I’m a fan. I enjoy them without thinking about the cues in the scripts and visuals, because I speak their language. But it is a great feeling to not just see what is on the screen, but also recognize the heritage and evolution of those cues from the background of the films’ genre. I read Fenin & Everson’s book The Western: From Silents to the Seventies – a veritable tome – and now I have that perspective when I watch a Western. A few aspects of the early films and industry surprised my young mind.

I love Clint Eastwood and the modern myth of the Western in movies like Tombstone and Once Upon a Time in the West. But the early industry was very different. It is easy to bring up an image of the Keystone Kops bouncing down the street to ragtime piano music. But the great dramas of the very early 1900s were Hart films.

William S. Hart

Hart’s films were carefully made, relatively historically accurate, and gave peaceful depictions of Native Americans. Reminds me of Chuck Norris – both grew up with Native Americans and made them a priority, and portrayed similar themes.

In Hart’s films, The Enemy was not some plastic tribe of uncivilized mongols; they were most often the white man, drinking and sinning against women. In practically every film the benefactor is a man who’s gone wrong and learns to go right, the victim is a wife or sister, the enemy is a hardened criminal, and the right path is generally religion – but if the sister isn’t an angel, then she must be the god of that religion, by the way the camera shines on her.

His heroes were not as brightly painted; they wore standard cowboy clothes, not flashy, useless decorations. They were gritty, flawed, but reasonable heroes who came around when needed most. And his stunts were right on target.

Copyright, Ince

The book shines a sympathetic light on Hart’s career, cheering him as one of the greatest western directors of all time. Hart had a number of fights with his “publishers.” As the first films became more complex, it was decided to have an actor direct the other actors, so that cameramen could focus on the scene. These directors then took charge of the script, directing the actors, and usually starring in the short films, as well. Hart was part of that beginning tradition.

As footage was very expensive, studios would re-edit and reuse scenes or tricks that were shot especially well. They would do this to such an extent that numerous “new” films were simply new edits of old footage, where the order of the plot would change just slightly. Audiences expected new movies every weekend, and with three days to shoot a 20-minute film, sometimes they wouldn’t have time to shoot good scenes every week. Much of Hart’s films were shot very well, so the studios would often reuse his footage in later shorts, without crediting or paying him for it. He fought in court and helped established some of the first copyright laws because of it.

Hart’s films were almost never credited to him publicly. Most of his writing, starring, and directing work was done for Thomas “Father of the Western” Ince, and Ince had the diabolical habit of taking whatever good films were made for him, and titling himself as Director – even when he had done nothing but finance the film! Hart eventually had a falling out with Ince over this.

It is just as interesting how much power snowballed from that point on until today’s multi-billion dollar film studios. Ince created the first modern studios, Inceville, which he later sold to Hart. Cecil Demille bought it in 1925. RKO shot there. Remember the reference to RKO in Singin’ In The Rain? All that old blood. My old Swedish friend has good memories of all those studios, names, and days.

The media has covered many angles to the game. Persson started work on the game on his own, but it has sold 1,180,851 copies and is officially still in Beta. Persson was invited to Valve Software’s headquarters, interviewed by countless publications and has been given a handful of awards for the game. Since he is now rich, he hired a few more friends to work on more indie games with a similar barebones approach. The games are simple designs with simple ideas. Quick turn-around, low budgets, high returns.

Persson has said the game industry’s blockbuster games approach and the low cost of entry into PC game development has left a huge hole for indie developers like himself to make games that take risks and appeal to the gamers between the Call of Duty’s and World of Warcraft’s.

Minecraft is the YouTube of video games. It doesn’t just have a similar appeal, it owes much of its fame to YouTube. Friends make their worlds and invite others to see what they’ve made. Much of its user base uses YouTube and makes videos of their creations. Most people first heard about Minecraft because of YouTube videos of impressive creations like the scale model of the USS Enterprise or a man accidentally burning his house down.

While most players just make humble empires in their worlds, I think people are inspired by knowing that the sky is the limit* – they can make whatever they want, and no matter how silly or nerdy it is, it might just be awesome.

Minecraft is a very social game, and it has that twang of user-generated, “endless” gameplay. But with no narrative, it has no drive except what you put into it. It’s fun to see a new feature work the first few times, but after the utilitarian in us wears out, we can get bored easily and we have to reinvent ourselves.

*It is 64 blocks from sea-level to the “roof” of the sky, at which point you hit an invisible wall.

Not that I blog much at all, but my friend Tim Mata and I have started posting all our game-related thoughts to gonzogamer.com. Definitely drop us a line if you have any thoughts, and subscribe to the RSS for our infrequent spurts of inspiration.

It came from the dumpster in my alley. My in-laws were in town, and as we drove by, my mother-in-law spotted it. My father-in-law stopped by the side and pulled it in his window. I was in the passenger seat, so he handed it straight to me.

It was missing a few things:

• Pins to hold the strings at the bridge
• washers to hold the tuning pegs at the head
• strings

Worst of all by far was that the neck was very bent. It was bent badly enough that the strings wouldn’t make any sound; they were pushing too tightly against the frets. I could see that someone had tried to file down the metal frets where the neck bent, to put some distance between the strings and frets, but the neck was at much too sharp an angle.

With a bent neck, the guitar was irreparably out of tune the higher I play on the fret board, but I was certainly not going to just throw it back in the trash. I must admit that I actually tried filing the frets myself, but it became clear very quickly that it wasn’t going to make a difference. So I tried the opposite; instead of filing away the bend in the neck, I raised the strings. The nut, which holds the strings in front of the tuning pegs, was already very high, and had a bit too much height, so I didn’t think I could raise that.

Instead, I raised the strings at the bridge… With a pen.

It still jangles a bit, but there are two problems with this method: first, of course, I lost a pen. And second, this actually changes the distance between the head and the bridge of the guitar, so I can’t tune it accurately “by hand;” I have to use a tuner. Oh well. The pen isn’t too big an issue, because, though I’m poor, my wife regularly finds pens on the ground in the big city, so we have many more than we need and they’re all free. I’ve been listening to a lot of music that the U.S. government recorded during the Dust Bowl, and it seems like nobody could tune back then anyway, so I’ll just pursue this style of music.

My ghetto guitar…

If you want to see it in action, I just posted a couple songs to my YouTube account and on the record label.

The cautious with a chip on his shoulder versus the overly optimistic.

My dad posted an article Clay Shirky wrote on “The Collapse of Complex Business Models” (think: Rome/Babylon/America) to Facebook a while back, and I liked it, so I picked up a couple of Shirky’s books and read them during a Christian rock festival (Cornerstone Festival) this July. I also happened to read about a book Jaron Lanier had written, in the vein of Amusing Ourselves To Death and all those hip, anti-media, obsessed media and media theory junkie folks, so I brought that with me as well. Surprisingly, they talked about and against each other!

The Internet: face-less, socialist, pseudo-spiritual garbage dump, and devaluer of culture

Jaron Lanier is a hippie known for his early work in artificial intelligence and virtual reality, and his love for really old instruments. But he apparently was close to the invention of the Internet, and wrote a book this spring called You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto.

He suggests that very few instances of creativity have come from the Internet itself, and what does come of it usually peters out after those few and far-between instances. 98% of the Internet is mash-ups of other media, lists of past events, descriptions of things that you can find in books. His argument is summed by saying that a pop-culture thesaurus (Wikipedia), a tool to search things with (Google), and the ability to send strings of 140-character paragraphs into the ether (Twitter) are the most popular, extremely dull technologies of Web 2.0.

Lanier is all about the foundations of the Internet; he’s concerned that the structure – sending irrelevant bits and bites back and forth without context – is hurting our image of ourselves as humans and is destroying the opportunity for people to innovate, make a living, and value ourselves. Wikipedia’s hive-mind hierarchy, Google’s formulas for deciding what sites you care about, and the social web in general, prioritize the general population over individuals.

Identity is separated from actions on the Internet; trolling is a constant problem, because people are immune to the social influence that normally balances interactions in-person. It is always a safe bet to be angry with a post than to praise it.

The Internet: communal, productive, forward-thinking garbage dump of culture

Clay Shirky wrote the books Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations in 2008 and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age this spring.

Shirky takes a completely different tack on the Internet’s benefits. He mostly dodges the issues Lanier has, and compares the Internet to America’s last past-time: television. After sleeping and eating, TV is our most common activity; 20 hours a week, destroys our self-image, completely passive activity, etc.

Web 2.0 and its interactive glory will push our world to new heights, where every bit of our stagnant lives, every moment we would otherwise be exclusively consuming media and content during, we will now be producing content, too. We will write comments, post responses and videos, all faster than ever before. And the more ambitious of us will collaborate around the world to make movies, music, and games without ever meeting or even seeing each other. Sounds great.

Beating the Robots

Lanier would say that having a personal, verified identity and being willing to be different on the Internet will be healthy in the long run.

His pessimism, or realism, regarding Shirky’s rosy view of the future productivity of the Internet over TV culture has one out-of-the-box solution I have thought of. Lanier is concerned with the middle class losing its purpose, especially as more and more skilled work is turned over to robots, leaving upper-class people to oversee the robots and lower-class people to work at McDonald’s. The Internet is part of the robots taking over, because it is written for robots (Google’s pretty literal). We will create a future where people don’t have things to sell to people who will buy. The economy will collapse, among everything else.

My idea comes from the pivotal book on German Expressionist Film and film’s role in World War II, From Caligari To Hitler. In this book published in 1947, Siegfried Kracauer examines the perspective of the Germans through World War I and entering World War II, through their film. In those early days, people didn’t know what to think of film. They didn’t see it as an art form, and actors in live theatre looked down on it.

So what can’t robots do? Make art. Art, as far as I’m concerned, is something created as art, to communicate something to an audience. It’s communication through a medium intentionally as art (not purely for knowledge or information). Film found its place as artwork and entertainment. The Internet, this new, unexplored medium, can become art and entertainment, also.

There are films that are “instructional;” showing you how to drive, for example, and showing you how to cook, on The Food Network. The Internet will have all of these parts, but there will also be parts of the Internet as art – not just displaying paintings or playing music, but taking advantage of all of the Internet’s abilities as a mixed medium art form.

The foundations need to be made into an art form. Not just paintings scanned and displayed, or music recorded and displayed – the Internet itself needs to be art, like film became an art itself, not just a recording of live theatre.

The design and programming (how the website acts when you interact with it) need to be considered and approached as artwork. It will gain not just utilitarian value as a function, but as a form, too. People will be interested in going to a website because it is itself a piece of artwork.

Hard to imagine, but I think it is a good idea in the long run to appease Jaron Lanier.

So it was with film; people thought of it as cheap and inappropriate compared to the live theatre of the day. But slowly actors could use the extra income, and they appreciated the trade-offs in ease of filming over performing every evening, and they migrated to film.

About a week ago, while eating lunch with friends, telling them about some of the criticism against Google, I explained to them why I don’t care about the great features of Gmail. My audience was all six or seven years older than me, and they were astonished that I don’t use it.

According to the college students I advise at North Park University, Twitter is still geeky and weird (and for rich white people), but phones are absolutely hip. These were “phone people;” people who live inside cell phones. Because I don’t use a cell phone (or even a laptop), desktop E-mail clients are much more sensible for me to use than web interfaces.

I have used Mozilla Corporation‘s Thunderbird E-mail client for at least four years. Right now it is on version 3, but glimpses at Thunderbird 4 are already out, and look fantastic. I’m especially excited about the underwater features it will have.

P.S. My hamburger had strips of plastic bag in it, but on the salary of an unemployed person, I appreciated the free meal.

P.P.S. I am even more unusual and hard to understand than I realized. I’m sorry if you’re confused.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend and professor Peter Berggren asked me to do some minor research for a documentary he’s making on music in Berlin during World War II. Wilhelm Furtwangler and Rudolph Dunbar were the two men I was to investigate.

Furtwangler conducted the Berlin Philharmonic before and during World War II. This was controversial, naturally, because it seemed to be accepting Nazi rule. However, he was tried and found not guilty of anything significant. I was looking for footage of his trial, which was filmed.

Rudolph Dunbar was a foreign correspondent to London for the Associated Negro Press, which the Chicago Defender newspaper used frequently. This made his private correspondence with Claude A. Barnett, head of the ANP, Chicago’s property! Basically. I rode down to the Chicago History Museum, paid for a year’s access to their Research Center ($15), and read through two folders of letters, telegrams, clippings, and wires between Barnett and Dunbar.

Dunbar was an accomplished symphony conductor as well as a journalist, and he conducted the London Philharmonic multiple times while stationed there. Interestingly, he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic after the war ended as a kind of double-jab at the Nazis: a black man could not only meet them on the battlefield, but he could conduct their derrieres, too. I was looking for any description of the nightlife and music scene in Berlin during the war, because Dunbar marched on Berlin with the U.S. forces.

At some point he came upon a large stash of Adolf Hitler’s stationary, which he sent a letter to Barnett on! You’ve already seen the header, but here is how the letter begins:

Unfortunately, Barnett and Dunbar spoke almost exclusively about bills and pay checks.

Conrad Veidt as Cesare the somnambulist, holding Jane over the city in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

About three months ago, I picked up John D. Barlow’s book “German Expressionist Film,” and have been maneuvering the library’s checkout policy ever since! It lovingly but critically covers the movement of the same name at the start of the 20th century.

If you are familiar with Expressionism then you probably don’t like it, either because you don’t like silent film or because the melodramatic acting, face paint, and stories are serious to the point of comedy. I understand your position, but evading silent film is not cool, and I have grown to love the contemporary farce that is passé expressionism.

But, in a way, Expressionism’s outlandishness is its honesty.

The Style

Expressionism is a “Post-World War I artistic movement…that distorted appearances to communicate inner emotional states.” (let.rug.nl)

It is a perspective overtly distorted by the artist, expressing its subjects’ qualities through every part of the production – using the sets and props, the actors’ movement, the costumes, and the story itself.

It shows the “inside” of its reality on the “outside.” Architecture is often skewed in expressionist films, like in the city in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (pictured above), to show the base nature of the city. “Even the walls are crooked!”

The stories in the expressionist movement are very dark. They end sadly, and usually involve inhuman enemies and grotesque, bitter endings on par with Edgar Allan Poe from a century earlier. The movement invented vampires in Nosferatu, and the crazy scientist is personified in multiple films. Like socialist and communist movements around it, people are often only referred to by their position in society: mother, butcher, chef, pianist, etc.

1905 – 1925 (R.I.P.)

As Barlow points out, German expressionism did not last very long, and is best known for its influence on later films. Some consider Citizen Kane German expressionism. It comes out in Welles’ use of shots from the ground-up on Charles Kane and shots from the ceiling-down on his wife, showing his will over her. When Kane grows old and fat, it is not just a picture of the reality that people do grow old and fat, but that Kane’s mind, purpose, and lifestyle – his pursuit of an empire – is old and fat.

Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Dr. Mabuse in Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922)

The Penguin of Tim Burton’s Batman Returns has its roots in expressionism, as well as everything else by Burton. Any time a person cackles and contorts their body, it’s because of expressionism. The man’s face morphs and his back arcs to show his inner character. He is not just superficially ugly, which would be trivial. He is warped and gnarled – warts, long nose, and all. Inside and out.

On Realism vs. Truth: The Merit of Expressionism

Allow me this tangent.

Realism is not honest. It is bound by the constraints and bias of a camera lens, just like anything else. It seems like a disownment of the very nature of your art; you can’t believe that you can take away the reality of the medium.

Journalism studies points out that objectivity (i.e., realism) is not truly attainable. This is fine, if your audience is aware of it. Realism is deceitful by not giving its audience the chance to consider whether it is a truthful style or not, while other styles are overtly “deceitful;” they are self-aware that they do not represent reality, and furthermore depicting reality is not their intention.

The illustrious book “Amusing Ourselves To Death” (Postman 1985) explains some differences between forms of communication. Text – with its rules of grammar, of sentence structure, verbs for actions and nouns for givers and receivers – has an inherent logic. But film does not always have an equivalent logic to it. It can follow the structure of text, but it is unwieldy when it does. Has anyone critiqued a film for you and called it “bookish?” I think I’ve said that before.

Alfred Hitchcock made an infamous experiment to explain “montage” using clips of himself smiling, sneering, and frowning, each followed by an image of a woman sunbathing. Montage made sense of images in context, but you can use images one after another and make no sense at all! For example, without more context, it makes no sense to show a toy duck and then a hamburger and then a person in space. But the audience does not need – and may not have the opportunity – to refute the connections being made between images.

Frankie Muniz as Malcolm in Malcolm in the Middle

One of my favorite examples of a highly stylized TV show is “Malcolm in the Middle.” It’s very skewed by Malcolm’s childish perspective, but we understand him very quickly because of it. His mother towers over him, exploding with anger; his father is unbelievably timid and soft-hearted; and at times, Malolm’s own social ineptitude is washed away by his inherited strength, and he demands for reality to bend to his will. This open display of bias and emotion is why I love Expressionism, too.

Germany’s Need to Express Truth in the Early 1900s

It is interesting to note the relationship between Expressionism and World Wars I and II.

1905……..Expressionism becomes popular
1914-18…The War to End All Wars (WWI)
1925……..Expressionism goes out of style
1933……..Adolf Schickelgruber Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany
1941……..(’39, as my Swedish friend says) World War II

It has been said that the expressionist movement was constantly pointing to the “inevitable” Nazi reign, though it was perhaps as much pushing the Nazi agenda and preparing Germans for the Third Reich as it was warning against it.

In 2008, Yukihiko Yoshida did a study called “Leni Riefenstahl and German expressionism: research in Visual Cultural Studies using the trans-disciplinary semantic spaces of specialized dictionaries.” The study took databases of images tagged with connotative and denotative keywords (a search engine) and found Riefenstahl’s imagery had the same qualities as imagery tagged “degenerate” – the term Nazis used for German expressionism. Riefenstahl was a famous propaganda film director, but expressionists in general were persecuted and their work “publicly disclaimed” during World War II.

Lang & Hitler, Nibelungen & Metropolis

Alfred Abel as Joh Fredersen in Metropolis (1927)

According to Hitler, when he wanted to go into painting the art schools told him he was too interested in architecture – his eyes were always distracted by the tall buildings around him. But he didn’t have the academic background to go into that field. Fritz Lang was born only a year before Hitler in Austria-Hungary, and studied architecture in Vienna and then painting in Paris, so there was potential for them to get along. Lang’s older brother even had the then-common name of “Adolf.”

In 1924, as expressionism began to fade, Lang made a two-film series, Die Nibelungen: Siegfried and Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge. They were based on German and Norse mythology, co-written by Thea von Harbou, who he married that same year (she wrote a number of screenplays with him). He made the films to lift the spirits of the German people. The country was devastated by World War I, and they felt unfairly forced to repair other countries at the same time as their own. The Die Nibelungen films were about the inherent good of the people. Lang wanted Germany to realize its worth – pick itself up and rebuild the country.

Hitler loved them, agreeing with Lang’s vision of the German people as inherently better than everyone else – What terrible irony! (Feder Files).

In a 1967 interview with the BBC, he said he made a third Die Nibelungen in 1932, called The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse, with Nazi slogans “[in] the mouth of the criminal,” but Nazis detained it and told him to see the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. This from Lang’s interview:

Goebbels was a very clever man, he was indescribably charming when I entered the room…He told me a lot of things, among other things that the ‘Fuhrer’ had seen Metropolis and another film that I had made – Die Niebelungen – and the ‘Fuhrer’ had said ‘this is the man who will give us THE Nazi film’…and my only thought was ‘how do I get out of here!’ (Euroscreenwriters)

Lang left Germany in 1933, but his wife, Harbou, stayed in Germany and continued to write under the Third Reich. Unsurprisingly, they were divorced by 1934. Fritz Lang’s movies in America are notably different from his work in Germany. Obviously a movie like Some Like it Hot is much more accessible than Between Two Worlds, but I wonder how much his ex-wife’s writing and relationship influenced his work. Of course, the significant changes in his life and the world at the time would be enough to mark such a change in style and subject matter.

Modern Art & The Death of Expressionism

By the 1930s, German Expressionism in its pure form was dead. It was replaced by realism in the USA and surrealism in Europe. They were all influenced by socialism and communism, and Expressionism was chained and locked in the basement, left screaming and banging, unable to prevent that candle from blowing out. And he never saw his love again. But one day, a lonely old man, passing the house by the tollway, heard the boy moaning. He opened the basement door and, always wanting to have a son, he took the boy to his terrarium, where he replaced the boy’s hands with scissors and trained the boy to kill wild animals for food.

But Expressionism lives on, in an undead kind of way – or like a spirit inhabiting another person’s body – in other films. It is no longer palatable to the world alone, but when you see a glimpse of it in a film, think about it, and appreciate the open emotion that it brings to your movies – that perilously open, embarrassingly open emotion.

It was a touch juvenile, but I would love to do more of this sort of thing for the North Park Press in my free time.

Tim posted it to the WBEZ blog.

Background

The mice we have in our building are run-of-the-mill, three inch house mice, mus musculus. This past Friday, our landlord actually sprayed for rodents all through the building, but spraying may more may not have any particularly measurable effect.

I was going to say that I can remember each of the three mice that I have killed in our apartment clearly and distinctly, but I realized that they have blended a bit, and I have to concentrate to figure out how each died and in what order. #1 went by mouse trap. #2 trapped itself in the bathroom with me. I closed the door on its hind legs accidentally, and it ran very slowly after that. I caught it in a bag and squashed it with a big glass jar. #3 caught its tail in a mouse trap trying to run away from me and couldn’t get through its hole in the wall with a trap on its tail. I was oblivious to it except that it squealed and scratched at the wall; I had been watching a movie, and came to the kitchen to posit my popcorn bowl. I caught it in a bag and squashed it with a big glass jar.

Monday morning, 12 October 2009

I stared at the dead mouse under my kitchen table for a minute. I crouched down and peered closely at it. The tail was off to its side, so it did not die in its tracks. Its head was between its front paws. It looked like it had accidentally fallen asleep with its eyes open. The assumption from the beginning was that it had eaten poison from our landlord’s work last week.

It was breathing.

That was my first clue. It didn’t make sense for it to be breathing if it were dead–I was sure of that. It couldn’t be moving its chest that way just from dead mouse nerves firing.

Of course, this changed everything. Well, it changed one thing. It was going to be harder to get rid of. I felt like Rick Blaine drinking, pining, “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.” Seeing it breathing made me want it to be in good health; not a mouse dying of poison but a clever mouse with a sense of humor! As I drew near, it would jump up and run for its life. I would jump, too, give a war whoop, catch it, and squash it with a big glass jar.

I could tell it was upset that I was very big. I got a bag and picked it up. I could blow on it and it would blink and ruffle its ears. I put it in the trash.

Ethics

Each time I come across a mouse I have to decide how I will kill it. We don’t have many resources in our apartment, and a knife isn’t an option. The best I can do is a quick death. Painless? Arr. In this case, whatever it was dying from was probably the best for it. Poison probably kept it from feeling anything. Squashing it with a big glass jar would likely get nowhere better. We can talk more about the allegory of crushing rodents with a jar of coins.

Where I come from, PETA is the butt end of a joke because they are known to be extremists. My experience suggests it is foolish to join PETA. As a Christian, I respect creation, but there is reasonable justification for the destruction of rodents.