Was too sick to go to Kelly Rowland tonight, and gave my pass away. As I morosely made my way home, I started to feel remarkably better. Damn. I comforted myself by listening not to Kelly, but to Aaliyah. Does anybody else think her last album, while too long, was nonetheless remarkable? After the swinging tuff girl act of the first two albums, I think she’d finally found a tone that was just so, one that could direct all those things that often make R&B tacky — an overabundance of sugary gloss and melismatic flourishes — towards something more sublime. Genius. That this tone is more vulnerable and classically “girly” isn’t something to apologise about, because through it, Aaliyah channels spookier flavours. “More Than a Woman” is like an infinity of baroque chambers, full of eyelashes and lips, but also strange homonculi. She was turning into a remarkable entertainer. If only… (Anyone mumbling some moralistic, auratic crap about “manufactured hit machines” can now promptly go fuck themselves. Oh yes.)
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Had an interesting chat to my brother on the weekend about the proletarianisation of aesthetic work, which led to Pattern Recognition, and “the footage”. He hasn’t read Gibson’s book, but the idea of a film that betrayed few traces of a particular time or place was ludicrous to him, and an impediment to the suspension of disbelief. I kinda agree that it’s ludicrous, but I don’t think it’s meant to be taken seriously on that level. It’s a kind of macguffin — like the glowing thing inside the suitcase in Pulp Fiction — that doesn’t have to “work” to make the story successful. Rather than “working” logically, the footage acts as a kind of talismanic attractor. And I doubt Gibson intended the footage to be literally free of “telltale semiotic markers”, as if those things could be discrete and hermenteutically certain; however unlikely, the idea that it could elude those kinds of identifications — in the face of a world of iconic logos and the data extraction capabilities of the worldwide Echelon spy-system — is what counts.
This brings to mind Nicholas Meyer’s fascinating director’s commentary on the Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan DVD; he asserts that if you lined up three “period films” that were all set in the 1850s but made in 1965, 1975 and 1985, you’d be able to successfully date them within a year or two. It’s not just specific things like the film stock, the use of steadicam, stylistic “lapses” or even the rhythm of the editing and the framing of shots, but the very way in which elements of the film rub together to generate meaning. In any case, this kind of historically specific mediation is actually what it’s all about, rather than trying to faithfully “recreate” an era. In this vein, there’s a great John Fowles essay (in Wormholes) about his experience of writing The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and needing to consciously mediate the perception of Victorian speech patterns.
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Last night I was watching Bollywood clips on Channel 31. Fantastic stuff. What I found really odd, though, was that they’d all been transferred to Beta video (or whatever Channel 31 use internally) in a really jarring way — the action was really jumpy, as if a couple of frames were being dropped every second. What I can’t figure out is why; they use PAL in India, so it can’t be a dodgy NTSC-to-PAL conversion system. In any case, it made for interesting viewing.
As it happens, in the last two weeks I’ve had conversations with two different people about framerates, and particularly about how filming at an ultra-high framerate would mean using film fast enough to capture the slightest movement in an even smaller instant, and that even if you dropped frames to play it back at the usual framerate, it’d still play differently, even if the naked eye can’t differentiate individual frames beyond 25fps. Rather, it’s the quality of those frames, the lack of motion blurring, that must make 50fps, even with every second frame dropped, seem so edgy and nervous.