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innuendostudios · 4 years

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Thoughts on Even More Games

[vague, unspecific spoilers for Heaven’s Vault, Later Alligator, and Life is Strange 2]

Thoughts on Heaven’s Vault

Heaven’s Vault is a game about archeology, which means it’s also a game about incompleteness. This is very clever. Inkle - also the developers of 80 Days, which I will play someday! - specialize in deep narratives that can be explored many, many ways, allowing for a lot of player choice. You make a lot of small decisions - do you share a discovery with the trader in exchange for a valuable item, or hide it so he doesn’t plunder it? do you go looking for your missing friend, or let her stay missing in case there are people trying to follow you to her? These all have their own little arcs and resolutions, and there are so many of them, and so many ways they can play out, that the game can never be played the same way twice. The overall story begins and ends in the same place and theoretically hits the same major beats, but the journey is tailored broadly and finely to each player; it’s a style of design Aaron A. Reed refers to as “not... a branching tree but a braided rope.”

Making a narrative about archeology is how you dodge the exponentially complicated nature of that design: if there are dozens of locations, characters, plot threads, bits of color, which can be engaged with at many points in time, or ignored, or dropped by the player halfway through, how do you avoid telling a story full of gaps and dead ends? Well... you don’t. Having only partial information and having to infer the rest is what archeology is.

The protagonist of Heaven’s Vault, Aliya, is digging up the secrets of an ancient civilization, having been sent by her academy to find a researcher who’s gone missing, and stumbling into his incredible discovery. Everywhere she goes, there are holes: she has partial understanding of the researcher’s journey and motives; he, in turn, had partial understanding of the mystery he was uncovering, and Aliya has only fragments of his knowledge; the ancient texts she translates are usually fragments of larger works, and she is guessing at the meanings of many of the words; the game’s constantly updating historical timeline has entire centuries with nothing but question marks. Aliya arrives in a new location and wonders aloud to her robot companion about what this place was, when it was founded, when it was abandoned, how her predecessor found his way her and where he went next and what he took with him.

The constant feeling of discovery - of unearthing - is magnificent. Site after site, I asked, “What is this place?” Always thinking, if the eventual answer is any good, this is going to be one of the best games I’ve ever played. And, in the end, it doesn’t give you an answer, it just give you enough to make the story feel complete. It answers by not answering.

Also, translating alien texts is just extremely my jam. I’m the weirdo who enjoyed the ending of Arrival but secretly wished the whole movie had been about xenolinguistics like the first half. I guess Inkle felt similar.

The game’s by no means perfect. I think I enjoyed the sailing between worlds more than most - it’s slow, but very pretty - but it’s going to discourage a replay. I don’t think the relationship between Aliya and her robot, Six, ever gets terribly interesting. Some of the archeology is a little too obviously game-y - sail around, wait to find a random ruin, beam Six down to grab an ancient doodad, translate a bit of text, lo and behold it’s from one of the sites you’re looking for and it’s narrowed your search radius somehow. (It gives Star Trek explanations the first few times - e.g. “it has radiation that only exists in one part of the nebula” - and then stops bothering.) And the game sags a little in the middle; it could’ve hacked out 3 or 4 dig sites and still given me the same experience.

But, all told, there’s magic in it, and it just feels good to be there. Do not sleep on this one.

Thoughts on Later Alligator

There’s not a ton to say about this game except that is charming as hell. Lindsay and Alex Small-Butera have build a beautifully animated world of cute alligators, one of whom is having a birthday party where he’s convinced he’s going to be murdered. He wants you to run around getting information out of everyone who’s going to be there, which you get by completing minigames. It’s a cast of weird and funny characters with weird and funny dialogue and there’s not much more to it than that.

The design can be a little frustrating. Some minigames, if you lose, you don’t get to try again. Some are annoyingly finicky. You need to complete them all to get the true ending, which means, in my case, playing the game three times to complete all the bits you missed or got locked out of. The ending was a little different each time, so it wasn’t a total wash, but the game’s on a timer that only advances when you play a game or take the bus, and once you’ve completed most of the games there’s a lot of traveling back and forth from one nowhere to another just to advance time to the next unskippable plot beat.

(It’s also a little unclear what you’re missing as you try to get the final ending, as some of the ongoing puzzle are optional.)

But I can’t get mad. The game is too damn cute! Each character is lively and unique, with tons of personality, and the dialogue is just clever enough not to fall into empty adorkability.

It good.

Thoughts on Life is Strange 2

Somewhere, early in the development of Life is Strange 2, some Dontnod employee wrote in a design document “Episode 4 - cult?” (but in French) and nobody told them “no.”

I will not forgive them for this,

After twenty minutes of LiS2, I was ready to yell at everyone who had reported it was boring. It has one of the most powerful, gut-punching openings of any game I’ve played in recent memory. And all through the first, second, and third episodes, I was in love. Unlike Before the Storm, this was its own creature, willing to make dramatic departures from the original game’s template. Instead of controlling a character with supernatural powers, you play as the superpowered character’s older brother. The one with the magic is a 9-year-old, unable to fully understand or control his abilities, suffering a recent trauma, and needing to be guided through a dangerous and racist world. All the ambition missing from Before the Storm is back, and this time the animation isn’t creepy and the writing is wildly improved (thanks to some journeyman script work from Fullbright’s Steve Gaynor) and I even have a computer able to play it on higher graphical settings.

But nothing good lasts.

Everything good about the series screeches to a halt in Episode 4, the one where some asshole said “cult?” and didn’t get a Nerf football thrown at their head. And it’s not just that it’s a terrible idea; it’s actually sort of amazing how much the game relies on an alchemy of plot, tone, theme, and writing, and how a slight imbalance can throw the whole thing off. Episode 4 has scene after scene that are powerful in their conception - brothers reunited after a violent rift; a boy having his first conversation with his estranged mother in nearly a decade; getting interrogated by the feds for a crime that can’t even be explained by physics - fall flat because the writers can’t think of anything interesting for the characters to say. (Steve Gaynor’s name stops appearing in the credits as of this episode.)

And here the game’s rickety bits, kept delicately together for three episodes, start to shake apart. Dontnod’s overly-earnest voice direction, which I didn’t notice in the early episodes, started to wear me down. (”Could you sigh mid-syllable, like you’re slightly overwhelmed with emotion?” “Sure, on which line?” “All of them.”) The thinness of the secondary characters, most of whom pop up for one episode and disappear, became more noticeable. The lack of a mechanical hook like the time rewinding of the original game, and the attendant commentary on choice-based games and power fantasies, made the game feel less substantial. The surreal imagery of the original, obligatorily evoked in the prequel, is sensibly absent, but there’s nothing equally striking that replaces it. Even the branching path decisions become less clear: the end-of-episode stat screens for the final episodes mentioned at least a dozen choices I didn’t even know I’d made, some of which were critical in shaping my younger brother’s morality and were not necessarily the choices I’d have made if I’d known I was making a choice at all.

Come the final episode, I got An Ending that seemed right for the way I’d played, but much of the way I’d played felt accidental.

So what are we to make of this? Life is Strange is a beautiful disaster, an ambitious disaster, where Life is Strange 2 is almost less interesting for being more competent. It has a huge mess of charged topics - American racism, teens losing their virginity, raising a child outside the nuclear family, grief and trauma - and, while it handles them without the gracelessness and sledgehammer subtlety of the original, it doesn’t come to any conclusions about any of them. LiS1, for all its jank, had some opinions, where LiS2 falls into the category of “this sure is some shit, innit?” games.

It starts with a powerful premise, deeply relatable characters, fine writing, beautiful art, but can’t even manage, in the end, to be a disaster. It is the only game in the series so far to be forgettable.

#Adventure Games #capsule review #heaven's vault #life is strange 2 #later alligator

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naylar-draws · 5 years

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so like could you tell us why strickler deserved to die

Lol I was not expecting someone to ask about that tag!

Boy oh boy ask and you shall recieve

(I did not intend for the reply to be this long but like here’s another essay length meta)

I don’t think Strickler as a character deserved to die, he’s far from the most heinous character in TH. But from a storytelling standpoint, I think killing him off in the s3 finale would have improved Trollhunters as a whole. For that point to make sense I’m gonna need to explain a few things first:

~1700 words under the cut

1) It is more or less an unspoken rule that if an action/adventure oriented story (be it a show, film, book, etc) wants to feel like it has real stakes, a character needs to die. Not just any character, but a main character or an important side character. This isn’t always the case, and I personally don’t think that there needs to be a death to make a story feel more real (No one died in ATLA’s finale), but that’s the trend and is often the easiest, most basic way to things. If utilized right, it can have a huge impact (Ned Stark in game of thrones, Boromir in fellowship)

2) A good finale/climax of a story wraps up the story’s themes and emotional core. It emphasizes it in some way, or offers commentary on it. IMHO a lot of TV and comic book finales can fall short because this. And its not necessarily the creators’ faults, its simply the structure of the industry. Often times a tv finale will be made before the creative team knows whether or not there will be a next season, or they’ll only be given a handful of episodes to wrap up the series. Same with comics. Good climaxes that incorporate a story’s theme off the top of my head are TAZ Balance, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Rocky.

3) A character death needs to mean something, either as a way to complete their character arc, or to comment on some overarching theme, or even to further another character’s development. (Boromir again, Gamora in Infinity War - yes I know she’s coming back - all the fucks that die in Last Stand of the Wreckers)

4) Positive actions should have payoffs. This is kind of cynical, but narratively, if a story wants to say that something is good, there should be a tangential positive effect for that action. For example, in TAZ balance, the theme is that you should choose love and that the bonds we build in life are just like really awesome man, and in the finale those bonds were actively used as a positive game mechanic which helped the heroes to defeat the enemy. Even if the story’s message is that we should do good even if it doesn’t benefit us, there’s still a positive effect to doing good that needs to be portrayed, for instance it could be “gets you into heaven” “makes you happy“ or “helps other people”.

Okay so that out of the way, I’m going to look at all of this through the lens of Trollhunters as a standalone series, instead of a trilogy. I know that there might be reasons the creative team decided to kill off some characters and not others that’ll be made apparent in Wizards. But since Wizards is a separate tv show from TH, its quality and the quality of Trollhunters should be looked at both individually as well as together. And since Wizards ain’t out I’m looking at TH on its own.

Oki Doki so, onto the meat of it. Trollhunters doesn’t really have any overarching theme or message. Bravery and becoming a hero could be contenders but imo that’s kinda lukewarm. I think an unrealized theme that could’ve been is that of redemption, and the idea that people can change if motivated to do so or offered a chance. One of the things that makes Tollhunters interesting and unique is its sheer amount of redeemed villains. We have Draal in the first six episodes, then Strickler, NotEnrique, Nomura, and Angor Rot. Not to mention Steve, and Aaarrrgghh, whose redemption arc happened before the show started. There are more redeemed villains than villains that stay villains.

And then there’s the people that change but not for the better, like Merlin, who apparently was once a pure and ideal heart, and potentially Morgana.

And then there’s Jim, who is remarkable because of his heart. He gives people chances, offers them friendship where other Trollhunters would have antagonized them. The theme would be basically give people a chance/the benefit of the doubt, reach out an olive branch, it might just make them friends. (And if they don’t take the opportunity to improve murder their faces.)

The TH climax was adequate, it wrapped up the plot, set up for a sequel, and had a decent escalation of action. But honestly, I personally thought the build up to the finale was much better than the finale itself. Though this is just like my opinion man, and if anyone thought it was great, cool.

The character that dies in the finale is Angor Rot. He changes sides and sacrifices himself helping the team battle Morgana. And, like, I always found it just kind of… meh? Like I’m sad that he died he was a great character but his death scene seems so pointless (like Draal’s). As I mentioned on point 3, Angor’s death doesn’t really mean anything. It doesn’t further another character, comment on a theme, and it’s an okay I guess conclusion to his redemption arc. The issue I have with it is that it’s not the natural conclusion to an arc for a character like him to have. We are never told that Angor Rot fears death. He died once and was miffed about it, but we never see an aversion to dying again. No, we see that Angor’s greatest fears are Morgana, and fading away or some shit. If the creators wanted to really write Angor off the show what they should have done was have him be the one to tackle Morgana into the shadow realm and never come back, thus facing an eternity with the one he fears most, the person who stole his soul and turned him into a slave.

BUT IF SOMEONE HAS TO DIE I think an even better death that would have been even better for the show, would be if Strickler sacrificed himself instead and Angor Rot was used to parallel Draal at the beginning of season 1. This would ultimately bring the show full circle and tie the finale in with the rest of the show, and helped realize a theme about redemption.

Strickler would have to sacrifice himself at some other conveniently point that relates to his character more, and the whole finale would have to be restructured, but here’s why I think it would’ve been better:

Strickler is a character who is introduced in the very beginning of the show and remains a constant throughout. He has the most nuanced and prolonged redemption arc of all the characters. He starts out as a self-serving Starscream trope who looks out for himself above all else. Throughout the show, he falls in love with someone and forms a father/son bond with Jim. If you follow the sort of character arc of someone who starts off cowardly and selfish and then learns to care about others to its logical conclusion, you find yourself at the point where the character must sacrifice something in order to prove their change, usually what they originally value most. Throughout the show we see Strickler try so hard and do so much to preserve his own life. What Strickler at the beginning of TH values most is obviously his own life. This is a man who greatly fears death. I’m sure you see where I’m going with this.

It would have been a great conclusion to his character if he sacrificed himself in order to save Barbara and/or Jim. Also it would show that positive payoff to Jim choosing to trust Strickler. If Jim hypothetically didn’t trust Strickler and give him a chance to redeem himself, then hypothetically Strickler wouldn’t be able to sacrifice himself and thus Barbara would hypothetically die.

But who knows, Strickler could die in wizards ;)

Strickler dying would also leave room for Angor Rot surviving. And Angor Rot surviving if done right, could be used to further development with Jim and reinforce that he still has his heart despite sacrificing his humanity. It could also give a reason to Draal’s pointless death (further Jim’s and Angor’s developement).

Here’s what I propose could’ve been done with Angor Rot if he didn’t die: He can turn on Morgana and maybe even appear like he’s going to die. Jim is given a choice of whether or not to save Angor Rot, and maybe at this point or sometime previous in the finale reiterate that Angor killed Draal and Jim’s mad about it. Jim is half troll now, he’s different, angrier and less forgiving, maybe all of its getting to him and the audience is made to wonder if Jim might become more like Merlin (who was once like Jim but became crueler) or if he still has the heart that made him so great in the first place. He’s at a crossroads deciding which path he’s going to go down. And then Jim saves Angor. Have it mirror in some way when Jim spared Draal that first time. Have Angor react similarly, being confused about it and be like “but I killed your buddy, you should let me die as revenge”, and maybe have Jim say something about how that’s not how he does it.

And then, and now I’m just going off and doing that whole “what I would’ve done” thing, but like and then as positive payoff to the good action of choosing to save Angor what if there’s one last scene at the end and it’s in Merlin’s tomb. We see Draal’s stony corpse, and then before it is a cauldron like how we saw with Aaarrrgghh, and it’s all steaming. And Angor’s hand stirs it. Then there’s a wide shot and we see Angor Rot standing before Draal’s corpse as it starts to fade back to living stone. Then Draal opens his eyes. And then cut to black credits role.

But like all of this just my opinion man. My rambling overly critical opinion that would get me weird looks if I talked about it irl lol

#ask #trollhunters #tales of arcadia #walter strickler #meta #words? on my art blog??

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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‘When paradigms die’: China veterans fear extinction in Trump’s Washington

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/when-paradigms-die-china-veterans-fear-extinction-in-trumps-washington/

‘When paradigms die’: China veterans fear extinction in Trump’s Washington

“The reality is China is not going anywhere. It’s one-fifth of humanity,” Susan Thornton said. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo

President Donald Trump’s push to toughen U.S. policy toward China has won over much of the Washington establishment, touching off a seismic shift in how many Americans view Beijing.

But one group is resisting — those who have spent decades pursuing diplomacy with China and who fear their approach might go extinct.

Story Continued Below

These former officials, diplomats and scholars are wary about the rise of a younger foreign policy generation that is almost uniformly more skeptical of China, never having experienced the impoverished, isolated country it once was. And they’re warning that the increasingly hard-line stance emanating from Washington — from both Republicans and Democrats — could unravel decades of relationship-building, raise the risk of a U.S.-China military confrontation and even lead to a new era of McCarthyism in America.

“I’m a globalist — I want the U.S. to be engaged in the world, including with other major countries like China,” said Susan Thornton, who oversaw East Asian and Pacific affairs in 2017 and 2018 at the State Department and was viewed by some Trump aides as too soft on Beijing. “The reality is China is not going anywhere. It’s one-fifth of humanity.”

Thornton went public with her concerns earlier this month, when she joined about 100 others to publish an open letter to Trump and members of Congress titled “China is not an enemy.”

“Although we are very troubled by Beijing’s recent behavior, which requires a strong response, we also believe that many U.S. actions are contributing directly to the downward spiral in relations,” the group wrote.

Douglas Paal, who held top Asia-related roles in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, said he signed the letter because “I just felt that we were getting one voice out of Washington only, which was conflict and confrontation.”

“People on other side, they tend to focus on the last 10 years but forget the last 40,” he said.

In a sign of how hotly contested such a stance has become, however, a rebuttal letter came within weeks. More than 100 people, many of them with military backgrounds, signed on to the missive, which urged Trump to “stay the course” in confronting China and declared that past U.S. engagement with China “contributed materially to the incremental erosion of U.S. national security.”

The letter was led by retired Navy Capt. James Fanell and was signed by many who came up through the military ranks. Some are part of Red Star Rising, a Fanell-led email group focused on China.

“For too long the names on the first letter have dominated the narrative on US-China relations,” Fanell wrote in an email. “U.S. administrations from both political parties have followed their advice for more than three decades over which the People’s Republic of China has not become the ‘responsible stakeholder’ they asserted it would be. It’s become a much graver threat, with our help!”

The spat, which continues in op-eds, speeches and other forums, is intense and at times personal — the more hawkish side sometimes derides the other as “panda huggers.” But for the most part, it has remained professional, people said. No one said they had been knowingly barred from Beltway jobs or cocktail parties as a result of joining the debate.

Thornton’s case, though, offers caution. She left the Foreign Service last year after her nomination to serve as assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs stalled on Capitol Hill — she’d been tagged as too nice to China.

There’s little question that more American leaders, on both the left and right, now believe the U.S. must be tougher on China. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, has urged Trump to “hang tough” on trade talks with China. Former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic candidate for president, drew criticism earlier this year for seeming to downplay the China challenge.

The shift toward a more hard-line U.S. stance on China began during the Obama administration and has accelerated under Trump. It has also coincided with the ascent of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Xi has expanded China’s military and economic presence by investing heavily in developing countries, and U.S. experts fear the moves are designed to trap those nations in perpetual servitude. The ruling Chinese Communist Party has intensified its crackdown on political dissent at home while also targeting religious minorities. It has placed more than 1 million Uighur Muslims in internment camps, according to the United Nations.

Critics also say China’s rulers view private businesses as appendages of the state, leading to concerns that Beijing could use firms — such as the tech company Huawei — as a tool to infiltrate other countries. Fears are also growing that Chinese students studying at American universities are spies in waiting for Beijing.

Trump’s top aides routinely warn about the dangers that China poses, with some even suggesting a civilizational clash is unfolding. Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech in October that some in China viewed as signaling the dawn of a new cold war. FBI Director Christopher Wray, whose agency has urged universities to more closely monitor Chinese students, has advocated a “whole of society” approach to counter Beijing.

Trump himself is most fixated on trade. He has imposed increasingly steep tariffs on China to pressure it into signing on to a new trade deal that he hopes will favor the United States. But Trump also has tried to keep a warm relationship with Xi — flummoxing China hawks this week when he praised Xi’s response to protests in Hong Kong. Still, even Trump concedes his relationship with Xi has soured.

“I used to say he was a good friend of mine,” Trump said earlier this month. “We’re probably not quite as close now. But I have to be for our country. He’s for China and I’m for USA, and that’s the way it’s got to be.”

A State Department official said the Trump administration welcomes the debate in the U.S. foreign policy community, but pushed back on the notion that the Trump administration is “hostile” to China.

“The United States is not hostile to China. In fact, we continue to seek a constructive, results-oriented relationship with China,” the official wrote in an email. “China has chosen a confrontational approach that extends well beyond its relationship with the United States.”

Still, some veteran China hands worry that Trump’s approach to China presages a new Red Scare in Washington, reminiscent of Joseph McCarthy’s wild accusations in the 1950s that hundreds of government officials were Soviet sympathizers. Some worry that people of Chinese descent, including U.S. citizens, could face discrimination as a result.

“I lack confidence in the ability of the American body politic, not just the Trump administration, at this point in our political history — especially when there’s so much racism, so much anti-immigration sentiment,,” said Susan Shirk, who chairs the 21st Century China Center at the University of California-San Diego. “It’s kind of bringing out some of the worst impulses.”

At times, such pushback has been met with hostility inside the Beltway. Anti-China groups, both new and old, have targeted what they derisively call the China “engagers.”

At a mid-July briefing of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, Frank Gaffney, a longtime Washington figure better known for Islamophobic views, accused these “engagers” of pining for a past approach that “has proven to be an exercise in submission, accommodation and futility as the Chinese Communists have proven to be more monolithic and increasingly hostile than their apologists in this country acknowledge.”

The committee — which relaunched earlier this year after previously existing in iterations that focused on the Soviet Union and Islamist terrorists — includes Steve Bannon, a former Trump aide and hero of the nationalist movement. Bannon, who has predicted the U.S. and China will eventually go to war, was one of the Trump aides who fiercely criticized Thornton before her retirement.

“The political mood means there’s no upside to arguing for engaging China. There’s just a downside,” said Philip Gordon, who held Europe and Middle East-related roles in the Obama administration and who signed the first letter. “But if you’re in this business, and you care about policy and want to be involved in the policy debate, you can’t let that entirely shut you down.”

Others say those who want to engage with China are exaggerating Trump’s policy as being overly hostile to China, and that what’s really driving them is anti-Trump sentiment. In many ways, this group argues, there’s mostly continuity in the U.S.-Chinese relationship. The U.S. maintains a robust diplomatic relationship with China, for one thing. And aside from Trump’s trade push, the relationship has not changed too dramatically, they argue.

“In the president’s mind, China is not an enemy. He’s the head of a commercial republic. He wants to do what he says, which is make very tough trade deals,” said Brian Kennedy, chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China.

Some observers wonder whether the spat might cause China to view the U.S. through an even more antagonistic lens, given that Beijing closely monitors such Washington debates. In an opinion column in the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party organ, one writer blasted the rebuttal letter’s characterizations of China.

“The implication is that the U.S. is the regime that brings most peace to humanity, which is astonishing,” the author wrote. “The U.S. did bring development and security to mankind, but that was long ago. After reading the letter, one doubts whether the writers are criticizing China or the U.S. itself?”

There also is a generational divide in the U.S. debate: younger China hands tend to be more hawkish than their predecessors. Notably, many in the younger crowd declined to sign on to the first letter warning against the drift in China policy, worried it was too nostalgic for a China that no longer exists.

“This is what happens when paradigms die,” one younger China analyst said.

But many of these same people also dismissed the rebuttal letter as one written by hard-liners who lack a serious understanding of multidimensional U.S.-China relationship.

Thornton said that people with more experience in international relations recognize that there are limits to what the U.S. can do in shaping the destiny of other countries. Ultimately, she insisted, there needs to be a robust debate about the nature of U.S. policy toward China, not blind submission to the idea that the U.S. has to be ever-tougher toward Beijing.

“I’m not romantic about China. I’m not romantic about anything,” Thornton said. “I am practical, and I’m not trying to change China. I’m trying to get things for the United States.”

#Foreign #Politics #Trump #Washington

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renaroo · 7 years

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Wednesday Roundups 7/6/17

Wow I had a lot to read and I still managed to turn it out faster than I turn out about 90% of these which I’m not sure if it’s a reflection on my reading and writing skills getting better or if I was stressing out over doing these way too much in the past.

Regardless, we have quite a variety this week and still seem to be celebrating Wonder Joy so let’s just get into it~

DC’s Batman, Creator Owned CBLDF Defender, Marvel’s Spider-Man/Deadpool, DC’s Superman, IDW’s Transformers: Lost Light, DC’s Wonder Woman FCBD, DC’s Wonder Woman: Steve Trevor, Viz’s Yona of the Dawn

DC’s Batman (2016-present) #24 Tom King, David Finch, Danny Miki, Clay Mann, Seth Mann, Jordie Bellaire

Okay, so I follow Batman at a distance because I’ll be completely honest: Tom King absolutely lost me with the Gotham and Gotham Girl plot because I just could not get into it, and it annoyed me, so I’ve been hands off with the title for the most part, a decision I only double downed on with the Catwoman debacle and my correct assumption in King really relying too heavily on TWISTS. a

....

But I absolutely picked up this issue because even if nothing in my thinking brain believes, at all, that this will be allowed to change the status quo between Bruce and Selina...

I love BatCat so much you guys.

He proposed. And I bought it purely for those pages.

I have to emphasize it was for those pages alone because I could not have cared less about Claire and Bruce’s conversation because I’m just so tired of how many people there are in Gotham and how this conversation would have been so much more meaningful if it came from Kate or Dick or Tim or Cass or Duke or Harper or Damian or Julia or Luke or Jean Paul or Leslie or -- THERE ARE SO MANY BAT CHARACTERS THAT ARE NOT BEING USED TO THEIR FULL POTENTIAL RIGHT NOW DAMMIT.

The conversation itself is kinda stuff we’ve heard before, and while I like how it tied in thematically it just wasn’t in me to not criticize the fact that it’s coming from the current OC of the Day.

Anyway.

I came for the BatCat and I was happy for it even if it was basically only three issues and I had to deal with grown artists making Gotham GIrl’s skirt incredibly short while she was in weird positions for most of it.

So. That’s my take on that.

Now I can write 3 million fics about how this could be wonderful and that Helena Wayne gets to grow up with all her siblings and be loved by the world. byyyyeeeeeeee

Creator Owned CBLDF Defender Vol. 2 #2 Marc Adreyko, Gene Luen Yang

So this is mostly just an addition at the last minute both because it’s free and because it’s, well, an information brochure about uniting to subscribe or pledge money to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund for all those who have been encouraged into activism thanks to recent events and the collective consciousness surrounding events like last year’s Pulse nightclub shooting.

It’s a good idea and it’s pro-community messaging speaks to me. I’d like to spread awareness for people that these voices are out there and that if you’re interested in providing support you can check out this particular brochure on Comixology for free or google at your leisure.

Marvel’s Spider-Man/Deadpool Vol. 2: Side Pieces Scott Aukerman, Gerry Duggan, Penn Jillette, Nick Giovannetti, Paul Scheer, Joshua Corin, Reilly Brown, Scott Koblish, Todd Nauck, Tigh Walker

Okay, so... I like Spider-Man/Deadpool’s first arc... but it’s pretty much exactly like Trinity over at DC and it’s spiritual predecessors Batman/Superman and Superman/Batman in that, outside of what’s honestly a pretty stellar initial premise, there is not a whole lot of plan behind where the comic wants to go for the future.

So you get a whole lot of different creative teams and no cohesive narrative or direction for the comic to go.

But I guess that really brings into question what makes ongoing comics work and whether or not th idea of “hilarious monthly team ups of Spider-Man and Deadpool without a point, and assumedly without continuity consequences” is enough to work.

And as someone who honestly really enjoys one-shot one-and-dones, that’s honestly a pass for me.

But at the same tim... I mean there’s a reason I have both Spider-Man/Deadpool and Trinity on trade wait status now.

The whole is not equivalent to the sum of its parts, but honestly it’s got some genuinely funny and worthwhile parts as it stands. And I appreciate that.

DC’s Superman (2016-present) #24 Patrick Gleason, Peter J. Tomasi, Doug Mahnke, Jaime Mendoza, Mick Gray, Joe Prado, Wil Quintana, John Kalisz

You know, sometimes being a comic fan is kind of like reading the newspaper more than reading a narrative story.

For me that’s kinda what this issue felt more like, I was getting information on where all the characters had moved since last time, the motivations, some backstories. Slight progress and movement in the form of an update on what happened to Lois and getting to see her still kicking Clark’s ass in gear despite his concern for her injury, which I liked, but overall this issue mostly felt like filler for the final moment where we see Jon fall completely into the control of Manchester Black.

Who... is a big whooping plot hole I am stil waiting to be addressed. Clark remembers Manchester Black from the New Earth continuity still and the “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?” and knows about the Elite, but do they know about him? Or are they completely different from the Super Elite we knew? Are we going to get a Justice League Elite mention (which good god please spare me, though I’ll take Sister Superior).

This is one of those cases where I feel like my overly extensive knowledge of things in continuity actually puts me at a disadvantage to actually like... reading and taken things for granted.

I want things to make sense, or I want enjoyable Kent family shenanigans.

But this issue did have Krypto so, I automatically add a star to it. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

IDW’s Transformers: Lost Light (2016-present) #6 James Roberts, Jack Lawrence, Joanna Lafuente

Look, sometimes I think it’s important for critics, reviewers, readers, what have you, to bea ble to say that they’re confused and don’t know what emotion to feel or whether or not the comic accomplished exactly what it wanted to and I’m just. Like.

Yes that is my emotion at the moment.

A lot of stuff happened in this issue. Like lots of crazy, out there, amazing stuff was packed into a single issue and it’s like, there were panels where you’d blink and you’d miss important character development notes -- like Ratchet hugging their Rung once they got back. Like there’s so much good -- Rodimus had a lot of amazing moments throughout and I love the range of humor to anger to disappointment that he showed. Like his trust and faith in others is already pretty shattered at the moment and to feel Megatron’s apparent betrayal adding onto that is like a million times more stuff. I fear he’s nearing a very dangerous ledge, which is bad because this issue also tells us that Rodimus’ death wish and lowkey desire to put himself in dangerous positions to die heroically is still as prominent as ever.

Someone hug my trash fire of a son, please.

And then magical girlfriend romance bringing back her girlfriend as a baby and it’s kinda weird like is it still going to be the same Lug? Does Anode acknowledge that it’s weird? Is anyone going to point out that they could feasibly use protoform matter now to resurrect anyone whose spark remnants are available now? Including Skids and Ravage?

what is going on

Anyway.

There’s a lot packed into this issue which is why I am honestly kind of happy that next issue’s description is a “fallout” from this because holy shit, I need room to breathe and think through things.

Also. Dat smile when Megatron heard Optimus’ voice in the epilogue-ish finale. I like. Maybe had a fangirl moment. Just maybe.

Anyway. I’m shrug emoji right now until I can get my emotional state sorted out because wow there’s a lot at the moment. Like a lot. A lot a lot.

DC’s Wonder Woman FCBD 2017 Special Edition (2017-present) #1 Greg Rucka, Nicola Scott, Romulo Fajarado Jr.

Like last week’s Wondy special, this is a reprint, but it’s a reprint of the first issue of “Year One” which still holds up as the far superior of the two starting Wonder Woman titles from Rucka last year and is amazingly well held up...

...save of course for the exact same criticisms as the last time I went over the issue which is Dead Bro Walking trope and a whole lot of Rucka Why???? that comes attached to the really bizarre treatment of race in the first arcs of the series. It’s just so bizarre.

But honestly, again, these moves are meant to attract the new, excited audience after the box office smash that has been the Wonder Woman movie -- an audience that has been largely female of all ages. And if there’s one free comic I’m glad will show up immediately on their google searches this Wednesday, I’m very glad it’s going to be the start of what has quickly become my favorite standard bearer of Wonder Woman’s origin story.

Something I appreciate even more after having finally read the entirety of Azzarrello’s Wondy run which. Eck. Wash my mouth out.

DC’s Wonder Woman: Steve Trevor (2017) #1 Tim Seeley, Christian Duce, Allen Passalaqua

So this addition to my pull was kind of unexpected in that I had no idea that it was coming out this week and thought “why not” because I’m literally still so Wonderfully Pumped Up a the moment and as far as I can see, the more proceeds DC and WB can see attributed to Wonder Woman the better.

That being said, Tim Seeley really dug into his Grayson roots in this one because that’s about the only thing I really got from this issue is that Steve Trevor’s a badass secret agent with secrets and a deep seeded guilt thing. Which kinda felt like a harsher toned take on his Dick Grayson more than anything else. Which is fine.

Part of the problem here is that I did not read the New52 short term published book that was A.R.G.U.S. or whatever where Steve starred during the weird interim where Steve was not allowed around Diana and Lois wasn’t allowed around Clark but DC still wants to make money from fans anyway.

idk. And since those kinds of spy books are rarely my cup of tea, I don’t think this issue sold me on renigging on that instinct.

Still it was cute and Diana and Steve’s interactions, while minimal, are really the driving portion of his narrative which I think is always good.

But, just like the Annual, I’m left just sitting here going “why don’t we use this opportunity to show off the upcoming Wonder Woman creative team, DC????”

And I get no answer bc DC actually doesn’t care about some weirdo random blogger on the internet constantly screaming at them.

Viz’s Yona of the Dawn (2009-present) Vol. 6 Mizuho Kusanagi

I have actually been very interested in Akatsuki no Yona since I saw its anime show up in my Crunchyroll feed, and as with most anime I can’t help but immediately try to find the manga instead because I am impatient and want Answers Now. As I understand it, the Viz official translations are far behind the current run of the manga (makes sense, as the manga series has been ongoing since 2009 in Japan), and is only catching up to where the anime left off so far, but that’s more than okay for me right now.

Because oh my gosh, it’s so amazing to read such a beautiful story about the growth, empowerment, and pure will of a female character as told by a female author and artist. I’m not the biggest fan of Shoujo as a style of art, but having Yona strike a balance between beautiful and cutesy visuals with what is ultimately a fairly action driven plot with intense moral posturing and constant detail put into the grayness of life’s choices makes Yona of the Dawn honestly unlike just about any Shoujo I’ve read before.

Yona is one of the most compelling heroines I’ve ever seen, and her intensity of spirit and her meaningful examination of her kingdom makes this fairy tale story really unlike anything else out there.

And while I’ve really enjoyed Yona to this point, I have to say it is an amazing relief to reach Volume 6 an finally get more female characters than just Yona. I like the reverse harem appeal of the cast as it has been so far, and I have affection for several of the boys, but man is it so much more meaningful to have a few more compelling female characters backing up Yona in the representation department.

Especially since some of Yona’s crew still feel... a little bland to me. It’s usually not a good sign in a massive cast when the traits that come immediately to mind for me are purely character design.

I’m excited for what’s to come and to see how our Princess fully realizes her potential as the Crimson Dragon.

Also I should note some skeevy parts of this. One I don’t mind but am sure other people might, there’s the fact that Yona’s current storyline is dealing with Yona taking down a ring of human traffickers and slavers, which brings up the question of autonomy both for Yona as a woman in this honestly pretty traditionally sexist kingdom but also for the Dragons themselves and how their “service” to Yona is framed as a question of their own will. But it’s still a story about human trafficking and that could bother a lot of people. Another thing in this volume, which has bothered me in the previous volumes but really came to a head this time around, is Hak’s... weirdly possessive outbursts toward Yona. I get that they are meant as... idk protective and romantic to some and that we’re supposed to be compelled by his struggle to not show his affection for Yona, but honestly I’m just kinda... naw hoss. Like Hak’s a fine character and I like his relationship and history with Yona most of the time, but like.. the weird pushing her against walls and... licking honey off of her wrists and just. idk. We’re lost in translation here or something bc I’m not a fan.

I’m also not a fan of Viz’s weird changes in the font randomly throughout the book? Like just stop. It’s bad when your translations look lazier than the fan translations I’ve seen floating around on tumblr.

I’ll be honest, as high quality as I consider almost all of these comics this week, I would say the good majority of them did not give me a fully emotional experience or really captivate me in a way that satisfied me from start to finish. And I’m sure in the follow up issues to come there’ll be a lot for me to question into why that might be for the majority of them, but that time is not now. So, as much as it may feel like cheating to pick a volumed book over single issues, I can’t help but say that Yona of the Dawn by far is my pick of the week. It delighted, it changed up its structure and storytelling, built out its world and has started spending more time on the titular characters where before it often felt like we were just taking for granted that there was a dragon gained every volume. And Yona herself is just one of the most satisfying characters to see grow into their own.

But that’s just my opinion, I’d love to hear what you all think. Agree? Disagree? Think I missed a great comic this week? Please let me know!

#SPOILERS #Wednesday Spoilers #Rena Roundups #Yona of the Dawn #Wonder Woman (2016 )#Superman (2016 )#Transformers: Lost Light #Spiderman/Deadpool (2016 )#Wonder Woman: Steve Trevor (2017)#Batman (2016 )

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the-desolated-quill · 7 years

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The Riddle Of The Sphinx - Inside No. 9 blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

When dealing with writers and comedians that dedicate themselves to very dark subject matters, the question often arises of where you draw the line. How far is too far? Are there some tropes and topics that are simply out of bounds? Often this comes down to personal taste. In the case of Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, there have been a few occasions where they went dangerously close to overstepping the mark before reeling themselves back in just in time. The Riddle Of The Sphinx, for me anyway, is the very rare occasion where I think they went WAY too far.

This is purely a subjective opinion of course. If you enjoyed the episode, then good for you. Clearly you’ve got a stronger stomach than I have. Personally, I thought this episode was just plain disgusting. Now yes, Pemberton and Shearsmith have done disgusting stuff before (Dr. Chinnery in the League Of Gentlemen for instance), but it was often over the top and tongue in cheek. This was just so disgusting to the point where I felt like it wasn’t entertaining any longer. It was just gross and made me feel very uncomfortable. You could argue that was the point and... yeah, fair enough. But even so, I wish to explain why I feel this was a step too far.

Things start off well enough. A woman (played by Alexandra Roach) visits a university professor (played by Steve Pemberton) to learn about cryptic crosswords in order to impress her boyfriend. Then, in a twist you can see coming from space, she reveals herself as being super clever and has poisoned the professor as revenge for what happened to her brother (I’ll come to that later). Then in another twist it turns out that the professor has swapped cups, meaning that the woman is poisoned instead and is now paralysed while Reece Shearsmith’s character threatens and emotionally tortures him for... very bizarre reasons, which I’ve delve into later.

Just to be clear, it’s not the cannibalism I object to as such (although that did make me feel very physically sick. Also If you haven’t seen the episode yet and you chose to ignore my spoiler warning, I imagine reading that I don’t object to cannibalism must be the weirdest out-of-context sentence you’ve ever come across). Rather it’s the context within which the cannibalism occurs. It’s the blatant misogyny of it I have a problem. What we’re basically watching is a young woman being stripped of any power, independence or dignity while two middle aged men objectify her. It’s incredibly uncomfortable and sickening to watch, and I suppose you could argue that’s the intention, but surely there was something else they could have written that was just as uncomfortable whilst still engaging. For instance, did we really need the scene where the professor tries to touch her up while she’s paralysed? Or Shearsmith’s character asking the professor if he’d prefer a bit of breast or leg, before settling for ‘the rump’. It also commits the cardinal sin of focusing on the male character’s trauma while the woman is being tortured as opposed to the woman’s. Maybe if they just kept as a two hander, with the professor being in control for the first half and the woman in control for the second, I would have been okay with it. I don’t know.

But like I said, you can argue that it’s just personal taste. I was just thinking and feeling the stuff the writers wanted me to feel and I just couldn’t handle it. Fair enough. I won’t argue with that. But my problems with The Riddle Of The Sphinx go beyond the ick factor of it. I also really don’t like the way Pemberton and Shearsmith chose to go about writing this. Inside No. 9 of course takes a lot of influence from other anthology series like Tales Of The Unexpected and The Twilight Zone, which usually have a twist in the narrative that alters your perception of the story. The Riddle Of The Sphinx however seems to consist of nothing but twists, to the point where the narrative becomes hard to follow and where I just simply stopped caring. My perception of what was going on was being altered so much that I just switched off. I didn’t understand what was happening and, frankly, I don’t really want to. Why should I?

While Pemberton and Shearsmith are desperately trying to pull the rug out from under us, they completely forget two important things. Cohesion and emotional investment. The reason the twists worked in previous stories was because they were, for the most part, simple and were happening to characters we grew to like and care about over the course of the episode. I didn’t care about any of the characters in this episode. Because you’re bing bombarded with twists and the course of the narrative was being changed constantly, it’s damn near impossible to get a good read on them. One minute the professor is a kindly teacher, then he’s a cold hearted despot, then he’s a rapist and finally a weeping victim. How am I supposed to feel about this guy? Should I be rooting for him or not? I don’t know and I don’t think the writers know either.

It doesn’t help that the plot is borderline incomprehensible. As best as I can understand it, the woman’s brother killed himself because the professor cheated at a crossword competition (maybe if they actually took the time to delve deeper into that, maybe the brother’s motivation for killing himself wouldn’t come across as so idiotic. I mean really?! You killed yourself over a fucking crossword?!) and so the sister decides to poison the professor (because that's the most logical response, right? Clearly stupidity and irrationality is a family trait), only for the tables to be turned on her and she ends getting poisoned. Reece Shearsmith pops up, says he’s her dad and promptly carves a piece of her for the professor to eat in exchange for the antidote and to be cleared of the attempted frame up via crossword (yeah and that’s another thing. The professor came up with the clues to the crossword, right? So how did the clues oh so conveniently point to things that would happen that night. Did I miss a line of dialogue? Did Shearsmith help? If that’s the case, it’s the same bullshit logic as The Bill. There’s no way Shearsmith could have known that far in advance what would happen and with such precision. Loads of things could have gone wrong). And then Shearsmith reveals that his wife had an affair with the professor, which means the woman is in fact the professor’s child and now he should totes kill himself with a prop gun that somehow magically turns into a real gun the minute you put a bullet in it. Okay, bye.

It does just come across like they were just making this up as they went along. There’s no effort to really delve into how the characters feel about these various, ludicrous and utterly pointless twists. How, for instance, does Shearsmith’s character feel about knowing he’s not the father of his kids and that a colleague he once respected betrayed his trust? And how can he so cooly sacrifice his not-daughter so willingly in his convoluted revenge plot? Surely there’d still be an emotional bond there. Well maybe if the episode didn’t consist almost entirely of expository dialogue explaining the overly complex backstory as well as how the fucking crossword works, we could actually have explored those questions.

Let’s face it. The only thing The Riddle Of The Sphinx has going for it is shock value. Maybe all of this crap makes some kind of sense on a second viewing (I doubt it, but maybe). Normally I watch each episode twice before writing one of these blogs, but I don’t really want to in this case. Call me a stick in the mud, but I don’t think watching a woman being sexually victimised, carved and eaten is very entertaining. That’s not really how I wish to spend my Tuesday evenings.

#the riddle of the sphinx #inside no. 9 #steve pemberton #reece shearsmith #bbc #review #spoilers

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Yvonne Rainer on How Filmmaking Gave Her Language

From Lives of Performers (1972) (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

The inimitable dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer is having a retrospective of her films starting Friday, July 21 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. An instrumental force in avant-garde dance and key player in the inception of the art collective Judson Dance Theater, Rainer took to filmmaking in the 1970s, occupying a unique space that both straddled and rejected the modes of performance art, documentary, essay, and film. Her directorial debut Lives of Performers (1972) tells the story of a love triangle between members of a dance ensemble through lovingly captured rehearsals, scraps of text, and dissonant voiceover. Film About A Woman Who… (1974) probes the norms of romantic taboo by telling the story of an extramarital affair in hushed allusions and repressed memories, the characters known only as “he” and “she.” (In that film, Rainer briefly occupies the role of a lady lion tamer, who says “Martha Graham and Jean-Luc Godard were as responsible for my leaving the circus as anybody”). Across the board, Rainer’s films are formally innovative and disinterested in the established strictures of narrative — which is to say, of cliché.

Rainer’s movies collapse safe boundaries between maker, work, and audience, not just once or twice (for easy, cathartic effect) but consistently throughout, drawing you back to square one and insisting that you take a long, hard look at your own relationship to the screen — a relationship which, like so many others, Rainer does not let us forget is about power.

“I must emphasize that it was language that filmmaking offered to me,” Rainer said over the phone. She describes dance as more “limited” in this sense, but that ever since she recently starting choreographing again, she’s been incorporating text, from art criticism to news articles, that she avidly reads. “I put a microphone up and interrupt what the dancers are doing. I’m like this gadfly, roaming around the stage, trying to get messages out. And it’s all live.”

For an octogenarian art-world legend, Rainer wasn’t just approachable; she was self-effacing, unpretentious, and easy to talk to. Time and again, the artist shrugged off theoretical approaches in favor of bringing conversation back to her means of production and, above all else, the work itself.

* * *

From Film About A Woman Who… (1974) (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

Steve Macfarlane: To quote your own film, Journeys from Berlin: “let’s start somewhere.” In Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), a backdrop of environmental collapse is used to explore the dissolution of a relationship. Around that time you mentioned using the camera to fragment or zoom in on the things that had been unavailable to you as a choreographer.

Yvonne Rainer: Kristina was my third film. Having read this book about oil tankers and the dangers of their capsizing and spreading oil, the havoc they’d cause on the natural world, that was the main topic. My dancing was not narrative; it was abstract, athletic, it had references, perhaps, but to dance history. My M.O. was to deal with a broader range of social, political issues. Filmmaking, the New American Cinema — Hollis Frampton, Maya Deren, and others — it was a way to combine aesthetic concerns with specific social issues. Then there were my contemporaries, Laura Mulvey and Peter Woolen, who made “talking pictures” with a lot of dialogue and didacticism. I knew them; my work was on programs with theirs.

From Kristina Talking Pictures (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

SM: Where were these screenings happening?

YR: Anthology Film Archives. The same situation as today: small film showcases, universities… I’ve never been in the big theaters that show Hollywood films.

SM: So much of the work plays with annotation: newspaper clippings, unattributed quotes, performers almost possessed by dialogues or texts that “break the spell” of the filmmaking.

YR: I must emphasize that it was language that filmmaking offered to me: I could play around with voice, I could interrupt someone speaking with a title or subtitle. Dance at that point seemed very limited to me in terms of my wider interests.

SM: Tell me about the decision to use that Rolling Stones song “No Expectations” in Lives of Performers.

YR: Oh… I just liked the song. It comes in halfway through a series of tableaux vivants — I probably just felt I had to liven up this staid, silent progression.

SM: So practical!

YR: A lot of choices had to do with duration. My feelings at that time were heavily prompted by John Cage: “if you can stand it for two minutes, try it for four.” In Film About A Woman Who…, there’s a long, slow tracking shot that seems interminable to me now. If I’m ever in an audience when it’s projected, I stay just to see when people will walk out! (Laughs) Sometimes the aesthetic adhered to more conventional standards, and then other times it was subject to disruption — the radical juxtaposition I mentioned earlier. If there’s any hard and fast rule, I guess it’s that one. Which I have continued to do throughout my film career.

From Kristina Talking Pictures (1976) (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

SM: If that shot took an eternity in 1972, it can only be more radical now: everything’s faster, shorter, louder, more saturated.

YR: There’s a scene in Jean Vigo’s Zero For Conduct where a boy has to stay after school, alone, in the classroom as punishment. He’s there for quite a while — fiddling his feet or his hands — and we have to stay with him. It’s far longer than you would expect in a film, then or today — and for Lives I took that and ran with it, when Valda Setterfield is sitting on the couch. There’s a cat beside her. She’s facing the camera, her back is against the wall. I let her go long twitching her feet — that was fascinating to me. It’s almost like a photograph. So yeah, I was very interested in what one could get away with. I didn’t feel I was violating any traditional narrative rules. The point was: What minimum of movement could keep you, or me, interested, at that particular moment? The end tableaux all had an exact duration of 15 seconds, something like that, timed with a stopwatch. At the end of each shot, the movement comes and you cut to the still. Like a metronome. And “No Expectations” came in exactly two thirds of the way through.

SM: And before that sequence, you see them rehearsing together one last time. The room empties out and there’s one last intertitle: “Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint. Something is expected of the other person and that makes him (and ourselves) unfree.”

YR: That’s Jung. I always felt other people could say things more accurately than I could (laughs). Now, since I’ve returned to dance, quotation is almost entirely what I utilize. It’s enabled me to come back to choreography; I no longer dance so much as I read. So there’s a continuity from the way I use language in film to the way I use it now, the kind of radical juxtaposition, to choreographic images. That itself is a quotation from Susan Sontag — films are full of radical juxtapositions — language, enactment, imagery.

From Mind Is a Muscle (1963)

SM: Is that something you’ve taken from filmmaking and put back into choreography?

YR: I made seven films, from 1972 to 1996, mainly through grants. Each doubled or tripled in cost, ranging from five to 10 thousand dollars in the early ’70s to $250,000 for MURDER and murder… I wasn’t about to make compromises in making more accessible kinds of work. I still wanted to make narrative films, and I could no longer raise the money.

And I was never very comfortable as a filmmaker; I loved the writing and editing, but the production, with the hierarchy, there was never enough money, and post-production… It was a nightmare to deal with laboratories where things were always going wrong and I didn’t have the money to reshoot. My work wasn’t very polished technically. I was, am, and will continue to be a techno-dummy! So I always knew there was a limited time I could do this. The economics of it create a preordained ending. I had my fill of the technical complications of filmmaking.

I remember arguments with Babette Mangolte, who taught me all about editing and was camerawoman on my first two-and-a-half films. She said, “You’ve done this twice, don’t do it again!” Sometimes I listened, sometimes I didn’t. Peter Wollen always used to say: “They let you make five.” Well, they, whoever they were, the powers that be, let me make seven. And I felt very lucky. But in a way I was very happy returning to dance. I never did my own camerawork, that’s part of my technical inaptitude.

I was always overly dependent on other people. As a choreographer I can relate to the dancers, I can feel more comfortable — to me it’s a much more direct situation in terms of creating something.

From Lives of Performers (1972) (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

SM: Lives of Performers struck me as this quintessentially collaborative, 1960s effort. Then I looked at your book of screenplays, published in 1989, and realized how meticulously your work is written ahead of time.

YR: But Lives was different from all my other films. In the few places where it might seem to be in sync, the speech was dubbed. This process entailed making a rough cut without sound, letting the performers all look at it, and then recording their responses — laughing, commenting. I also assigned them various instructions in this kind of makeshift script: read this. Paraphrase this. So you’re hearing variations in the way they speak. And I was still dancing then. I had a performance at the Whitney: one side of the space I projected a rough cut without sound, while the performers sat in front and read their lines, while other live performers did the same things that you saw in the projected images. I never made anything like that again. The scripts were much more detailed and better adhered-to than that one. So now I am very fond of Lives — it has a kind of impromptu, ad hoc aspect I never tried to duplicate again.

SM: The first film of yours I saw was The Man Who Envied Women.

YR: Where the main character, Jack Deller — as in, “Jack, Tell Her” — is played by two different actors.

SM: Tell me about shooting the lecture scene, wherein Jack (or the two Jacks, as it were) are lecturing on Foucault and Lacan. The camera slowly wraps around the lectern, back to the audience, past the audience, into the other rooms of the apartment… Students are splaying light on them as they ask questions, the audio tracks are blending, the dynamics are all out of whack, untenable.

YR: Oh, the impossible lecture scene. That came verbatim from my friend, the philosopher Thomas Zummer, who had been a disciple of Foucault. I just put his lecture in the mouths of the two actors in front of this very bored classroom, and ran with it. A funny scene, but in hindsight I’m critical of it. Not for the lecture, but because it was in a huge, newly renovated loft I was borrowing from an artist, who hadn’t moved in yet. One of the themes of that film is artists buying abandoned tenements in the Lower East Side. We move from the lecture space to this empty, new kitchen area, and then this glass, brick wall, into the bathroom… I was exploring these icons of real estate development in lower Manhattan. But I don’t think that’s clear enough. If I were to do it again I would put a big banner on the wall: “MOVE UP TO DOWNTOWN.” I saw that banner traveling in Seattle — the real estate agents were encouraging people to buy these newly developed co-ops.

From The Man Who Envied Women (1985) (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

SM: You use yet another framing device when Jack sits and talks about his sex life, and scenes from Hollywood movies from his generation’s childhood are playing behind him. There’s a lot of choreography in that, too.

YR: Well, these are film noirs — all films about women either putting themselves down or being put down, condescended to, by men. Even after Barbara Stanwyck finally shoots Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, she’s apologizing for it! I was very influenced by my becoming conscious of the role women play in patriarchy. All those films behind Jack reflect that.

I was trying to deal with different power relations — the power of the community in the Lower East Side, to shoot down the city’s attempts at making money off of middle-class artists, selling them property, and then the other events going on at that time.

SM: The film also uses Jack’s milieu to interrogate artist communities during the Reagan Administration — there’s a through-line about death squads in Central America, and the ineffectiveness of artists, of “high culture” at large, in standing against something like that. Were you at a point of frustration?

YR: Oh. I never expected my work to change the world in any way. The best I can ask of anything I do is that it gives support and encouragement to like-minded people. Certainly I don’t rule out art’s possibility to intervene, especially in the situation we’re in now. We have to keep making moves against this appalling presidency — I’m signing six petitions a day! Artists have to stay awake, and not belittle small moves. You have to try, to join with other people and get resistance into your work, whatever way you can — even in dance (laughs). I still find that harder to do.

SM: What’s harder?

YR: I’m interested in movements and by moving people around, but it’s still restricted by the norms and history of choreography. Again: language is where I can still make inroads and make allusions to a larger world. I love to switch gears, to keep you guessing, pulling them in and then pushing them away — a Brechtian device. You so easily lose yourself in narrative conventions, the shot-reverse shot; even in the later films, I always try to break that up. And wake you up, so to speak.

SM: Your work is always self-aware in the sense that it shows how film images lie.

YR: Language lies, but there’s a lot of irony to the language I use. Outright description, commentary, etcetera. When quotations are being juxtaposed to the dancers, it’s interrupting what happens on stage. If I were still making films I would probably present this Ghosh quote in a rolling title. I don’t know what the image would be around/before/after it, but you know — sometimes I would have someone read it, or…. But I would get this message out, somehow.

SM: It’s hard not to think of your “No Manifesto” (1965), which included: “No to the glamor and transcendency of the star image”; “No to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer”; and “No to moving or being moved.” Your filmmaking was never about pretty pictures. To you, what is the value of beauty today?

From Film About A Woman Who… (1974) (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

YR: I’m as susceptible to beauty as the next person. A little bit goes a long way, maybe? I just saw The Beguiled, with Kirsten Dunst and Nicole Kidman. The way Sofia Coppola cuts away to these southern, misty, cobwebby, moss-ridden landscapes over and and over again — well, I thought she overdid it a bit. But, it’s not my aesthetic. It is surprising though, how that male character who seems so seductive and sympathetic in the beginning, all of a sudden he becomes a monster — and I’m such a realist or a literalist, you know, I don’t believe Kidman’s character character would have the expertise to cut off his leg without him dying of sepsis. I found that very unlikely. But that’s what conventional films do: they condense what might be a much longer narrative and you have to go along with it. The devices do draw you in, but I like fewer and fewer movies being made today.

One film I saw recently which excited me was Streetscapes by the German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz. It was an ambitious and captivating survey of his obsessions and personal history with architecture and film. I’m still processing it.

Film noir was wonderful for me — on TV I would sit and binge every afternoon; around 3 o’clock, they were showing film noirs. And before that, in San Francisco, my father, who was trilingual, would take me to see French and Italian art movies. Those were the days! But when you’re younger you’re much more susceptible to those kinds of things — then you undergo a kind of stiffening that prevents you from enjoying what younger people enjoy. After all, I’m 82 years old — I can’t expect to enjoy what a 20-year-old is inspired by.

Talking Pictures: The Cinema of Yvonne Rainer is at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (70 Lincoln Center Plaza #7, Upper West Side, Manhattan) July 21–27.

The post Yvonne Rainer on How Filmmaking Gave Her Language appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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