hny-010

What was the first thing I did on the internet in 2010? I'm not ashamed to admit it. I watched a man in a chicken suit playing "What Is Love" on a melodica. He has a loop pedal as well. It's quite a treat.

also, re. Inglourious Basterds, intentional but unexplained misspelling of which is clearly meant to drive people like me up the effing wall,

I find Tarantino's movies so satisfying, and after considering IB against Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction, three quite different films, I have a few ideas why. The ideas involve form. /structure. /pacing. When I think of PF I think of the drive-time conversations between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson; when I think of KB, believe it or not, what first comes to mind is the scene at the end of vol. 2 where he shoots her with a tranquilizer and they talk about superheroes. And IB is replete with these LONG scenes, so meticulously paced--the opening vignette and basement bar scenes especially, both of which, it has been pointed out to me, could function independently as one-act plays.

Now, why do I like these so much? Maybe they're a refreshing corrective to pomo fragmentation/information overload/frenetic pace of life. IB is fragmented too, but only into large segments, these big chapters that each stand alone to a certain extent. You can consider each one independently and then place them together like five big pieces of an extremely easy puzzle. How nice is that? Movies are the ultimate medium of fragmentation. The units are so small--shots that are often seconds long that don't have to be made in the same place or at the same time--the crew takes these tiny bits and composes them in such a way as to make you feel like it's continuous when it quite often isn't.

In typical big Hollywood movies, there is never any SPACE.

A movie also takes everyone the same amount of time to watch, so pacing is to a large extent normalized. A novel, by contrast, is quite difficult to fragment. Sure it's made up of words, but it's a big heavy chunk of them and most of the time, paging through, the only superficially obvious segments are chapters. And a novel's pacing is much more irregular; it's the same word count, but some people work on the book for a year off and on and some power through it in a week or whatever.

You don't think of a novel containing space, necessarily--the reader really gets to decide a lot of that (by stopping to think about something, paging back to check a fact or a name, or putting the book down to take a break). Temporal media like music and movies have a more direct manner of manipulating space, and for me Tarantino does it so well in these long, drawn-out scenes. People talk for a while, tension rises, then they are silent, have a drink, look at each other for a second. It's a QT movie and you know there's gonna be some shit blowing up pretty soon, but regardless as a viewer I just love those lulls in conversation and action, those sumptuous cinematic fermatas.

The weird thing is, I remember having the sensation, watching the movie, that it was somehow making me feel like I was doing some of the work putting the story together. It's not really true, not nearly so much anyway as it is in Pulp Fiction. But there's at least that sense that, unlike in the big-budget movie next door, they're moving a step or two past just spelling everything out for you.

It's weird because actually Tarantino actually makes his form so clear. This is a movie with chapters--not just DVD chapters for convenience but actual chapters like with a big black screen and white letters that say CHAPTER ONE: 1940 and so on. It made me think about extended forms in instrumental music. Someone listens to you play the piano for half an hour without stopping and they think this "piece" is just one giant blob, they have no idea where the markers are. If they know how to listen to it they do, but these days most people don't know how to listen to the music that any given musician is making, especially if it's instrumental music of most but the most obvious and repetitive types, and God knows the musicians aren't helping them out by giving them any hints. And here we have a movie that is telling us CHAPTER 2: FOUR YEARS LATER. Can you imagine what some candor like this could do for instrumental music? This is what my programs are going to look like from now on. RIGHT AFTER THE GUY ON THE RIGHT TURNS HIS PAGE, SOMETHING IMPORTANT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. Obviously the players talking between movements or internal sections would break the mood in a serious way--but then, we'd usually consider a chapter-title card to break a movie's flow too, but it works for QT, he unifies it with style and atmosphere and story, why can't we?