Hey! Have you noticed the “Store” tab on the “Foreclosure” website? We’ve got a wide selection of tees, sweats and caps bearing the “Rot and Decay Films” and “Foreclosure” logos. And from now until forever, we will donate all profits from the store to “Partners in Health” a non-profit organization working on the ground in Haiti for the last twenty years. So support Haiti and support independent film and get yourself a cool new t-shirt.
Labels: Foreclosure
Labels: Criticism, Filmmaking, Horror
Labels: Horror
Below is an excerpt from an interview between Kaneto Shindo and Joan Mellen.
The prolific Japanese director talks about his whole career. Below he discusses the social elements at work in his supremely eerie horror folktale, "Onibaba" (1964).
Mellen: I find the social dimension of your films very complex and interesting. Would you describe how in your films you depict the class struggle as it appeared both in history and society?
Shindo: Speaking about Onibaba in particular, my main historical interest focuses on ordinary people... their energy to carry themselves beyond the predicaments they encounter daily. I wish to describe the struggles of the so-called common people which usually never appear in recorded history. This is why I made Onibaba. My mind was always on the commoners, not on the lords, politicans, or anyone of name and fame. I wanted to convey the lives of down-to-earth people who live like weeds.
Mellen: In the setting of Onibaba I noticed that the people seemed very small, moving around a lake where the reeds were very tall and imposing.
Shindo: Yes, the tall, swaying reeds are my symbol of the world, the society which surrounds people. In Kuroneko bushes are used for the same symbolic end. Tall, densem swaying reeds represent the world in which these commoners live and to which the eyes of lords and politicians do not reach. My eyes, or rather the camera's eyes, is fixed to view the world from the very lowest level of society, not from the top.
Labels: economic crisis, Foreclosure
Labels: Foreclosure, Horror
I was dismayed to see “Peeping Tom” on the list. I can think of few films so essential to our understanding of contemporary horror.
The film follows the murderous exploits of Mark Lewis, a solitary photographer who preys on women. Sometimes posing as a documentarian, Mark gets his victims in front of his 16mm film camera, he kills them with his tripod immortalizing their death throes on film.
The viewer is thrust into the point of view of the camera’s viewfinder, forcing us into identification with both the deadly mechanism and the deeply disturbed Mark. We become both the murderer and the means. Even more disconcerting is the allegorical significance of this approach. The viewer is confronted with their own voyeurism.
“Peeing Tom’s” first person aesthetic takes on a new significance when we consider the current horror film fixation with POV. Camera phones, video messaging, and other portable media have provided a new awareness of the first person field of vision that the modern horror film exploits. Movies like “Quarantine” and “Cloverfield” mimic familiar digital platforms as a foray into traditional zombie/infection and monster films respectively.
These are standard genre movies but they are always seem to be reaching to a higher level of verisimilitude. Their approach assumes that the familiarity of the first person digital viewpoint is what incites fear in the viewer. The limited range of vision offered by this approach can be genuinely terrifying (see "[REC]") but a film like “Peeping Tom” exposes an oversight these recent horror films make. They do not realize that identification with the monster is far more horrifying than relation to the victim. When we are forced to identify with the monster, we are faced with out own unrepresentable dark side.
John Carpenter’s "Halloween” aligns us with the central monster to great effect. The opening tracking shot gives us the POV of Michael Myers as a child.
The power of this opener is that it gives us a greater understanding of his monstrous pervasiveness. When we find ourselves yelling at the screen at some nubile slasher victim-“Don’t go into that house, whatever you do, don’t go in that damn house!”- it’s because we have this special access to the monster that Carpenter provides.
(please refer to this great explication of the opening of “Halloween” on Jim Emerson’s Scanners website: Opening Shots: Halloween)
This does not mean that victim identification and pro-sumer video are useless as horror strategies. Perhaps more successful than the strict video mimicry of a film like “Quarantine” is the hybrid method of “28 Days Later" which replicated the lo-fi look of broadcast style video without tethering the film to a visual conceit. The flip side of this aesthetic discussion is the practical use of video. "The Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal Activity" -despite all their flaws and even- made their limitations a narrative virtue, far outstripping production costs upon release.
Labels: Cinematography, Criticism, Digital Video, Filmmaking, Horror
Interviews with Americans made over the space of a road trip...Labels: Cinematography, Filmmaking, Sound
The share of borrowers who are falling seriously behind on loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration jumped by more than a third in the past year, foreshadowing a crush of foreclosures that could further buffet an agency vital to the housing market's recovery....
Labels: economic crisis, Foreclosure
Labels: Filmmaking, Sound
