Hollywood leaves a lot to be desired in terms of innovation. Studios tend to find something that works, and then squeeze out every penny possible. The viability of these brainless practices aside, it takes quite a bit for the town to even consider greenlighting an original property, let alone a complete restructuring.
But a restructuring is exactly what happened in Hollywood in the ‘60s and ‘70s, despite the laborious pace of the shift (compared to what was happening in Europe), and all the resulting resistance. “The New Cinema,” a short documentary produced sometime in the late 1960s (the exact date is unknown) has found new life on the Internet recently and takes an in depth look at the old Hollywood system and the new crowd of directors who were on the verge of starting one of the great cinematic rebirths.
Directed by Gary Young, “The New Cinema” features some great impromptu interviews from the likes of Roman Polanski, Andy Warhol, Dustin Hoffman, Francis Ford Coppola, and the up-and-coming at the time George Lucas. And while the doc is interesting in its own right, it’s amazing to see this particular collection of filmmakers, most of whom would make some of the greatest movies in history.
It really is impossible to overstate the fact that most of the music around us sounds the way it does today because of an electronic revolution that happened primarily in the 1960s and 70s (with roots stretching back to the turn of the century). While folk and rock and roll solidified the sound of the present on home hi-fis and coffee shop and festival stages, the sound of the future was crafted behind studio doors and in scientific laboratories. What the Future Sounded Like, the short documentary above, transports us back to that time, specifically in Britain, where some of the finest recording technology developed to meet the increasing demands of bands like the Beatles and Pink Floyd.
Much less well-known are entities like the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, whose crew of engineers and audio scientists made what sounded like magic to the ears of radio and television audiences. “Think of a sound, now make it,” says Peter Zinovieff “any sound is now possible, any combination of sounds is now possible.” Zinovieff, London-born son of an émigré Russian princess and inventor of the hugely influential VCS3 synthesizer in 1969, opens the documentary—fittingly, since his technology helped power the futuristic sound of progressive rock, and since, together with the Radiophonic Workshop’s Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, he ran Unit Delta Plus, a studio group that created and promoted electronic music.
Also appearing in the documentary is Tristram Cary, who, with Zinovieff, founded Electronic Music Studios, one of four makers of commercial synthesizers in the late sixties, along with ARP, Buchla, and Moog. Zinovieff and Carey are not household names in part because they didn’t particularly strive to be, preferring to work behind the scenes on experimental forms and eschewing popular music even as their technology gave birth to so much of it. The aristocratic Zinovieff and pipe-smoking, professorial Carey hardly fit in with the crowd of rock and pop stars they inspired.
In hindsight, however, Zinovieff desires more recognition for their work. “One thing which is odd, is that there’s a missing chapter, which is EMS, in all the books about electronic music. People do not know what incredible mechanical adventures we were up to.” Those adventures included not only creating new technology, but composing never-before-heard music. Both Zinovieff and Carey continue to create electronic scores, and Carey happens to be one of the first adopters in Britain of musique concrète, the proto-electronic music pioneered in the 1940s using tape machines, microphones, filters, and other recording devices, along with found sounds, field recordings, and ad hoc instruments made from non-instrument objects. (See examples of these techniques in the clip above from the 1979 BBC documentary The New Sound of Music.)
Many of the sounds that emerged from Britain’s electronic music founders came out of the detritus of World War II. Carey’s first serious studio design, he says, “coincided with the post-war appearance of an enormous amount of junk from the army, navy, and air force. For someone who knew what to do, and could handle a soldering iron, and could design audio equipment, even if you only had 30 shillings in your pocket, you could get something.” With their knowledge of electronics and hodge-podge of technology, Carey and his compatriots were designing an avant-garde electronic “high modernity,” author Trevor Pinch declares. “I think you can think of people like Tristan Carey as dreaming of a future soundscape of London.” Nowadays, those sounds are as familiar to us as the music piped over the speakers in restaurants and shops. One wonders what the future after the future these pioneers designed will sound like?
Screenplay By: Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke & Richard Linklater Directed By: Richard Linklater
You know that you are watching a great movie when Baseball Tonight has taken up most of your night and at about midnight you figure, “Oh, what the heck I’ll start this and watch a little bit before I fall asleep” but next thing you know it’s one thirty in the morning and time has passed you by. That is what happened with my viewing of Before Sunset. I already had a good jumping off point since I loved the preceding Before Sunrise, but loving one movie doesn’t guarantee you’ll love it’s successor. Before Sunset is a different movie, it’s much the same as Before Sunrise, but in important ways it is very different. Before Sunset is engaging to the point of time flying by. It’s not paced fast, it’s paced naturally, yet it moves by at incredible speed because it is one of those rare movies where real time stops while you watch it. Some sort of cosmic speed time takes over and time moves faster than it should. Maybe I sound crazy, but hopefully this is a feeling others have had with some movie, because I know I have had the feeling of the loss of real time with more than a few stellar films.
It’s inevitable that similarities will exist with Before Sunrise, the crew of Before Sunset is essentially the same across the board as it was in Before Sunrise. The same conversational tone remains, the dialogue flows free and easy between the two leads and is highly engaging and smart for the audience to take in. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have the same chemistry as before. They are in sync with one another from the get go and it shows. As with Before Sunrise you have two actors giving brilliant performances that will no doubt go unnoticed by the great masses. Yes, Before Sunset is similar to Before Sunrise, but in so many ways it is very different.
The conversations are still existential in nature, but now they are of a different existentialism. In Before Sunrise the focus was on Jesse and Celine as individuals, how they viewed the world and how the world affected them. Before Sunset changes up their viewpoint in accordance with their older ages and new found maturity. Now they talk in terms of how issues relate to them only in the larger picture. The focus isn’t on them as individuals, rather the focus is on Jesse and Celine and the world. Big issues are still tackled, some of the same issues from Before Sunrise are touched upon again, but now they offer worldly insight as opposed to individual insight.
Before Sunset is a love story and a film about the relationship of Jesse and Celine. But, it’s also not a love story and not about their relationship. It’s important to realize that the film works on both levels. At the same time you have the personal story of these two characters and how they feel about each other, there is the theme of growth in humanity. The movie focuses on the ideas of growing up, how we change and why, what we were like, what we remember and what the future may hold for us just as much as it focuses on the very intimate tale of Jesse and Celine. All the while you are taken by the story of these two maybe meant for each other people, you are also caught up in the larger picture of where humanity stands today in relation to the growth of these two characters.
In a film like Before Sunset it’s easy to overlook the role the director plays. Richard Linklater once again makes his camera another character, we live through his camera because it allows us to become a part of every conversation and moment. But, in Before Sunset his camera isn’t static like it was in Before Sunrise. This time the camera moves, it circles around, it tracks, follows, etc.. The locales aren’t just backgrounds in Before Sunset, because this time Jesse and Celine aren’t in a fantasy world. Before Sunset is real, they have real consequences to deal with and they know it. So does the camera, it never frames them as solitary beings off in their own world. Linklater presents Jesse and Celine as part of the larger world around them, their fantasy night is long over, now they are enmeshed in reality.
If forced to pick, and this is really hard, my favorite aspect of Before Sunset would be the idea of how our past greatly affects us. One missed chance can have serious repercussions just as much as one mistake. Our past leads to problems that will haunt us through all our waking hours, and our past even seeps into our dreams. More than anything our past can lead to an inability to connect. The car ride is the best example of this, filled with many moments where Jesse and Celine want to connect with each other, they reach out to each other but they can’t because of their fear of the consequences of their actions and remembrances of past pain. The car ride displays this idea beautifully, and that is when Hawke and Delpy are at their most powerful, eliciting emotion from each other and from the audience. Cheesy drama isn’t needed, in the simple act of watching one break down and the other try to console but fail we feel for these characters more than any manufactured drama could hope to make us feel.
The ascent up the stairs to Celine’s apartment is handled masterfully. That is when the film begins to mold into whatever shape you have decided to apply to it. Their ascent is full of oodles of bottled up tension, with each and every turn on that stairwell it feels like something should happen, needs to happen, but you know it can’t. This leads into the perfect ending, it is sweet and it is honest. It’s also up to each individual to interpret the oncoming blackness in their own way. Does Jesse leave or doesn’t he? Do they both go back to their false lives or do they finally realize that they were meant for each other and give it a go? You can’t go wrong no matter what way you go, but I tend to believe that Jesse stays and they end up together. I’m sure that is the hopeless romantic in me coming out, but what can I say, I am hopeless after all.
Maybe this is the last we will see of these characters, or maybe Linklater, Hawke and Delpy plan to come back in another nine years. I can only hope that is the case, because those three, along with the rest of the crew, have found a winning combination. If they don’t come back then I am still content, because Before Sunset is a splendid movie, a rarity that doesn’t come along all that often. More would be welcome, but if this is all I get then I couldn’t ask for anything better.
Dr. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) inhabits the perfect role in a movie that’s a story about telling stories. She works in the equally fictional-sounding position of narratologist, specializing in myths and legends, and while she resides and teaches in London, at the start of “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” she’s arriving in Istanbul for a conference. Writer and director George Miller based his movie on the title story in A.S. Byatt’s 1994 anthology “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” but it’s apparent early on that “Three Thousand Years of Longing” is as much a personal, affectionate tribute to the power of story as it is a fantasy about the highs and lows of love and desire. When Alithea arrives at her hotel in Istanbul, she’s surprised with a stay in the Agatha Christie suite, where the famed mystery writer reportedly penned her most renowned work, “Murder on the Orient Express.” At a lecture, she and a colleague delve into how comic book superheroes comprise our modern myths, a graphic prominently featuring Superman displayed behind her. And at a curio shop in this ancient city from which stemmed some of the world’s most oft-told tales, Alithea buys a pretty little vase she digs out from beneath a pile of knick-knacks.
It’s after she returns to her hotel room that Alithea becomes a part of those stories that so much of her life seems to revolve around. While scrubbing the dirty bottle, she inadvertently pops its top and unleashes billowing clouds of purple smoke that coalesce into an enormous, human-like being: a djinn (Idris Elba). After the djinn gets situated, quickly catching up on the current culture and language by examining Alithea’s laptop and TV, he informs Alithea that she needs to make three wishes— her heart’s desire, with some limitations— because after he grants them he will finally be free. It’s the sort of opportunity most people would leap at, but Alithea is flummoxed. She, ever practical, has no heart’s desire— at least, she doesn’t think she does. In her narration that opens the film, she states that she is alone (no spouse, no children) and likes it that way. We later discover through her conversations with the Djinn that she was married, once, but that she and her husband grew apart and he eventually left her for another woman, a child lost before it was even born implied to be the impetus for their downward spiral.
But moreover, because she is so well-verses in myths, Alithea knows what the Djinn is capable of, and of what follies can come of indulging in his powers. To catch her up on how he came to be her in possession, the Djinn tells Alithea three stories: three stories of love, and how the actions love spurred him to caused him to end up back inside the bottle every time, spanning from three thousand years ago to the time of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), to palace concubine Gülten (Ece Yüksel) in the time of the Ottoman Prince Mustafa in the 1500s, to the intelligent and fiery Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), a woman thirsty for knowledge and stuck in a passionless marriage to a much older man. Like most anthologies, these extended flashbacks framed as the Djinn telling Alithea stories as they huddle in her room occasionally miss the mark, but it’s difficult not to be drawn in by Miller’s beguiling concoction of fantasy and history, especially when Elba is the storyteller, his low voice conveying the tinges of sadness and regret over his past that provide the emotional beats the narrative sorely needs. The spell-binding visuals don’t hurt either. Some of the computer effects aren’t too convincing, but cinematographer John Seale (who Miller lured out of retirement for 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” and again to work on “Three Thousand Years”) works his magic, whirling the viewer over vast landscapes and elaborate palace interiors and in and out of the Djinn’s perspective. Exhilarating cinema is crafted even from the scenes where the characters are mostly sedentary. He keeps the camera moving even when characters are just sitting in a car, or following Alithea out of the airport. Margaret Sixel, Miller’s wife and frequent collaborator, serves as editor and enhances the camerawork even more with her cuts, a series of match cuts in the aforementioned sequence, for example, tracing the wheels of the plane touching down, to the wheels of Alithea’s baggage cart as she disembarks.
It’s when “Three Thousand Years” turns into its overlong fourth act after the stories have been told that it becomes a much more trying affair. Alithea discovers that she does want to make a wish, as much to her surprise as it is to the viewer. Miller’s attempt to end on a big swing for romance is admirable, but the change in Alithea is too abrupt, and the romantic chemistry between Swinton and Elba, talented performers though they are (I mean, who else could play a a woman named Alithea Binnie but Swinton?), is too flat when it ought to sizzle. The issue of the film’s exoticism of people of color, a problem that haunts the otherwise fantastical images Miller conjures in his imaginings of Middle Eastern countries and peoples throughout, takes on an even more troubling edge in this chapter as well. Perhaps being a magical being like a Djinn means he transcends race, but Elba’s character is essentially repressed by a white woman for an extended period of time, existing to serve her but not able to be his own person because of that. Of course, that’s part of the film’s lesson—that love must grow organically and not be forced, so that by the end of the movie the Djinn spends time with Alithea of his own volition— but the casting of a Black man and a white woman in these specific roles automatically casts a problematic shadow over the relationship.
Despite issues that make for an underwhelming experience, I kind of love that “Three Thousand Years Longing” is the movie Miller chose to make in between his acclaimed— and dare I say, revolutionary?— “Fury Road,” and his upcoming prequel to that film, “Furiosa.” Proving over and over throughout his career that he is as adept at creating charming family fare (“Babe,” “Happy Feet”) as he is gritty dystopian action movies, Miller marries the two here for a story that, for all the tragedies it contains, is too in love with love and with the creation and telling of tales to ever feel cynical. And it’s a real family affair as well; in addition to Sixel, Miller collaborated on the screenplay with his daughter, Augusta Gore. That affection that exists in the very fabric of the film’s creation is reflected on screen, because for all its faults, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” above all makes it clear that it is never too late to open up to love.
After the Crash 