Seeing how the ever-more-distinctive cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson has developed from his feature debut Hard Eight to his new Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice, you have to wonder how he learned his craft. Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, The Master: ambitious pictures like these, artistically unusual and heavily referential but also surprisingly popular, make you sense an unschooled filmmaker behind the camera (a path to filmmaking greatness best exemplified by Quentin Tarantino).
But Anderson didn’t get this far entirely without higher education: let the record show that he did spend two semesters at Emerson College — a brief period, but one in which he took an English class from none other than David Foster Wallace. “It was the first teacher I fell in love with,” he told Marc Maron in an interview on Maron’s podcast WTF . “I’d never found anybody else like that at any of the other schools I’d been to.” Anderson even called Wallace, a professor “generous with his phone number,” to discuss “a couple crazy ideas” on a paper he was writing about Don DeLillo’s White Noise at “midnight the night before it was due.”
(At The Paris Review, Dan Piepenbringhas more on the intersection of Anderson’s life and Wallace’s, including the latter’s opinions on the former’s movies: “he was a fan of Boogie Nights, which he told a friend was ‘exactly the story’ he’d wanted to write. He was less jazzed about Magnolia, though, which he found pretentious, hollow, and ‘100% gradschoolish in a bad way.‘”)
Anderson also enrolled at New York University’s film school, but rather than staying only two semesters, he stayed only two days. In the clip up top, from an interview with critic Elvis Mitchell, Anderson recounts the whole of his NYU experience. His first instructor announced, “If anyone is here to write Terminator 2, get out.” And so Anderson thought, “What if I do want to write Terminator 2? Terminator 2’s a pretty awesome movie.” (An assessment, incidentally, from which Wallace’s greatly differs.) When he turned in a page from a David Mamet script for his first assignment and his unsuspecting teacher gave it a C+, Anderson knew he had to leave. Living off of the tuition NYU returned to him, he got to work on a short film of his own.
“My filmmaking education consisted of finding out what filmmakers I liked were watching, then seeing those films,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I learned the technical stuff from books and magazines, and with the new technology you can watch entire movies accompanied by audio commentary from the director. You can learn more from John Sturges’ audio track on the Bad Day at Black Rock laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school.” He said that just a few years after leaving NYU, when he hit it big with Boogie Nights — a film whose highly entertaining DVD commentary from Anderson himself provides another few years’ worth of film school at least.
There may be no more a macabrely misogynistic sentence in English literature than Edgar Allan Poe’s contention that “the death… of a beautiful woman” is “unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” (His perhaps ironic observation prompted Sylvia Plath to write, over a hundred years later, “The woman is perfected / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment.”) The sentence comes from Poe’s 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” and if this work were only known for its literary fetishization of what Elisabeth Bronfen calls “an aesthetically pleasing corpse”—marking deep anxieties about both “female sexuality and decay”—then it would indeed still be of interest to feminists and academics, though not perhaps to the average reader.
But Poe has much more to say that does not involve a romance with dead women. The essay delivers on its title’s promise. It is here that we find Poe’s famous theory of what good literature is and does, achieving what he calls “unity of effect.” This literary “totality” results from a collection of essential elements that the author deems indispensable in “constructing a story,” whether in poetry or prose, that produces a “vivid effect.”
To illustrate what he means, Poe walks us through an analysis of his own work, “The Raven.” We are to take for granted as readers that “The Raven” achieves its desired effect. Poe has no misgivings about that. But how does it do so? Against commonplace ideas that writers “compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition,” Poe has not “the least difficulty in recalling to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions”—steps he considers almost “mathematical.” Nor does he consider it a “breach of decorum” to pull aside the curtain and reveal his tricks. Below, in condensed form, we have listed the major points of Poe’s essay, covering the elements he considers most necessary to “effective” literary composition.
Know the ending in advance, before you begin writing.
“Nothing is more clear,” writes Poe, “than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen.” Once writing commences, the author must keep the ending “constantly in view” in order to “give a plot its indispensable air of consequence” and inevitability.
Keep it short—the “single sitting” rule.
Poe contends that “if any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression.” Force the reader to take a break, and “the affairs of the world interfere” and break the spell. This “limit of a single sitting” admits of exceptions, of course. It must—or the novel would be disqualified as literature. Poe cites Robinson Crusoe as one example of a work of art “demanding of no unity.” But the single sitting rule applies to all poems, and for this reason, he writes, Milton’s Paradise Lost fails to achieve a sustained effect.
Decide on the desired effect.
The author must decide in advance “the choice of impression” he or she wishes to leave on the reader. Poe assumes here a tremendous amount about the ability of authors to manipulate readers’ emotions. He even has the audacity to claim that the design of the “The Raven” rendered the work “universally appreciable.” It may be so, but perhaps it does not universally inspire an appreciation of Beauty that “excites the sensitive soul to tears”—Poe’s desired effect for the poem.
Choose the tone of the work.
Poe claims the highest ground for his work, though it is debatable whether he was entirely serious. As “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem” in general, and “The Raven” in particular, “Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all poetical tones.” Whatever tone one chooses, however, the technique Poe employs, and recommends, likely applies. It is that of the “refrain”—a repeated “key-note” in word, phrase, or image that sustains the mood. In “The Raven,” the word “Nevermore” performs this function, a word Poe chose for its phonetic as much as for its conceptual qualities.
Poe claims that his choice of the Raven to deliver this refrain arose from a desire to reconcile the unthinking “monotony of the exercise” with the reasoning capabilities of a human character. He at first considered putting the word in the beak of a parrot, then settled on a Raven—“the bird of ill omen”—in keeping with the melancholy tone.
Determine the theme and characterization of the work.
Here Poe makes his claim about “the death of a beautiful woman,” and adds, “the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” He chooses these particulars to represent his theme—“the most melancholy,” Death. Contrary to the methods of many a writer, Poe moves from the abstract to the concrete, choosing characters as mouthpieces of ideas.
Establish the climax.
In “The Raven,” Poe says, he “had now to combine the two ideas, of a lover lamenting his deceased mistress and a Raven continuously repeating the word ‘Nevermore.’” In bringing them together, he composed the third-to-last stanza first, allowing it to determine the “rhythm, the metre, and the length and general arrangement” of the remainder of the poem. As in the planning stage, Poe recommends that the writing “have its beginning—at the end.”
Determine the setting.
Though this aspect of any work seems the obvious place to start, Poe holds it to the end, after he has already decided why he wants to place certain characters in place, saying certain things. Only when he has clarified his purpose and broadly sketched in advance how he intends to acheive it does he decide “to place the lover in his chamber… richly furnished.” Arriving at these details last does not mean, however, that they are afterthoughts, but that they are suggested—or inevitably follow from—the work that comes before. In the case of “The Raven,” Poe tells us that in order to carry out his literary scheme, “a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident.”
Throughout his analysis, Poe continues to stress—with the high degree of repetition he favors in all of his writing—that he keeps “originality always in view.” But originality, for Poe, is not “a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition.” Instead, he writes, it “demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.” In other words, Poe recommends that the writer make full use of familiar conventions and forms, but varying, combining, and adapting them to suit the purpose of the work and make them his or her own.
Though some of Poe’s discussion of technique relates specifically to poetry, as his own prose fiction testifies, these steps can equally apply to the art of the short story. And though he insists that depictions of Beauty and Death—or the melancholy beauty of death—mark the highest of literary aims, one could certainly adapt his formula to less obsessively morbid themes as well.
Humorist David Sedaris has become something of a local hero in his adopted home of West Sussex, England. And for fairly unexpected reasons. Repulsed by the litter problem in England, Sedaris began spending 3–8 hours each day picking up trash along the side of various roads. Day in, day out. Fast forward a few years, and the local community honored Sedaris by naming a garbage truck after him — “Pig Pen Sedaris.” And now we have him testifying before the MPs on the Communities and Local Government Committee. If you like C‑SPAN, you will love these 2+ hours of video.
Perhaps rather than trying to identify the source, we should work toward being open to inspiration in whatever guise it presents itself. It’s an approach that certainly seems to be working for Patti Smith and David Lynch, aka the Godmother of Punk and Jimmy Stewart from Mars, both a shockingly youthful 69.
One of the most exciting things about their recent segment for the BBC’s Newsnight “Encounters” series is watching how appreciative these veterans are of each other’s process.
“I want a copy of what you just said,” Smith gasps, after Lynch likens the beginnings of a creative process to being in possession of a single, intriguing puzzle piece, knowing that a completed version exists in the adjacent room.
As artists, they’re committed to peeking beneath the veneer. “What’s more horrifying than normalcy?” Smith asks.
It does seem important to note how both of these longtime practitioners mention jotting their ideas down immediately following the muse’s visit.
The Templeton Foundation asked some heavy-hitter thinkers to answer the question, “Does the Universe Have a Purpose”. Some said “Yes” and “Certainly.” Others concluded “Unlikely” and “No.” Neil deGrasse Tyson — astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science — gave an answer that falls technically in the “Not Certain” camp.
Above, you can watch a video where Tyson reads his answer aloud, and the makers of Minute Physics provide the rudimentary animation. One thing astrophysicists have is a knack for putting things into a deeper context, often making “big” human questions look remarkably small (if not somewhat absurd). Carl Sagan did it remarkably well in his famous ‘The Pale Blue Dot’ speech. And Tyson picks up right where Sagan left off.
We still live in a world where, despite Copernicus, we think the world revolves essentially around us. And, to the extent that that’s true, some will find Tyson’s data points disorienting. Others might wonder whether we should angst so much about the questions we perennially ask in the first place. I guess I am kind of there today.
Remember courtroom sketch artists? The mere fact that they did what they did captured my imagination as a kid, representing as it seemed one of the few remaining vestiges of an older, more askew America, one bound by fewer yet stricter rules and all the more fascinating a component of history for it. These drawings of the shoot of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey remind me of courtroom sketches, albeit on some stylistic levels more than others. And interestingly, just as court reporters once had to use sketch artists because of the supposed disturbance cameras would cause in the courtroom, these drawings result from the pursuit of something less troublesome to a set than a regular still photographer.
From 2001 onwards, Kubrick created illustrated production stills of what happened on his set, rather than having a photographer take noisy and distracting photographs. The illustrations, documenting for the media what happened in front of the camera as well as behind it, would then be sent out in press kits to publications and other media outlets that could promote the film.
Enter, in 1966, English magazine illustrator Brian Sanders (now perhaps best known for the pastiches of that decade he’s done for Mad Men), hired to turn up to the 2001 shoot and quietly draw what he saw. None of these images, however — or the rest of those featured at Kubrickonia — appeared anywhere until the actual year 2001, when TheIndependent’s magazine used them in an article. Cinephiles now and again wish for the return of illustrated movie posters, and sometimes we do occasionally see a new one, but looking at what Sanders came up with for 2001, I can’t help but ponder the still-unrealized potential of the illustrated production still. You can see more illustrations — once lost and now found — here.
A week ago, Charlie Hebdo was anything but a household name. On Wednesday, after the appalling terrorist attacks in Paris, all of that changed.
We all now have Charlie Hebdo on the tip of our tongues. We’ve seen samples of their satirical cartoons. And we’ve read about the news outlets too afraid to print them. But what do we still know about Charlie Hebdo — about the actual cartoonists who made the newspaper tick, their satirical ambitions and their creative process? Not very much.
The short documentary above, filmed at Charlie Hebdo in 2006 by Jerôme Lambert and Philippe Picard, helps fill in some of these blanks. The clip shows several of the cartoonists and editors murdered earlier this week — Jean Cabut (aka Cabu), Bernard Verlhac (aka Tignous) and Georges Wolinski — making a fateful decision: Would they put a satirical image of Muhammad on the cover of their newspaper?
The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists turned “provocation and bad taste” (to use Lambert and Picard’s words) into a particularly French form of political satire. As the French translator Arthur Goldhammerexplained it earlier this week, “There is an old Parisian tradition of cheeky humour that respects nothing and no one,” which goes back to the French Revolution. “It’s an anarchic populist form of obscenity that aims to cut down anything that would erect itself as venerable, sacred or powerful,” and it is directed against “authority in general, against hierarchy and against the presumption that any individual or group has exclusive possession of the truth.” That tradition will continue next week when Charlie Hebdo and its surviving staff plan to publish one million copies of their next edition.
Full disclosure: On my 7th grade report card, a sympathetic science teacher tempered a shockingly low grade with a handwritten note to my parents. Something to the effect of it being her opinion that my interest in theater would, ultimately, serve me far better than any information she was attempting to ram through my skull.
Thank you, Miss Cooper, for your compassion and exceptional foresight.
There are times, though, when I do wish I was just a teensy bit better informed about certain buzzy scientific theories. Hank Green’s information-packed science Crash Courses are helpful to a degree, but he talks so damn fast, I often have the sensation of stumbling stupidly behind…
As long as I don’t lose myself in non-scientific flourishes like the cat in a box anchoring some of Hawking’s equations or a sweet homage to ET, I may be able to keep hold of this tiger’s tail. Or at least nod with something resembling interest, the next time a science-obsessed teen is sharing his or her passion…
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