Notes on Visual Style

First year film class at U of T; one of the concepts they discussed with us was something called “invisible style”. All films have style my professor explained, all shooting has style; different choices of where you’re putting the light; where you are putting the camera; how often you cut; what type of music you use, even how your actors look. All these are stylistic choices. There’s no one version of these choices which is without style.

However there are certain sets of choices you make which are closer to what we as viewers are most comfortable with; which are less jarring; which either as something do with our natural way of interpreting the world as a series of cuts or just as we’re used to as a rhythm we’ve become familiar with over the years through a lifetime of received visual storytelling. And it is this, ’style with no style’ which fades into the background; and allows a viewer to immerse themselves in an experience; that allows a director or storyteller to calm, to coax, to lull their viewers into their vision, their fantasy.

Now. This can be done to create a seamless effect of immersion; or for subversion; a sense of a calm before the storm, before something more shocking, jarring, or powerful both narratively or stylistically. Does such a thing exist in comics?

Maybe it does… the simple box… the panel grid… Brubaker and Cameron Stewart et al use it to some effect with a ‘tv’ style frame throughout their Catwoman run, which is busted open by the dramatic fight sequences; blowout layouts, shatter panels; blast through pages. But if there are more stylistic pages done throughout; more unusual layouts; more ‘visible style’; there is less a sense of the unease. The breakup on the breakout. Do you see what I mean?

In terms of video or film, this is one of the appealing virtues of the mockumentary form; as documentaries have a set of conventions; then the subversion of it is all contained to the subject matter within the shooting style and format. Which is funny. It’s set up, you know the conventions of your picture; it’s the actual content contained within the box, whether its Spinal Tap or David Brent that becomes so shocking so unconventional.

So if you want to make something work through style, you got to be ready to play and subvert it. Everything is style. Even when it’s invisible.

Songs of the New

Well well we’re back again. Too much time I think spent by ourselves, but that’s what you get when you work as a freelancer.

So what’s going on? Discovered Platform by Michel Houellebecq.  That’s some hard writing. Damn.

I’d read his book on HP Lovecraft and found it really convincing. The subtitle was “Against the world, Against Life”, the philosophy within could be those who enjoy reading do so as an alternative to participating in life or society, or well pretty much at the exclusion of anything else. The life of imagination, being antithetical to the world outside, which is pretty much the conclusion by the end of the book.

Anyway, Platform. Never knew that such a risible contempt for pretty much everything could be so entertaining.

Kind of like Fight Club, but replacing fighting with fucking, and instead of taking on America, it’s taking on the whole world through the lens of global tourism and sexual politics.

If you can imagine that. Seriously good writing. Powerful ideas. Frightening conclusions. And some hot fucking.

And they say there’s no good sex in literature these days. And this guy won the IMPAC!

Dark & Long (Revised Edition)

Beyond just not having to be up; I’m actually up; no point in that now.

Cool dark of 6:00 in the morning. Make some instant coffee; inspired by reading some comics last night.  Catwoman wakes up her tough-guy P.I. by breaking into his apartment and making him coffee at 4 in the morning. Who would say no to that?

The collection I’m reading is some Ed Brubaker stuff, drawn by Cameron Stewart et al  from way back in 2002 when they just did the redesign on her costume. It’s weird, the costume is almost practical, with big heavy boots, cats eyes goggles hiding her eyes; with a slinky Emma Peel thing going on too. Less the ‘I’m a big sexy cat’ just jumping around the sky in skintight purple, more hey, I’m going to put on some leather and rob some houses. Maybe kick a dude in the face too.

Anyhow the new look fits the plot, which is pure noir crime all the way;  all about crooked cops and the drug trade lifted right from The Wire. And I mean that in a good way, there’s a bent cop named McNaulty (sic) for Pete’s sake. Anyhow,  Brubaker knows how to roll out a story; and feels less like a superheroine adventure than an actual crime story that happens to have Catwoman in it. Kinda like a Ms. Tree. Let’s hear it for tough dames!

Also reading: Ladies and Gentlemen: The Bible! by Johnathan Goldstein. And it is fabulous. Back copy sayz poetic and poignant, and something about being funny. I knew he was funny. What I didn’t know was that he could write stories that would actually move me. This puts him in a whole other league of funnymen. Highly Highly Recommend this joint.

After Dark: An Appetizer

From the secret stash here at Balfour Books picked up After Dark by Haruki Murakami. The Japanese novelist read in translation, so it makes me wonder how it will work.  I’ve heard that he is an influence on David Mitchell’s stuff, so I was definitely intrigued, and we certainly  move enough of them on the fiction shelf here so there must be something going on.

And After Dark best of all looked, short, enough to get a read on whether this author’s worth pursuing. That’s part of the question I guess when choosing a book. When there’s so many writers going back even in the last hundred years, do keep moving through them sampling them all the diverse range, or do you find the ones that ping with you, that resonate and explore their depths.   Depends on the writer I guess, and I suppose the way you read. I read like a comic-book geek; a teenage sci-fi freak, scouring the aisles of your public libraries for every for every last one, a completist. At least that urge is within me, which is why now as an adult, a seeker of more mature tastes I try to seek out new writers new finds that expand my knowledge my own experience and comfort zones. Which brings me to Murakami.

After Dark plots the path of a group of characters drifting through Tokyo in the after hours, caught in the space between midnight and dusk, when the rest of the world sleeps. It’s about people who are operating during these times because one way or another, they’ve each fallen through the cracks. And somehow, in tracing their encounters and emanations a narrative emerges of what it means to live in this displaced time and person.

Time flows weird and strange in the book, and Murakami’s prose captures this well, with delicacy and insight. This same precision is applied to the characters who reveal their secrets to one another. I was impressed by how much he was able to really draw out of his fictional people, their problems, their realities seemed so nuanced, so real. The details of who they were and why, and how they went about their lives in the off hours, intrigued.  And by the end of the story I was really rooting for them and wanting them to be whole.   There was also this nice mythic subplot of a sleeping beauty/snow white caught in an eternal sleep, and sometimes the glass box of a television screen. That was handled quite well as well, a quiet counterpart to the dialogue driven encounters.  Not bad at all.

So yes to Murakami. Good to try new things. The book was short, like really short, big type, supiciously wide margins. But size isn’t everything. This was the perfect sushi snack to whet my appetite for more.

How Do You Write Like AA Gill?

He might be one of the best writers I’ve ever read. Pyrotechnics? Nah. Fuck that. It’s complete control. He’s composing symphonies tracing thoughts so delicately then dropping scorn like timpanis. I don’t know if it’s classical or if it’s punk rock, cause it’s so intelligent, so free-ranging; then so bitingly fierce, so jack-knife savage. Wit! Wildean wit! Armed like a sniper to pick off his subjects, illuminating the familiar making them new and strange; delineating the weird so you’ll never see it short of his way again. Is it simply the exaggeration that makes his criticism so scouring? And if so, why do all his observations sound like their right on the money? Gill’s giant brain’s brings a storm of knowledge to his subjects, and this depth of analysis and allusion makes you as a reader feel worldly, and complicit in his conspiracy. So funny, so poignant, so mean, did I mention he’s Scottish? A.A. Gill might be my new hero.

My Dark Places

Weekend away, visiting the nation’s capital, or more strictly speaking, its suburbs.  Kanata, which from the passenger seat appears to be an accretion of business parks and corporate headquarters, was a  5 hour drive so plenty of time to be catching up on some reading. Managed to polish off two books on the way, both of which freaked me out. The first was The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson, a book about small town cop with a ‘sickness’ that is just starting to resurface.  Thompson makes a point of not steering clear of the violence perpetrated by his protagonist; but then what is told comes with such subtle turns of phrase, such intelligence that sometimes you have to  slow down and read a sentence again just to really believe what you think just happened, did. It also rides on such terrible insight into the killer; who gains the same enjoyment out of needling someone with clichés in conversation as he does actually knocking people around.  Dobb’s reactions to his own shocking violence, can seem wildly inappropriate to the situation, but perfectly fit to the mind of this sociopath. It’s these moments that show the power of the first person narration, to place the reader in an alien situation, a skin that’s not their own. Anyway, I devoured it.

The second book was one recommended to me by Mark Askwith, after I told him I was trying to crack the structure of short horror fiction. Twentieth Century Ghosts by Joe Hill is a book of contemporary short stories, throwing the gauntlet down to be a successor of literary/horror cross over fiction, in the vein of Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker and more recently Kelly Link. Much to learn here along the lines of how to screw a tight story together; how to bring out the gore; how to up the spook factor; what human dramas to tap to make something that has a pulse (hint—your own!). Self-consciously written in parts, grotesquely detailed in others, particularly in the lead story “Best New Horror”, the anthology seemed to take a genuine delight in all the different contradictory aspects of horror: its trashiness, its literary aspirations, and the freedom given when writing in that space in between. Made me wonder what his comic books Locke & Key are like too.

All of this is to say, I’ve got some new stuff I’ve been working on too. I’d heard about Thompson’s book for a while but picked it up because I’ve been experimenting with that mode for a comics short story. It’s called The Push and it’s being drawn right now by Eric Kim for an upcoming Popgun anthology.  It’s shorter, more suspense than horror, but should push you off in a dark place when it comes to its stop. More to post on it soon.  I’m liking it, but wow, wish I could say it went as far as The Killer Inside Me; that sucker goes to the end of the line.

Whazamo!

Department of Things I’ve been doing lately:

Not a lot to knock out here other than that.  This is a big deal! Weekly videos! Bloggers! Profiles! Polls! Contests?!? All under the Vepo label.  Now how about that?

Meanwhile, Freelance Blues remains on hiatus.  But the new pages are coming in and I have to tell you they are sweet.  Hopefully we’ll be opening shop up again in early June.  Things’ll get ugly. Guaranteed.

Always Be Closing

Late night head crazed again for us boyee. Nothing too cagey, just too many different things jumbled up in our brain-box for sleep. Or perhaps it’s taking a nap earlier in the evening. Don’t fuck with sleep– sleep always wins.
Where we at. Juiced up on Mad Men two nights in a row; staying up till 2 in the morning watching essentially the entire first season in two sittings. Also saw the Soulpepper production of Glengarry Glen Ross last night with my brother-in-law. Now that was fucking something. Just watching salesmen tear each other to ribbons, each one yo-yo-ing, sling-shoting back and forth between triumph and despair. That Mamet, he’s got, and can I finish, he’s got, just a second, he’s got a way with, just wait, he’s got a way with words. Curious, I’ve never seen the film all the way through, just about all I’ve seen of it is this:

Which isn’t in the play at all. From the dead tone of the film I also expected something a lot more grim; a lot more hopeless; but there’s something weird when you see this desperation played out live in front of you. It was actually hilarious, cathartic, even at it’s most biting and cruel. I can’t really understand how that works. Maybe its just relief not to be on the receiving end. Doing some sales myself these days for the new studio, but I’ll try not to take their lessons to much to heart. But besides the ABC’s, there’s one I’ll remember: “Never open your mouth till you know what the shot is.”

Return of the Repressed

I’m working on a couple pitches right now for comics anthologies. Since I’m generally interested in the gruesome these days, that’s where the pitches are leaning. Horror stories. So I been thinking about ‘em. Reading old DC Comics’ House of Mystery stories. Watching freaky flicks recommended by friends. Just generally getting in the mode you know? It’s been pretty natural coming up with freaky, ooky, grotesque concepts. That seems to be the easy part. Nailing down that ick factor. That sort of unusual angle on something familiar that makes you squirm. But what’s the motivation behind it all? What’s the trick that makes these things tick?

So I saw a couple of horror-ish flicks that made me think about it, how they each had a weird world that they are developing, but needed to come up with some reason behind it. The Machinist follows a freakishly skinny Christian Bale as a factory worker who hasn’t slept for a year, and is watching his life fall apart around him. He gets caught up in a Lynch-ian mindfuck mystery of paranoia, which is you know, great. Freaky dude, trying to figure out who’s fucking with him, that’s a fun ride for a narrative. But what’s the why motivating him?

Then I watched Bug. This was about a paranoid woman, living by herself in a crappy motel, hiding out from her ex-con husband who may or may not have been released on parole. But then this strange drifter comes into her life who may or may not be infested by bugs, of both the creepy crawly and the spook variety.

Both these flicks were, well, weird as hell, surreal at parts as their characters took em to increasingly gross places. But what held them together was that smash of real, that fragment of motivation in the back of each of their protagonist’s life that they were trying to find. A bit like Memento, how he’s trying to find that piece of himself. Each of the main characters, in this case the machinist, and Ashley Judd’s bug-ridden heroine, each of them were recovery from some real-life trauma in their past. Something human. Something cripplingly real in the way tragedy strikes the lives of any normal person. And for each of them, the resolution of this mystery is I think what made them work, or not.

This is what I think is part of the glue of a good horror story; that element of real repressed trauma from life, which then are extrapolated and metaphorically enacted by the fantasy elements of the story. But it always returns to that trauma. The return of the repressed. We need to know that awful things happen for a reason. Which makes horror movies sort of therapy, as the characters reach for the light at the end of the tunnel, the recognition, the reconciliation with their shattered pasts, even if means embracing their death.

How much more crippling would it be if they failed in their journey, perhaps which could be said to seen of a film like The Descent. Or perhaps if the horrible, the metaphorical forced upon them was without cause at all? I can’t tell which would be worse. The link to the real makes it something you can relate to. Hits close to home. Gets you in the guts, in the way that pure causality might not be able.

Anyway, see Bug and you tell me.

Shaun of the Fuzz

Up but not productive with more early morning awakening. One thing I’m thinking about– Edgar Wright is in town, making his Scott Pilgrim movie. Now that’s a job–getting up everyday to make a comic book movie. Saw the double feature of his films on the weekend, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I hadn’t seen either of them since I saw them in the theatre. And they are both still really good. You can see how he’s pushing what he could do with film technique and having a really good time doing it. Whip pans, extra-long takes, music montages, playing with all of the film language to create something new. Thematically I get where he’s coming from as well, as each film feels so true. It’s that same kind of feelings that inspired Freelance Blues. Wright was at the screenings introducing each film, and he explained their autobiographical roots, as Hot Fuzz was actually shot in his hometown. What’s more apparently his first job was at the grocery store that is run by the evil Timothy Dalton in Hot Fuzz. From these small seeds huh?