JOCELYNE CHAPUT - FILM EDITOR
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"our apparently factual reality"

1/22/2016

 
I can see something true through the camera that is not immediately visible. If I start from you and your expectation as a participant of what cinema should be, you will start staging yourself, you’ll start acting out an idealized image of yourself, you’ll start acting out the fantasies that you hold of yourself. And I’ll be able to know how you dream of yourself, how you imagine the world. And that’s also how I tried to use the camera, especially in The Act of Killing. And I think that’s the state of nature for the non-fiction camera. If I put a camera on anybody, they start to perform. And from that performance we can see how people want to be seen. And we can infer how they really see themselves. In short, we can see the role of fiction storytelling and fantasy in constituting our apparently factual reality.

- Joshua Oppenheimer, interviewed by Dana Knight for The Independent

some insights from talk with Joshua Oppenheimer

1/20/2016

 
I was lucky to catch a discussion with Joshua Oppenheimer in Vancouver  before a screening of The Look of Silence. Along with its precursor The Act of Killing, these two films are staggering companion pieces, must-sees that are having very real impacts on filmmakers, politicians, societies, etc. For in-depth pieces, try this one from The Atlantic, or this one from The Independent. 
Since most who attended the talk are involved in filmmaking, he indulged our curiosity about the particulars of his process and techniques. Here are a few highlights :

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a satisfying pairing of two passages from Murakami's 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' 

1/18/2016

 
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*this one reminds me of film editing...
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*... and this one is like watching a film.

Jules et Jim revisited

1/15/2016

 
Tonight I re-watched Jules et Jim, a choice made after spotting the excellent poster at a coffee shop (excellent because it depicts Catherine, not the titulary Jules and Jim.... clever), and realizing I had large gaps in my memory to refill.
​
The film is a free-spirited rendition of sweet and free going sour and confined, on many levels. It's a radiant reminder that cinematic freedom can be exercised in every department, and meaningfully. 
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Truffaut embraces contradiction to create meaning—Jules and Jim is sad yet humorous, breathless yet contemplative, universal yet hermetic, based on a book by a man in his 70s yet directed by a man in his 20s. It knows of life's folly so intimately that it is impossibly naïve, and its selfless love of the cinema borders on narcissistic.

​[...]

This is not a great film because it equals the sum of its parts, but because it so fully embodies the altruism of its maker. It represents some of the first and most essential steps into a new age of filmmaking, one that you wish would endure still.

- Chuck Rudolph, for Slant Magazine

they live on

1/14/2016

 
When a public luminary leaves us suddenly, it hits hard because they never withdrew from their vital role in present-day humanity. Today I thank: David Bowie, Oliver Sacks and Karen Schmeer. Their stars will never dim.

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Terry Gross on the interviewer's potential

1/11/2016

 
"Anyone who agrees to be interviewed must decide where to draw the line between what is public and what is private," Gross says. "But the line can shift, depending on who is asking the questions. What puts someone on guard isn't necessarily the fear of being 'found out.' It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood."
http://www.npr.org/people/2100593/terry-gross

editing Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

1/10/2016

 
I didn't realize (but am not so surprised) it took 5 years to build and finesse this masterpiece of overlapping patterns that span highly distinctive lifestyles and life forms.

​"That's the big joke. It wasn't fast at all, and it wasn't cheap, but it was out of control." (Karen Schmeer)

Karen Schmeer discusses editing "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" from Schmeer Fellowship on Vimeo.

highlights from interview with editors of new Star Wars

1/9/2016

 

Mary Jo: A first cut is never a first cut. It's usually my fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth cut by the time I'm ready to show it to J.J.. It's one reason why I absolutely detest the term 'editor's assembly'. We are taking a point of view, and cutting something with intent. We are not 'assembling' anything.
[...]
Creative COW: Out of curiosity, were either of you Star Wars fans in a major way before this?

Maryann: I was a big Star Wars fan.
[...]

Mary Jo: I was not a fan. I mean, it's not that I was anti-Star Wars, I just wasn't particularly into the films and I didn't see them until it turned out that I was going to be working on them.
[...]
I also think there was an actual advantage to that. I didn't have this feeling of things being sacred. I could just look at it, maybe at times a little more dispassionately. "Well even if it is true that you're making this reference to this thing that you all hold near and dear, it's not really working here," or whatever. 


And I think J.J. felt that too. In fact, when I first told him that I hadn't seen the Star Wars movies, he said he didn't want me to see them. That was his first response. "Oh that's great! Don't see them! You'll be be like the person we want to attract who's never seen the movies."

[...]
Mary Jo: We started with the dialog between the characters, and their actions. We might have something to slot in if there was a previz done for the scene, but most of the time, we didn't have that. The fact that we start with the actions of characters creates a personal way into the action of the scene. 

Maryann: Any action sequence is better if you're in it WITH the character.​

​https://library.creativecow.net/wilson_tim/Editing_Star-Wars-The-Force-Awakens/1

supplement to the last post... 

1/8/2016

 
... because the notion of 'truth' is open to excellent, necessary debate/conversation, of which the previous post is but one hint. I turn to Errol Morris for more depth: 
First on Radiolab, discussing the truth/untruth of an 1855 photograph taken during the Crimean War: 
And in conversation with The Believer. I pulled a few excerpts (below) but the whole article is worth a read!
... to me these are really, really, really important issues. 
[...]
... the claim that everybody sees the world differently, is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim. What really surprised me on re-watching Rashomon is that you know what really happened at the end. It's pretty damn clear. Kurosawa gives you the pieces of evidence that allow you to figure out what really happened. So, it's not what many people imagine it to be, but it is a very powerful story about self-interest, about wishful thinking, about self-deception, about people imagining scenarios at variance with the truth. And so I found Rashomon to be far more interesting than I had remembered it. With an underlying theme very much like The Thin Blue Line. Truth exists, but people have a vested interest in not knowing it.
[...]
I was surprised at the time that The Thin Blue Line came out that people reacted to the reenactments as blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. Between documentary and drama. My feeling was the exact opposite. It was telling us how images can confuse us. Images are not reality, nor do I claim that they are. In fact, they usually bear a very complicated relationship to reality. And when people talk about reenactments, I like to point out that consciousness, itself, is a reenactment. Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray-matter of the brain. Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real. Take the first line in Vernon, Florida: "Reality. You mean, this is the real world. I never thought of that."

http://errolmorris.com/content/interview/believer0404.html

to a year of staying true to the 'integrity of ideas'

1/8/2016

 
Diana Vreeland's fashion-forward ideas are currently cruising at breakneck speeds in the form of in-flight entertainment. Something tells me she would approve. The 'entertainment' in question is a biographical documentary about her called Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel. The film appeals on many fronts, not just the fashion/art perspective. One of my favorite parts - in her later career with the Met's Costume Institute - recounts her insistence on exaggerating the wig of a mannequin for the exhibit 'The Eighteenth-Century Woman' (pictured below). In reasoning with designer Harold Koda (who happens to be stepping down this month from heading the Costume Institute), she says, and I'm paraphrasing, 'it is not about showing the whole complete truth, but the integrity of the idea' . 
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See 'read more' for another example from the film Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

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