunch of images in succession around its edge. By spinning the zoopraxiscope quickly, the images appeared to be one fluid stream of motion to the human eye. Thus, the question of whether horses ever went completely airborne while galloping was answered. In the seconds-long motion picture, there was, in fact, a time where the horse hooves were all off the ground and it was completely airborne. More importantly, though, the first motion picture ever was created.

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"Movies are art. Now than ever." 64

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An art film (also known as art movie, specialty film, art house film, or in the collective sense as art cinema) is the result of filmmaking which is typically a serious, independent film aimed at a niche market rather than a mass market audience. Film critics and film studies scholars typically define an “art film” using a “…canon of films and those formal qualities that mark them as different from mainstream Hollywood films”, which includes, among other elements: a social realism style; an emphasis on the authorial expressivity of the director; and a focus on the thoughts and dreams of characters, rather than presenting a clear, goal-driven story. Film scholar David Bordwell claims that “art cinema itself is a film genre, with its own distinct conventions.” Art film producers usually present their films at specialty theatres (repertory cinemas, or in the U.S. “arthouse cinemas”) and film festivals. Art films are aimed at small niche market audiences, which means they can rarely get the financial backing which will permit large production budgets, expensive special effects, costly celebrity actors, or huge advertising campaigns, as are used in widely-released mainstream blockbuster. Furthermore, a certain degree of experience and knowledge are required to understand or appreciate such films; one mid-1990s art film was called “largely a cerebral experience” which you enjoy “because of what you know about film”. This contrasts sharply with mainstream “blockbuster” films, which are geared more towards escapism and pure entertainment. For promotion, art films rely on the publicity generated from film critics’ reviews, discussion of their film by arts columnists, commentators and bloggers, and “word-of-mouth” promotion by audience members. Since art films have small initial investment costs, they only need to appeal to a small portion of the mainstream viewing audiences to become financially viable.

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SONCHIDI

Amit Dutta, 2011. 66

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THE RADIANT CHILD Jean-Michel Basquiat, 2010.

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ANOMALISA

Charlie Kaufman, 2015. 68

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BASS ON TITLES Saul Bass, 1977.

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TWO MONKS

Juan Bustillo Oro, 1934.

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ALWAYS FOR PLEASURE Les Banks, 1978.

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FRANCES HA

Noah Baumbach, 2012. 72

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MELANCHOLIA Lars Von Trier, 2011.

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GREY GARDENS

David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, And Muffie Meyer, 1975.

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LOVING VINCENT Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman, 2017.

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SPIKE LEE

“YOU HOPE THAT BLACK PEOPLE WILL STOP BEING HUNTED DOWN LIKE ANIMALS”.

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THE DIRECTOR HAS SPOKEN ABOUT RACE AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL, WHERE HE IS THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT OF THE PALME D’OR JURY. ISSUE 01

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“I’m just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as people, from music, novels, the streets.”

Spike Lee commented on the US’s current racial justice crisis in typically forthright fashion at the Cannes film festival on Tuesday, saying he hoped the time had come that “black people will stop being hunted down like animals”. Lee, who is the president of the jury that will pick the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, was speaking at the jury’s press conference on the first day of the festival. Having been asked a question about his 1989 film Do the Right Thing, which contains a scene in which a black youth, Radio Raheem, is killed by police, Lee responded: “I wrote it in 1988. When you see brother Eric Garner, when you see king George Floyd murdered, lynched, I think of Radio Raheem; and you would think and hope that 30 motherfucking years later, that black people stop being hunted down like animals.” Lee, who wore a cap with “1619” in reference to the date of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia, also took aim at Donald Trump and other ISSUE 01

populist figures. In response to a question about anti-LGBT laws in Georgia, Lee said: “This world is run by gangsters: Agent Orange [Donald Trump], there’s a guy in Brazil and Putin. That’s it: they’re gangsters. They have no morals, no scruples. That’s the world we live in. We have to speak out against gangsters like that.” The subject of Cannes’ fractious relationship with Netflix also came up, after the festival’s general delegate Thierry Frémauxhad earlier criticised streaming platforms as “people who we are not sure if they want cinema to survive”. Unlike other festivals, Cannes demands that selected films receive a theatrical release in France. Lee, whose film Da 5 Bloods was released in June 2020 by Netflix (after its planned screening at Cannes was abandoned due to the pandemic), said he did not consider streaming a threat. “Cinema and streaming platforms can coexist. At one time, there was a thinking that TV was going to kill cinema. This stuff is not new. It’s all a cycle.” 81

A New Reality LED VOLUMES ARE AN EXCITING NEW TOOL IN THE CINEMATOGRAPHER’S TOOLBOX, MIXING THE REAL WITH THE UNREAL. 82

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Dusanditat autam, solupti antias mi inus.

The term “virtual production” encompasses practices like previsualisation and remote location reccies, but its most exciting branch is in filming itself: the ability to shoot not on a location or physical set, nor on a blue or green screen, but against huge LED monitors displaying any background the filmmakers desire. At its simplest, these monitors may constitute a single wall. At its most advanced, a huge arc of screens, plus another acting as a ceiling, form a space known as a “volume”. Content for the screens can be straightforward 2D footage or allISSUE 01

encompassing material from a 360-degree camera rig. The most groundbreaking setups use a video-gaming engine, typically Unreal from Epic Games, to render prebuilt 3D backgrounds known as “loads” or “levels”. By tracking the motion of the camera within the volume, the computer system adjusts the parallax in the virtual backgrounds to give a convincing illusion of depth. The term “virtual production” encompasses practices like previsualisation and remote location reccies, but its most exciting branch is in filming itselft: the ability to shoot on location. 83

GRAZIE MILLE

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The Shining, 1982.

JUST A FINAL THANKS!

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A CINEMATIC ODYSSEY/ ISSUE 01/ 2021 WINTER ISSUE

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‘A Cinematic Odyssey’ is an independent magazine with the aim of supporting cinema from all around the world. It sheds light upon the filmmaker’s army, and features hidden gems from experimental to avant garde films. Through talks and collaboration, this feature sheds light upon the essence of a film - its story. In the magazine, there are also some curious insights that explore the relationship between film and photograhy on several levels, from the experimental film stills at MOMA, to unexplored negatives and collaborations between artists, celebrating the art of story-telling.