Images, etc.
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Housekeeping re: mugs
The rest of the mugs I haven’t shipped yet are going out on Friday, and then hopefully if you ordered one (or a few) mugs, they arrive safely and soundly in your home in a few days. I am loving seeing all the pictures of mugs in people’s homes; keep them coming!
Housekeeping re: Fran Magazine schedule
There will be a Fran Magazine next Wednesday (the usual day) October 30th, and then Fran Magazine will be off on November 6th — the day after the election, lol? — on account of a) what may feel like an unpredictable vibe and b) my going back on residency. Fran Magazine will, however, return on November 13th despite still being on residency because I’d like to write a bit about how I pace my time when I am on residency. Then we’ll be back to normal (hopefully…) through the end of the year.
On beauty
A few days ago, a friend and I were discussing the David Marchese interview with Mia Khalifa — two people neither of us care much about or even for. One of the things that my friend took away from the interview was Marchese’s unseemly disinterest in actually pressing Khalifa on a few particular topics, something that seems to prove, to me, that he doesn’t really give a shit about her. A passage both of us were struck by was when Marchese confronts Khalifa about tweets she made in response to violence in Israel last year on October 7th. The excerpt is here below, with Marchese’s text in bold and Khalifa’s regular. I’m coming in midway through her response, but I think you’ll get the gist.
…There was this one scene where a fence was being broken down, and it was civilians, it was children — it felt like the Berlin Wall coming down. That’s what the scene looked like. And that’s why I said “freedom fighters,” because every Palestinian who still has the will to live is a freedom fighter. That’s what it was in reference to. The other one, the photo, it just felt so baroque.
You referred to it as looking like a “Renaissance painting.” Exactly. The composition, everything about it — at the time it was too soon. But I feel like that’s not a radical thing to say about something that looks so — it looked crazy.
Marchese asks her about these posts because they got her “in trouble” with, well, people. I’ll admit I hadn’t heard about or seen these tweets up until I read the interview. Again, I only kind of know who she is, and reading the Marchese interview was more an exercise in “what’s all this then” than active interest in content.
I’m inclined to agree with Khalifa that the images that came out of that day “looked crazy,” whatever your definition of that word is, but I was struck by Khalifa’s jump in the answer from an image that “felt baroque” to Marchese’s correction of her original “Renaissance painting,” as well as the greater urge to call something a “Renaissance painting” that seems like a normal way to tweet about any image that striking in any way.
I think the images to which Khalifa refers to are probably closest to her initial assessment — the more action-driven nature of Baroque paintings — but I got really stuck on the “looking like a Renaissance painting,” in part because (I’m going out on a limb here) Khalifa maybe doesn’t know the difference off-hand between Baroque and Renaissance art, and also the rampant proliferation of meme-speak of identifying images with chaos or curious framing or moments of unexpected beauty as “looking like a Renaissance painting.” I think when people say that they are not, for instance, thinking or imagining the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and mostly want to say that an iPhone photo (“not art”) looks like “real art” (beautiful), or they are saying, as I think Khalifa maybe was trying to get at, that what they’re looking at moves them in an otherwise unfamiliar way — they are seeing something their eyes may not initially quite know how to see, the shock of which awes or astounds or repulses them.
I was thinking about this, in part, because Dick Pope died. Pope was a longtime cinematographer best known for his collaborations with filmmaker Mike Leigh, who I have talked about so much in this magazine that it’s not worth my time to try to figure out which back issue to link to. Pope is also associated with, though not responsible for, this iconic Oscars fuck up.
When the then-president of the Academy called Dick Pope “Dick Poop,” it was for his second nomination1 for his work on Leigh’s J.M.W. Turner biopic (for lack of a better word) Mr. Turner, which is a beautiful-looking film.
I’ve seen every film that Mike Leigh and Dick Pope worked on together, and a number of those films — Mr. Turner included, but also Vera Drake and Topsy-Turvy — are particularly beautiful-looking films. Some of this derives from meticulous production design, but these are frequently striking-looking and visually memorable films. I’d argue that Pope is as great a image-maker of faces as Tak Fujimoto, who shot a number of Jonathan Demme’s films.
For all that Pope rendered striking images in Leigh films, what I’ve grown to admire about his cinematography is that often the films are not objectively beautiful, or are, in fact, kind of ugly on purpose. I don’t mean poorly blocked, or badly lit, but I mean that Leigh’s filmmaking often sheds light on an uglier part of society, and the reason he’s largely been able to do so without overwrought sentimentality is because he’s willing to show ugly parts of the world as genuinely ugly. Films like Naked and All or Nothing benefit from this cold framing, preventing either from slipping into message films or a poverty porn. Where the Pope cinematography really shines and works for me is in Another Year, Leigh’s 2010 follow-up to Happy-Go-Lucky.
Another Year focuses on a year in the life of an elderly couple — Tom and Gerri2 (Jim Broadbent and the extremely beautiful and wonderful Ruth Sheen) — and their friends and loved ones, though the film does a rather neat slight of hand where it becomes clear to the viewer that perhaps the person to be focusing on is Tom and Gerri’s friend Mary (Lesley Manville), a depressed alcoholic who grows increasingly resentful of the couple’s happiness. In fact, Tom and Gerri seem to be surrounded by quite a few unhappy people whose lives they cannot fix; while the presence of these people in their lives does not actively seem to be ruining their peace, the continued and relentless contentment of Tom and Gerri provokes a profound resentment in a number of people close to them.
The film is — depending on the season — very beige or very grayish blue, and one of the things I admire most about Pope’s work on Another Year is that he resists the urge to depict Tom and Gerri’s DEEPLY enviable kitchen, like Nancy Meyers-type shit, as anything but bland and unfriendly, despite their ostensibly beautiful tile and wonderful cabinetry. Pope’s cinematography takes the point of view of the unhappier characters in the script, showing much of Tom and Gerri’s life as a kind of a bland niceness (though the couple has some wonderful depth to them) that would be easy to grow resentful of. There is a flatness to the envy, because envy is a rather flat emotion, one that doesn’t build forward but sinks deep into itself. The less nice this life can look, the more a character like Mary can justify to herself that it’s fine she doesn’t have it.3
I was reading this piece in The Verge about where 2004 “went” — images that we took in a pre-social media, pre-iPhone camera time of life, that got uploaded, maybe, to something like Flickr, but now don’t seem to really exist when I was back visiting my parents this weekend. When I am staying with my parents, I often get antsy and feel like I have to go for a walk, if only to simulate my life in New York City where I am constantly leaving my house to run 1-10 errands and be overstimulated by capitalism ($6 iced coffee, designer donut). This time when I was visiting home, my mom asked me to take photos of any good fall trees if I saw them. I briefly thought: “You see these trees all the time. You know which ones are good.” And yet, there I was, taking photos of trees.
I have my Facebook photo archives saved on an external disk somewhere, but I otherwise lack images of what my hometown looked like when I was growing up. Old storefronts, pre-renovated houses, the high school before it got a new parking lot or a new wing or whatever else. Some of that comes down to the fact that I was a child not motivated by nostalgia, the rest of it being that I didn’t have a means to make any images like that on my own. I was surprised to hear from a friend who is a parent that their seven year old’s favorite toy is a handheld camera that he uses to take photos of stuff he likes.
I rewatched a bit of Rap World on a screener (Rap World: AVAILABLE NOW!) while I was home, in part because watching Rap World made me think of 2009, the last year I fully lived at home in a real way, and the ugly (and beautiful) digital nature of the film and how it makes parking lots and suburban houses look. One of the most wonderful images in the movie is this one, in which Casey (Jack Bensinger) takes a photo of a woman he meets in a parking lot (played by Sarah Sherman).
I was never cool enough to have any kind of phone that turned sideways with a keyboard, but I did have one of those red LG flip phones with a camera that I know I took dozens of photos on, so many photos that I had to always go back and delete old photos. I’m not sure those photos went anywhere: onto a computer, or a website, or a Livejournal, or anything like that. I couldn’t even tell you now what they were probably off — friends, surely, or stuff from band trips, but the specifics are fuzzy and I know if I were to ever see those images again I’d be horrified at how awful they look.
That moment in Rap World, however, has a certain poignance — I think for as funny as the film is, it’s often quite moving in a certain way — in that we as an audience know that much of what was documented between, say, 2004-2009 now doesn’t exist or does exist but is secluded away (on external hard drive, or whatever). Much of that film is about documentation, rather than creation from nothing. To have said back then that you want to remember something forever is, perhaps, to not know that we would quickly lose the ability to do that, but also that the world we and they wanted to remember was an “uglier” version of what we now see, though the ugliness to beautiful ratio of, say, the world in general is mostly the same.
Because I now take a figure drawing class on weekends, I spend a lot of time looking at both Renaissance paintings and pencil drawings, trying to figure out how to see as they once saw. Whenever I’m not doing well in class (which is often — I am a bad visual artist!), the rhetorical questions from our teacher are always the same: Are you looking? Are you seeing? Can you show us what you see?
Dick Pope had been previously nominated for his work on The Illusionist, which I’ve never seen.
lol, of course
Pope’s final collaboration with Leigh is Hard Truths, which many people have yet to see but I have… Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of great interior images in that movie, the contrast between apartments and homes well-lived in, versus those that must remain pristine and without character. But you’ll see!
"Dick Poop" is how I would describe images made with Grok 2.
re: pre-social media digital images, it's not exactly the same thing as still photos but this is why I love video archivists who upload old footage online just for the fun of seeing what stuff was like in the age when it was easy to take photos and videos of stuff but we weren't all posting it yet. the youtube channel "vampire robot" has lots of stuff like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEJeVdf8Lg that's just a 13 minute long video about buying a ticket to the dark knight in 2008.