How Filmmakers Make Cameras Disappear: Mirrors in Movies

in Film, Television | September 26th, 2024

If you’ve never tried your hand at filmmaking, you might assume that its hardest visual challenges are the creation of effects-laden spectacles: starships duking it out in space, monsters stomping through major cities, animals speaking and dancing like Broadway stars, that sort of thing. But consider the challenge posed by simply capturing a scene set in a bathroom. Almost all such spaces include a large mirror, meaning that most angles from which you could shoot will violate an important rule cited by Youtuber Paul E.T. in the video above: “Don’t show the camera in the shot.”

Yet we’ve all seen major motion pictures and television series with scenes not just in bathrooms but other mirror-equipped spaces, from rooms used for interrogating suspects to rooms used for preparing to come out on stage. What’s more, the camera often passes blithely before these mirrors with a vampire-like lack of a reflection. The techniques used to achieve such shots are now mature enough that we may not even notice that what we’re seeing doesn’t make visual sense. How they work is the subject of Paul E.T.‘s investigation, beginning with an episode of Criminal: United Kingdom in which a camera somehow floats around a room with a one-way mirror, never appearing in that mirror.

Another more familiar example comes from Contact, directed by the visual-effects maven Robert Zemeckis. In its early flashback sequence, an adolescent version of its astronomer protagonist runs toward the backward-tracking camera and reaches out to open what turns out to be a bathroom medicine cabinet, into whose mirror we must have — yet cannot possibly have — been looking into the whole time. What we’re seeing is actually a seamless fusion of two shots, with the “empty” (that is, blue-screen-filled) frame of the cabinet mirror superimposed on the end of the shot of the young actress running toward it. While not technically easy, it’s at least conceptually straightforward.

Paul E.T. finds another, more complicated mirror shot in no less a masterwork of cinema than Zack Snider’s Sucker Punch, which tracks all the way around from one side of a set of dressing-room mirrors to the other. “What you’re actually seeing when the camera moves is the transitioning from one side of a duplicated set to the other,” he explains, “with an invisible cut spliced in there” — which involves lookalike actresses literally trying to mirror each other’s movements. No such elaborate trickery for Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure, which shoots straight-on into a bathroom mirror by building the camera into the wall, then digitally erasing it in post-production.

While we do live in an age of “fix it in post” (an instinct with an arguably regrettable effect on cinema), mirror shots, on the whole, still require some degree of foresight and inventiveness. Such was the case with that scene from Criminal: United Kingdom, which Paul E.T. simply couldn’t figure out on his own. His search for answers led him to e‑mail the episode’s B‑camera operator, who explained that the production involved neither a blue screen nor doubles, but “a combination of well-choreographed camera work and VFX.” The result: a shot that may look unremarkable at first, but on closer inspection, attests to the subtle power of movie magic — or TV magic, at any rate.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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How the Hugely Acclaimed Shōgun TV Series Makes Translation Interesting

in Language, Television | September 17th, 2024

Many of us grew up seeing hardback copies of Shōgun on various domestic bookshelves. Whether their owners ever actually got through James Clavell’s famously hefty novel of seventeenth-century Japan is open to question, but they may well have seen the first television adaptation, which aired on NBC in 1980. Starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune (and narrated by Orson Welles), that ten-hour miniseries offered an unprecedentedly cinematic experience to the home viewers of America, presenting them with things they’d never before seen on television — and things they’d never heard on television, not least numerous lines delivered in untranslated Japanese.

The idea, according to screenwriter Eric Bercovici, was to put the viewers in the shoes of Chamberlain’s protagonist John Blackthorne, an English ship pilot marooned in Japan with no knowledge of the local language. During the show’s run, newspapers printed glossaries of the Japanese words most important to the story. The second adaptation of Shōgun, which aired earlier this year on FX, does things differently. For one thing, it makes use of those helpful devices known as subtitles, which over the past four and a half decades have become not just accepted but demanded by Western audiences (even for productions in their own language).

This choice, as Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak says in his video on the new Shōgun, “lets us into the minds and conversations of the Japanese characters,” much like the omniscient narration of Clavell’s novel. Puschak highlights how the series “uses the act of translation to explore the possibilities and limitations of communication across cultures and communication, period.” One notable example is its portrayal of the various bilingual characters who interpret for Blackthorne, each of whom does so differently according to his or her motivations. The 1980 Shōgun also had a few such scenes, but their dramatic irony was inaccessible to monolingual viewers.

Even if you speak both English and Japanese, you know how little protection that really offers against cultural misunderstandings. The new Shōgun’s dramatization of that truth has surely done its part to win the show more Emmy awards than any other single season of television. A comparison to the 1980 adaptation, which represented the height of dramatic television in its day, reveals the ways in which our expectations of the form have changed over time. Nevertheless, even the 2024 Shōgun takes its liberties, the most brazen being the use of English instead of Portuguese, the real language of first contact between Japan and the West. Clearly, Portugal has its work cut out: to raise a generation of actors ready to star in the next adaptation by the late twenty-sixties. がんばって and boa sorte.

The 17th-Century Japanese Samurai Who Sailed to Europe, Met the Pope & Became a Roman Citizen

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Download 1,000+ Digitized Tapes of Sounds from Classic Hollywood Films & TV, Courtesy of the Internet Archive

in Archives, Film, Television | September 2nd, 2024

Watch enough classic movies — especially classic movies from slightly downmarket studios — and you’ll swear you’ve been hearing the very same sound effects over and over again. That’s because you have been hearing the very same sound effects over and over again: once recorded or acquired for one film, they could, of course, be re-used in another, and another, and another. No such frequently employed recording has a more illustrious and well-documented history than the so-called “Wilhelm scream,” which, according to Oliver Macaulay at the Science + Media Museum, “has been used in over 400 films and TV programs.”

“First recorded in 1951, the ‘Wilhelm scream’ was initially featured as stock sound effect in Raoul Walsh’s western Distant Drums,” writes Macaulay, but it got its name from a scene in The Charge at Feather River, from 1953: “When Private Wilhelm takes an arrow to the leg, he lets out the fabled blood-curdling cry which came to permeate Hollywood’s soundscape.”

It may well have been most widely heard in the original Star Wars, “when Luke Skywalker shoots a stormtrooper off a ledge,” but for decades it was pulled from the vault whenever “characters meet a grim and grisly end, from being shot to falling off a building to being caught up in an explosion.”

Originally labeled “Man eaten by an alligator; screams” (for such was the fate of the character in Distant Drums), the original recording session of this much-discussed sound effect is now downloadable from the USC Optical Sound Effects Library at the Internet Archive. It contains three collections: the Gold and Red Libraries, which “consist of high-quality, first generation copies of original nitrate optical sound effects from the 1930s & 40s created for Hollywood studios,” and the Sunset Editorial (SSE) Library, which “includes classic effects from the 1930s into the ’80s” by the eponymous outfit. At a Freesound Blog post about the archiving and preservation of the SSE Library, audio engineer Craig Smith notes that the company “mainly did episodic television shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, The Partridge Family, and The Waltons.”

Listening through the USC Optical Sound Effects Library will thus prove a resonant experience, as it were, with fans of mid-century Hollywood movies and television alike. It may also inspire an appreciation for the sheer amount of recording, indexing, editing, and mixing work that must have gone into even outwardly simple productions, which nevertheless required the sounds of doors, birds, sirens, guns, and falling bodies — as well as the voices of men, women, children — to fill out a plausible audiovisual atmosphere. They also reveal, as Smith puts it, “the shared culture of Hollywood’s take on what things ‘sounded like.’ ” Heard in isolation, some of these may seem no more realistic than the Wilhelm scream, but that wasn’t quite the point; they just had to sound like things do in movies and on TV.

via Mefi

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

in History, Music, Technology, Television | August 15th, 2024

Survey the British public about the most important institution to arise in their country after World War II, and a lot of respondents are going to say the National Health Service. But keep asking around, and you’ll sooner or later encounter a few serious electronic-music enthusiasts who name the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Established in 1958 to provide music and sound effects for the Beeb’s radio productions — not least the documentaries and dramas of the artistically and intellectually ambitious Third Programme — the unit’s work eventually expanded to work on television shows as well. One could scarcely imagine Doctor Who, which debuted in 1963, without the Radiophonic Workshop’s sonic aesthetic.

By the end of the nineteen-sixties, the Radiophonic Workshop had been creating electronic music and injecting it into the lives of ordinary listeners and viewers for more than a decade. Even so, that same public didn’t necessarily possess a clear understanding of what, exactly, electronic music was. Hence this explanatory BBC television clip from 1969, which brings on Radiophonic Workshop head Desmond Briscoe as well as composers John Baker, David Cain, and Daphne Oram (previously featured here on Open Culture).

Having long since built her own studio, Oram also demonstrates her own techniques for creating and manipulating sound, few of which will look familiar to fans of electronic music in our digital culture today.

Even in 1969, none of Oram’s tools were digital in the way we now understand the term. In fact, the working process shown in this clip was so thoroughly analog as to involve painting the forms of sound waves directly onto slides and strips of film. She crafted sounds by hand in this way not purely due to technical limitation, but because extensive experience had shown her that it produced more interesting results: “if one does it by purely electronic means, one tends to get fixed on one vibration, one frequency of vibrato, which becomes dull.” Believing that “music should be a projection of a thought process in the mind of a human being,” Oram expressed reservations about a future in which computers pump out “music by the yard”: a future that, these 55 years later, seems to have arrived.

Meet Delia Derbyshire, the Dr. Who Composer Who Almost Turned The Beatles’ “Yesterday” Into Early Electronica

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Rolling Stones Introduce Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf on US TV, One of the “Greatest Cultural Moments of the 20th Century” (1965)

in History, Music, Television | July 29th, 2024

Howlin’ Wolf may well have been the greatest blues singer of the 20th century. Certainly many people have said so, but there are other measurements than mere opinion, though it’s one I happen to share. The man born Chester Arthur Burnett also had a profound historical effect on popular culture, and on the way the Chicago blues carried “the sound of Jim Crow,” as Eric Lott writes, into American cities in the north, and into Europe and the UK. Recording for both Chess and Sun Records in the 50s (Sam Phillips said of his voice, “It’s where the soul of man never dies”), Burnett’s raw sound “was at once urgently urban and country plain… southern and rural in instrumentation and howlingly electric in form.”

He was also phenomenal on stage. His hulking six-foot-six frame and intense glowering stare belied some very smooth moves, but his finesse only enhanced his edginess. He seemed at any moment like he might actually turn into a wolf, letting the impulse give out in plaintive, ragged howls and prowls around the stage. “I couldn’t do no yodelin’,” he said, “so I turned to howlin’. And it’s done me just fine.” He played a very mean harmonica and did acrobatic guitar tricks before Hendrix, picked up from his mentor Charlie Patton. And he played with the best musicians, in large part because he was known to pay well and on time. If you wanted to play electric blues, Howlin’ Wolf was a man to watch.

This reputation was Wolf’s entrée to the stage of ABC variety show Shindig! in 1965, opening for the Rolling Stones. He had just returned from his 1964 tour of Europe and the UK with the American Folk Blues Festival, playing to large, appreciative crossover crowds. He’d also just released “Killing Floor,” a record Ted Gioia notes “reached out to young listeners without losing the deep blues feeling that stood as the cornerstone of Wolf’s sound.” The following year, the Rolling Stones insisted that Shindig!’s producers “also feature either Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf” before they would go on the show. Wolf won out over his rival Waters, toned down the theatrics of his act for a more prudish white audience, and “for the first time in his storied career, the celebrated bluesman performed on a national television broadcast.”

Why is this significant? Over the decades, the Stones regularly performed with their blues heroes. But this was new media ground. Brian Jones’ shy, starstruck introduction to Wolf before his performance above conveys what he saw as the importance of the moment. Jones’ biographer Paul Trynka may overstate the case, but in some degree at least, Wolf’s appearance on Shindig! “built a bridge over a cultural abyss and connected America with its own black culture.” The show constituted “a life-changing moment, both for the American teenagers clustered round the TV in their living rooms, and for a generation of blues performers who had been stuck in a cultural ghetto.” One of these teenagers described the event as “like Christmas morning.”

Eric Lott points to the show’s formative importance to the Stones, who “sit scattered around the Shindig! set watching Wolf in full-metal idolatry” as he sings “How Many More Years,” a song Led Zeppelin would later turn into “How Many More Times.” (See the Stones do their Shindig! performance of jangly, subdued “The Last Time,” here.) The performance represents more, however, than the “British Invasion embrace” of the blues. It shows Wolf’s mainstream breakout, and the Stones paying tribute to a founding father of rock and roll, an act of humility in a band not especially known or appreciated for that quality.

“It was altogether appropriate,” says music writer Peter Guralnick, “that they would be sitting at Wolf’s feet… that’s what it represented. His music was not simply the foundation or the cornerstone; it was the most vital thing you could ever imagine.” Guralnick, notes John Burnett at NPR, calls it “one of the greatest cultural moments of the 20th century.” At minimum, Burnett writes, it’s “one of the most incongruous moments in American pop music”—up until the mid-sixties, at least.

Whether or not the moment could live up to its legend, the people involved saw it as groundbreaking. The venerable Son House sat in attendance—“the man who knew Robert Johnson and Charley Patton,” remarked Brian Jones in awe. And the Rolling Stone positioning himself in deference to “Chicago blues,” Trynka writes, “uncompromising music aimed at a black audience, was a radical, epoch-changing step, both for baby boomer Americans and the musicians themselves. Fourteen and fifteen-year-old kids… hardly understood the growth of civil rights; but they could understand the importance of a handsome Englishman who described the mountainous, gravel-voiced bluesman as a ‘hero’ and sat smiling at his feet.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Martin Mull (RIP) Satirically Interviews a Young Tom Waits on Fernwood 2 Night (1977)

in Music, Television | July 1st, 2024

These days, references to seventies television increasingly require prefatory explanation. Who under the age of 60 recalls, for example, the cultural phenomenon that was Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, an absurdist satire so faithful to the soap-opera form it parodied that it aired every weeknight, putting out 325 episodes between early 1976 and mid-1977? And even for those who do remember the show, it would surely require a stretch of the memory to summon to mind its minor character Garth Gimble, an abusive husband who meets his grisly fate on the sharp end of an aluminum Christmas tree. (We’ll set the question of how many remember aluminum Christmas trees aside for the holiday season.)

Garth Gimble was the breakout role for a musical comedian turned actor called Martin Mull, who died last week at the age of 80. Tributes have mentioned the characters he played on shows from Roseanne and Sabrina the Teenage Witch to Arrested Development and Veep.

But to those who were watching TV in the summer of 1977, Mull has always been — and will always be — not Garth Gimble but his twin brother Barth, host of a low-budget late-night talk show in the small town of Fernwood, Ohio, the setting of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Fernwood-2-Night premiered as a temporary replacement for that show (and thus as yet another expansion of the televisual universe created by mega-producer Norman Lear), but it soon took on a countercultural life of its own.

The fictional talk-show form of Fernwood-2-Night was ahead of its time; more daring still was its occasional arrangement of real-life guests. That roster included a young Tom Waits, himself a living embodiment of the blurred line between reality and fiction. As the show’s announcer Jerry Hubbard, Fred Willard puts all of his distinctive delivery into declaring Waits “very famous for Fernwood.” Mull plays Gimble as the kind of man on which the appeal of Waits’ art is wholly lost: “I know he sells a lot of albums, and he makes about half a million big ones in one year,” he says by way of introduction. “In my book, that spells talent.”

Naturally, Gimble is game to set the liquor-swigging singer up for an old groaner by remarking on the strangeness of talking to a guest with a bottle in front of him. “Well, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” Waits growls in compliance. This comes after his performance of the song “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King)” from his then-most recent album Small Change. It’s safe to say that many viewers on Fernwood-2-Night’s wavelength became fans of Waits as soon as they heard it. Nearly half a century later, they no doubt still remember his appearance fondly — at least as fondly as they remember the Wonderblender.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Stephen King Names His Five Favorite Works by Stephen King

in Books, Television | June 3rd, 2024

Stephen King has no doubt forgotten writing more books than most of us will ever publish. But even now, in his prolific “late career,” if you ask him to name his own most favored works, he can do it without hesitation. Stephen Colbert tried that out a few years ago on The Late Show, when the writer made an appearance to promote his then-latest book Billy Summers. The first of Stephen King’s top five by Stephen King is “Survivor Type,” a 1982 short story about “a physician who gets stranded on a little island, and he’s smuggling heroin, and he’s starving, so he eats himself piece by piece.”

“Survivor Type” may be a deep cut — and one that initially struggled for publication, being so disturbing that King remembers “even men’s magazines” turning it down — but it’s nevertheless been adapted into five different films since the twenty-tens alone. King may have enjoyed massive book sales throughout almost the entirety of his career, but it certainly hasn’t hurt his brand that so many of his works have become movies and television shows, many of them cultural phenomena in their own right. Take the case of Misery, another of King’s selections, the 1990 feature-film version of which gave us Kathy Bates’ Oscar-winning performance as a crazed fan who kidnaps her favorite novelist.

Misery was directed by Rob Reiner, who’d worked with King’s material before: in 1986, he turned the story “The Body” into Stand by Me, which is now considered a high point in the categories of eighties teen-star vehicles and early-sixties nostalgia pictures. After seeing its first screening, King declared it “the best film ever made out of anything I’ve written” — before characteristically adding, “which isn’t saying much.” (That same year, recall, King not just wrote but directed Maximum Overdrive, a spectacle of malevolent machines taking over a truck stop that he later described as a “moron movie.”)

King also enthuses about his 2006 novel Lisey’s Story, as well as its Apple TV+ series adaptation, which had just come out at the time. Also still-new was the second televisual rendition of The Stand, King’s 1978 novel set in the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic. “Any similarities to what’s going on now are just too close for comfort,” he says to Colbert in this COVID-era clip, though it’s ambiguous whether the book actually makes his top five. Colbert suggests filling out the list with Billy Summers, presumably on the principle that every writer favors his most recent work. But where would King rank the three novels he’s cranked out since?

Stephen King Creates a List of His 10 Favorite Novels

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 22 ) |

When a Drunken Charles Bukowski Walked Off the Prestigious French Talk Show Apostrophes (1978)

in Literature, Television | June 3rd, 2024

Charles Bukowski didn’t do TV — or at least he didn’t do American TV. Like a Hollywood movie star shooting a Japanese commercial, he did make an exception for a gig abroad. It happened in 1978, when the poet received an invitation from the popular French literary talk show Apostrophes. Bukowski wasn’t the first foreigner to grace its set: a few years earlier, Vladimir Nabokov had come in advance of the French translation of Ada, but only under the conditions that he be allowed to pre-write his answers and read them off notecards, and to drink whiskey from a teapot during the interview. No such niceties for the author of Ham on Rye, who was set up with earpiece interpretation and Sancerre straight from the bottle.

Or rather, bottles, plural: Bukowski had polished off one of them by the time Apostrophes host Bernard Pivot opened the live broadcast by asking him how it felt to be celebrated on French television. Already drunk, Bukowski responded in a slurred and dismissive fashion. Things deteriorated from there, and Bukowski kept rambling as the other panelists tried to carry on their conversation. At one point François Cavanna ventured a “Bukowski ta gueule”; soon thereafter, Pivot opted for a more direct “Bukowski, shut up,” which prompted the guest of honor’s unsteadily impromptu departure. “Pivot bid him au revoir with a Gallic shrug,” writes Howard Sounes in Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life.

“The next day, he didn’t remember anything, of course, but the whole of France was running to book shops to buy his books,” says Barfly director Barbet Schroeder in the documentary The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski. “In a few hours they were all sold out.” This succès de scandale made Bukowski even more of a literary rock star in France than he’d already become. The episode has also been widely remembered in the Francophone world since the death of Bernard Pivot earlier this month, never failing to make the much-circulated lists of Apostrophes’ most memorable broadcasts during its fifteen-year run.

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“Six million people watched him,” writes Adam Nossiter in Pivot’s New York Times obituary, “and nearly everybody wanted to be on his show. And nearly everybody was, including French literary giants like Marguerite Duras, Patrick Modiano, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Marguerite Yourcenar and Georges Simenon.” (One very special episode even brought on “a haggard-looking Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, not long out of the Soviet Union.”) Apart from Bukowski, Apostrophes’ guest list also included a very different American with an equally enthusiastic French readership: the late Paul Auster, who — like most of the cultural figures whose appearances on the show you can sample on this Youtube playlist — preceded Pivot to that great talk show in the sky.

“Don’t Try”: The Philosophy of the Hardworking Charles Bukowski

Hear 130 Minutes of Charles Bukowski’s First-Ever Recorded Readings (1968)

Charles Bukowski Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

Bukowski: Born Into This — The Definitive Documentary on the Hard-Living American Poet (2003)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Filmmakers Make Cameras Disappear: Mirrors in Movies

How the Hugely Acclaimed Shōgun TV Series Makes Translation Interesting

Download 1,000+ Digitized Tapes of Sounds from Classic Hollywood Films & TV, Courtesy of the Internet Archive

What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

The Rolling Stones Introduce Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf on US TV, One of the “Greatest Cultural Moments of the 20th Century” (1965)

Martin Mull (RIP) Satirically Interviews a Young Tom Waits on Fernwood 2 Night (1977)

Stephen King Names His Five Favorite Works by Stephen King

When a Drunken Charles Bukowski Walked Off the Prestigious French Talk Show Apostrophes (1978)

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