It is pouring and the street is plastered with dead wet leaves like an earlier phase of this season, but we can use our front door again and are now receiving deliveries to it, which after eight years of not being reliably able to use our own address as a mailstop is luxurious. Have some links.
1. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nineweaving: Robert Macfarlane on The Dark Is Rising. He writes, unsurprisingly, beautifully about it and its influence on him and and about the upcoming adaptation, but I get to feel smug because he is in agreement with a question I was just asking: "Though it's structured around a Manichean opposition of Light and Dark, Cooper's novel refuses to cleave into neat binaries. I think of it, in fact, as a cold war novel, first published in 1973 and kindred in its moral complexities to early Le Carré; describing a conflict fought in the shadows, in which no one is clean." I don't want to write that book about the shifting shapes of war in fantasy literature over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I just want to read it. (It should include David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937).)
2. While I have been cheerfully enjoying process shots all over my recent viewing from the '40's and '50's, I had not realized that Industrial Light & Magic had reinvented rear projection. This article compares it to matte paintings, but it's a combination of actors moving on a soundstage in the foreground and action moving on a screen in the background: since the images are coming off the screen behind them, it's not even front projection. I get that it's more flexible and interactive than a traditional pre-filmed panorama slightly fuzzed out beyond the windows of the car which the actors on set are not actually driving, but it still means your physical depth of field stops when you hit the screen and if you're going for the total illusion of a space, there's only so far that blocking and cinematography will camouflage the limits, which sounds as though it is already becoming visible in the shows that use this process: "The Volume inevitably encourages a certain kind of scene: A cluster of people in front of either a wide-open space or a setting that doesn't involve much physical exploration of the landscape. For instance, Obi-Wan crossing a wide street with a cityscape in the background." I should be clear that I am not yelling at the general principle of this technology, so long as it doesn't produce narratives that are all staged and shot the same way. I just saw an extremely effective rear projection cattle stampede last night in Blood on the Moon (1948), not to mention all manner of alternation between location and studio shots. Sometimes you shoot in the Rockies, sometimes you cover your cast with potato flakes. I had just heard vaguely about the revolutionary filming of The Mandalorian (2019–) at the time and no one mentioned it was much more like a digital revision of a one-time staple in-camera technique, which on its own is interesting to me.
3. Speaking of teething technologies, I had somehow never heard of the travails of Technicolor 1, not limited to eyestrain and the 3-D glasses problem of an additive color system. "There was no getting around the difficulties created by the special projector required to show the film. It was temperamental and had to be brought into each theater in a portable fireproof booth. Kalmus despaired that it required an operator who was 'a cross between a college professor and an acrobat.'" I still wish its one example in the wild survived. If someone could put the time and effort into restoring the long-lost-and-given-up-on Cinerama of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), I bet we'd have found a way to view The Gulf Between (1917).
4. It's a stained glass hermit crab suncatcher and I just like it very much.
5. I adore everything about this review. "Do not even start on who the Englishman played by the Australian is meant to be."
It is not quite true that I haven't seen myself in a mirror since we took the door off the bathroom cabinet, since we just propped it carefully against a wall and it regularly reflects my ankles, but it was the only mirror in the house and therefore in the last few days I have seen far more of my own reflection in the shadowy way of the glass-fronted cabinet in the dining room and the sloping windows of cars I pass on the street and at that resolution I am starting to think I might as well invest in some Etruscan bronze.
1. Courtesy of
nineweaving: Robert Macfarlane on The Dark Is Rising. He writes, unsurprisingly, beautifully about it and its influence on him and and about the upcoming adaptation, but I get to feel smug because he is in agreement with a question I was just asking: "Though it's structured around a Manichean opposition of Light and Dark, Cooper's novel refuses to cleave into neat binaries. I think of it, in fact, as a cold war novel, first published in 1973 and kindred in its moral complexities to early Le Carré; describing a conflict fought in the shadows, in which no one is clean." I don't want to write that book about the shifting shapes of war in fantasy literature over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I just want to read it. (It should include David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937).)2. While I have been cheerfully enjoying process shots all over my recent viewing from the '40's and '50's, I had not realized that Industrial Light & Magic had reinvented rear projection. This article compares it to matte paintings, but it's a combination of actors moving on a soundstage in the foreground and action moving on a screen in the background: since the images are coming off the screen behind them, it's not even front projection. I get that it's more flexible and interactive than a traditional pre-filmed panorama slightly fuzzed out beyond the windows of the car which the actors on set are not actually driving, but it still means your physical depth of field stops when you hit the screen and if you're going for the total illusion of a space, there's only so far that blocking and cinematography will camouflage the limits, which sounds as though it is already becoming visible in the shows that use this process: "The Volume inevitably encourages a certain kind of scene: A cluster of people in front of either a wide-open space or a setting that doesn't involve much physical exploration of the landscape. For instance, Obi-Wan crossing a wide street with a cityscape in the background." I should be clear that I am not yelling at the general principle of this technology, so long as it doesn't produce narratives that are all staged and shot the same way. I just saw an extremely effective rear projection cattle stampede last night in Blood on the Moon (1948), not to mention all manner of alternation between location and studio shots. Sometimes you shoot in the Rockies, sometimes you cover your cast with potato flakes. I had just heard vaguely about the revolutionary filming of The Mandalorian (2019–) at the time and no one mentioned it was much more like a digital revision of a one-time staple in-camera technique, which on its own is interesting to me.
3. Speaking of teething technologies, I had somehow never heard of the travails of Technicolor 1, not limited to eyestrain and the 3-D glasses problem of an additive color system. "There was no getting around the difficulties created by the special projector required to show the film. It was temperamental and had to be brought into each theater in a portable fireproof booth. Kalmus despaired that it required an operator who was 'a cross between a college professor and an acrobat.'" I still wish its one example in the wild survived. If someone could put the time and effort into restoring the long-lost-and-given-up-on Cinerama of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), I bet we'd have found a way to view The Gulf Between (1917).
4. It's a stained glass hermit crab suncatcher and I just like it very much.
5. I adore everything about this review. "Do not even start on who the Englishman played by the Australian is meant to be."
It is not quite true that I haven't seen myself in a mirror since we took the door off the bathroom cabinet, since we just propped it carefully against a wall and it regularly reflects my ankles, but it was the only mirror in the house and therefore in the last few days I have seen far more of my own reflection in the shadowy way of the glass-fronted cabinet in the dining room and the sloping windows of cars I pass on the street and at that resolution I am starting to think I might as well invest in some Etruscan bronze.
