and just because books are the repository of all the redemptions and damnations, all the sanities and insanities, of the divine anarchy of the soul, they are still, as they have always been, an object of suspicion to every kind of ruling authority. in a second-hand bookshop are the hors of the altar where all the outlawed thoughts of humanity can take refuge! here, like desperate bandits, hid all the reckless progeny of our wild, dark, self-lacerating hearts. a bookshop  is  a powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.

of all the ‘houses of ill fame’ which a tyrant, a bureaucrat, a propagandist, a moralist, a champion of law and order, an advocate of keeping people ignorant for their own good, hurries past with averted eyes or threatens with his minions, a bookshop is the most flagrant.

Maybe we don’t value it as much because we tend to think of the voice as belonging entirely to acting, the way we used to think facial expressions were entirely the work of the people whose faces were being photographed. But the act of recording and mixing can make a soft voice shrill or a nasal one pleasant. It can turn words into mumbles or give a shape to whispering. There’s just as much that can be done with the voice as with the face.

When I write about the voice, I don’t mean dialogue. I mean the recording of the voice, something like the image of face — the voice as a pure expression. We have so many ideas related to the body and the face in film, and just as many related to the voice, though we tend to not notice them (is it just that we’d rather not think about it?).

There are films where it seems like the sound recordists’ names should be placed in the opening credits, like the cinematographer’s — we think of them as “techinicians,” but the director used to be just a technician, too, a name not even worth knowing. The microphone can be close or far, like the camera; a lavalier mic can get even closer than a camera ever could. We have a theory of the voice, even if we don’t realize it. Why else would we be so offended by the voices in Public Enemies, which are supposedly “too quiet?”

We wouldn’t have the same complaint about footsteps, a door opening, or any of the other sounds that can be just as important to a film. The theory of the voice that we’ve developed goes like this: “There are sounds, and then there is the voice.” To treat the voice as just a sound is offensive. The voice, as long as it’s not part of a crowd, is sacred.

The lone, expressing voice is the closest we have in contemporary cinema to a direct link to the individual. That’s why it’s such a key ingredient for Wong Kar-Wai (ingredient is the right word; Wong’s films are all mixtures). Wong’s displaced voices are displaced souls; whatever the body may be, the voice has always stood in for the soul in his films, as it did in before for Andrei Tarkovsky, though Tarkovsky’s hushed dubbing always made it seem as though the soul and the body had separated at the moment of filming.

It’s as true of My Blueberry Nights as of 2046, though in the Anglosphere we didn’t treat My Blueberry Nights quite as kindly because we realized how direct Wong’s voices had always been — confessional, almost embarrassing to listen to. It’s easy to imagine understatement when you don’t know how a language is supposed to sound. In the foreign tonalities of Cantonese, we could imagine whatever emphasis we wanted for the dialogue.

Faced with “the real thing,” we’re always surprised; we say the director “doesn’t understand” the culture because we don’t want to admit that maybe we didn’t understand the director to begin with (anyway, with just one American film Wong seems to have a better grip on America than Wim Wenders ever did). For Wong, the voice can exist apart from the body, especially in a film. Robinson Devor has taken this even further with his most recent two films, completely separating the voice (which to Devor isn’t just a sound) and the image.

Sound in cinema is often the most “artificial” (and therefore real) aspect. It remains one of cinema’s most dangerous aspects. So there’s a perversity to recording sound as it actually occurs instead of how we experience it. People — especially people who’ve lived most of their lives in cities — usually don’t notice the diverse noise around them (I’m thinking here of the tourists I see in the South Loop, covering their ears when an El train passes overhead, unused to blocking out the screeching like the rest of us). We hone in on voices.

At a party, we hear the person talking to us more clearly than whatever music might be blaring. Consistently since The Nun, Jacques Rivette’s recorded dialogue from a distance. It’s the most “theatrical” element in his films, not because it’s got anything to with theater, but because what you hear reminds you of sitting in an audience. The audible creaking of the floorboards, the sometimes uncontrollably loud footsteps, makes every apartment into a stage.

If Rivette ever set out to make ordinary life resemble theater, he accomplished it with the sounds, not the images. The creaking of The Duchess of Langeais, the crackling of the fire place, the sound of furniture and clothes rustling is at the same volume as the dialogue. Rivette’s voices are always bouncing off of walls and floors.

What connects him to Hou Hsiao-hsien is the fact that neither is interested in a “dramatic” treatment of the voice. As a body takes up only a portion of the frame in one of Rivette’s medium or wide shots (his close-ups can be counted on one hand), the voice should only take up a portion of the sound, even if it’s the only loud thing around, just as the body might be the only thing that’s moving. Hou has had no trouble working in foreign languages (Japanese in Café Lumière, French in Flight of the Red Balloon) and it’s because he records every language as if it’s foreign.

Like in a Rivette film, the microphone picks up the voices by recording the room. It’s not like the eavesdropping of Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, where every voice is overheard, but something more “organic,” as if every word said is inseparable from the situation where it occured. Voice-over would seem out of place in a Hou film, as he doesn’t believe in the voice existing apart from its two sources: a person and a situation. Dubbing never really suited him, either, not the way it suits Béla Tarr.

There aren’t characters more designed than Tarr’s, bodies and voices coming from different actors at different times. We’re quick to praise the effects of his tracking shots, but not the effects of his dubbed dialogue, which has become as much a part of Tarr as the black-and-white and the long takes.

Francis Ford Coppola and his usual editor and sound mixer, Walter Murch, have made beautiful use of of dubbing in Youth Without Youth and Tetro. Like in the old Italian movies, the dubbed-in voices are all mixed at the same level (Aleksandr Sokurov did a similar thing with the dubbing of Russian Ark). It gives the films a claustrophobia, the kind you usually associate with the clarity of a novel — the dialogue closer to text, with no sense of volume.

The shot might be an exterior, two people in a cafe, but the sound is all interior, as if recorded from inside their heads. This isn’t something new for Coppola — in Rumblefish, he had Mickey Rourke’s airy mumble mixed at the same level as the rest of the dialogue — and in fact, it could be argued that, aside from a few concessions to popular taste in the 1990s and a few overlaps in the 1970s with what was then considered “good cinema,” his cinema has remained unchanged. It’s always been strange, though now it’s found more ways to explore its strangeness.

Sometimes the classic can help you to understand the contemporary. You read, you see, you hear something old and it puts the new into perspective. Last week, I saw two movies at Doc Films I’d watched before. Watched, but maybe not seen, at least not the degree I think I’ve seen them now. Two beautiful, noisy movies. The first was George Romero’s The Crazies, a rediscovery for myself and Ben Sachs, who’d written the film up for Cine-File.info, and, sitting in the row behind me, leaned forward in the first reel to tell me he thought we were watching “Weekend, as directed by Don Siegel.”

I think it might’ve been the audience, which seemed to validate a lot of what we’d previously only suspected about the film — its humor, its surreality, its politics. The other was Chimes at Midnight. There are bits of the image you can only pick up on a small screen and certain things you can only hear in headphones, just as there are certain aspects you can only see in projection and certain sounds you can only understand when you hear them blasted through speakers. The Battle of Shrewsbury in Chimes, which on video had appeared political, maybe allegorical, becomes more intense in projection. It seems less “designed” and more “felt.” But it’s not the images and the edits that I want to talk about — it’s the sounds. The dialogue in Chimes at Midnight was, surprisingly, as difficult to understand at Doc as in my apartment.

“Overlapping” is the wrong word; I don’t even feel comfortable saying “mixed.” It’s thrown together, a big pile of spoken words, but not layered or structured like in one of the Dolby Godards, but polyphonic, maybe even dodecaphonic. A composition for recorded voices which blend, the words losing meaning, the voices wound together into a single complex feeling. I think of Peter Brotzmann’s saxophone on Machine Gun. The Crazies is different — it’s shrill. Every voice is like a fire alarm. Every line is an emergency.

I think of the voices in those two films even more than I do of the faces. Here is the recording of the voice as both a way to convey dialogue and something abstract, just a sound, as if it wasn’t a voice at all. But it’s possible to go further. There’s that Fernand Léger quote: “As long as the human body is considered a sentimental or expressive value in painting, no evolution in pictures of people will be possible.” We could say the same thing about the voice. Michael Mann, who is always ten steps ahead of everyone else, has recorded and mixed the voice unsentimentally in Public Enemies. Someday, we’ll forgive him for it.

this is a list of movies that just made the difference in my life – year by year, not all of the i watched in the theater during its initial run but saw just shortly in the second run theater, on vhs and dvd…it was hard considering some years, just had a frantastic handful of stories that i just sunk into but at the end of the day, only one stood out, if not by a slim margin – and for personal reasons.

1977 – Star Wars (okay so i didn’t see this in the theatre obviously but when i first watched it later, it scared me, it opened various chambers inside that just made fantasy come to life…)

1978 – The Deer Hunter (when i first saw this with cousins, i didn’t know what to make of it, a bunch of guys shooting at one another and then they went home and then the guy shot himself, then, i didn’t know who any of the actors were but it was a pretty raw moment…)

1979 – Kramer Vs. Kramer (this was just a great story telling the strength of a father and his love for his child)

1980 – Ordinary People (a movie i watched with my parents, pretty interesting but didn’t make any sense until later on when i saw it again and just thought it was a great tale of familial intricacies)

1981 – Raiders of the Lost Ark (like star wars, this was another milestone in my movie watching history, a great hero and just plain pure adventure!!)

1982 – Tron (this just opened everything on how I watched at movies & tv, some bizarre/scary moments)

1983 – Rumble Fish (another movie my cousin introduced me to, didn’t like b&w when i was young but came to appreciate it later on, but this was just a cool movie, and made it just better when i read the book in elementary)

1984 – Once Upon A Time in America (my uncle had this on vhs and i watched it one afternoon and just thought it was long, drab and brown, don’t ask…later on when i watched it on dvd, i thought back and it was one of the first epic films i ever watched)

1985 – The Breakfast Club (countless movies in this era but this was just a staple in my 80′s childhood, close runner up was weird science)

1986 – The Color of Money (my cousin took me to this movie and as soon as it started, my love for billiards began – which later on i achieved amateur status in bc and alberta)

1987 – Dirty Dancing (fallin under the 80′s umbrella, this was just the craze and was one of the more mainstream ‘older’ movies i watched during this time)

1988 – The Unbearable Lightness of Being (i can’t remember the reason why i picked this up on vhs but this was the time i began to watch a lot of late night movies; mostly foreign cinema and nearly all of them just broke the walls down for me in another sense, plus it introduced me to the great daniel day-lewis)

1989 – Do the Right Thing (ahh, the dance parties, the beginning of the urban movie in hollywood and when i saw this with the cousins at the theater, this was one of the coolest ones i’ve ever seen)

1990 – Home Alone (this was the year of home alone – not since a christmas story, did a seasonal movie ever became one of my favorites, along with the sequel these just rocked!)

1991 – Terminator 2: Judgment Day (seeing this with my dad and uncle, it just blew my mind! my dad was slightly irritated by the volume at the theater but my uncle was impressed just as much as i was, of course the original terrified me but this was just fucking cool!)

1992 – Unforgiven (around this time i began to watch a lot of westerns, beginning with kurosawa’s epics for some reason, but when this gem came out it beat out the magnificent seven as my fave western)

1993 – Carlito’s Way (at this point, ive seen every single pacino film but this just and still does hold up as my favorite of his)

1994 – Interview With A Vampire (having read the first three books, i was excited about this, this put me on edge but it was a wow experience, not sure if it was but it was the first time i read a novel, loved it and the film adaptation came out)

1995 – Before Sunrise (this movie got me hooked onto travelling, though it didn’t have a lot to say that it did what it did, but the energy and freedom behind this story really did it for me)

1996 – Swingers (ahh, the basement parties, the trips into the city, the attitude, it was a playa’s ball that year and the time around it)

1997 – Good Will Hunting (boy, i am so glad i saw this at the theater because til now, it is my most personal story on film, so many points on his journey i felt and i was engrossed from the beginning to the end)

1998 – Dark City (i chose this because it just brought out thoughts i had written in earlier years in poetry and short story – recommend watching this back to back after The Truman Show..)

1999 – Fight Club (slightly beating out the matrix, i thought this was the best flick at the turn of the century and just made sense of the world or rather, culture, during this time)

2000 – Requiem for A Dream (still, one of my fave indie flicks, this was one of those movies you just hear about and then go see but i caught a matinee and this just fit the bill!!)

2001 – The Fellowship of the Ring (no explanation – i have been waiting for this one for nearly 12 years)

2002 – The Bourne Identity (a character i loved in the books, and matt damon just up’d the level in this movie)

2003 – House of Sand and Fog (for this year, this was a story that just had perfect timing)

2004 – The Notebook (i must admit that when it comes to simplistic, good story telling with a lot of heart, romantic dramas really does it for me, and this just did it, simply.)

2005 – Crash (a slow year in film i thought but this just stood out – all the hype, all the successes/rewards)

2006 – Children of Men (another story that just provoked thoughts from previous writings that raised my eyebrows during the movie, many times in the theater i just smirked at myself, such a smart, well placed story)

2007 – Atonement (just a beautiful blend of imagery, story and character, A+)

2008 – The Happening (this is my favorite shamalamadingdong film – yes i understand that the world has a few years if all bees disappear, and including this theory and the one that plants give off a neurotoxin ‘unhealthy’ to man, this, the filmmaker was tooling for this story on the palette of an epidemic, though i do enjoy more of a closed area situation where peril…but personally this was a total mind fuck and the imagery just struck that hitchcock’ian nerve inside, brilliant!)

2009 – ???

(Photo: Irv Steinberg/Globe Photos)

The seventies-era golden age of American film has been so exhaustively romanticized that it’s hard to believe anything, or anyone, has been overlooked—until you consider the actor John Cazale. You likely recognize his face, but if his name proves elusive, that only strengthens the case for I Knew It Was You, a 40-minute HBO-produced documentary from director Richard Shepard that’s the centerpiece of BAM’s upcoming retrospective “Rediscovering John Cazale.” The classic tidbit of Cazale trivia is that he appeared in only five films, all of which (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, The Deer Hunter) were nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. The films are all landmarks, of course, and so Cazale—best known as the frail Fredo Corleone—may be vaguely familiar. I Knew It Was You makes a convincing, even moving, argument that he’s been severely underappreciated as well.

To call Cazale a Zelig of the seventies movie boom is to undersell his talent and his influence. It’s true he appeared in three films and three plays with Al Pacino—they’d met while working as messengers at Standard Oil—including a famed 1968 Off Broadway production of The Indian Wants the Bronx, written by Israel Horovitz (the father, incidentally, of Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz). It’s true that Cazale was romantically involved with Meryl Streep, whom he’d met doing Measure for Measure at Shakespeare in the Park, and whom he loved right up to his death from lung cancer, at age 42, in 1978. (“I’ve met the greatest actress in the history of the world,” he told Pacino; as it turned out, he may well have been right.) I Knew It Was You is a lively summation of Cazale’s career, but its real success comes in demonstrating that, had he lived, he’d be mentioned today in the same breath as Pacino, Streep, Robert De Niro, and Gene Hackman—i.e., the Mount Rushmore of American Film Acting.

Shepard undertook the project simply because he, like many film nuts, is a closet Cazale fan. He wanted to learn more, but found little was out there. So he cold-called Cazale’s brother for an interview. Shepard knew, though, that he’d have no film without Streep, who’d been famously reluctant to discuss her relationship with Cazale. “Her response was ‘I don’t talk about my private life, and I certainly don’t talk about it with people I don’t know,’ ” Shepard says. By chance, Streep ran into Cazale’s brother at an art opening, and he persuaded her to take part. “That was the turning point,” Shepard says.

“I learned more about acting from John than from anybody,” says Pacino in the film, and a half-dozen other actors—including De Niro, Hackman, Streep, and next-generation admirers like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Steve Buscemi—dissect Cazale’s brilliance. It’s an affecting tribute, a fascinating tutorial, and a warm love letter to an era electric with talent. Along with Shepard’s film (and a Q&A with the director), BAM’s festival will feature screenings of all five of Cazale’s films. The hardest part is choosing which one to see, so don’t. See them all.

source: http://nymag.com/movies/

so i found out that you yourself can get made into a MadMen. this is moi in all my spiffyness…

source: http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/madmenyourself/