tiny little hands

 i didn’t always think i had giant hands. my husband says they’re tiny, but on camera, no. so yesterday, while shooting at Shep’s Studio, i asked Cammie, the receptionist, to “stand in,” to loan me her tinylittlehands for the shot of a person picking up the scrap of paper (see earlier posts). she had bright red nail polish on short trimmed nails, and her incredibly delicate hands looked so lovely in the shot.

as an actor, i get angry that directors always want the tiniest people. i’m not tiny. but so i had a completely different perspective yesterday. wondering, how can i best create this image? and that answer was, “tinier, go tinier.” damn.

into the bathroom

 i love a good bathroom scene. they are especially good if the bathroom is sparsely decorative and modernminimalist (with, possibly,   Provençale touches). so i’m excited to start filming at my friend’s salon, where the bathroom is all that (i’ll post a picture after tomorrow). the plan is to approximate a person walking into the bathroom, having  a seat, and then spying the inspirational “art” on the floor (see earlier posts). i wish i had one of those stabilizing belt things that allow you to move w/ your camera w/out jostling all over. i once had an editor comment upon my “style as a filmmaker,” by which he meant, shakycam (merde). i don’t go in for that, but it happens when you make ridiculously independent films w/ no budget or crew. sometimes, it’s funny. sometimes, it’s distracting. it always makes me long for a crew, but then, i wonder about the extent to which i would have control given a crew. i once saw an emerging filmmaker (who has since won several prestigious awards) argue with a d.p. on a shoot at the Sundance Filmmaker Labs . . . really fight. i mean, to the point where the d.p. threatened to walk off the project. it was something to see. and i got it. completely. each believed that their vision and expertise was compromised by the other. in making my first short film, proposition 1984, my first editor (the one i watched to learn final cut pro) was insistent that i hung on my opening shot for too long. but i was going for that, that destabilizing “what is this?” vibe that might invite a reflective film viewer to desire more and to frustrate an “ordinary” (i realize that’s a horribly problematic distinction) film viewer into staying because damn it, i’ve been waiting and she’s a friend so i’d better not be the only one to get up and leave.

more after the shoot.

filming begins

 . . . on my little film “remove to dispense” this coming tuesday, may 28 @ 6:00 pm. i am using my friend’s ultra-modern and sleek salon space to mimic the MoMA. the place is shep’s studio in provo, utah (801.373.4085 . . . no website yet, although i’ve been yelping at him to make one). shep is a masterful stylist, and the salon is an experience w/ a lovely minimalist vibe. i’m lucky to have access to it for filming purposes. can’t wait. i may even shoot some video for a film i’d planned long ago — “shep’s beard” — sort of a takeoff on that lovely, short coffeetablebook, Dali’s Mustache (salvidor dali & phillipe halsman). shep frequently refashions his facial hair in ways that recall dali’s distinguishing visual characteristic and how he plays with it in the book. because shep is interesting to look at and especially interesting to watch as he works, and because his facial hair is, well, intriguiging in its various iterations, i want to make a little film about it. hopefully, he will also cooperate with this project, come tuesday evening.

remove to dispense

so what has us confused about film as rhetoric? i have recently heard a linguist say that visual images (central to filmic meaning) are merely “stimuli” because  they cannot provide for Toulminian warrants and that thus film cannot operate as rhetoric apart from language (as words). but it seems to me that visual images in filmic texts operate rhetorically in ways that may or may not align w/ authorial intention, the latter being fairly irrelevant. but still some rhetoricians and linguists will say that rhetoric is nothing w/out a centralizing exigence which is discerned and acted upon by a human agent. and this may be true in a limited way, limited because we know that meaning emerges regardless of these authorial hunches and actions.  it seems absurd to deny film’s status as rhetoric on the basis of an absent Toulimian warrant rendered in words; in fact, recognizing this absurdity reveals rhetoric’s disciplinary vulnerability and the ego instabilities of people working in these fields (and i am one of them), where claims to generalizing concepts that enable or reject other concepts assist the field (and careers) in their coherence/power projects.  Toulmin — one rhetorical conceptualization, the warrant, not the whole of rhetoric and meaning and intention and linguistic action and social exchange but a potential rhetorical choice, a choice that often emerges regardless of intention (and intention is where the argument hinges). within film,  meaning evolves (just as a filmmaker intended, let’s say) via adherence to genre conventions . . . and/or they are emergent and diverse, and they happen beyond what a filmmaker means or intends or imagines. this is nothing new, the fallacy of authorial intention, but it seems to me that my colleague’s rejection of film as rhetoric hinges upon authorial intention as a determinant of a language project’s status as rhetoric; i keep coming back to this insistence as a form of absurdity that is frustrating in the extreme. and i think it’s about ego and disciplinary identity and power. thus, my new little film, “remove to dispense,” which i hope to complete within the next month or so. inspired by a scrap of cardboard i found on the bathroom floor at MoMA, it’s a throw-away object, but in its graphic and ideational simplicity, it appealed to me as art. maybe this is because of how my intellectual interests converge with my aesthetics or my punk roots or because i had just watched some warhol video . . .