What is one to do with thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a proper blog post? Why round them up and turn them into a thirtieth portmanteau post on television of course!
The night is always darkest just before it’s totally black
Game of Thrones‘ latest episode has garnered much criticism for being less an adaptation of the work of George RR Martin and more that of Matthew Arnold:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
But it made me think about Robert Elswit’s work on Velvet Buzzsaw, not least because of its cinematographer’s curious defence. Fabian Wagner, as reported by Variety, blamed the poor saps who shelled out a cable premium to watch this underlit farrago. It’s all down to “viewers’ home devices, which he says aren’t fit for the show’s cinematic filming. ‘A lot of the problem is that a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly, ‘ he said … ‘Personally I don’t have to always see what’s going on because it’s more about the emotional impact. Game of Thrones is a cinematic show and therefore you have to watch it like you’re at a cinema: in a darkened room. If you watch a night scene in a brightly-lit room then that won’t help you see the image properly.'” But but but Fabian, this is a TV show, you’re not meant to light it as if it was a movie, because people can’t watch it as if it was a movie. I loved Bradford Young’s work on Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, but I completely understood the objections of some critics about its sepulchral lighting. I have never seen it on television, and I can imagine it would lose much impact and become quite frustrating on the small screen because, and pay attention here Fabian, it was lit for cinema viewing – which doesn’t just mean that you watch it in the dark, but that you watch it on a big screen in the dark. A BIG screen, hence Roger Moore’s disquisition on the value of a raised eyebrow because it shoots up about 12 feet on a proper cinema screen. [As for the idea that you don’t need to see what’s going on because it’s about the emotional impact of what’s going on that you can’t see – arrant nonsense.] I had the very odd sensation watching Velvet Buzzsaw that something was off about Robert Elswit’s normally glorious cinematography; and I felt he’d got caught in an existential crisis. Here he was working on something that Netflix wants everyone (especially the Oscars and film critics) to accept is a proper movie damn it, and yet aware that this might be shown at a single film festival and then watched by nearly all of its (usually undisclosed number of) viewers on a small screen. If a movie is made to be watched on the small screen, and not to be watched in a cinema on a big screen, then what makes it different from a Hallmark TV movie other than its star power, budget, and attendant style?
Yes, Renault, I smoke, there’s no need to be so shocked about it.
The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there
The BBC has got my goat in the past few days with their irritating nonsense. Multiple times on Friday night’s tribute to Jazz 625 we were treated like small impressionable children with no more free will than a Pavlovian dog by being warned that footage of the original 1960s show would contain people – gasp – smoking – clasp your pearls in horror, there’s worse to come – indoors -gasp for breath as if your lungs were being filled with secondhand smoke from a 1960s image and fall to the floor writhing in agony! Thank you Auntie, but I am capable of realising that the 1960s is not the 2010s. But there was worse on Thursday night when Janina Ramirez warned us that footage of Alan Yentob talking about Leonardo Da Vinci in 2003 would contain Yentob – gasp – smoking – clasp your pearls in horror, there’s worse to come – indoors – gasp for breath as if your lungs were being filled with secondhand smoke from a 2000s image and fall to the floor writhing in agony! Oh for Christ’s sake…. The repetition of the phrase ‘it was a different time’ clearly means this is some sort of policy at the BBC to lecture the audience at every opportunity, but as so often with this kind of approach it was counterproductive because Yentob simply had a half-smoked cigarette in one hand while he spread out notebooks by Da Vinci on a bar counter. I would not have noticed the cigarette if my attention had not been drawn to it, if I had seen it at all I might have mistaken it for a short pencil. Well done, BBC, well done. This is the kind of policing impulse that shares a mindset with the fools who want all old movies rated 18s because they feature smoking, and it both cases it betrays a mind that wishes to excoriate when it doesn’t forget the past in order to smugly bask in the wonderful nature of the present. Oblivious to the fact that the present will no doubt be excoriated in similar manner in the future, most likely for what it is most smug about right now.
Talking Movies 