In the previous post in this series, I considered how the pose and three-dimensionality of a figural sculpture support its interpretation.  I noted that representational sculptures reside at the intersection of what is actual and what is virtual.  Because it is there and we can regard it in many ways, a statue shows us part of a projected fictional world and implies or suggests even more, unrealized in the sculpture, about that world.  The artist leaves its underdetermined fictional details to the viewer's imagination.

I described how different vantages on Michelangelo's David yield somewhat different understandings of the figure, and I explained how Bernini later carried vantage-based variations to an energetic extreme in his own David.  From these observations and others, I drew a conclusion: although we typically think of movies in relation to photography and painting, film (like its cousin, theater) is more akin to sculpture.

Asserting a close kinship among sculpture, theater, and film raises issues of technology, so I would like to recommend a way of thinking about technology and to illustrate how it can inform the interpretation of art.

In 1346, King Edward III Plantagenet crossed the English Channel to assert his claims on France.  After startling victories in Caen and Crécy, he laid siege to Calais.  Caen had fallen in a day; Calais, at the urging of King Philip VI Valois, held out for nearly a year.

Resisting a siege is a nasty business, and under the persuasive weight of disease, starvation, and want, the people of Calais finally decided to negotiate.  Edward offered terms: he would show mercy and not sack the city in exchange for the lives of half a dozen of its most important citizens– an offer generous to the many but harsh to the few.  After months of deprivation, they could scarcely reject the terms. But who would rise to give his life?

A leader did step up, and then another and another until six had offered themselves: Eustache de Saint-Pierre, Jean d'Aire, Jacques de Wiessant, Pierre de Wiessant, Jean de Fiennes, and Andrieu d'Andres.  Several were among the city's wealthiest and most influential figures, and all understood in some measure that the privileges of reputation presuppose honor and civic duty. They would pay the price for the survival of Calais.

Dressed in simple robes, draped in nooses, and bearing the keys to the keep and gates– all in accord with Edward's instructions– they marched forth from their city in the hope that by sacrificing their lives, they would save their people.  (The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.  Remember.) Did they hesitate, think twice, reconsider? Did they waver in resolve or press stolidly onward? Were they enraged at the enemy, at humankind, at God? Did faith and faithful action steel them against encroaching fear and doubt?

As a matter of historical record, the six heroes were eventually spared in a display of magnanimity.  However, at the moment when they rose to the occasion and walked off toward the enemy's camp to face their doom, the six had no reason to suppose their lives were anything but forfeit.  And it is that moment of bittersweet hope and despair that Auguste Rodin chose to depict in his masterful bronze of 1889, The Burghers of Calais.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais

This work rather obviously participates in the same multi-perspectival dynamic that gave life to the statues mentioned above. Here, however, two differences appear, one physical and one thematic.  The physical difference is that this is a sculptural group rather than a single figure; the somatic complexity is much richer.  The viewer walking around this sculpture, moving toward it, or drawing away from it, will have the opportunity to notice many more changes in surface, shadow, and shape than even Bernini's David affords.

The idea of having multiple figures in a sculptural group is no novelty, though Rodin deploys the idea with sophistication.  What is perhaps more novel, or at least more typical of Rodin's culture and era than of earlier times, is the statue's exploration of psychology and emotion.  The thematic difference between Rodin's group and earlier sculptures is that the complexities of pose and spatial extension serve not so much to project an unsculpted fictional world around the figures, but rather to project a plurality of virtual mental worlds within or among the figures.

The statue does not imply or suggest what it might be like to depart besieged Calais and to march toward the encamped English.  Instead, it whispers, declares, and bellows what it might be like to ponder one's impending death and the seeming pointlessness of so many great, petty, proud, or pious achievements as one now prepares to march toward the moment of capitulation, humiliation, and negation.  Bernini invoked our imagination by showing us body and intentionality; Rodin invokes our imagination and empathy by showing us conflicted or decided minds, stable or wavering intentions, the threshold where prior dreams are dashed and a desperate hope in behalf of others takes their place.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, Jacques de Wiessant

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, Jean d'Aire

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, Andrieu d'Andres

The work invites empathy, analysis, and introspection by presenting unexpected or evocative details and juxtapositions to the exploratory viewer. From one vantage, it appears as if the six, as a cluster, are ambling toward their fate. From another, the group breaks into two as a leader in the front turns to encourage his companions in the back.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais

Still another vantage reveals that half of the group is headed in the wrong direction, one clutching his head in despair or disbelief, and two moving as one in rhymed poses as they retreat to his aid or exhortation.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais

The more a viewer explores and ponders the information this sculpture offers, the more the physical gives way to the mental. Historical imagination gives way to the presentation of concepts, assertions about human character, portrayals of vulnerability or resilience, considerations of individuality and community, and a host of other themes that speak to what it is to be fragile humans in a fragmented, fractious world.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, Pierre de Wiessant

To put it in a more useful way, The Burghers of Calais is a technology that amplifies our powers of inspection, introspection, empathy, and intention by providing a rich occasion for their exercise.

What, after all, is a technology? What is the etymological "logic of art"? As a matter of cultural and linguistic habit, we use the term "technology" to refer to certain classes of gadgets, machinery, or manipulation. Turn to the "tech" section of any newsfeed, and it will be replete with discussions of 4G cell phones or particle accelerators or biomodification. But this way of using the term "technology" elides the point worth emphasizing.

I prefer to emphasize that technology always stands in a certain relation to the people who use it: technology is anything that amplifies what the human body can already do. A club amplifies the ability to punch. A gun amplifies the ability to throw. A telephone amplifies the ability to shout. A motor vehicle amplifies the ability to run. Clothing amplifies the protective and insulating qualities of skin. Architecture, oddly enough, is large, static, communal clothing. Telecast media amplify vision or audition. The hard drive and RAM of a computer amplify the ability to remember and to calculate. And so on.

Any technology may be understood this way, and therefore anything that acts as a force multiplier on what humans in general can already do may be construed as a technology. What's more (and setting aside the mind/body problem), technologies may amplify not only the physical but also the mental. Formal logic is a conceptual technology that amplifies the ability to think systematically, to argue cogently, and to relate premises to inferences in a way that yields foreseeable material results from abstract plans. Language, one might say, is a distributive technology that amplifies the ability to define and organize human experience by engaging and uniting many people in ordered pursuit of those tasks.

So then, what of art? The fictional projection of possible worlds in text, paint, stone, metal, or light is a material technology that amplifies our ability to entertain and evaluate conditional counterfactuals. This, of course, is just a jargon-laden way of saying that representational books, movies, and art propose imaginary scenarios– in some respects like the actual world and in some respects different– and thereby provide a means for us to safely explore alternate paths of choice and action without the burden of non-fictional consequences. Vicarious experience, fantasy, imagination, escape– these are the crux, but they're complex notions best left for another post.

The key point is that we use technologies such as chiseling and bronze casting to make artworks, but an artwork is itself a technology by means of which we do something else. (Of course, it is a staple of aesthetics and art theory that a work becomes "art" at precisely the point where we abandon any notion of its utility. For reasons best deferred, I find that understanding of art inadequate, a historical curiosity of that stream of modernism that has its source in the Enlightenment.) But if the key question is how we are using art, then it is always already the case that the maker and the consumer of art are both embroiled in the creation and valuation of its meanings: active in some ways and passive in others, now resolute and now conflicted, egoistic but altruistic, insular or communal, in a grand negotiation of the terms of surrender and victory.

And if the consumer is always already as much a factor as the producer, then it just won't do to maintain that art is something that artists do for (or to) willing but passive recipients. It's not a question of whether the audience actively contributes to the art it finds enriching, but of how much, how well, and how.

Poor Agostino di Duccio.  He had learned his craft under the most innovative and imaginatively expressive sculptural master of the quattrocento, Donatello.  But Agostino could not have been happy on the mountain in Carrara as he oversaw the quarrying of a shallow, broad block of marble some eighteen feet long.  Over the course of his career, Agostino had taken to bas-relief work of the sort one finds on the façade of a church or a palazzo.  He had created grand works in terra cotta, too, but clay is a thing far different from stone.

Nevertheless, here he was, perhaps because the elders in Florence had decided to make good on a fifty year old plan to erect a huge statue of Donatello's making on a buttress of the cathedral.  Then in his late 70s, Donatello was no longer in a position to give more than nominal attention to such a project.  To Agostino fell the labor.

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Empire Strikes Back is almost as old as I am! I still remember being in a theatre in Little Rock when the first rumble of the AT-ATs hit. Check out Peter Mayhew's awesome walking stick!

Ezra's appreciation of Kick Ass, just below, reminds me of two things.  First, this is likely to be a low posting week, so why not fill it with a meaningless list?

Second, I had been meaning to get around to this list in particular.  I give you, in no particular order, five supremely violent films which constitute great art:

The Killer (John Woo, starring Chow Yun Fat, the greatest action hero in movie history, 1989) – This is the film that brought non-martial arts Hong Kong cinema to American eyes.  An assassin for the Chinese tongs (or mafia, if you like) is stricken by remorse after blinding a woman in a hired killing.  In the process of trying to save her, he runs afoul of his bosses, who won't let him go straight.  Mayhem ensues.

Dead Alive (Peter Jackson, 1992) – Before The Lord of the Rings, Jackson made indie movies in New Zealand.  This is the one that put him on the map.  A group of archaeologists return to civilization bearing a slow-burning infection which turns people into berserk killers.  If you think you've seen this show before, you haven't. The violence goes beyond horrific, into the realm of comedy.  Even George Romero and Sam Raimi never made anything like this.  After viewing Dead Alive, you will agree on two things: 1) that Danny Boyle is a cheap hack; and 2) the supreme zombie-killing tool is the gasoline powered lawnmower, if you have the stones to wield it in hand-to-hand combat.

Shogun Assassin ("Robert Houson", 1980) – Quentin Tarantino rightly paid tribute to this in Kill Bill, Volume II.  After years of faithful service, the Shogun of Japan's most ruthless samurai retainer grows a conscience, and tries to leave his master's service.  His master is displeased and kills the man's family.  Sound familiar?  Maybe it is, but the awe-inspiring carnage that the man leaves in his wake as he seeks to raise his surviving son while taking revenge on the ruler of Japan is like nothing you've seen.  This strangely poignant tale of massacre and horror inspired the wonderful comic book series Lone Wolf and Cub.

The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) – Along with Sergio Leone and Mel Brooks, Sam Peckinpah killed the western for a good twenty years.  You've probably seen it, but if you haven't, the story of a gang of bankrobbers hanging on for one last score as the old west becomes modern America is, on its own merits, one of the finest westerns ever made, as iconic as High Noon or The Searchers.  What sets it apart from the classic western is Peckinpah's obsession with gunplay as a form of dance.  The opening sequence, in which the bunch ride horses to rob a bank in a town which already has plenty of cars, and the moments leading up to the final shootout, are two of the best moments in American film.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) – Have you actually seen it, or just heard about it?  You might be surprised that a film with this lurid title shows less blood than Psycho.  Hearing that, you might be surprised to find that it's still far more horrifying than anything that passes for horror movies today.  People who see deep meanings in things claim that this is a vegetarian manifesto, but I don't buy that.  It is, despite the title, one of the most intelligent horror films ever made, with a gritty, almost documentary feel comparable in fright to Night of the Living Dead.

Please feel free to discuss and supplement this list, in comments.

Kick Ass is a really good movie. It's a very satisfying melange of teen comedy like American Pie, dark superhero film like Watchmen and gory violence porn like Kill Bill. I'm more than a little surprised it got made.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the film is how great Nicholas Cage is in it. I am not a big fan of his particular brand of overacting. And yet, the fact that he does a spot on Adam West Batman voice when he is in superhero guise was just one nice layer of his performance.

The film did a nice job of deconstructing the traditional roles of heros & villains. It was not quite as meta as Invincible (one of my favorite movies) but it came close. It observes how often family tragedy is a spurring point for the traditional comic hero and villain, and gives 3 different examples of this effect.

In general, the movie was very successful in blending the disparate elements of it's plot. Smarter people than I could examine the role the whole "she thinks I'm gay" storyline plays in the standard hero origin (is it a secret identity? Are heroes pretending to be something they aren't?)

Note: this movie is extraordinarily violent. There is plenty of blood, massive amounts of shootings, people being burnt to death and all sorts of beatings.

Deadline Hollywood is making me very happy. Joss directing the movie of my favorite comic book? Yes please!

A few years ago, I saw a delightful little English comedy titled Death at a Funeral. It was a light farce about wackiness at the funeral of the patriarch of an extended clan of characters. I saw it for two main reasons, Alan Tudyk and Pete Dinklage. (name dropping alert: I attended college and did a play with Pete Dinklage. He was one of the three people in my program that made me realize that I was doing this for fun, and they were doing it because they had to.)

The movie was fun, if unremarkable. I didn't really think about it again. Cut to today. I saw a commercial for a semi funny looking movie with Chris Rock, Danny Glover and Tracy Morgan called Death at a Funeral. Didn't really think much of it, until I saw Pete in one of the previews. It's the same freaking movie!

I have to admit I'm sort of intrigued. Is this like a Vince Vaughn "Psycho" shot for shot remake or a Battlestar Galactica reimagining? The plots look pretty similar from the previews (right down to the uptight guy taking hallucinogens.) The kicker? Pete is playing the same character (with the same plot, but a different name) in both films.

I have to admit, I'm intrigued.

In 2000 a tradition was born among my friends. Each Memorial Day as many of us as could make it would gather for the long weekend (up til this year it had always been in the Bay Area, but this year we are going to Portland) and watch the worst movie we could find in theatres. This tradition is thanks to one movie, and one movie only – Battlefield Earth. It's not the worst movie I have ever seen (that honor still goes to Eye of the Beholder), but it's darn close. It was also just voted as the worst film of the decade by the Razzies.

We sat in that theatre openly mocking the film. Towards the end we were joined by several other members of the audience. I mean the movie was a perfect confluence of things to mock – John Travolta, Forest Whittaker, horrible dialogue, Scientology – it's all there.

Thanks to that movie, one of the best traditions in my life was created. And now, thanks to that movie one of the funnier pieces of Hollywood writing has been created. J.D. Shapiro, the original screenwriter of the movie has written an apology to anyone who saw the film.  It's a recommended read, even if you haven't seen the film.

I saw Avatar last night. It's pretty much what you expect (superlative graphics, pretty meh story, some wince inducing dialogue). There were several incidences where the CG (especially where creatures were involved) were up to Gollum quality (or maybe even better..)

But here's what fascinated me about the movie: it didn't feel the need to explain things. Most sci-fi falls into the trap of needing to explain things. I'm sure the writer feels like they catering to their geek audience. In reality, that's usually the biggest problem we have with the movie. Their explanation is so far-fetched (or based on ridiculously bad science) that it damages the movie.

Avatar takes a different approach – it gives no explanations at all. There is no pseudo science or exposition about why mountains float on Pandora. Mountains just float on Pandora. Everybody knows that. I found myself enjoying the film more because they didn't explain how the person could control an alien homonculus, they just could.

It's an interesting narrative tool, and it definitely increased my enjoyment of the movie. I didn't spend time thinking "that can't happen" or looking for the (definitely there) problems with science.

It's not a great movie. It is a beautiful one. It's also a movie that doesn't owe you any explanations, and doesn't offer any. I think more sci-fi movies should consider this path.

I was tossing around various ideas for titles that would cleverly point out my anger and disdain for a series that I have not read,but I decided to just be direct. Last night, I went to see New Moon. I had not seen any of the other movies, or read any of the books. I have to admit, I had done some reading about the misogyny in the books and knew that the author was the "special underwear wearing" type of Mormon. I didn't just dislike the movie, it made me actively angry.

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"Patrick" is a good name.  "Patricia" is a good name.  The diminutive "Pat" diminishes either name, though lots of people use it. Still, why oh why would you use the diminutive version if you had this last name?

You can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: Nothing. Not even the fee for the corporate employee award program, which I would appreciate if you would put up personally.

As I've said before, I think orthodoxy to political movements and political parties is a recipe for stupid behavior. When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you are invested in being a Republican/Democrat/conservative/progressive/whatever, everything looks like one of the bugaboos of that particular ideology. (By the way, I am not suggesting that I am immune to this problem.)

Case in point: the Telegraph runs a piece about an upcoming movie called Creation about Charles Darwin. It looks terrific. This is the Telegraph's uncritical thesis:

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Liberal blogs rushed to take the story at face value. The story was a nail to their hammer: it portrayed mainstream America — and religion — as intolerant and willfully ignorant.

Such critics, by and large, did not engage in critical scrutiny of the Telegraph's thesis or of the message that the film's producers were trying to promote. Fortunately, some people did. Take increasingly prominent science-fiction author and commentator John Scalzi, who writes a great blog. Scalzi is to the left of me; he's by no stretch of the imagination a conservative or someone sympathetic to pro-creationist anti-Darwinist sentiment. But he's also usually not an orthodox thinker. So he penned an awesome take-down of credulously accepting the premise that the film can't find a distributor because Americans are anti-science idiots:

Alternately, and leaving aside any discussion of the actual quality of the film, it may be that a quiet story about the difficult relationship between an increasingly agnostic 19th Century British scientist and his increasingly devout wife, thrown into sharp relief by the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter, performed by mid-list stars, is not exactly the sort of film that’s going to draw in a huge winter holiday crowd, regardless of whether that scientist happens to be Darwin or not, and that these facts are rather more pertinent, from a potential distributor’s point of view.

Read the whole thing; I especially like his vision of the Will-Smith-vehicle Darwin biopic that would get distributed easily. Scalzi is enough of a skeptic that he suggests the same thing I immediately suspected — that this "halp halp Americans are idiots" notion is clever marketing at the movie's target audience. (That target audience, I submit, probably includes a sizable segment of people whose self-esteem is premised on being smarter, better people than the unwashed hordes of Middle America.) I frequently disagree with Scalzi's conclusions, but this openness to nuance is why I like to read him.

Credit is also due to frequent critic of religion and proponent of science P.Z. Myers, who also recognized that the film's situation might also not be all about American hostility to science.

As for the commentators who took it at face value — well, one has to wonder whether, in the days of William Castle's B-movie advertisements, they would have bought the advertised insurance policies in case they died of fright during the film:

Macabre (1958): A certificate for a $1,000 life insurance policy from Lloyd's of London was given to each customer in case he/she should die of fright during the film. Showings also had fake nurses stationed in the lobbies and hearses parked outside the theater.

This weekend Katrina and I had a relatively rare date night. [I am informed that the concept of "date night" for married people offends some people and causes them to roll their eyes. I suspect these are mostly people that I would prefer to offend anyway, and who would probably be rolling their eyes at me whatever I do. So whatever.]

We went to see "District 9". Though Katrina enjoyed it, it was violent enough that I am certain I shall be required to go see 2-3 movies in which relationship issues are resolved through dialogue, and in which fisticuffs, explosions, or gratuitous nudity are treated as inappropriate and/or tragic in the unlikely event they occur at all.

It was worth it. Beware; plot spoilers below the jump.

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Do any of you people know where these individuals learned to shoot? Private Joker!

Sir, from Mystery Science Theater 3000, Sir!

From Mystery Science Theater 3000!  Outstanding!  Those individuals showed what one motivated Mystery Science Theater fan and a bad movie can do!

The ultimate shooters.  The ultimate fish.  The ultimate barrel.

On August 20th, the lead writer and stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000 take on Plan Nine From Outer Space. At theaters all over America and Canada.  I am so there!

Thanks to Kathy Shaidle for the tip.

"The right of martial artists, to keep and bear numchucks, shall not be infringed."

Today is without a doubt one of the oddest in the history of Supreme Court nominations, or indeed Senate debate (and that's setting the bar low indeed), in that we have heard repeated references, from Senators and the media, to "numchucks".

In the spirit of the times, it behooves us all to learn these facts about nunchaku:

• Sonia Sotomayor is, to our knowledge, the most prominent federal judge to address the question of whether the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms includes the right to brandish nunchaku. Unfortunately, Judge Sotomayor dodged the important question of whether nunchaku are "arms" of the sort used by founding era militia.
• The most famous wielder of nunchaku was undoubtedly Bruce Lee, whose rout of Mr. Han's private army in Enter the Dragon is rightly regarded as one of the greatest fight scenes in movie history.  Unfortunately, British film and dvd viewers could not watch this scene in its original glory, because the British Board of Film Classification banned the depiction of nunchaku in any form.

• Considering recent controversy regarding alleged misuse or overuse of the TASER by police, it's comforting to know that  Orcutt Police Defensive Systems, Inc., of Denver Colorado, markets the Orcutt Police Nunchaku, or OPN-III, as a safe and non-lethal alternative for control of suspects.  According to the manufacturer, "over 200 law enforcement agencies across the United States have field tested and adopted the Orcutt Police Nunchaku as their primary control device."
• In addition to its primary modern role as a safe and non-lethal tool for the police, nunchaku can be used to drive golf balls, open wine bottles, and to light up a cigar.

(Thanks to Twitter user Stwbrry_Blonde for the tip.)