a weblog by Eduardo Sousa, a film student from Porto,
Portugal
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Words and Thoughts in RGB is my most successful piece of work to date. It won three Best Documentary awards and a Jury Prize in local festivals, and has been selected to a few important festivals both in Portugal and abroad. Not bad, for a small documentary shot and edited in under a week, and which was not supposed to be made.
Way back in the third year of film school there was this optional mini-documentary exercise. In haste I wrote a small voiceover text in English and asked my South African friend Joana to read it. Having done Type Seven (also in video) a few months previously, my intention was to make a small educational documentary as a PC demo, then take it both to film festivals and PC demo 'compos'. A nice plan, hence the English. However, other things happened and I dropped the project.
Skip to a year later. I had spent most of the fourth and last year of film school preparing a 'serious' documentary about immigration to / emmigration from Porto. However, my most definite lack of production skills meant completion at that pace would be years in the future, and the scarcity of good material I had with just a month until the deadline left me completely demoralized. So I had a conversation with the prof, and we agreed I would deliver a smaller project. Time to dust off the old Words and Thoughts in RGB voiceover tape. I decided to cut corners and make a proper video so no more PC demo, even though I used some effect sequences I had designed in Demopaja. More so, 30% of the video running time is filled with the same out of focus shots of headlights in the dusk, which I shot two days before deadline after I decided to go to the movies to unwind for a couple of hours and then watched the starting credits of Paul Haggis' Crash.
(I had cut so many corners in fact, I am ashamed to admit, the documentary has two serious factual errors: the visible spectrum wavelengths are between 400nm and 700nm, not 300-700nm, and blue is close to 430nm, not 700nm.)
Anyway, the documentary was finished, then submitted to festivals. It won the Jury Prize after its first public exhibition at the Ovarvideo festival. My expectations for this hasty documentary were so low I hadn't bothered to attend the awards cerimony and didn't know I had won for a couple of days until someone from the festival called me early in the morning while I was asleep. Suddently a small work of mine had earned me enough money for a laptop, and I realized this festival thing might be the way to go whenever I finish something... So, even after a very discreet mid-week, mid-afternoon appearance at the important Vila do Conde festival I had a distribution offer from a small producer and distributor, Andar Filmes, and a couple of years later the chance to reshoot the whole thing in HD and proper non-hasty conditions, under request of the Coimbra University Science Museum. And hopefully, it'll be the first of a 5-part series. Words and Thoughts in RGB had gone a long way, baby!
Today I finished editing Segredos da Luz e da Matéria: A Cor, also known as Words and Thoughts in RGB 2.0. For your viewing pleasure, here's the original. Enjoy.
After years of reading all the praise about The Wire on the internet, I finally caught a bit of an episode on TV yesterday (portuguese cable subscribers can watch the first season on MOV, weekdays at 21:00). Just as I accidentally zapped into it, I watched a it turns out classic scene in which two detectives investigate a crime scene while constantly muttering to themselves variations on the word 'fuck'. And the whole thing had such a class that in my mind it instantly downgraded every other depiction of policemen at work in film or television. I browsed the listings and watched the full episode when it repeated later last night, and I found The Wire nothing short of brilliant. Interestingly enough, turns out the series was created by David Simon, also responsible for Homicide: Life on the Street, perhaps my favourite TV show ever.
The thing about The Wire is that it feels Real, and to enumerate cop films that felt as realistic as The Wire, I say perhaps Serpico (by Sidney Lumet, one of the most underrated working American directors who owes nothing to Academia favourites such as Scorsese), or the 1950s classic Detective Story by William Wyler (which for its age is incredibly realistic in the portrail of a working precint). The Wire is no 'television' at all, it's more cinema than most films. And so are other TV series nowadays.
One of the things that really irks me about Film Studies and many critics is the constant labelling of different calibers of moving image as 'good', 'ungood' or as Evil Incarnate. I don't like many things on TV and I don't like the lowest-common-denominator culture that oozes from the networks, but I always felt a nasty pinch in my spine whenever someone gives me a variation of the 'on Cinema as Art and TV as Shite' speech. A big canvas in a dark room, a TV screen, a phone screen, or a webpage embed are all just different ways in which to see moving images, each with a different context. Just that. Different calibers have implications on what kind of images work in each, and some things do crossover between screen calibers and contexts better than others (i.e. Cinerama westerns relied too much in extreme long shots and watching them is only tolerable in a big projection). For the film/videomakers that just means an awareness of the destination displays. Artistic quality is something else altogether.
Most TV used to be bad because you only had big networks that were part of a monoculture and therefore little diversity. Today there's lots and lots of cable channels, all competing against each other and against the Internet besides movie theatres, books, etc. An explosion in diversity allows for TV series that are true works of art, and should no longer be regarded as the stupid serialized C-movies they never were. It's true there are things like CSI: Horatio Caine One-Liners or 24: Far-Fetched Conundrums Only Solved By Torture, but then you also have the movies of Brett Ratner or Rob Cohen. Bad TV is as bad as cinema can be. Good TV - can be just as good. ¶
I wrote about Glória many times before, but never went and put the whole thing online for everyone to watch. Now, keeping with my ongoing exploration of the 'information must be free' philosophy, you can watch Glória in two somewhat different versions:
Glória, played by the excelent Ana Margarida Carvalho, is a woman who was just left by her husband. She's all of a sudden lonely and bored, so she goes and starts stalking a man, looking at his trash, breaking into his apartment and even hiring help to make the stalking easier. Only that... Well, why don't you just watch it? Embedded above is the brand new 15' 'short' version, which I edited for better traction at festivals while bringing it more similar to my original screenplay.
Over at Vimeo you can also watch the original 22' 'long' version, in which the story is told in a non-linear way and features an unscripted final montage in which we watch the fate of secondary characters, as proposed by the actors.
Thanks again to everyone who played a part in the movie. The cast - Margarida, Mariana, Inês and Alex - and also Cristina (who played a part besides executive producing), Sara Monteiro, Sara Nogueira, Joana Gaio, Joana Costa, Ana, Marcelino and John - thank you all. Enjoy. ¶
As I write this I'm listening to the maddening honking of people protesting against the rise in the price of petrol. My office is adjacent to the main square of Porto, and these people have nothing better to do than spending a Saturday afternoon driving up and down the square blasting their gas-guzzler's horns. They seem to have had enough of the oil companies' abuse.
They're stupid. They are like junkies protesting against their dealers.
These are hard times if you drive a taxi, if you have a fleet of trucks, if you buy a bus pass every month, if you buy food that happens to have fertilizer involved in its production, etecetera. Hard times for all, and harder still they'll be. But you feel robbed because you drive alone to work every day in a car that has a bigger-than-1000cc engine because it's a bit chilly outside? You are just the bastard who's ruining it all for the rest of us. So shut you mouth.
It's true I drive a gasoline-powered car sometimes. But when I can't, I won't. I already take the subway or the bus during the day and if there were half-decent mass-transit solutions past 10pm I'd be more than happy to take my car in a last drive to the junkyard.
The personal automobile was one of the 20th century greatest mistakes, like asbestos or DDT, and is responsible for an addictive vicious circle of incompetence in both local politics and geopolitics. It turned urban planning to shit while sparking wars. So for once I'm on the Big Oil & Speculators' side. I do hope the Money Wizzes do manipulate the price of gas to rise as fast as possible, buffering it as much as possible from the real unavoidable, supply-and-demand price of crude, so that perhaps the inevitable changes in our way of life can start before the logic of failing supplies brings those changes in a way brutal and uncontrolable. ¶
For a couple of months now I've been reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It's a big book, and a tough one to read. Like the work of José Saramago, the style of Pynchon's writing turns reading it into work, made worthwhile by the golden nuggets scattered about (clever observations, plot twists, etc). But, writing density aside, Pynchon's work is quite different, full of postmodern style shifts and surreal episodes, some hardcore enough to make Pier Paolo Pasolini blush. Still, I'm writing all this because of the following passage from Gravity's Rainbow:
“[...] And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide... "Good morning folks, this is Heidelberg we're coming into now, you know the old refrain, 'I lost my heart in Heidelberg',well I have a friend who lost both his ears here! Don't get me wrong, it's really a nice town, the people are warm and wonderful - when they're not dueling. [...]”
'Nuff said. ¶
Reel time, ladies and gentlemen. It's incredible I never bothered to update my reel since I finished film school (my old reel was done before the final year). But alas, as they say, blessed the designer who never updates his portfolio, that means he doesn't need one. I'm not so blessed, as my professional precariousness has been on the rise lately. Hence a new reel. As before I left out the pedestrian stuff I usually do (institutional videos and such) so the reel only consists of stuff I can really relate to. To keep with the times, you can even watch it in gorgeous streaming HD (too bad I lack more HD content to put there).
I hope the spell works. ¶
Funny thing, I've been wanting to write about There Will Be Blood for weeks now (in a nutshell: here's a movie worthy of the title Citizen Kane part II: The Deicide, and surely one of the 21st century top ten films). But I'll be dissing something instead. It's a lot more fun:
I really, really like Francis Ford Coppola. I mean, this is the guy that came from the Roger Corman B-movie heart of darkness (and 3D sexploitation!), and all of a sudden BAM! in less than ten years did four of the Top Ten Movies Ever in many people's lists (the first two Godfathers, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now). Beat that, Welles! However, time passed and then things such as this happened.
And now, after ten years of retirement, there's this. Youth Without Youth has a really terrible script. Why did he even consider this for his comeback? I'm all for unapologetic science fiction / fantasy, it's a lot more ballsy than having this C-grade sci-fi dementia coated in some sort of ugly pseudoliterarian/spiritual paint. And Francis Ford Coppola might still have a little of his master touch, but for most of the movie it feels as if he is someone else stealing from his own box of tricks (i.e. his signature vertical flips - such as in the opening of Apocalypse Now, here appear as forced at the very least, nauseating in parts). And what's with those crappy 'liquidify' effects - the kind that was already crappy in techno videos made in 1992?
And another thing: Is it just me, or is the whole premise of much of the latter part of the film disturbingly similar to Paul Auster's appaling The Inner Life of Martin Frost? Is there anything cornier than a Unless Writer Stops Muse Dies plot? Francis Ford Coppola the director deserves better material, or else he may end doing the kind of movies where in the end, it was all just a dream or something.
Oh. Oops. ¶