The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974/France/dir. Jacques Rivette) appeared at #97 on my original list.

What it is • What if Alice, rather than following a white rabbit down its hole into Wonderland, followed another Alice? Celine and Julie are in the long tradition of female heroines entering a strange world (think not just Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy, but cinematic distaff duos in Mulholland Drive, 3 Women, or Persona) yet the extent to which these to fall into an alternate reality, and the extent to which they are create it, is never quite clear. An air of mischievious play suffuses the film, as if the actresses - and their director - are making it up as they go along. Julie (Dominique Labourier), the seemingly more sensible Alice of the two, is a librarian who begins to chase and is then followed by Celine (Juliet Berto), our sexy white rabbit, an actress/compulsive liar who muffs Julie's love interest and tells her friends that Julie is her sister. The film's "plot" begins when the two pranksters swallow hard candies which magically transport them inside a strange, seemingly abandoned house where a morose family enacts an ever-repeating melodrama of betrayal, resentment, and grief. It's up to Celine and Julie to rescue a little girl who will be murdered - to reset this fatalistic narrative, to take control over it as they have over their own freewheeling lives. Celine and Julie Go Boating - a hard film to explain, but as much an atmosphere as a story - has been called by David Thomson "the most innovative film since Citizen Kane," and though its innovations are more in the nature of mind games than technical tricks, it really is a trip.

Why I like it •
I'm not sure I have the best attention span or sharpest focus; in fact I know I don't - sometimes, watching even films I enjoy, my mind will float away or I'll start thinking of what comes next in the movie. Many films build this anticipation into their very construction, egging the viewer into a state of anticipation. Jacques Rivette's films are different. I await developments to be sure, but with a sense of wonder and curiosity rather than impatience. Somehow, for me at least, from their very first frame they cultivate an air of enjoyment-in-the-moment. I once described Rivette's cinema as "slithering across the screen like a boa constrictor, so long you lose track of time and find yourself hypnotized by the movement; they contain mulitudes within their bullies - these are films you can get lost in." Yet at the same time, Celine and Julie is not only a sensuous experience, it is a movie full of ideas, if you choose to pursue them. Who are the "ghosts" in this "haunted house" that Celine and Julie observe? Are they characters in a conventional narrative film, one much unlike that which Celine and Julie inhabit in their own lives? Most interesting to me is that, when they eat the candy and immerse themselves in the "story" of this house, the lighting is crisp, the actors look real, and we generally experience the incidents as if we were watching a movie. When, at the film's end, Celine and Julie sneak into the house itself, no longer taking candy to get there, the lighting is bizarrely imbalanced, the actors wear garish makeup, and their delivery seems fundamentally out-of-tune with their surroundings (hence Celine's and Julie's contagious giggles). This is the difference between watching a finished movie, and participating in a film shoot on a set; or, to put it differently, the difference between the "total film" we imagine in our heads and the artificiality of how this concrete product is created. No doubt this reflection would have great meaning for the New Wave generation, which graduated from passively admiring the beautiful illusions of Hollywood to analyzing the images that created these illusions, to creating their own images - often self-consciously. So then, to cut myself short, I like this film because it makes me feel (a luxurious relaxation in the moment) and it makes me think (about the nature of movies and "reality").

How you can see it • Celine and Julie Go Boating is not on American DVD, but as I write this the film is available in its entirety on You Tube (click closed-captioning for English subtitles). Get over there fast! If the link no longer works, well, just find some hard candy, start sucking, and wait for the shock... (I also discussed Rivette's work in a review of his debut, Paris Belongs to Us.)

What do you think? • What is the relationship between the house and the outside world? Are they both fantasies, of a different nature? How does Celine and Julie relate to the darker, more brooding films like Out 1, L'Amour Fou, or Paris Belongs to Us which preceded it? What facilitates the lighter, more playful tone? Did Jacques Rivette have Ingmar Bergman in mind when he created his melodrama-within-a-comedy? Did you have him in mind when you watched it?

There's a certain discipline, a certain art if you will, in laying out visual tributes and choosing which screen-caps will top a post. Often something must be sacrificed for the visual flow, and so many striking images - along with some fascinatingly random ones -  get cast by the wayside (sort of like making a film, come to think of it). At other times, the post itself is abandoned or deleted, leaving the headers in limbo.

Recently, while browsing my web albums for other purposes, I noticed numerous pictures that had been uploaded but never posted on the blog. Here they are, lined up in reverse order of when they were supposed to be used - still a limited selection (if I put everything up there'd be thousands of castoffs swarming this column). Nonetheless there's quite a lot here (I stopped counting after the first hundred), including stills and screen-caps borrowed from others, but probably a majority (especially of the top half) were my caps.

Oddly enough, given their chronology, these pictures form a kind of alternate-universe historical overview of Lost in the Movies...

This series is an episode guide to the Japanese anime television show Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995 - 96) and the spin-off films. Each entry includes my own reflection on the episode, followed by a conversation with fellow blogger Bob Clark.

The battle is won, but the drama is not yet over. The evil diamond from outer space, that latest Angel which arrived at the end of last episode, has been slaughtered and lies smoking amongst the wreckage of downtown Tokyo-3; no lights illuminate its lifeless shell, for all the electricity in Japan was diverted precisely to defeat it. Yet in order for Shinji's second power-blast to hit its target, Rei's Evangelion (placed on defense in its first active engagement with the enemy) was forced to fend off the Angel's own firepower with a shield that barely protects the Eva's vulnerable pilot. Her role completed, she now allows the weary mecha-warrior to collapse, and Shinji races to its side, the gigantic robot he pilots provided physical power to match the skinny teenage boy's emotional intensity. Leaping from the cockpit to yank upon the hatch, he sees that Rei is woozy but okay inside and tears fill his eyes.

This is the final resolution to "Rei II," more purely devoted to war strategy and military hardware than any episode we've seen so far - yet powered ultimately, like all the other Evangelion episodes, by the raw, human material of emotional anxiety and release. This conclusion also allows Shinji to come full-circle, from an isolated and weak little boy to someone capable of not only doing his duty, but rescuing another. It also, of course, echoes his father's actions which is why Rei smiles in the end: she's discovered someone else who cares about her, this time not a somewhat remote and imposing authority figure, a mysterious commander she must loyally obey, but a young boy her own age - a peer and companion-in-arms whose solidarity in suffering takes some edge of her own stoic loneliness.

If we see Shinji adapt more fully to his heroic and social role here, we also realize just how intensely professional, confident, and - perhaps - ruthless Misato is when it comes to her own authority. It is her idea to focus all the energy in Japan into a single ray blast directed at the nearly impenetrable Angel drilling its way down to central headquarters (the plan is called "Operation Yashima," a designation Japanese Evangelion fans applied to their government's similar plan to preserve energy during the 2011 tsunami disaster). What's more, as Misato proposes Operation Yashima, and smiles defiantly as she affirms that its chances of success are just below 9%, there is an almost blinding self-assurance to her presentation which both impresses and slightly disturbs us. While of course she will suffer if the plan does not succeed, its success relies ultimately on the two fragile pilots, Shinji and Rei, onto whom she confers this awesome responsibility without the slightest hesitation.

This episode completes Rei's character development which began in earnest last episode (hence the "Rei II" of the title). By its end, we feel we understand her much better; she has not lost her essentially enigmatic character and yet we gain a sense of her uncertainty, her confusion, which never interferes with her commitment to duty or sense of self-composure. And yet as she stares down at Gendo's glasses, connecting them now ambiguously to her commander's son as well, as she manages a real smile at episode's end, gazing into Shinji's tear-filled eyes, we realize she's human as well. Just because she doesn't let her essential bewilderment at the surrounding world affect her actions does not mean she isn't sad and lost inside. Of course there will ultimately be more to it than just that, but a sense of fragile soul will power us through the various hints and revelations to come, connecting us to her even as she remains - in some sense - an alien creature.

Meanwhile we see an extension of Shinji's earlier realization that protecting an individual focuses his attention and motivates him much more powerfully than entertaining abstract notions of saving the world. Just as he was battered by the Angel in Episode 3 before being forced to save his classmates (and thus finding the ability to disobey orders and attack the enemy head-on), here we begin the episode as he's caught off-guard and nearly destroyed by the lethal diamond. Only when Rei puts her own body on the line does Shinji find the willpower and determination to fight back effectively. As Evangelion never fails to remind us, the stakes may be global and apocalyptic, but it is the intimate connections which ultimately provide the greatest inspiration.

For
The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Dogville (2003/Denmark/dir. Lars von Trier) appeared at #96 on my original list.

What it is • A very different nightmare on Elm Street. Grace Margaret Mulligan (Nicole Kidman) hides out from gangsters in an all-American small town and eventually the townspeople mix support with exploitation, until she is suffering so greatly at their hands that the gangsters arrive as a force of liberation. The entire film unfolds on a massive soundstage, decorated with a few spare, suggestive props and chalk outlines, a sort of theatrical blueprint. This perverse, fascinating, gesture both serves - like the work of playwright and director Bertolt Brecht - to highlight the artificiality inherent in the stories we enjoy (like Celine and Julie before it), yet it also makes us aware of how little is really needed for us to fall under the spell of these illusions, since by film's end we're entirely enveloped by the nasty little world of Dogville. On its premiere at Cannes, the film was virulently attacked by viewers and critics who found it misogynistic, misanthropic, and even anti-American. Maybe it is all of those things, but it's also brutally honest - one of those films in which the director subjects the cast and the audience to psychological games and emotional challenges but doesn't let himself off the hook either.

Why I like it •
Dogville is both brilliant and exhausting. I love it, but I've only seen it once (though I'm overdue for a re-viewing); it was the film that fully revealed Lars von Trier's genius for me. "Postmodern" is a word that's been thrown around a lot in the past twenty years and I think von Trier fits the bill with his heightened self-consciousness, his layers of metatextual irony, his quality of pastiche - mixing and matching elements of film, art, and life which one wouldn't usually associate just because he can. Yet he has something most postmodernists don't seem to have: a sense of depth, and weight. That's why I like Dogville so much; because alongside the clever presentation, the intellectual mind games, the willful perversity in which nothing is allowed to be simple or face-value, there's also a sense of raw emotion and pain, a feeling of responsibility - as I said, von Trier is brutal but he never lets you forget it's him being brutal, not just the characters onscreen or the situation. He's the director as God, to be sure, but more a Greek god than the Hebrew God, playing with humanity because he can, because he has power, but never trying to dress it up in morality or hide behind a cloud. He tortures others, but he tortures himself first of all. The film is not for everyone, and many don't see the heart in von Trier that I do. But you should definitely check it out for yourself and pay a visit - this is a bracing and exhilirating movie. To me, a great director expresses his or her vision, in rich cinematic language (and Dogville, for all its theatrical trappings, is cinematic at its core, utilizing close-up, editing, and composition to its advantage), as directly and emphatically as possible. Lars von Trier certainly does that.

How you can see it • Dogville is available on DVD from Netflix.

What do you think? • Is Dogville "enjoyable" or "entertaining"? Does it need to be? Does von Trier take responsibility for his cruelty/sadism, and does he need to? Where does this film stand in his larger body of work? How do its aesthetics and ethos relate to the Dogme 95 movement, a lo-fi manifesto that von Trier cosigned in the 90s? Is von Trier a postmodernist? What does that term mean?

Aloud? In my video essay? Right now??

I am preparing my entry in the Wonders in the Dark comedy countdown, which will appear by early tomorrow morning on that site and mine. It's a video essay in which I interweave clips from Modern Times with selections from great pieces by Roland Barthes, Graham Greene, and Otis Ferguson. Right now, the temp track I'm cutting to is my voice narrating all three authors and frankly I'd rather have a variety of narrators especially to cut back and forth between the authors, putting them into conversation without confusion as to whose saying what (at present, I'm using titles to indicate this but shifting voices would of course be easier).

If you want to take a stab at this last-minute adventure, here's what you can do:

1) The essays are listed below. Select one and leave a comment indicating which you've taken (so that if someone else volunteers, they don't take the same one).

2) Read it into your iPhone or other recording device if you have one, and then send me the voice file. If you keep it under 5-7 minutes, or record it in segments less than 5-7 minutes, you should be able to send it in one email. On the iPhone in particular this is very easy to do. My email is movieman0283@gmail.com .

3) Sit back and let me take care of the rest. Unfortunately I'll be away from email for a few hours (so don't ask me, just go for it!), but when I return I'll take what I've gotten and replace my own temp track with your voice. Presto! A Greek chorus of bloggers impersonating critics of old.

I feel a bit like Tom Sawyer whitewashing, haha. But it'll be fun, I promise...

Fair warning, though, if someone has already sent me a recording of one of these I can't guarantee I will use yours. It only takes five minutes, but only take the leap if you're okay with that possibility.

I will see all of you tomorrow morning with my Modern Times video essay regardless of what happens with this option...

The essays follow after the jump:




Roland Barthes, "The Poor Man and the Proleteriat", p. 48-49 of Mythologies is online in its entirety (see link)

Otis Ferguson, "Hallelujah, Bum Again"

Modern Times is about the last thing they should have called the Chaplin picture, which has had one of the most amazing build-ups of interest and advance speculation on record. Its times were modern when the movies were younger and screen motion was a little faster and more jerky than life, and sequence came in 40-foot spurts, cut off by titles (two direct quotes here are "Alone and Hungry" and "Dawn); when no one, least of all an officer of the law, could pass a day without getting a foot in the slack of his pants, when people walked into doorjambs on every dignified exit, stubbed toes everywhere on the straightway, and took most of their edibles full in the face; when tables and chairs were breakaways, comedy was whiskers, and heroes maneuvered serenly for minutes on abysses that were only too visible to the audience. It is in short a silent film, with pantomime, printed dialogue, and such sound effects as were formerly supplied by the pit band and would not be done by dubbing, except for Chaplin's song at the end. And not only that: it is a feature picture made up of several one- or two-reel shorts, proposed titles being The Shop, The Jailbird, The Watchman, The Singing Waiter.

Part of this old-time atmosphere can be credited to the sets. The factory layout is elaborate and stylized, but not in the modern way or with the modern vividness of light and shadow; the department store might have been Wanamaker's in its heyday; the "dance" music is a cross between Vienna and a small-town brass band, twenty years old at least; the costumes are generally previous; and as to faces and types, Chaplin has kept a lot of old friends with him, types from days when a heavy was a heavy and Chester Conklin's moustache obscured his chin (still does). Above everything , of course, is the fact that the methods of silent days built up their tradition in group management and acting - in the first, a more formal explicitness, so that crowds gather jerkily from nowhere, emphasized players move stiffly front and center, the camera does less shifting; in the second, actors tend to undelrine their parts heavily and with copious motion (see the irate diner, see the hoity-toity wife of the parson, see Big Bill and the rest).

Modern Times has several new angles, principally those of the factory and the occasional off-stage reports of strikes and misery (the girl's father was shot in a demonstration). But they are incidental. Even in taking Rene Clair's conveyor-belt idea, for example, you can almost hear Chaplin, where Clair directed a complex hubbub, saying to one of his old trusties: You drop the wrench, I kick you in the pants, you take it big, and we cut to chase, got it? It has the thread of a story: Chaplin's meeting up with the orphan girl, very wild and sweet, and their career together. For the rest it is disconnected comedy stuff: the embarrassing situation, the embroilment and chase, and the specialty number, e.g., the roller skates, the completely wonderful song-and-dance bit, the Chaplin idyll of a cottage and an automatic cow, beautiful with humor and sentiment. These things and the minor business all along the way - in jails, cafeterias, with oil cans, trays, swinging doors, refractory machinery - are duplicates, they take you back.

But such matters would not call for discussion if all together they did not set up a definite mood, a disturbing sense of the quaint. Chaplin himself is not dated, never will be; he is a reservoir of humor, master of an infinite array of dodges, agile in both mind and body; he is not only a character but a complex character, with the perfect ability to make evident all the shades of his odd and charming feelings; not only a touching character, but a first-class buffoon and I guess the master of our time in dumb show. But this does not make him a first-class picture maker. He may personally surmount his period, but as director-producer he can't carry his whole show with him, and I'll take bets that if he keeps on refusing to learn any more than he learned when the movies themselves were just learning, each successive picture he makes will seem, on release, to fall short of what went before. The general reaction to this one anyway is the wonder that these primitive formulas can be so genuinely comic and endearing.


There has been a furor here and there in the press about the social content of Modern Times, and this could be skipped easily if Chaplin himself were not somehow confused (see his introduction to the film) over its worth as corrective comment. Well, the truth is that Chaplin is a comedian; he may start off with an idea, but almost directly he is back to type again, the happy hobo and blithe unregenerate, a little sad, a little droll. Whatever happens to him happens by virtue of his own naive bewilderment, prankishness, absurd ineptitude, and the constant support of very surprising coincidence. He couldn't keep a job or out of jail anywhere in the world, including the Soviet Union - that is , if he is to be true to the Chaplin character.

And Chaplin is still the same jaunty wistful figure, pinning his tatters about a queer dignity of person, perpetually embarked on an elaborate fraud, transparent to the world but never very much so to himself. He brings the rites and dignities of Park Avenue to the gutters of Avenue A, and he keeps it up unsmilingly until it is time to heave the pie, to kick the props out, to mock with gestures and scuttle off, more motion than headway, all shoes, hat, stick, and chase. With him it is all a continuous performance, played with the gravity, innocence, and wonder of childhoood, but with ancient wisdom in the matters of snipping cigar butts and tripping coppers into the garbage pile. He is pathetic with the unhappiness of never, never succeeding - either in crossing a hotel lobby without at least one header into the spittoon or in eating the steaks, chops, and ham and eggs that are forever in his dreams; and yet he somehow cancels this or plays it down: when the ludicrous and debasing occurs, he picks himself up with serenity and self-respect, and when it is time for heartbreaks he has only a wry face, a shrug, some indication of that fall-to-rise-again philosophy htat has made hoboing and destitution such harmless fun for his own special audience, the people of America. His life on the screen is material for tragedy, ordinarily. But on the screen he is only partly a citizen of this world: he lives mostly in that unreal happy land - you see the little figure walking off down the road toward it always into the fade-out - where kicks, thumps, injustice, and nowhere to sleep are no more than a teasing and a jolly dream (Oh, with a little pang perhaps, a gentle Woollcott tear) and the stuff a paying public's cherished happy endings are made of.


Graham Greene, "Modern Times"

    I am too much an admirer of Mr. Chaplin to believe that the most important thing about his new film is that for a few minutes we are allowed to hear his agreeable and rather husky voice in a song. The little man has at last definitely entered the contemporary scene; there has always before been a hint of 'period' about his courage and misfortunes; he carried about with him more than the mere custard-pie of Karno's days, its manners, its curious clothes, its sense of pathos and its dated poverty. There were occasions, in his encounters with blind flower-girls or his adventures in mean streets or in the odd little pitch-pine mission halls where he carried round the bag or preached in pantomime on a subject so near to his own experience as the tale of David and Goliath, when he seemed to go back almost as far as Dickens. The change is evident in his choice of heroine: fair and featureless with the smudged effect of an amateur water-colour which has run, they never appeared again in leading parts, for they were quite characterless. But Miss Paulette Goddard, dark, grimy, with her amusing urban an dplebeian face, is a promise that th elittle man will no longer linger at the edge of mawkish situation, the unfair pathos of the blind girl and the orphan child. One feels about her as Hyacinth felt about Millicent in The Princess Casamassima: 'she laughed with her laugh of the poeple, and if you hit her hard enough would cry with their tears'. For the first time the little man does not go off alone, flaunting his cane and battered bowler along the endless road out of the screen. He goes in company looking for what may turn up.


    What had turned up was first a job in a huge factory twisting screws tighether as little pieces of nameless machinery passed him on a moving belt, under the televised eye of the manager, an eye that followed him even into the lavatory where he snatched an illicit smoke. The experiment of an automatic feeding machine, which will enable a man to be fed while he works, drives him crazy (the running amok of this machine, with its hygieneic mouth-wiper, at the moment when it has reached the Indian corn course, is horrifyingly funny; it is the best scene, I think, that Mr. Chaplin has ever invented). When he leaves hospital he is arrested as a Communist leader (he has picked up a red street flag which has fallen off a lorry) and released again after foiling a prison hold-up. Unemployment and prison punctuate his life, starvation and lucky breaks, and somewhere in its course he attaches to himself the other piece of human refuse.


    The Marxists, I suppose, will claim this as their film, but it is a good deal less and a good deal more than Socialist in intention. No real political passion has gone to it: the police batter the man at one moment and feed him with buns the next: and there is no warm maternal optimism, in the Mitchison manner, about the character of the workers: when the police are brutes, the men are cowards; the little man is always left in the lurch. Nor do we find him wondering 'what a Socialist man should do', but dreaming of a steady job and the most bourgeois home. Mr. Chaplin, whatever his political convictions may be, is an artists and not a propagandist. He doesn't try to explain, but presents with vivid fantasy what seem to him a crazy comic tragic world without a plan, but his sketch of the inhuman factory does not lead us to suppose that his little man would be more at home at Dneipostroi. He presents, he doesn't offer political solutions.




This post will be deleted in eight hours.

Attention, lurkers! JPK of Can't Explain has volunteered himself for Barthes' essay. That leaves only one to go - either Otis Ferguson or Graham Greene. Pick your poison! Drink it quickly! Send me the bottle!

And read here if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about...

Sorry to those who clicked through this morning, thinking it was up. I'm exporting it now - so in a few hours it should be ready. The post was scheduled at 9am ahead of time and I forgot to set it back to draft mode. Apologies. Stay tuned.

This series is an episode guide to the Japanese anime television show Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995 - 96) and the spin-off films. Each entry includes my own reflection on the episode, followed by a conversation with fellow blogger Bob Clark.

And now for a breather. Sort of. After a six-episode storyline which thrust Shinji right into battle, began to establish his awkward social environment, and drew the bonds tighter between him and his fellow pilot, blue-haired Rei (even more of an outcast than he) we take a step back. This is an episode that is really, well, an episode: a standalone event which explores characters while giving them a one-off challenge mostly unconnected to the rest of the series - this time the enemy is no Angel, but a manmade robot monotonously stomping through a wasteland while its nuclear pacemaker ticks away. It's up to Shinji and Misato to stop it but even if the stakes seem slightly lower this time, we're nonetheless allowed exposition which will nudge us toward some ominous revelations.

To begin with, "A Human Work" seems charmingly (or excessively, depending upon your taste) cartoonish and comedic, with Misato in full-party girl mode and the animation zanier and more exaggerated than we've seen for a while. She chugs her beer and burps while Shinji and that bizarre pet penguin roll their eyes. Goofy sound effects fill the soundtrack, along with the lighter-than-air Eva-Odd Couple theme accompanying most scenes at Misato's dinner table. Later she shows up at Shinji's school in stylish dress for the parent-teacher conference, underlining her bizarre triple role as the boy's bratty big sister, irritating yet attractive roommate, and responsible mother figure (least emphasis of all on that last attribute).

After letting Misato take a backseat to Rei for a couple episode, Anno once again focuses on the first woman in Shinji's life, and even more than Shinji himself, Misato could be called the main character of this episode. She calls the shots throughout and, even more unusually, she takes the big risks too, donning an exposure suit and descending into the run-amok JetAlone robot whose remote controls aren't working, to shut it down manually. The JetAlone, with its humorously plodding gait, dumbly swinging arms, and Cheshire-Cat like "is there a there there?" grin, is an effective symbol of human technology gone astray, lacking the soul (in the form of suffering pilots, baring the burden for the rest of the human race) which has made the Evas so powerful, and so frightening.

It's up to NERV, personified by Misato's gritty determination and arrogant assumption of authority (here she makes up for the sense that, on the last episode, she was cockily calling the shots while others paid the price), to save the day. And yet, for the first time really, we get a very strong sense of NERV's ambiguous morality. At episode's end, Ritsuko meets alone with Gendo and together they affirm that everything went according to plan, except for Misato's impromptu rescue mission. The suggestion is chilling - clearly NERV somehow sabotaged the JetAlone to trigger its haywire disobedience of the human master, in order to discredit rivals to the Evangelion program. Furthermore, they allowed Misato to go ahead with his risky plan, obviously valuing her life very little, and they were prepared to see the JetAlone detonate at an unknown, and apparently unimportant, cost to human life. It's shocking enough to know that the organization Misato and Shinji work for is so callous, but also chilling to realize Ritsuko, the cool but presumably on-the-level official we've seen as Misato's straight-woman companion-in-arms may have ulterior motives.

As for Rei, meanwhile,  it isn't even that she appears in only one scene of the episode - I'm pretty sure she's only in one shot. It's a rather startling comedown from the exposure she was given last time and it hints at what to come: the introduction, in the next episode, of another female character who will turn Shinji's social universe upside down, introducing an element of assertive, brash personality onto this show of withdrawn moody characters (so far Misato, a complicated mix of responsibility and childishness, wisdom and immaturity, is the only real extrovert we've met; while not without her own bipolar streak, Asuka one-ups Misato's brazenness with unapologetic adolescent chutzpah, at once infuriating and intoxicating). Consider this episode a palette cleanser before a major change of course...





This series will break until the new year.
Next week, on this day, I will premiere my short film "Class of 2002."

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Persona (1966/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman) appeared at #95 on my original list.

What it is • Elisabeth (Liv Ullmann) is mute, by choice apparently. An actress horrified by the world around her (represented by the image of a burning monk in Vietnam) and oddly fascinated by a photo of her young son, her silence seems an alluring mystery. And it's a mystery that we sense Alma (Bibi Andersson), like us, wants to solve. Alma is normal, chatty (she more than compensates for Elisabeth's lack of conversation) is the actress' nurse, watching over her during a recuperative rest at an isolated seashore. She tells Elisabeth all about her life and, as the quiet but intense Elisabeth, taller, enigmatic, more self-possessed than Alma, slowly starts to take over the nurse's fragile mind we don't get closer to any simple answers but somehow we do feel we're getting closer to the experience, what philosophers might call the "phenomenon," of Elisabeth's withdrawal from the world. The prolific, intensely personal Ingmar Bergman made many celebrated movies, but Persona is often acclaimed as his masterpiece - the most intense, the most personal, at once an icon of 60s art-house chic and a supremely individual expression, at no point moreso than when the babbling Alma, suffering what seems to be a mental breakdown, lets loose a stream of self-doubt and incoherent anxiety and we suddenly sense - with the shock of an epiphany - that Bergman himself is letting down his guard and telling us what it's like inside his own head.

Why I like it •
Persona was one of the first foreign films I ever saw; when I was a teenager I found a rarity-rental place nearby and between that and the local library began renting movies like The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, and The Seventh Seal (that was my first Bergman, I think), which I'd been reading about in movie books for years. These movie books included avant-garde art films beside Hollywood entertainments and I didn't really see a contradiction between the two. I approached Persona less as a story being told than as a dream being experienced, and I loved it. I bring this up because often there's a perceived difficulty in bridging the gap between popcorn movies and more "difficult," "artistic" films. The gap is usually more in people's minds than the works themselves; art films are an extension of what exists in mainstream movies - as Pauline Kael put it in her famed essay on the virtues of trash, "the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitement sustained longer." Experimental works should be primarily visceral, acting on the viewer's imagination like a vivid dream. I value Persona for its tactile qualities, the way you "notice the knots in a wooden column or the way another person smokes a cigarette, removing the tobacco from their tongue," and for the way it connects this heightened sensibility to a raw uneasiness, opening a window out of thin air through which can peer at the madness just shadowing our daily life. I cherish the film for helping to introduce me to this side of cinema, and even when its effect is not as strong on me as that first viewing, I retain it as a high water mark of the adventures possible along the celluloid path.

How you can see it • Persona is available on DVD from Netflix. A clip from the film is featured at 4:25 in "That Total Film", Chapter 16 in my video series. I also offered a full-length review of Persona as part of my "Big Ones" series a year ago.

What do you think? • Is Persona a good introduction to either "art" or "experimental" cinema, and what do those terms mean? How does Bergman's previous work play into Persona? Does the film represent a turning point in his career? How relevant is the fact that Bergman was changing lovers at the time - from Andersson to Ullmann? Does it make sense to focus on the film essentially a personal expression, or is this losing perspective on its thematic and aesthetic elements? Why do you think Elisabeth is silent?

This series is an episode guide to the Japanese anime television show Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995 - 96) and the spin-off films. Each entry includes my own reflection on the episode, followed by a conversation with fellow blogger Bob Clark.

Neon Genesis Evangelion begins quietly enough. I was going to say "slowly" but it's only slow in comparison to the rest of the episode; cuts come quick (maybe one every couple seconds) and we've barely oriented ourselves to our surroundings (a brief title tells us we're in 2015) before the action begins. Yet in that initial moment, the city streets are empty (except for Shinji Ikari, 14-year-old boy waiting alone with only a picture of some busty brunette babe to keep him company; he stares at it quizzically). Nearby , dozens of UN tanks perch along a winding coastal highway, their guns trained on the sea, but there are no shells exploding or frantic commands circulating via radio. There is a mood of grim, silent anticipation. One image, intriguing but difficult to make out, seems to show a quasi-animal, quasi-machine creature humming through shallow waters, toward the shore. The only sound we hear is the cawing of a bird; onscreen we see a seagull perched on the long gun of one tank, and this neat, spare composition has an air of Ozu about it (specifically the opening of Floating Weeds). And then it begins.

An explosion of water (captured not fluidly, but in a jagged succession of still images as if a boggled mind is only barely registering what it sees), the seagull flies away, and the guns open fire. A monster emerges from the sea, humanoid in its shape, gigantic in its size, its densely-packed upper torso and mosquito-like, hollow-eyed "face" reminding us of those creepy long-nosed island giants from an old Popeye short. This is a fantastic, fascinatingly strange beast, the first of our deadly angels, and - shocking as this may seem - it's actually the most conventional of the Angels we'll encounter. As it stomps from the ocean onto land, crushing tanks, absorbing heavy artillery fire, and effortlessly swatting away heavily armored choppers, its antecedents are obvious: from Ozu to Godzilla in the blink of an eye. This sets Evangelion's tone perfectly.

That young boy is still waiting in the city streets when the evacuation notices blare over a loudspeaker and the hot lady from his photo - Misato, the seemingly carefree yet authoritative NERV representative who will escort him to that headquarters (run by Shinji's estranged father, whose brief appearances in the episode make a strong impression, especially in a close-up of his cold, closed-mouth grin during a moment of extreme peril for his timid son), has arrived as a deus ex machina (and "god in the machine" will be a term appropriate for Evangelion in more ways than one) to whisk the frightened teenager off to safety, or rather to even greater danger. But not before he witness an apparition, a young girl his age standing solemnly alone in the middle of an empty street only for a moment, before the general alarm is sounded. He will see her again at the end of the episode, heavily bandaged as she has been for some time; obviously this vision was not physical but metaphysical. To the monster movie mayhem and disciplined formal restraint Evangelion has already displayed, we can now add a touch of mysticism. Eventually it will be quite a bit more than a touch.

From there on, the kickoff episode of Evangelion barely pauses and yet somehow it never seems rushed; we are introduced in no-frills yet dramatic fashion to each of the elements that will play out over twenty-six episodes: the first appearance of the underground city, Tokyo-3, awes Shinji; the intimidating reveal of the Evangelion robot he's expected to pilot is certainly memorable (the lights in a dark room power up to reveal a massive metal purple face a few feet from Shinji's own), and the grand entrance of Rei Ayanami, blue-haired, fragile yet powerful in her swaddled, white-suited form, is an iconic initiation to one of Evangelion's most mysterious and intriguing characters. And yet, even as these accelerated story points leave a strong impression (not to mention the characters introduced to us with deft touches, so that their personalities become clear at a glance without seeming oversimplified - and as we'll discover, of course, there's more than meets the eye), we are not lingering over any of them.

The phrase that pops to mind watching the first episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion is "in medias res" - as with so many great stories, we are thrust right into a compelling, exciting universe that seems as if it always existed. Evangelion combines this tradition with another, that of the character who, like us, is a "stranger here," encountering all these people and phenomena for the first time himself. His hesitation and horror, when asked to pilot a gigantic robot and battle some sort of alien creature which is decimating the hardened warriors aboveground is made all the more plausible by our own disorientation in this rapid-fire narrative. If we are just barely absorbing what's going on, watching this safely on a TV screen, how must he feel asked to participate in this seemingly apocalyptic event? The appearance of Rei, the girl he saw in the street earlier in an apparent mystical daydream, convinces him he must pilot the Eva and the episode ends with him confronting the Angel on the street above.

We've come very far in twenty-two minutes, from a lonely boy on the street to that same child (ostentatiously dubbed the "First Child") planted in a huge machine without any physical training or even psychological preparation, asked to save the world.

The online premiere date is not yet set, as I am still cutting the film, but it's planned for between December 21 and the end of the year. Watch this space.

This is the final chapter of my short film. Watch Part 1 and Part 2 first, or wait until Monday morning when I post the film in its entirety. I would actually recommended viewing Class of 2002 in one sitting, which better sustains its dramatic momentum, but understand some my prefer a serialized format. That's one reason I uploaded them this way first, though doing so also allowed me to set more reasonable deadlines for myself in terms of completion.

At any rate, this is not a project for which I am being paid, or getting some sort of school credit (my student days are long in the past by now), or fulfilling any sort of externally-imposed goal. It's not part of a contest, or commissioned by anyone but yours truly. Class of 2002 is strictly personal; it's for me - and more importantly, it's for all of you. So I hope you are able to watch and enjoy it. See you Monday...



The embedded video does not work on my computer, though it seems to be fine on most. If you have trouble viewing, Click here to watch Part 3.

Evening update: If you were having trouble viewing on Vimeo, please not that the embed has been changed to You Tube

Class of 2002 is subtitled "a photo-memoir" because it takes the form of a documentary fusing snapshots, home movies, found footage and voiceover to recall the tragic lives of five young people the narrator knew in high school. This is, of course, a work of fiction and through its anecdotes, illustrations, and asides I hope to tell an overarching story. The narrator focuses is on his five classmates, whom we discover through his descriptions and recollections, but eventually we learn more about his own life, and how it connects to the people and places we've encountered.

You can view the short film, uninterrupted and in its entirety here:



(It's also on Vimeo; however, I had trouble viewing it on that platform, and switched to You Tube.)

I will return later with further details about the how & why of this film. For now, please watch it. I made it for you guys, as well as for me. Enjoy.

My long journey began in, of all places, Hollywood.

Not behind the closed doors of a cushy studio office, or in a limousine winding between the (literally) star-studded sidewalks, nor even on a sweaty camaraderie-boosting soundstage but at a wings joint on Sunset Boulevard. It had been nearly two months since my quixotic arrival in Los Angeles, but this was the first time I had actually gone out in the city itself, after weeks of scrambling to find a place to live and work. Now, as the clock rolled past midnight, and April gave way to May, I was unwinding with co-workers after a stressful week

Having finally secured a position at a fundraising organization, I set to work immediately pursing my real goal, making movies, only to discover, like the characters in Godard's tragicomic La Chinoise, that what I thought had been a great leap was only the beginning of a long march. Additionally, the week had seen my blog disappear into thin air (later resolved, although at the moment my prospects appeared bleak) and offered reminders that, even once hired "permanently" this high-turnover job was hardly a sure thing (indeed, within a few days, I'd be the only one at this table left at the office).

Tonight, the talk quickly shifted from work to movies - street fundraisers, like all impermanent employees in this city, tend to be supplementing work, or dreams of work, in the entertainment industry. I turned to a younger co-worker, who had earlier claimed many story concepts he didn't know what to do with (in other words, the exact opposite of my problem), and asked him if he had any short film ideas he'd be willing to share.

He responded, "Yeah...I haven't written much on it, but I'd love to see a movie about a bunch of characters waiting at a train station for the afterlife. It wouldn't be about where they were going or what happened when the train arrived, but what they were thinking, and who they were."

With that, the wheels began to turn...



The initiation of this project in an atmosphere of camaraderie and collaboration is ironic, since so much of what followed was pursued alone. For months I would sit outside my home in a peeling lawn chair from the 1970s, filling journals with excessive notations, more often meanderings than epiphanies. Initially, however, the eurekas outnumbered the dead ends. Among the former: there would be five characters, they would have something else in common beyond being dead, they would in fact be classmates reunited in the afterlife on the cusp of their living peers' tenth reunion (something I'll discuss more extensively in this piece's conclusion), and there would be a sixth character, Jacob, an outsider - either newly dead or not dead at all - who encountered these characters in an out-of-body experience, or a dream (much like the Biblical Jacob, watching angels ascend a ladder to heaven in a wilderness vision).

Above all the characters were clear to me right away, and I never wavered. The first was a mysterious, alluring girl who was the center of attention but preferred to be left alone, only to be horribly murdered soon after high school (Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer was an obvious inspiration here, but so was an afterschool special - or was it a dream? - I saw as a very young child, which has haunted me ever since, in which one day a girl simply disappears and is never seen again). The second was a likable guy who kept his regrets and anxieties to himself, eventually joining the Marines and dying in Iraq (many close friends, relatives, and acquaintances have gone overseas in the past five years, something I think remains an underrepresented phenomenon in contemporary cinema). The third was a brash, confident scholar and athlete, full of charisma and felled by cancer (sadly, I've known too many who have gone this way and always been deeply disturbed by the external, physical transformation following the various treatments). The fourth was a perpetual loser, bullying in childhood, druggily withdrawn in adolescence, and despairingly afflicted in youth before committing suicide beneath a Boston train (something that used to happen all the time when I lived there; the character himself, with his addictions and struggles with mental illness, is familiar to me and somehow he was always the one here who fascinated me most). The fifth and final was a fun, easygoing, down-to-earth teenager turned young mother and long-suffering wife, killed routinely yet gruesomely in a highway accident alongside her son (emblematic of so many peers of mine, whose leap into the responsibilities and rewards of parenthood is both something that astonishes me and something that I've gotten used to - and probably the element that most represents to me the growth, change, and maturity these characters undergo).

As noted, there were dead ends too and they were eventually prevalent. I couldn't figure out what these characters had to say to one another, and I turned to other story structures for inspiration, eventually flirting with writing the film as a feature. I even patterned one version of the story after The Wizard of Oz with Jacob dreaming he's back in high school among now-much-younger teenagers (Munchkins), assigned by his slightly obnoxious ex-class president turned school principal to track down an inspirational teacher who died when they were all in school. Jacob would take a yellow school bus to the eccentric teacher's luxurious home, picking up his classmates, each embodying a quality he needs or lacks, and arriving at the teacher's doorstep only to discover that the typically pie-in-the-sky baby boomer has nothing to offer him or his peers, nothing that can relate to the lives they are living/have lived anyway. Potentially pretentious if not handled with the right amount of humor, this idea was - more importantly - wildly impractical under current conditions.

It was around this point that I suggested to myself a photo-montage opening in which we saw pictures from the characters' pasts, perhaps set to music, and maybe even a bit of narration as Jacob recalled who they were. Whatever followed this exposition would be another matter; this sequence would crystallize who these people were and where they came from. The more I thought about this idea, the more I liked it and eventually I realized, with a bit of shock at how easily this simple, natural notion had hitherto escaped me, that in fact this was the movie I wanted to make. And, as an added bonus, it would be a hell of a lot easier than hiring a schoolbus and shooting a feature film. The film had always essentially been about the characters. Now it would be so emphatically.



With this, I was relieved of the duty to write dialogue, and assigned a new challenge: craft a narration that could carry the piece and articulate the narrative details and character descriptions without being overbearing. A tall order, since every budding screenwriter is taught first and foremost to avoid voiceover. Here I was writing a film that was nothing else.

And so I dumped the afterlife angle. I waved goodbye to the train station, although eventually it snuck back in, allusively, as the intro to the finished film. I abandoned the Oz revisions, separated the characters from one another, and returned to what had always compelled me most: not what happened after their deaths, but what happened before then. I wondered if I should reveal right away that they had all died, and ultimately decided against it - the film would be dark and tragic enough without casting the narrative in a bleak, grim light right away. Better to experience the disappointment alongside the narrator, even as we suspect what's coming (something I certainly did not go out of my way to conceal).

Meanwhile Jacob remained elusive. He only became clearer to me when I inserted him more explicitly into the story he was telling, by revealing that he was in fact the neglectful, alcoholic ex-husband he had been referring to in Leah's story (a development that arose naturally as I wrote, surprising me when it came out). With this it became clearer and clearer that the narration would not only be a loosely connected collection of short stories, but the indirect biography of Jacob himself, revealed in glimpses and allusions throughout. Making Jacob Leah's husband and the father of her children also gave him a narrative journey, something that had been lacking in earlier drafts - and while the conclusion remains bittersweet at best, the fact that he is now raising a daughter at least lends a kind of stoic acceptance to the tragic tale.

With so many directions I could go in, so many details to include or avoid, I decided I needed some discipline. Around this time I was watching Hollis Frampton's films (nostalgia in particular, with its narrated memories over slowly burning photographs was an obvious inspiration) and flirted with some structuralist conceits to keep my short film within fruitful limitations. Among other conceits were, formally, a focus on the number ten (10 years since graduation, and also "20" divided by "02") and, thematically, a vague correspondence to the Old Testament story of Jacob (beyond just the narrator's name and the Jacob's Ladder-like dream). Ultimately, after focusing my energies and explicitly inspiring a few passages or gestures, these helpful if potentially silly hooks were either abandoned or submerged, although the discipline required to write a 10-minute narration helped me to economize immensely, creating much of the text I would eventually use for the finished film.

The most lingering influence of these structuralist devices was actually on the characters' names, which had fluctuated wildly until this point but never changed again even when I sometimes wanted them to, embarrassed by their arbitrary genesis. They all include the letter "J", which is the tenth letter of the alphabet (and of course, the first letter of my own name) - variously as first, last, middle, married, and nickname. And they are all named, first or last, after the characters from Jacob's tale in the Old Testament with whom whom their personalities correspond.



Around the end of August, while job-hunting and trying to make use of my unexpected free time, I cracked down on my writing. A few days, here and there, I headed to a city park and sat down on a bench or a large tree branch to write, and write, and write - sometimes literally from sunrise to sunset. In this fashion, I hammered out the first true draft of the narration, after scribbling around the edges for months. Now my characters finally existed on the page, and it was time to make them a reality in the flesh.

I posted a listing on the L.A. Casting website a few days after attempting something similar on Craigslist. That first effort had been a complete dud - a posting on a community board asking if anyone had pictures they wanted to share for a film project, describing Class of 2002's purpose and approach. Crickets - I did not receive a single response.

Knowing that there would be nothing for them to "perform" per se, I had initially been hesitant to specifically approach actors. But I eventually decided that, more than anyone else, they were willing to put themselves out there, would be happy to see their images in circulation, and might view the choice and submission of photos as an opportunity for creative collaboration. It turned out I was right. I posted a casting call for Class of 2002, filled with brief descriptions of each character by age range and personality, and within days I had a few hundred submissions, especially for Rachel (anyone who has ever posted a request for young actresses age 18-30 has probably experienced a similar deluge). As I corresponded with actors, the field winnowed of course, in part from self-removal, as actors discovered they would not be acting, or simply never responded to my initial messages. Yet in the end, enough people remained for choices to be necessary, certainly an advantageous position for any director to be in.

Really, I had remarkable luck. Some of the characters I thought would be trickiest to find sent the first and most enthusiastic emails to greet me in my inbox. Regan Young, who was cast as Jules, not only had copious photos of his stint in the Marines (in both Iraq and Afghanistan, though I eventually used only the former), he was excited about the project and wanted to meet right away to discuss further. Kevin Mosteller was the only person I ever really considered for Jared; the photos from his teen years perfectly captured that stumbling rebellion embodied in the character's inwardly hurt but outwardly confrontational personality. And as a working voiceover actor expressing interest in Jacob's narration, he turned out to be the perfect two-for-one (especially since I had always seen Jacob and Jared as two sides of the same coin).

Leah and Rachel were trickier; a lot of actresses expressed interest and each offered different qualities. Eventually I chose two Stephanies. Stephanie Rojas exhibited a warm, friendly quality in her photos conveying the comfort Jacob both resists and is drawn towards. Furthermore she had numerous pictures with her adorable nephew, whose cheerful screen presence adds another layer of regret and sorrow to the revelation that Jacob has lost both a wife and a son. Stephanie Hunter faced the toughest competition of anyone, since Rachel received the most submissions. A bit younger than the other actors who submitted (many of whom were actually Class of 2002), she nonetheless won out in the end because her very strong screen presence. And she had lots of these photos too, submitting more than anyone else and confessing that since she was a kid, she'd had a camera glued to her hand. An added bonus: she was the only person who had home movies available, which served as a melancholy punctuation in one of her characters' sequences.

Finally, there was R.J., the trickiest of them all. Initially, she was not only a star school athlete but a potential Olympian. Her dogged determination on the racetrack was one of her most essential features, and an important visual trait in what was, after all, a movie rather than a written text. As it turned out, nobody had running pictures. Until the end, I clung to this feature, turning eventually outside of L.A. Casting, to my friend Morgan Magistro-Capuozzo, who is not an actress but whom I'd included in a few past projects. She had run cross-country in high school, and graciously agreed to join in at a very late date. As it turned out, she actually couldn't find any running pictures, yet I'd unexpectedly struck gold because in so many other ways the images she provided embodied the determined, gritty, headstrong persona of R.J., who - as it turned out - had been there in front of me all along. I ended up probably using more of Morgan's pictures than anyone else's.

Casting dragged on through November, as the actors patiently waited for me to confirm with them and I struggled with computer problems and a heavier work schedule. I had eventually set a deadline for myself of late December, and yet as Thanksgiving passed and the last month of the year drew nearer, I had not even begun editing the project yet. I cut a very rough trailer at the end of the month, but all of the work lay ahead and increasingly began to seem very intimidating. Had I bitten off more than I could chew? Was the entire project an ill-conceived mess, a complete folly? Would circumstances, particularly the used Mac from hell, sink the film before I could even kick it off? I began to wonder.



For years, I have simply loved editing. It's when everything comes together for me, when I can see the pieces click and the magic start to happen. Preproduction can be hell, as the finished result remains abstract and doubts confront one at every opportunity for procrastination. Production is trial by fire, a rewarding tonic inasmuch as problems must be worked through and cannot be avoided, but emotionally draining, physically exhausting, and mentally intimidating. Postproduction, on the other hand, has all the virtues the other two stages don't. The raw material is all there, and does not need to be conjured from thin air. I've always done my best work reacting to something; this is true of my writing as well as my filmmaking - I love bouncing elements off of one another and figuring out new ways to put them together. Meanwhile, to a certain extent in editing time is more free, and one has to ability to explore and experiment, no longer quite so limned in by the demands of cast and crew or the restrictions of time and money.

One of the perks of Class of 2002, once I got past my excitement with the idea itself and began to recognize the practical benefits of my approach, was that it skipped over the stress and failures of production and allowed me to create the entire film at my own pace in the editing room. And yet, as winter hit sunny California and my self-imposed deadline crept closer, I felt increasingly anxious and neurotic about the film's prospects, the approach I should take, and where/how I should supplement the photos with other material, from home movies to stock footage, to original footage shot by myself or friends/family I unsuccessfully commissioned to casually produce "second unit" b-roll (in only one case did this come to fruition, as my buddy Jeremy Lampert captured vivid images of Philadelphia from his cell phone).

Since I'm supposed to be promoting the finished product, and myself as a filmmaker, I will avoid rehashing my own missteps and miscalculations here. Suffice to say it was only in the second half of December that the ball really got rolling. About a week before Christmas, Kevin generously leant his time and drove over to Pasadena for what turned into a marathon recording session, stretching till 11 at night. His patience still astonishes me especially since we ended up recording the entire narration in the cramped quarter of his car, where the acoustics were better than the garage I'd originally planned on using. Through multiple takes and my own at times meandering attempts to convey what I was looking for, Kevin responded extremely well to direction and gave me the essential spine of the film, upon which it would rise or fall.

One of the reasons the recording and editing of the project had been perpetually delayed was that I was not yet satisfied with the shape of the material. After focusing for a while on the need to economize, I returned to the text in early December for the first time in months and began expanding it instead. I wrote a much longer version of every character's story, more novelistic than cinematic in texture (out of this arose the R.J. 8th grade party anecdote, some new and more effective opening lines, and the much-extended Leah passage in which Jacob recalls the places they lived, which turned into my favorite bit in the entire film). Then I contracted this down again into a more manageable size, which was used for Kevin's recording.

Yet in the end I probably cut more than half the material Kevin recorded. Only hearing some of the words read back to me, did I realize where and how I'd overwritten - some of the revisions were made right there in the car but the bulk were crafted in the editing room by cutting short and rearranging various lines. It was amazing to me how much I didn't need to get my point across; I'm glad I wrote and recorded as much as I did, to give me flexibility, but it was chastening to be reminded how few words it takes to convey a point.

Meanwhile, the film's visual texture was coming together. Just before recording the narration, Regan had offered up a dozen or so videos from his time in Iraq and I realized right away that these would become a very important part of the finished film, as indeed they did. The range of visual texture and captured experience was astonishing, capped by a video documenting his re-enlistment at a base in Iraq, with gunfire sounding in the background. While the film's backbone would remain the narration and still snapshots, I knew these dynamic video visuals would do wonders to draw the viewer in and lend a sense of visceral vitality to the picture.



In the last week and a half of December 2012 (December 21, my initial deadline, had come and gone) - particularly the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve - I threw myself into editing, feeling that I finally had all the elements in place. Initially this consisted of cutting a trailer, arranging and cutting down the narration until I felt I had eliminated all the fat, examining all the videos I'd received from Regan, and importing some new, last-minute photo additions. Finally, on the last weekend of the year I discovered a public-domain website which would serve as my video salvation (since most of my requests for outside b-roll had fallen flat). Initially, I used this sparingly, punctuating each character's intro with a brief moment from some of the more casual stock footage.

The real find, and the sort of inspirational kick in the pants worth much more than just its tangible effect on the project, was a fifties documentary on the area I grew up in! All along I had wanted the characters to be from New England, and had even included explicit references to Massachussetts towns in the narration (although much of this was cut, some remains). And here was my home, filtered through the haze of an old-fashioned documentary, both familiar and displaced. I ended up using many images from this footage, especially in the second half.

I set aside a Saturday strictly for this film (this was, in fact, to be my very last day off from work; I'm not scheduled for another until at least February). As they tend to do, all my doubts and worries crept upon me and I found myself rearranging ambitious plans to go drive all around the L.A. area to film b-roll, instead limiting original footage to the beginning of the film, to be shot during sunrise at Angel's Flight Railway (a historic wooden track up a steep hill in downtown L.A.)  and the ending, to be shot during sunset at the Santa Monica pier.

That evening, December 29, I headed to Santa Monica armed only with my iPhone and began shooting. Though the camera is not HD and some of the interior footage was unusable (including b-roll of a carousel, which wasn't as photogenic as expected anyway), the "magic hour" exteriors came out surprisingly well, with figures silhouetted against the colorful sky and the light casting a beautiful glow on everything. The next morning I woke up at 5am and headed to Angel's Flight, a location I had intended to use in some fashion ever since the early days back in May. I was pleasantly surprised by this footage as well, especially a shot taken on the promenade overlooking the hill, panning/tilting from a raker below to the just-risen sun peeking out over the city skyline. I turned this into an important transitional shot in the finished film.

It was now December 30, and all the pieces were finally in place. That afternoon I settled in to edit all night long, barely sleeping the following morning and returning from work in the evening to put the finished touches on the first half of the film. Remarkably, this was all wrapped up in time for the first half of Class of 2002 to premiere on New Year's Eve, the last hours of 2012, which seemed so appropriate in so many ways.

Though I had hoped to turn a new page in 2013, I was obviously still not done with the film. I took a rest for a while, and then plunged back in, incorporating far more video footage in the second half and taking a more stylistically ambitious approach. This was especially true at the film's conclusion. When I reached Jared's passage I realized I did not have enough material to illustrate his story, and so I returned to the trusty Internet Archive to hunt for more stock footage. This time I emphasized Boston and found some great shots, climaxing in a silent assembly of shots from a travelogue documentary of Massachussetts. These were used sparingly for Jared and retroactively added to Rachel's passage (a shot of a horse turning from a fence and walking away from the camera worked perfectly to punctuate a particular moment), by and large reserved for the climactic moment in which Jacob reveals all of his memories and regrets revolving around Leah and the children.

Here, also, music finally came into the picture. I had been struggling with the idea of a score from the get-go, eventually concluding that the best route was to find free classical music online, where many public-domain recordings existed. Yet nothing I found seemed satisfactory. As a result I uploaded the first half without music at all (something I think actually works well there, and wouldn't change). Eventually I discovered a Dvorak symphony I liked, by sampling classical music stored on my iPod and then seeking out another edition on the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, this recording was unsatisfactory in many ways; the passage I wanted to use was too short, and marred by the loud sounds of pages rustling, chairs squeaking, and voices clearing their throats. My solution was to slow it down dramatically and sure enough, the slow-motion version of the music worked perfectly to set the ominous tone of Part 2, and eventually to underscore Jacob's emotional revelations at the film's end. I also used a bit of Bach as he discusses his marriage to Leah.

I uploaded the second half in two parts, back to back, and with that, technically, my work was finished. Yet I wasn't quite satisfied - for one thing, views were very slim (in fact, a day or two after posting, Part 2 hadn't received any views at all). I knew this was never going to be a viral phenomenon, but the complete lack of response was nonetheless disappointing. I decided to upload the film all as one piece (which worked better for the dramatic momentum), and also made various minor technical and aesthetic revisions, as a final last-minute touch adding a logo to beginning and end for "Paradise Pictures" which I suppose from here on will be my one-man studio insignia.

Two days ago, the post went up. Even then my work was not done. Various uploads would not play on my computer screen and I had to create a new YouTube account to post the complete film, since my previous one had been "penalized" for spurious charges stemming from my video essay on Modern Times in December (more on that at another time...). More late nights, more last-minute revisions, all the way up to now, as the reasonable and productive schedule I envisioned for myself, once this film was completed, keeps getting pushed back.

Even now, writing this piece, which I intended to finish before midnight, it is 4am. I am due at work in 3 hours, so I must be certifiable, but somehow this just seemed necessary. A few stray comments on the video finally fired me up, and made me feel like maybe there's an audience there after all. I hesitated initially to talk about what led to the film, feeling I should let it speak for itself. But like the proverbial tree falling in the woods with no one around, it needed a loudspeaker. Maybe this will help.

So there it is, how it - and I - got here. However, before re-presenting the film itself, I need to address one more topic, the touchiest and most central to the work itself. It was written before what you're reading now, and moved to the end of the piece where it is more effective. So here I can say goodnight and snatch a few hours of sleep, much-needed and hopefully well-earned, before sending you on your way.



Less than a week after the seed was planted for this short film, I struck upon the central concept that would outlast the initial premise and motivate me during dry spells. The five characters, awaiting the last train into the afterlife, would all be the same age. Or rather, they would be different ages but born the same year before dying at various points in the decade since high school graduation. This notion, a kind of macabre class reunion, resonated with me as I approached the tenth anniversary of my own high school graduation and looked back over the years to see mostly dashed dreams, unexpected disappointments, and a slow, hard acceptance of adult reality as opposed to the naive innocence of youth. All generations experience this to a certain extent but the historical circumstances of the Class of 2002 were unique.

Raised in the retrospectively comfortable, confident nineties - when history had supposedly ended - we received a rude awakening on September 11, 2001, which fell right at the start of our senior year. And yet out of this dark moment there seemed to be a greater unity, not just in the nation at large but amongst ourselves. When we graduated that feeling of vague determination and purpose, powered by an unearthed anxiety was still with us. As it turned out, however, it was too vague, and quickly dissipated by the abrupt and still bewildering turn toward Iraq, the tendency of the cultural consciousness to submerge rather than than address the national trauma, and the eventual economic collapse in which the chickens of avoidance seemed to come home to roost, confronting everyone troubled by but able to ignore wars abroad and looming terror threats at home with a raw, immediate reality that could not be brushed aside.

Meanwhile I noticed that Hollywood, and even independent films by and large, could not capture the zeitgeist. There were some brave attempts, and indeed probably more films directly addressed current events than during the supposedly rabble-rousing Vietnam era. Yet back then, even without confronting the war directly, movies had easily captured the mood of the times in ways indirect yet immediate. Bonnie and Clyde may have taken place thirty years earlier, The Graduate may have set a youthful square as its protagonist, Midnight Cowboy may have avoided Vietnam altogether but for a fleeting moment in which Ratso tells a protesting hippie to "take a bath." Yet they all captured the sixties in ways that few films of my own youth, excepting Spike Lee's magnificently mournful 25th Hour, could claim to capture the zeroes.

Well, I've written about this phenomenon (and my own admiration for 25th Hour) elsewhere, and obviously I couldn't hope to rectify this with a little short film hardly anyone would see. Yet the desire to articulate something I hadn't seen articulated motivated me, even as I knew my film would not openly confront the major events and trends of the decade, except for one character's story and fleeting moments elsewhere. More directly, I hoped to paint a different portrait of the "millennial" generation than that I'd seen depicted in the media, which would have you believe all twentysomethings are perpetual adolescents living in a haze of self-referential irony and irresponsible immaturity.

Never mind that virtually all of my friends are married, many with children. Never mind that many millennials did not go to Iraq or Afghanistan, but that most of the people who did go were millennials. Forget for a moment that unemployment has hit young people the hardest, and not everyone can grapple with it by turning this into an HBO show. When I look back over the past ten years I see a generation forced to grow up much faster than their parents. They are often the ones who have fought the wars - in both sense of the word "fought," shouldering the burden of debt and unemployment, and trying to raise families in an America that seems in many ways to be declining, even as they struggle to reaffirm a hope and idealism that older, bitter generations deny.

I see the film as a tribute to those people, some of whom I count among my friends, even as I recognize that I have often fallen short in my own life. Though we are different in many ways, this is something I share with Jacob - a desire to respect and honor the struggles and often undesired confrontations with reality that life will always toss into our paths, and an acknowledgement that some people have borne this brunt more than others.

The film ends on a bittersweet note which is admittedly quite pessimistic on close examination. It is true to the character, and while it was tempting to end the film with a serene shot of the sea (inspired by the closing sequence of Contempt), suggesting that an eternal order outlasts the trials and travails of human suffering, I chose instead to tilt down to the tunnel below. There the film ends, a descent to complement the ascension with which it opens.

I do acknowledge the existence of transcendence but right now, in this film, it feels necessary to emphasize the opposite quality. Raised in hope and confidence, however tinged by fear and a latent uncertainty, it is the disappointment that appears the more shocking, and the more character-defining, for the Class of 2002...in this film, and elsewhere.




Well, from here it's up to you. If you like the film, please share it with others, however possible. It is your word of mouth, or the virtual equivalent thereof, that will bring further viewers my way. Thanks for reading - and watching. See you next time.