May 15th, 2011. I am given a book by my favourite poet, Bob Hicok. In it there’s a poem about the 2007 Virginia Polytechnic Institute massacre – to date the deadliest shooting of innocent people by a single gunman in US history. This excerpt from the poem …]]>

May 15th, 2011.
I am given a book by my favourite poet, Bob Hicok. In it there’s a poem about the 2007 Virginia Polytechnic Institute massacre – to date the deadliest shooting of innocent people by a single gunman in US history. This excerpt from the poem speaks for itself -

People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed
because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,
to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually
I answered these messages: there’s nothing
to say back except of course there’s nothing
to say, thank you for your willingness
to say it. Because this was about nothing.
A boy who felt that he was nothing,
who erased and entered that erasure, and guns
that are good for nothing, and talk of guns
that is good for nothing, and spring
that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some,
and scotch for others.

March 23rd, 2012.
Two kids get in a fight on the platform of an L train stop in Brooklyn, New York. Both fall in front of a train coming into the station. One of them leaps from the tracks just in time and flees the scene. The other is dragged down the platform by the train, right in front of my eyes. His body half under the train, his arms grabbing at the side of the train, his torso spinning like a propeller, his blood smearing down the side of the carriages. I turn away in disbelief, my brain numb as people run past me screaming in tears, vomiting as they run. There’s one girl standing still in front of me as everyone rushes past both of us. She’s looking at me, her face all wet, her eyes pleading at me as if somehow I can provide an answer. The best I can do is not look at her.

The kid is still alive. There’s a woman crouched down by him trying to help him in whatever way she can. Unsure about what I can do I turn and leave. Halfway up the steps I curse at myself, and turn back. A few of us gang together try to push the train away from the body, so we can get him out. It’s a hopeless exercise. Soon the Fire Department arrives and we are all ejected onto the streets.

People are opening their front doors and letting those clearly in shock come in and rest a while. I call my friend, whose apartment I’d just left 15 minutes before, and he talks me through it. He invites me back over to his, but it seems to make more sense to walk home alone.

July 17th, 2012.
A friend posts a photograph on the internet that he’s taken of a poster from the new Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises. Below the photograph he’s excitedly left the comment -

THREE. MOTHER. FUCKING. DAYS.

I type my response beneath it. My words expounding on my similarly outrageous levels of enthusiasm. My friend replies, and our proverbial high-five is over just moments after it began. The occasion and the words we used are swiftly forgotten about.

July 20th, 2012.
In Aurora, Colorado, a 24-year-old man opened fire on his fellow cinema-goers during a screening of the new Batman film. Thanks to our phones, everyone everywhere knows about it moments after it happens.

Soon after New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, a friend of my father’s, publishes a thoughtful and lengthy article swiftly reminding people of art’s inability to drive people to kill -

Having a mind to kill, at least in any systematic fashion, means that your mind is ready-warped; that the warping may well have started long before, perhaps in childhood; and that you may perhaps seek out, or be drawn to, areas of sensation—notably those entailing sex or violence—which can encourage, inflame, or accelerate the warping. Whatever we learn of the Aurora murderer, whatever he may profess, and whatever the weaponry, body armor, and headgear that he may have sported, and however it seems like a creepy match for what is worn, by heroes and villains alike, in the Batman movies—despite all that, he was not driven by those movies to slaughter.

July 21st, 2012.
Some time in the afternoon I receive an email from a filmmaker friend of mine that simply read -

Dark Knight Rises murders is the most bleak metaphor of art and cinema in American cultural history.

This coming from a man with two children of his own, and a deep-set distaste for exploitative artwork. I wrote back saying that I was inclined to agree. I said that it reminded me of when my father read from a newspaper article in 2001. An article that was suggesting that part of what made the World Trade Center attacks so powerful, was what an artistic gesture they were. 911 being the emergency services number in the US, and the two towers being hit by one commercial airplane each, and both completely collapsing in such a seemingly unlikely way as a result. My father also added that film and television are of course also responsible for making violence appear to be something beautiful.

Back in the present, film critic Roger Ebert weighs in on the continuing debate about the connection between violence and art  -

I’m not sure there is an easy link between movies and gun violence. I think the link is between the violence and the publicity. I don’t know if [the Aurora killer] cared deeply about Batman. I suspect he cared deeply about seeing himself on the news.

LA Times reporter Patrick Goldstein blames advertising -

This, of course, has happened before. In 1981, Taxi Driver became embroiled in controversy when John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate then-President Ronald Reagan after becoming obsessed with the film, whose character Travis Bickle attempts to kill a presidential candidate. In Hinckley’s case, he was affected by the movie. With the Colorado gunman, the inspiration may well have come from the pull of a mammoth Hollywood Big Event.

In almost any big city today, it’s nearly impossible to avoid being exposed to the wall-to-wall advertising for a global behemoth such as “Dark Knight.” The result is almost Orwellian — nearly everywhere you look, your gaze meets the stern glare of Batman and his nemesis, their eyes full of menace. On TV, the film’s ads are chock full of thunderous collisions and mass brawls.

Talk about life imitating art. Days before the film’s release, the movie review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes had to suspend user comments on reviews of “Dark Knight” after readers made derogatory and threatening remarks about the critics who wrote them. Incensed fans heaped abuse on one critic, Marshal Fine, saying he should “die in a fire.” Rotten Tomatoes’ editor said it was the first time the site had suspended user comments, explaining that “it just got to be too much hate.”

July 22nd, 2012.
A friend and I race back from a New Jersey beach town to catch an afternoon screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Manhattan. 15 minutes into the film we are aware of a group of four men behind us talking loudly and occasionally walking up and down in the isle next to us, using their phones as flashlights. I turn to tell them to shut up, and so does my friend. The looks we are greeted with from these men leave us speechless, and we quickly turn back to the film. I suddenly feel unsafe and start looking around me in the darkness. It dawns on me that this is the first trip to the cinema since the killings the week before. I start imagining how the same thing could happen to all of us in this room. The words of my filmmaker friend the day before start going around and around in my head. Eventually the film rescues me from these thoughts and I lose myself in its story.

As the film ends and I’m left slightly shaky by its moving denouement, a second wave of fear sweeps over me. I have to quickly pull my hands to my face to hide a wash of quite unexpected tears. I feel in a moment like I’ve lost something very dear to me. I realize that it feels like we have lost the sanctity of the cinema. I realize that until this point I’ve used the cinema as a place I can completely escape from the world, no matter what. It feels right there and then like this is now gone.

I try to relate this to my friend afterwards and he tells me I’m talking nonsense. Coming to my senses in the outside air I realize that I probably am.

July 23rd, 2012.
I mention to a friend and co-worker that I’m thinking about writing about my feelings on the Dark Knight Rises murders. He sits down on the couch opposite my desk and we talk it through. Half-way through the conversation he points out that as far as he was aware the last time there was a killing in a theater in US history, it was when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth, as noted elsewhere in the Goldstein piece quoted above, perhaps similarly chose a place to commit his crime that would give him the necessary ‘stage’ for his actions. One similarity between the events that did seem to gel with this, was that Wilkes Booth shouted a line from a killing in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar before shooting Lincoln. This seems to tie to the fact that the Aurora killer later told police he was The Joker, a murderous character from the previous Batman film. Wilkes Booth’s Shakespearean line of course being that famously uttered by Brutus before the murder of Julius – “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” This literally translates as “Thus always to tyrants,” and is also the Virginia state motto. Wilkes Booth was from Virginia.

July 24th, 2012.
The documentary film maker and director of Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore, just posted an article on his website asking America to think deeply about their obsession with killing. He points out that it’s likely not the guns. He states in fact that it’s the American people and their apparent inability to care for each other, hinting of course at the country’s precarious healthcare system -

We are an easily frightened people and it is easy to manipulate us with fear. What are we so afraid of that we need to have 300 million guns in our homes? Who do we think is going to hurt us? Why are most of these guns in white suburban and rural homes? Maybe we should fix our race problem and our poverty problem (again, number 1 in the industrialized world) and then maybe there would be fewer frustrated, frightened, angry people reaching for the gun in the drawer. Maybe we would take better care of each other.

Oliver Gettel, the same day, publishes an article for the LA Times in which he pulls together the responses to the killings from 6 of the western world’s more notable film critics. A comment beneath the article reads -

What’s completely lost in all this chatter is that the hero of The Dark Knight Rises saw his parents murdered by a gunman and DOES NOT CARRY A GUN for that reason.  Also during the movie, he knocked Catwoman’s gun out of her hands saying “no killing”.  John Blake, on using his gun in self defense, found the whole thing distasteful and threw his gun away.  If there’s one hero who would be the symbol this is Batman. 

July 25th, 2012.
US President Barack Obama is on national television addressing the issue of gun violence in cities, stating that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not criminals. He continues to say -

When there’s an extraordinarily heartbreaking tragedy like the one we saw, there’s always an outcry immediately after for action. There’s talk of new reforms. There’s talk of legislation. And too often those efforts are defeated by politics and by lobbying and eventually by the pull of our collective attention elsewhere. But what I said in the wake of Tucson is we’re going to stay on this persistently. I will continue to work with members of both parties and with religious groups and with civic organizations to arrive at a consensus around violence reduction.

Warner Brothers is pulling trailers of its forthcoming film Gangster Squad, which depict assailants with Tommy-guns shooting cinema goers from behind a cinema screen. The film has also been pulled from the studio’s Fall release schedule.

July 26th, 2012.
I sit down to write this article, and just moments after I’ve written a working title I get a message on my phone. The message tells me that someone has replied to the comment I left on the internet on the 13th. They’re replying to the comment I left beneath my friend’s photograph of a Batman poster, just days before the killings. The reply simply reads -

A week later, your comment doesn’t sound like the best wording, does it?

I’m confused. I quickly scroll back up to my original comment, and read it again -

Better be good. Really good. World crushingly good. So good it actually kills me. So good everyone in my theater dies. Like end of the world good, you know?

I look back at the essay I’m writing. I almost vomit. I close the computer. I reply to the person on my phone apologizing profusely, but my comments feel futile. I know it’s extremely unlikely that I’m responsible in any way, but nevertheless my thoughts are racing. I call two friends and ask them to talk me through it. I then go for a long walk. I need to be out among people.

July 29th, 2012.
Michael Moore is on American national television for the first time in 10 years talking with talk show host, Piers Morgan, about American gun laws. He’s remarking upon President Barack Obama’s comments about his awareness that it could have been his own daughters in that screening that night. Michael Moore, undeniably a fan of Obama, doesn’t hesitate to fire back at the President -

If President Obama is watching right now — and I — and I say this with all due respect — what if it were them? What if it were them last Thursday night? Would you stand at the microphone the next day and say I feel your pain and, you know, we just — we — the — the existing gun laws, that’s what he said — the existing laws are enough. Is that really what you’d say, Mr. President? I don’t think so.

August 1st, 2012.
An anonymous comment has appeared at the bottom of Michael Moore’s July 24th article that reads -

American Pop Culture Quiz

Questions:
How many High School kids were shot in Compton this year? How many of them made the news or got their medical bills paid? Why are kids from Colorado so much more important than the ones in L.A.?

Answers:
Dozens. None. They’re White!

August 8th, 2012.
It’s midnight. I’m sitting down to watch a film with my brother that’s been produced by an old friend of mine. The film is called Boy A, and is based loosely on the aftermath of the killing of the 2-year-old James Bulger in England in 1993. The two kids who committed the killing splashed their victim in blue paint, in imitation of the 1991 film Child’s Play 3.

Boy A is good, and my brother and I end up arguing afterwards about how sympathetic the killers friends would have been ‘in reality’, compared to the film.

August 10th, 2012.
I am sitting at my laptop in my brother’s apartment in London, sun streaming in through the windows. It’s an unusually hot day, after what’s been a very rainy English summer. There have been at least two more widely-publicized shootings in the US since the Aurora killings. Unable to escape the feeling that I should write something, I delete everything I’ve written and start over.

Around March last year a friend of mine showed me an article about why the video game Angry Birds is so successful. The author Charles L. Mauro CHFP (Certified Human Factors Engineering Professional), was attempting to provide a cognitive scientific report on why the game has been so …]]>

Around March last year a friend of mine showed me an article about why the video game Angry Birds is so successful. The author Charles L. Mauro CHFP (Certified Human Factors Engineering Professional), was attempting to provide a cognitive scientific report on why the game has been so unbelievably successful (now with physical merchandise doing the rounds, and a feature film in the works). These sort of reports remind me of the guy who used to lease us our old studio space in Manhattan who was always trying to think of what he used to call “the next YouTube.” His desire to get rich through some cool new internet startup idea, rather than just sitting down and working hard on playing to his strengths, used to confound us a little. Similarly an analysis of what makes Angry Birds ‘genius’ with the intention of perhaps helping others reapply these findings on a project that could also be as successful, seems fairly futile. I can guarantee you the makers of Angry Birds didn’t apply this ‘science’ when creating the game. They simply wanted to make a fun game and used their intuition to do so. Mauro’s article talks about the ‘mystery’ behind the game as if it was all so calculated. We all know that when you’re deep in the development of a project like this, these things just come about as part and parcel of making it more fun to play. The objective logic that comes with so many levels of artistic ‘criticism’, is so often just an afterthought in the minds of those actually making something. The simple, prevailing fact remains that the brilliance of these things comes purely from the subconscious when making something good. A subconscious that has been trained hard by years of enjoying other art forms in all their many facets. A subconscious that is firing on all cylinders when you’re stuck into development and are becoming one with the creation of the thing.

The most interesting part of Mauro’s article, and in fact the part that lead me to get into an argument with my friend about it, was his ‘How things look’ subheading in which he states the following -

“This leads to a more interesting question: How does visual design impact success in the marketplace? I routinely get this question from clients who are undertaking large redesign or new development projects. Decades after it first surfaced in automobile design, visual design is still the most contentious aspect of designing compelling user experiences. Designers (mostly of the UX stripe) routinely sell clients on the concept that the visual design (graphic style) of a given interface solution is a critical factor in success. This assumption seems to make good intuitive sense. However, the actual working principle is counter-intuitive. In most user experience design solutions, visual design (how things look) is technically a hygiene factor. You get serious negative points if it is missing, but minimal positive lift beyond first impression, if a user interface has great visual design. When we conduct user engagement studies for clients (not the same as usability testing), we routinely see data that strongly supports this theory.”

Needless to say but I found the implications of this statement pretty unsettling and was reminded starkly of Bill Hick’s Advertising or Marketing comic routine (watch it below). Particularly Mauro’s last sentence which almost entirely echoes Hick’s line, “You know what Bill’s doing now, he’s going for the righteous indignation dollar, that’s a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we’ve done research, huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

The following is a slightly polished version of what I had to say in reply to my friend, regarding Mauro’s points about visual design. It’s relevance to the IFP, filmmakers in general and the making of art of any kind will I hope be evident.

…

Mauro’s argument perhaps stands given the Angry Birds exact context, but largely speaking he’s dealing with a more more profound and complex issue. His point falls flat when you try to apply it to what I’m going to call the ‘Rags to Riches‘ argument. This argument understands that first impressions are certainly of value and that the actual experience of using something is fundamental, but in the end the psychological impact of the visual is the most important, lasting and hard to measure. The ‘rags’ in this case being of course the perceived immediate impact of good visual design, and the ‘riches’ being the powerful long-term, psychological and sociological effects of said design.

I agree that when Mauro is perhaps simply asking, “Why is this game so successful? Look how much money it made – here’s how to potentially make that money too,” then sure, what he’s saying could be of use. However when you consider how depressing people’s neighborhoods, streets, homes, offices, cubicles and online user experiences can be on a daily basis due to skimping on visual design for the sake of ‘what works’, and you then see this later turning into depression, anger and ill-will towards others, you realize we’re talking about something much, much bigger. Something which arguably could affect financial prospects more subconsciously and seriously, albeit at a slower pace.

Mauro continues later in the article to say -

“Even more important than good or bad visual design is appropriate visual design.”

I think this is the key factor here, and that people confuse this issue way too often. Angry Birds has a very appropriate, high standard of design. Without it it simply would not appeal to the millions who’ve paid for it. Guys think it’s pretty cool, girls think it’s cute, it makes kids laugh, it spaces out adults – all of this is absolutely requisite and in this regard Mauro’s article absolutely nails many of the elements that make it so enjoyable to use.

In the same fashion if you were going to design cheap housing in some backwater town, would you use materials that are going to stain, droop, crack and crumble after a few years? You know full well no one is going to revisit this place for repairs and that those living there can’t afford to repair it either. Why make anything that will rot both physically and psychologically everything around it? If there isn’t enough money to make it well, it should not be made at all. To quote the architect Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead -

“Rules? Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn’t borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn’t borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window, and stairway to express it.”

It’s about long-term psychology as much as it is about immediate success, and without discussing these decisions you can’t knock one thing and say it’s simply not as important as the other. As Mauro notes you can’t accurately put monetary value on visual changes, but in the same way that you do things to help the environment (that you also can’t see directly dying as a result of your actions), it’s wrong to imply as Mauro does that it’s simply a ‘hygiene factor.’ That hygiene factor is what I’m calling the long-term psychology of a design, and what Howard Roark calls a building’s soul.

So, to correct Mauro somewhat, I think it would be smarter to state that, “Even more important than good or bad visual design is appropriate visual design, and what is appropriate design is multi-faceted and entirely respective of context.”

Whether you like it or not, your entire world is affected by the look and feel of the things you engage with for long periods each day. It’s a designer’s job to try to overcome employers who make it less attractive and ‘more functional’ simply because they can pay you less to do this job and make more money. These people are idiots who don’t have a long-view of their general, daily, psycho-visual imbalances. I say this of course with the proviso that greater function doesn’t always come with a guaranteed decrease in visual quality – it just seems to so often be the case. The simple fact remains that cutting corners makes people suffer and if you can run away with the money and ignore the consequences, you’re a selfish charlatan. You are a part of the problem and not the solution.

I can appreciate that Mauro is largely appealing to those who want to make a buck, however this is bad advice because it assumes that the only value of good design is related to products and their markets. To reiterate once and for all, it’s our responsibility as human beings to remember there’s a lot of people on the planet who have no control over the look of the world around them and who are ruled by those who want to ‘make a buck’. Those of us that must suffer living beneath billboards towering above, promising soulless dreams, the garishly coloured junk food wrappers sitting in the gutter, the television commercials selling drugs for pains that don’t exist, the dying buildings built with cheap materials slumping under the weight of their own short lives, the angry faces and the lack of respect for anything. These people aren’t idiots. They know better than anyone that the look of the world around them massively affects their subconscious state of mind. They know it when they walk out of their rotting front door, glance at the grey sky, the paint peeling from the walls of their neighbour’s house across the street, scrape the ice from their car’s windshield with the splintering lid of a margarine tub, curse as the car won’t start and their foot goes through the rusted bottom of it as they lash out in anger. They know it when some of them later get drunk and walk around smashing windows, keying car doors, spray-painting church walls, and beating people up – all scenes I’ve witnessed in my years growing up in England in the suburbs of Cambridge, 3 years at University in Manchester and later living in Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City. It’s a level of rage that I can support and forgive when places like that are your reality. Try getting mugged at 8:30am on your way to work, as I was in 2008, and being told by the cops that there’s no point in reporting it.

Some of these people hate the world around them. They know what the end-game is better than the thoughtless assholes who make the products, create the ads for them and leave those ads gathering mould on some rusted old bus-stop sign, 23 stops out of town in some relentless nightmare of a burnt out suburb. The sorts of places that otherwise only filmmakers dare frequent in order to make their gritty melodramas. We have got to remember that every small gesture toward making things simply functional, that disregards how much ‘greyer’ you are making the user’s day, is a very valid negative point.

There’s a lyric from the Pulp song Glory Days that comes to mind -

“Oh we were brought up on the Space-Race, now they expect you to clean toilets.”

…

Of course these arguments mean nothing until you can tie them back to money. This is the hard cold fact one must accept if you’re going to make any changes to the world these days. There are no gods left to use as any real threat to your actions, and the perceived ties between actual art and big money are mostly hanging by a string. Mauro wrote his article for people who want to make money. I am writing my article for free, with no apparent financial gain for anyone. So let me throw my marketing hat in the ring for a second here and point out how a long-term view of these things can and will actually make you money, as well as making the world a better place.

Think about how things will look retrospectively if you actually put in the time to make something visually beautiful as well as functionally sound. We only ever look back at the things that looked and performed fantastically, and cherish those particular things with heaps of nostalgia and warm hearts. We never look back at the ugly, embarrassing things that made lots of money in the same way. This might seem irrelevant, but listen up – these days heaps of money is made by harnessing that retro-active nostalgia and reaping what you can from that. More than ever we are focusing on remakes, reboots, retro-fashion, older sounding records, aging our photographs, and 80s-looking video game pixelated aesthetics.

There’s no denying that there is money in making things built to last, making things a canonical representation of the visual style of the era you’re living in and making people feel respected by giving them the finest. People want to love their past, they want to look back at previous decades with a smile, they want to relive that in every way they can and they’ll buy it.

It all comes full circle ultimately.

Everything from the look of a video game to the look of a bus-stop is relevant to people’s daily experience of the world. If you give people one moment to think you don’t care about them and that you’re not offering them in some capacity the best of what life has to offer, then you’re responsible for the slow, aching decline of civilization, the inevitable death of your company and, to paraphrase Fight Club, Brad Pitt pissing in your food at the formal business dinner where your boss raised a glass to you and offered you that huge promotion.

In the end, whatever your craft, the moment you’re thinking about the money, skimping on the quality of the design and focusing on your immediate financial gains, the worse you are making life for everyone else, and eventually yourself. So the next time you’re arguing with your designer, give this some thought. Could be they’re just a chump doing lazy work, but it could be that they’re fighting for a larger cause, one they subscribed to at a younger age when they made the connection between beauty and a better life. Rags to riches.

Rule 1. (to kill expectation)

Go into the film without having read or watched anything. Trailers are acceptable, as they are sometimes created by film directors themselves, though even that sometimes is questionable.

Rule 2. (to kill projection)

Assess what the film is trying to say or achieve within the realm of what …]]>

Rule 1. (to kill expectation)

Go into the film without having read or watched anything. Trailers are acceptable, as they are sometimes created by film directors themselves, though even that sometimes is questionable.

Rule 2. (to kill projection)

Assess what the film is trying to say or achieve within the realm of what kind of movie it is trying to be. Do not project your own expectations. Let the film dictate the level of expectation, be that tonally, narratively or conceptually. 

Then, assess how well you think the film reaches whatever goals it set out to achieve.

Rule 3. (to kill hype)

Don’t talk about the film with anyone who has not seen it, except if you’re encouraging them to go see it. Only discuss the film with those that have seen it, and discuss it hard. That’s what it’s there for.

…

Consciously or otherwise, everyone has their own series of qualifications when assessing how much they’ve enjoyed a film. There are others for whom these guidelines can be reapplied to how much they appreciate other forms of art as well. There are even those who don’t consider film a true art form, but we spit on those people.

I am the son of two fine artists; my mother a painter, my father a painter. Here is their legend: they met on the steps of the Tate Gallery in early 70s London, and it was love at first sight. The legend failed to mention, of course, that my father was actually with his ex-girlfriend on those steps at the time and my mother, who had yet to win his heart, was simply being introduced to them by a mutual friend. Later they told me when going through some difficulties of my own that, whilst it was love – a great love – it was of course not the matinée movie my brother and I had in our heads as kids.

Bearing this in mind, I want to talk about a way of thinking about film criticism that led to my friend Adam and I crafting the rules above. Adam is my age and makes music. He and I met at university in Manchester, England in 2001 and we have analyzed films together, endlessly and relentlessly, ever since. I don’t see him so often these days as he lives in London, and I in New York, but the arguments are no less heated. To make matters worse, Adam was recently staying with me for a couple of weeks in New York. In the midst of yet another discourse (as we were hopping between trains on our way to some party) I found myself restating my assumptions about how one should critically assess a film’s worth. Adam, nodding his head, jokingly called them The Rules. We laughed then, but at some point later that night I made a mental note to write something about it.

…

Three key elements cloud a person’s judgement about a film. The first is hype. The second, and somewhat a byproduct of hype, is expectation, which for the most part, leads to projection.

I found out the truth about how my parents met during a difficult time. Knowing about it and about events thereafter rescued a large part of my sanity from the jaws of god-knows-what. I could suddenly see how similarly I’d behaved to my father and how my mistakes, somehow subconsciously, were identical to his given all he’d become now. Of course it didn’t excuse what I’d done, but it calmed me hugely. For years I had had no connection to their experience – they’d had this perfect thing, married young, I had not – there was no connection.

People go about their lives telling people how they met their significant other or how they got their great job or how they made their millions, and they’ve refined these stories into what one might call legends. Every detail is exaggerated for the sake of effect. These romantic sagas are indeed legends, but are also what I like to call hype, and we create them all the time to justify and cement in some way the life changing decisions we’ve made. The things we’ve decided we’re never going to take back, and if we do, know it will hurt to do so.

It is because of hype that a lot of people are in some way afraid of art. This is not because they aren’t capable of understanding it, or because they don’t want to understand it, but because they aren’t given the chance to understand it. In fact, we are more and more these days encouraged not to. For example, you walk into some art galleries in New York and you’ll see something akin to a plank of wood leaning against a wall. As you stare at it, confused as to whether a workman left it behind on his way to the toilet or whether it’s actually an exhibit, a young gallery owner will stride over, massaging his sore nostrils, and hand you an essay explaining why this plank is art. Gone is your chance to say to yourself,

“Hey, it’s just a plank.”

It’s now something about which, due to the convoluted wording of the gallery owner’s essay, you’re clearly not equipped to make up your own mind.

If you’d grown up with my brother and I you’d have had to live through years of my parents ranting and raving about the appalling nature of art teaching at the various schools we ended up going to in England. Why is art not taught well any more? Well, my parents have their views, but  I believe it’s largely because no one is trying any more to comprehend the true financial value of an artistic eduction, and therefore assume people will struggle to employ those with that alone. This is sad because it implies that they make no connection between how things look and how people feel. In today’s “money or nothing” world, most stuff pretty much looks like shit, and that plays a part in why people are depressed, break everything around them and want to kill themselves.

So this is where advertising features in our problem. What is the one thing that thinks it’s art, but in fact simply tries to squeeze money out of people by emulating art for financial ends? That’s right, advertising, and nothing comes close to the psychological mess that is advertising actually advertising art. Nothing.

Films are ruined daily by advertising and hype is their big, blood-letting knife. I stopped buying film magazines for over 10 years the day I accidentally saw a film called Fight Club, without knowing anything about it. You might know it. What you might also know is the feeling I had that night when watching it. The feeling of experiencing something incredible for the first time without knowing a single thing about it. The purity of an idea, a story, a climax that is in every way a surprise to you is almost overwhelming. It’s narcotic. Adam and I use it like a drug. You’d think, given that obvious metaphor and the general propensity to track down “good coke,” “straight dope” or “strong-ass weed,” that other people might not choose to cut their art with anything either. You know, to keep it pure. You’d be wrong.

In fact, all joking aside, it’s actually more serious than that.

Hype not only ruins the impact of the art, it undermines the very value of art itself in the first place. Every day our faces are filled with reviews, star ratings, adverts screaming “It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry,” “Critics are saying this is X’s best film in years” and “Empire Magazine calls it ‘Amazing’”. All of this, not to make you enjoy the film any more, but to simply make sure you give them some money for it, and not just money for it, but to better pay back that misused advertising budget. Of course, none of what the advertising is saying is true. None of it can be true. Much like reading a film review, it’s misguided to think that someone you don’t know, possibly wouldn’t even like and particularly someone who’s job it is to write shit like that, could dictate what would make you laugh or cry.

Here-in, hype (by its very nature) takes whatever is remotely good about something and amplifies it beyond all rational levels, thus creating our second problem, expectation.

I once got into an argument with someone at a party about a film, which I was insisting was good and he was arguing wasn’t. In the end it turned out he’d not actually seen the film but was basing his opinion on what he’d read on Rotten Tomatoes, and therefore didn’t want to see it. The fact that people allow the votes and opinions of other people they don’t know to help them decide upon a unique, personal experience such as a film, is somewhat ironic.

Advertising companies are paid to sell things. Hype for a film gets people into the cinema seat and so therefore counts as a sales tool. The main method people use to hype something these days is to give you more and more of it in fragments before you actually see it. This, with reference to my Fight Club experience and the consequent drug metaphor, of course ruins it. We’ve all been there – Trailer 1, Trailer 2, Trailer 3, The Featurette and The First 5 Minutes. Each element bandied about out of context, each leading you to subconsciously make up your own mind about certain lines of dialogue or certain dramatic moments, and thus often ruining what it’s like to experience those moments first-hand, in the context of the film.

Expectation thus also leading to projection - you projecting what you expect to see over what’s actually happening, therefore destabilizing the film’s own chances to say what it’s trying to say.

I sat through a meeting a few days ago with a film director, his producer and his marketing team working on a strategy building up to the screening of their film at a major festival. The marketing team were detailing how they have a series of mailing lists they send a film’s Facebook page to just to guarantee a certain number of ‘Likes’ on a film from the moment it’s released. You wonder for a second during these moments how the director feels about such a gesture. How he can possibly know what people feel about his film when every gauge he has is blurred somehow by all this bullshit.

Just like my parents, the legend of the film is never ever the reality of the film. Just like the New York art gallery experience, you are being told what to see when you see something – for the sake of making you feel better about the money they want you to spend on it.

Alfred Hitchcock famously banned anyone from entering the movie theater after a screening of his film Psycho had begun, back in the 60s. Of course this created what is now a legendary amount of hype around the movie, but at least his approach still kept the details of the art itself a mystery. All you knew is that the director cared about the integrity of his film, which in itself is all you should ever need to know about the film.

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So how should you yourself approach a film, to avoid these pitfalls? You know, when it’s just you and it, in a room together, no strings. What then?

[Spoilers ahead]

Somewhere at the end of the 90s. I had just finished watching The Matrix with my father. This was a film that had never sat well with me. He’d never seen it before and I’d seen it previously in the cinema. We were watching it with some other friends and of course everyone got in a discussion about it afterwards. I argued against anyone who said they thought it was a good movie as I just couldn’t stomach the ending. I felt it made no dramatic sense. To me there was no chemistry between the lead characters Neo and Trinity, so for the film to just assume he’d come back to life because she loved him, seemed like the most trite, undeserved dramatic climax.

In response my father said something along the lines of -

“No Caspar, you’re not arguing within the context of the film. You’re projecting what you want onto the film. The film clearly stated early on that Neo, if he indeed was ‘the one’, would be able to manipulate The Matrix in some way. Therefore him dying in The Matrix but still living on in reality is entirely fair based on that assumption. Sure it might not connect with you particularly, but you can’t fault them beyond that, as they have established their own internal film logic and carried that through to its logical conclusion. Therefore Trinity’s love for Neo is actually beside the point. She just happens to be saying “I love you” when he wakes up. Coincidence yes, but where do you even start with coincidence in storytelling?”

[End of spoilers] 

I really had no come-back for this at the time. What I did however have, forming in my head for future contemplation, was a set of rules for how I’d approach my assessment of art. The very same rules you see at the top of this article. Since myself and Adam’s greatest passion is film, we’ve explicitly crafted them for use in that context and they continue to serve us well. We created them so we know how to understand a film, without having to necessarily read a review, watch a trailer or pay attention to a single ad.

It’s this line of thinking that lead me to understand what the New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane famously called “good trash” in the context of one of his reviews. I also now have absolutely no fear of loving and defending whole-heartedly a b-movie horror like SAW as much as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The Rules make absolutely no prejudice, they allow you to love anything you want, but simply ask that you think for yourself. The Rules stop you getting confused over what you should call art and what you should not. They simply make you focus on good versus bad and help you sidestep all the hype and bullshit the advertisers and marketing types out there would have you believe will help you enjoy the experience more.

I would apply them to more examples for you, but I’m already way over my word limit here. So by all means, try them out.

See how you get on.

See you at the cinema.

I saw Gus Vant Sant’s film Elephant in Italy whilst on holiday with my girlfriend of the time. It was  not long after the film had come out and we were lucky enough to find a cinema that hadn’t dubbed it; they had simply put the Italian in sub-titles in …]]>

I saw Gus Vant Sant’s film Elephant in Italy whilst on holiday with my girlfriend of the time. It was  not long after the film had come out and we were lucky enough to find a cinema that hadn’t dubbed it; they had simply put the Italian in sub-titles in instead. It was of course a beautiful, warm evening and the film, despite it’s delicate and dark subject matter, also left me with the most beautiful, warm feeling. Now Elephant certainly had it’s political undercurrents and was more topical than a film like Pavilion, but the sensation it created of simply following, watching and remaining detached from the events portrayed gave me an almost paralyzing feeling of powerlessness. It felt as if for a moment the film might actually miss the action that was so central to its genesis and leave me feeling as if it was one of those dreams you have where you can never quite see someone’s face, no matter what you try. Quite why this felt so good, I couldn’t tell you. It did however leave me wanting more.

Pavilion, from this year’s IFP crop, is one of these types of films. In fact had it not been for seeing Elephant that day, and then later seeing Terrence Malick’s The New World, then perhaps the hot and sweaty July day when director Tim Sutton screened Pavilion for us in my living room, might have been all the more uncomfortable. It was too late though, I’d already fallen hook line and sinker for films of this kind, and the fact that I knew this director wanted us to help him with this project meant that the trip to the bathroom and back, the moment the film finished, was a very exciting one. All 25 feet of it.

My co-worker Zach referred me once to a film (Portrait of Jason, 1967) where a man is sitting there smoking a cigarette for pretty much the entire film. That’s it. Talking about this on the way to get lunch one day we agreed that in a film like that, where that’s all that happens, the small things turn into huge events. Zach then stopped, scratched his head and thought for a moment, whispering to the air in front of him, “what was it that happened in that one…”. I stopped too, waited, and then finally he said “Ah yes, he ran out of gas on his lighter. Huge deal!” We both laughed and then stepped inside Jimmy’s, our regular lunch joint.

So to reiterate, Pavilion really is one of those exact films. It’s almost fair to say that if you blink or cough, you could miss the entire ‘reveal’ at the end of it. There are tiny fragmented shards of dialogue that tell you what’s happening whilst all the while you’re watching the most detached, beautiful and mesmerizing footage of kids feeling out the moments in those long, long, useless days of our youth. In fact what I said when I came back from the bathroom after Tim had screened his movie for us was ‘congratulations’. Congratulations for capturing that feeling of the abstract, aimless ennui of what it was to be young, with almost no sense of responsibility at all.

Tim then explained that he wanted a website and film posters from us, and we ended up all walking back along a hot Front Street in Brooklyn, talking all sorts of nonsense. Eventually he had to go one way, and we the other, but Pavilion wasn’t going to let us stray too far from each other in the coming months.

The next part, the actual design process, was tough. It’s always tough but this was particularly hard because we really wanted to nail it. Not because this was our ‘big chance’. Chances are people won’t see Pavilion ‘en masse’ until Tim’s next film is out and everyone is freaking out about how good he is. Then they’ll be picking up ‘that risky first movie’, you know, ‘to give it another chance’. No, we really wanted to nail this because the film demanded it. It was begging us to explain to someone who only saw the poster or visited the website for a second, what the film was about without of course explicitly telling them. You know, without a tagline even. It was such an abstract concept and relied so much on a feeling, that we felt it to be an exciting challenge. That said, we also of course didn’t want to oversell it. When very little happens, you can easily make a website or poster that promises too much. That too was a no no.

So the design work began and I sat huddled over my computer for several days in that nervous funk I always get into when I know I can do it and will do it, but it’s just not happening yet. Then, soon, like trying to pee when you’re really drunk, really full of booze, and have been holding it in for too long, things began to trickle out. Then moments later they all just came out together. Pretty soon I had a list of ideas spilled out on the page and sent them to Giles (best friend and Version Industries co-founder) for his thoughts.

He was into it.

For the website we agreed that animated GIFs, living movie stills, or what people are now calling cinemagraphs, were the right direction. There aren’t many truly captivating, art-for-the-sake-of-art websites on the internet, but of the few my favourite is easily if we don’t, remember me. Take a look. If you don’t know the site already (and already love it), you soon will. The only difficulty with Pavilion is that a lot of it is shot with a moving / handheld camera, and IWDRM has the luxury of picking out the movies with all the beautiful static shots in them. Nevertheless, the laid back, audio-less, ethereal quality of these was absolutely spot on for this project and so all we had to do was convince Tim.

Tim was down.

For the posters there were a bunch of things I’d scribbled on paper scraps lying half on and half off my couch in my living room the night before. These I’d typed up and emailed myself and then hated the next morning. However one or two of them triggered new ideas and we realized that effectively taking an idea from the most unlikely of sources – Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 film Back to the Future - was very possibly the solution to this film’s supporting printwork. So we quickly started putting together some demos using a low-quality quicktime of the film Tim had linked us to.

The extent of Tim’s enthusiasm for our ideas in the coming days was enough to get me through the coldest of winters, let alone the balmy week in July that it was. He wrote us back a long email analyzing each concept and explaining why each one worked for him in different ways. We then encouraged him to choose his top 2-3 concepts so that we could start working on the final editions. As I touched on in last month’s article – there’s being paid for doing some work and then there’s meeting the approval of someone who you respect. These two things are completely different, and the energy you get from one far exceeds the other. There was a fantastic feeling in the Version Industries studio the weeks that followed, hard at work as we were hard on the site and a final set of posters.

Some days into the production Tim wrote another excited email stating that he was so in love with the type treatment on the posters that he wanted us to do all the type for the actual film’s credit sequences. The hot pink, italic, capital letters had hit a chord with him (as we’d hoped it might), and had now dethroned the more restrained, plain, black, capitalized Futura he’d been using up until that point.

The only part that still concerns me slightly as we prepare to reveal the work we’ve been doing here is that it all still somehow doesn’t feel involved enough on some cursory level. I think this is because as a company we’re used to coming at a concept from several angles and layering up the visuals where possible. However, in being true to this very unusual film we knew that in every way less was more, and that meaning and impact were to be obtained from the most subtle and imperceptible touches. Furthermore when watching the film you realize the footage is almost untouched out of the camera, and this too informed the very raw and simple feel of all the work we produced in support of it.

So, without further ado, here is the Pavilion website -

And here are two of my favourites from the selection of posters we produced for the film -

We won’t spoil the details of the film by explaining our exact reasoning for the various elements of each design. We do hope however that each speaks for itself and that everything I’ve said gives you some insight into the process from start to finish, as well as leaving you with some unanswered questions of course …

For those who were not at the two talks I did for the IFP, my name is Caspar Newbolt and …]]> First of all, thank you IFP for the invitation to write monthly articles for your blog. It’s a very flattering and exciting opportunity, and I mean to give it my all.

For those who were not at the two talks I did for the IFP, my name is Caspar Newbolt and I co-founded Version Industries. To give you some context in terms of any comments I make towards films throughout this post and any future posts, I am currently in the process of developing four low to medium-budget film-related projects, alongside my more regular design duties at Version Industries. Three of these are music videos and one is a short film. I have shot, directed and edited three music videos and one documentary to date and have provided my company’s design services to three IFP film directors. I am also currently working on a record cover for a film soundtrack – the re-scoring of the 1970s science-fiction film Silent Running by 65daysofstatic.

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I’d like to start my IFP blog series by talking about the underrated commodity that is trust. It is perhaps the most valuable psychological element within the collaborative creative process, and so I believe very much worth talking about within the context of this blog. What’s most interesting about it is how it pervades the various parts of what we all do in different ways. Whether it be trust in the way you can emotionally captivate people with your work, trust in the collaborations you form as part of your work process, or trust in the way your projects aren’t given a chance to perform on their own terms. There are other ways of course, but these I believe are key at least to the way I work and the experiences I’ve had thus far. The following examples, anecdotes and rants I hope will illustrate these points clearly.

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In terms of the work I do for Version Industries, I have a healthy obsession with narrative and pathos, and feel that one should inherently lead to the other if you’re going to win the trust of your audience, whatever the medium. For this very reason I try wherever possible to tell a story with each project, be it a website, a record cover, a poster or a music video. I don’t mean a ‘story’ in the ‘fashion magazine’ sense, I mean a story with characters, scenes, events and climaxes. Now of course it doesn’t have to be a sad story to be a good story, but without a sense of pathos somewhere along the line, you won’t glean any real loyalty for your work. Take the funniest film you’ve ever seen and there’ll be a moment of sadness sitting right at the heart of it, and whether you like it or not it’s that moment that grounds everything else. Why? Because sadness feels more true than happiness. We might only recollect the happy memories and we certainly don’t have much memory of pain, but it’s a fact that it’s the sad moments that help us lower our defenses, bring us together and help us trust each other. Trust being fundamental if you are an artist trying to earn the respect of your peers and garner support from your audience. It’s trust that leads them to follow your progress and consequently support for your next piece of work, be that financially or other.

Two projects of this kind that we’ve just completed are record covers, one for the Nashville, Tennessee electronic musician Makeup and Vanity Set and the other for the Manchester, England electronic musician Polinski. Each project involved setting up a narrative behind the music and then illustrating that as best we could in the artwork. Makeup and Vanity Set only had one image produced by us, Polinski consisted of a series of panels much like a triptych. Both stories contained the element of loss and the drive to search, find and get back that which was gone – pathos and narrative. I’d recently lost someone very dear to me and these on-going projects provided me, to a certain extent, with a cathartic outlet for this. You can see both covers below.

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In terms of collaborations, as mentioned above I do a lot of pro-bono work for projects of my own choosing. These projects are generally for bands, but the bands I’m into are typically of a cinematic or conceptual nature. The projects are more of a collaboration and each have turned into good friendships. If you want to produce the best work you can, you must work with people you can call friends and, furthermore, who are on the same wavelength as you artistically. This way you are always expressing yourself creatively in the most honest and open-hearted way, and they are giving you the platform to do this on. You then get to the point where you’re talking to them every day online or offline and the process is no longer about deadlines. It’s more about a stream of ideas, references and concepts that never ends, and a body of work that evolves as each of you grow, live life and tackle each new obstacle together. Again, it’s all about trust.

All the film makers I look up to and respect have a very singular vision that’s come to be in part as a the result of a very trusting, long-lasting friendship. Whether it be Darren Aronofsky and Clint Mansell, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti or John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, we all smile when we think of the powerful pieces they’ve put together.

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Finally, in an ideal world we’d hope the people financing, promoting and pushing our work would believe in us enough to let the work speak for itself. A lack of trust is the reason product placement in film has become more and more aggressive. If the consumers believed anything the advertisers said, they might spend less time avoiding what they had to say. If the film studios believed in the film makers and their script, they might not be so insistent on re-writing the film as a commercial.  Instead ads breed like bacteria, form like a mould on every surface and continue to find new ways to invade our waking moments. David Lynch put it better than any of us really.

The moment you lose trust in someone or something is a very precarious and dangerous occasion and it is sadly not something people fear enough. As the old saying goes – if you haven’t got anything good to say, then don’t say anything – lest you lose their trust and sacrifice your integrity in the process. The author and screenwriter William Goldman took what seemed a very defeatist stance when he stated his great rule of (studio and independent) film making: nobody knows anything. By this he of course meant that despite having a great script, great actors, a great director and every other good thing you can have going for a film – how it turns out and how it’s received can still not be guaranteed. Now he’s a great writer and has a vast amount of experience to back this statement up, but we all know there are more examples than you can count on two hands of cases of directors and writers who’ve put out a pretty consistent body of work throughout their careers. Stanley Kubrick being the first that comes to mind – a case which makes me think that Goldman was perhaps a little to financially minded in his statement. After all no one accurately remembers how well a film did in history, they just remember how much they enjoyed it.

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So a level of trust certainly pervades everything we do artistically and there are touchstones certainly to ensuring a trustworthy relationship or set of particularly creative circumstances.

Managing expectations well is one of these. You need to govern well the scale and cost of the project, but never the ambition or scope. This way no one is paying a lot for a project that is taking a risk, but everyone is making sure that project happens because it’s an exciting risk and therefore a highly motivating endeavor. As we all know, expensive does not equal good. It never has and it never will.

Taste is the other major factor here. Some people have good taste and some don’t. Taste is fundamental to making great art and is what should be the focus of producers, investors paving your way. By this I mean you should be finding producers and investors that have good taste, and they in turn should be looking for good musicians, writers and directors who have the same. Only together will you be able to trust each other to make great art, and only together will everyone be satisfied.

Trust makes good art, earning trust takes management and good taste.