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• The Eyeball #42: Talking to Tom Nissley About The Most Dangerous Game
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“Even the best reading I’ve ever done is nowhere near those moments alone with my work, when it’s going well, when I discover something about a character that’s been eluding me for months. At the same time, I want to reiterate that a lot of the promotion stuff is fun. It definitely is. But nowhere near the soul transformative experience of writing itself.”

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“An iron stairwell led to a basement. The stairs opened into a dim, low-ceilinged space that smelled of opium smoke and industrial-grade lubricants. A soldier elbowed past them on his way out, zipping his fly. The 83rd turned on their beams and swept the floor with light. The room appeared littered with dissected mannequins. An arm crawled out of their way and hid under a sofa as they advanced. They followed the sound of sex groans to a curtained alcove.”

Related Posts:

• Blueprints of the Afterlife Release and Interview
• Ryan Boudinot’s New Book
• Ryan Boudinot in SF
• The Eyeball #42: Talking to Tom Nissley About The Most Dangerous Game
• The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren

***

The Rumpus: What did you think of the movie?

Tom Nissley: I was thrilled by how short it was. I did a double take when I saw the running time on the Netflix sleeve: 1 hr, 3 min. Of course, all that meant was my wife and I could watch the commentary track right afterwards (we fell asleep halfway through, like we usually do). But I loved how fast the plot moved: we were giggling at how efficiently the opening shipwreck happened, and not (just) in a campy way.

With a movie like this, made to a different aesthetic standard than I usually look for, it can be interesting to try to separate the campy pleasures from the immediate ones. The camp is easy to spot, every time Count Zaroff strokes the scar on his forehead. But there were immediate pleasures too. The shipwreck is authentically disturbing, maybe because it happens more quickly than we expect, and even those stunt bodies falling into the water have an abruptness that makes you feel their impact. And even Zaroff, when he spouts his business about “after the hunt, then comes the love”: you don’t expect rape to be brought up so explicitly, but those were the pre-Code years. And the dogs, especially in the foggy swamp: the dogs don’t know they’re in a campy movie. There’s a moment when the hounds are climbing up a steep bank in an alarmingly powerful way and one can’t quite make it to the top and falls back while the others rush on from below him: that was probably the most moving sequence in the whole picture for me.

But the legendary man-hunting-man sequence? That’s where it just got silly: it felt like a Road Runner cartoon, but with less tension. That’s where running out of money (as apparently they did) really did some damage.

I do love that Joel McCrea, though. What a fresh-faced young man.

What did you think? What cut through the camp for you?

Rumpus: The shipwreck was disturbing? I thought it was the funniest sequence of the whole movie. It reminds me of the time my dad and I were watching an old episode of Dr. Who at my grandparents’ house and there was this part where a guy gets crushed between two robot mummies. As my dad and I were cracking up, my grandmother came into the room, saw what we were watching, and said, “This isn’t scary to you?” It’s always interesting to me how movies we once considered suspenseful or fraught with a certain emotion can seem cheeseball to us now, owing to production values and pre-Method acting.

When did this film come out? 1932? It seems to me the whole thing is about Social Darwinism, which is interesting considering what was right around the corner, historically speaking. You’ve got your blonde, civilized hero (McCrea, who I loved in Sullivan’s Travels) up against the swarthy, scenery-chewing Zaroff and his gang of Cossacks. I’m not exactly saying that this is a pro-Aryan film, but there’s a whiff of xenophobia that hangs over the whole thing like a haze.

Nissley: Yes, the Aryan-Americans vs. the forces of darkness element is hard to ignore, especially when you pair MDG with the movie it was made alongside of, with the same directors and some of the same sets: King Kong. This kind of stuff would have been red meat for the grad-school cultural studies industry I used to be part of: it’s so unembarrassed about its anxieties and obsessions that you hardly know where to begin. Regarding Social Darwinism specifically, I thought on one hand it undercuts the “survival of the fittest” idea by making man-hunting-man so disgusting, to the point that now that McCrea, the great white hunter, knows what it’s like to be hunted himself, he seems to have lost his taste for blood. But I’m sure you could shoehorn it back into Social Darwinist ideas (as I understand them) by seeing Count Z as representing a decadent, savage race that will be superseded by fresh-faced, fair-play Americans like McCrea.

Speaking of grad school and Cossacks, here’s a background detail I absolutely love. Have you read The Possessed, Elif Batuman’s fabulously entertaining book on the writers and scholars of Russian literature? There’s a great little section in her chapter on Isaac Babel in which she realizes that “Frank Mosher,” an American airman who Babel describes interrogating in 1920 after he was shot down while fighting the Bolsheviks, was none other than Merian Cooper, the creator of King Kong and, yes, The Most Dangerous Game. (It appears, in fact, that Babel was the one who saved the future filmmaker from being killed by his Cossack comrades after he crashed.) Knowing that Cooper spent months as a prisoner of the Soviets (shoveling snow on the railroad, apparently) does add some color to his portrait of this mad, murderous Russian. And by the way, here’s Babel’s description of Mosher/Cooper from his diary: “A shot-down American pilot, barefoot but elegant, neck like a column, dazzlingly white teeth, his uniform covered with oil and dirt.” Sure sounds like Joel McCrea after he washes up on Ship-Trap Island!

Another nice biographical tidbit, this time from the commentary track: “Ivan,” the mute Cossack brute in the count’s employ, was played by Noble Johnson, one of the few black actors in early Hollywood, who ran his own African-American studio, called the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, from 1916 to 1921.

I’m the kind of movie viewer who has IMDb open while I watch, and I love to make these connections outside the walls of the film, so feel free to run with them, but I’m also curious about how you watch a movie like this as a writer. Are you always looking for things you can take away–either bits of craft or actual shards of story or fact–and incorporate into the worlds you build in your fiction? Were there any raw materials you mined from this rich vein?

Rumpus: You truly are the master of trivia. I had no idea about the Babel connection, that’s amazing. I revisit Red Cavalry occasionally and assign him to students all the time. So fascinating to think that he crossed paths in such a dramatic way with Cooper, whose King Kong was the favorite movie of one Adolf Hitler (I’m pretty sure I know this thanks to the Genus edition of Trivial Pursuit). Have you read any of the propaganda Babel wrote? It’s terrifying, blood-thirsty stuff. My favorite line is “Stamp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins, Red Army fighters!”

I don’t know what “as a writer” really means anymore. I brush my teeth as a writer, I drive my car as a writer, I make dinner as a writer. I think, more broadly, your question is about incorporating influence. Every movie, book, album, etc. goes into the mulch pile to some degree. I latch on to some works more than others. The Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky, for example, was a film that deeply influenced my upcoming novel. But the more deliberate my attempts at drawing in an influence, the less influential that source becomes. Which is why I can’t seem to do research for anything I write, and sort of recoil at the very idea of research. Influences have to happen at the level of the subconscious, not as something deliberately sought out.

I’m interested in your movie digestive process as well. At least to the outside observer, it appears like your brain is full of hyperlinks. Like you’re webbing together all these pieces of information. This observation, I suppose, offers a sneaky opportunity for me to ask you about Jeopardy!. As I watched you clean up on that show, I wanted to get a sense for what was going through your head in the moment you hit the buzzer. Were there times when you hit the buzzer without actually knowing the question, and in the gap of time between when Trebek said your name and you had to speak, it came to you? Did you ever intuit that you might know the answer, so you buzzed in, having faith that your brain would catch up to your intuition?

Nissley: Hey, you’re not so bad at accessing the database either–look at you pulling out some excellent Babel facts of your own!

I know what you’re saying about being influenced by everything and nothing. I agree especially that the harder you try to incorporate something, the more it falls apart in your hands. To answer my own question, though (why else do we ask them?), one way I try to enjoy something like The Most Dangerous Game that has, for better or worse, almost no similarities to the way I tell stories is to look for material or techniques that I would never think to use on my own. A head floating in a vat? Maybe not. But the startling effect of action speeded up beyond our expectations, or the authentic animal presence of those unruly dogs? Those fragments I hope I can put aside somewhere in the storehouse to use when I need them.

Meanwhile, it all comes back to Jeopardy! (nice job remembering the exclamation point). What goes through my head before the buzzer? I’m trying to navigate that web of information as fast as I can. The mechanics of it are that I would try to read the clue faster than Alex and decide, by the time he got to the end, whether I knew the answer or not. One of my few strategies was not guessing at things I wasn’t pretty sure I knew, so if I couldn’t come up with an answer in time, I would just lay off the buzzer (which sometimes meant letting questions I could have gotten go by). Sometimes, though, I would be almost certain I “knew” an answer, even if I hadn’t articulated it to myself: neurologically, I guess I had navigated to the right spot in my memory, and knew the spot existed, but hadn’t accessed it yet. Usually, I was able to pull it up (once I remember desperately picturing Malcolm McDowell’s face and bowler hat while trying to pull out the words “Clockwork Orange“), but not always (like when I could only draw the first few syllables of “Savonarola” out of my brain in time). But those few seconds when you’re reading the question, trying to figure it out, and then getting ready to buzz: I’m not sure my brain has ever worked that well. I know I played a lot better on the show than I did at home, or even in rehearsals: there’s something about the adrenaline of the real game that finally pushed my brain to work at maximum capacity for a short time. There’s a thrill to operating in real time like that–it feels like the three-dimensional concentration when you have the ball in the lane in a basketball game, or when you’re part of the back and forth in a good conversation. And I think the speed of the game is one reason it’s so popular. There’s an electric flow to it that’s unlike, say, the more leisurely pub trivia games you and I have had the pleasure of playing a few times.

But meanwhile, it’s that web of information that makes Jeopardy! (and those fun facts we both pulled out about Babel and King Kong) seem less like trivia and more like knowledge. As a lot of people have pointed out, the more nodes you have on your network of knowledge, the more new facts stick, because they attach in various ways to the data that are already there. And so the main part of the fun for me of watching something like MDG is not the drama within the movie, but all the connections I can make to things outside the movie: to a good friend’s infatuation with Fay Wray, to hairstyles and fashions of another time (those high-waisted pants!), to The Man with Two Brains, to Gilligan’s Island, to the Bolsheviks and the Cossacks. And that’s why to me the DVD commentary track is perhaps the great new art form of the millennium.

That’s not always the case, though–there are other pleasures in other movies. In The Tree of Life, say, I didn’t get most of my enjoyment from thinking, “Oh, that’s Sean Penn, and just think of all the other stuff he represents.” In fact, within that movie, recognizing Sean Penn as Sean Penn was a drawback for me. But that movie wasn’t a hermetic experience either: the echoes of 2001 added to the experience for me, as did, I think, recognizing Brad Pitt as Brad Pitt, maybe because his character had enough weight to hold its own with the aura of Brad Pitt the star.

Rumpus: I can’t imagine doing anything but choking in Jeopardy!!!!! (Tell me, do you have to pronounce it with the exclamation point as well?) I figured everyone read the clue before Alex finished saying it. And since I have you on this subject, what’s the clicker like? From what I gather they’re the same technology as an old school Atari joystick.

What do you think is the difference between trivia and knowledge?

I watched The Tree of Life at home while suffering a cold, which is far from an ideal viewing experience. Oh yeah, and it was daytime, too. Even so, the cinematography blew me away, as has always been the case with Malick’s films. The way he makes plants look, the way he somehow manages to convey what the temperature of the air is in a scene. But I have to say what I most looked forward to was seeing those dinosaurs. And I wish one of them would have eaten Sean Penn. I love Sean Penn in nearly everything he does. There’s this lesser Woody Allen movie called Sweet and Low Down where I think he’s hilarious and brilliant. But between the interstellar screen saver sections of The Tree of Life, the guy just seemed adrift. I liked The Tree of Life but I was aware of myself wanting to like it, because liking it would prove to myself that I’m smart. I didn’t connect to it like I connected to The Thin Red Line or The New World. I though the scene where the whole cast meets on the beach was fairly cheeseball, like the series finale of Lost. And the “I give you my son” line annoyed me in a way that only an atheist who was raised Catholic can be annoyed. But any time Terrence Malick trains a camera on a weed, I’ll be happy to look at that all day long.

Nissley: At this point, I’ve said the word “Jeopardy” so much in the past year that it’s a little hard to reach the exclamatory. I think my usual intonation is closer to the interrobang. And yes, I think some early-’80s console experience with Combat or Missile Command is excellent training for mastering the “signaling device,” though the red button is at the top of the stick, not on the base, as with Atari.

The line between trivia and knowledge is in the eye of the beholder, but one way I think of it is that trivia is an obscure fact known for the sake of its obscurity (for example, Q: Who was on deck when Bobby Thomson hit the shot heard ’round the world? A: Willie Mays), whereas knowledge is a fact that you know organically as part of a larger structure of understanding (e.g., Q: Who is the only third-party presidential candidate since the Civil War to finish second? A: Teddy Roosevelt, 1912). But no doubt I’m just trying to paper over my own embarrassment at being a trivia champ by giving it a more respectable name. I did, after all, reveal to 10 million viewers that I know who Kim Kardashian was married to.

Now back to high art! I think I must have seen The Tree of Life under optimal conditions (although it was so long I had to go and pee in the middle, which I never do at the movies, but I figured I wouldn’t really miss any big plot points), because I just drank it down like water (maybe that’s why I had to pee). I’ve seen and enjoyed most of the Malick movies, but none have really gotten under my skin the way this one did. But “under my skin” is wrong–it felt like it was my skin. It wasn’t that I identified strongly with the story so much as the philosophy, which to my eyes expressed a sort of ecstatic sense of the world around us, and its unalterable impermanence. From what I’ve heard Malick fits his religious sense into some sort of Christianity, but I felt like I had never seen my own wide-eyed atheism embodied so profoundly before. As you said, it’s really a religion of the camera. My sister knows one of the cameramen Malick sent out to collect some of the non-story footage, and my understanding is that his mandate was pretty much: bring back beautiful stuff. I want that job.

But the Sean Penn sections, especially the laughable scene on the beach? I mostly pretend that they weren’t even in the picture. People who have told me how much they hated the movie tend to focus on those scenes, and I can’t really argue with them, except to say that I ignore them and am still left with my favorite movie (or probably anything) of the year.

I’ve never seen Sweet and Lowdown (I just can’t keep up with the Woodman), but the mention they made of it in passing in that recent PBS documentary on Allen made me want to track it down (along with a dozen other Woodys I’ve missed or half-forgotten).

Rumpus: Okay, Tom, one more for the road: This actor, who had a cameo appearance in Gravity’s Rainbow, in 2011 shared the sound stage with such creatures as Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, and Gonzo the Great.

Nissley: You’re going to end this with a stumper? Do I at least have until daybreak to answer it, like Joel McCrea? I can see you stroking your forehead wound now…

Well, I’m pretty sure Jason Segal’s not name-checked in Gravity’s Rainbow, but I haven’t taken my kids to The Muppets yet, so I have to think of who might still be alive that would have been big enough for Pynchon in the early ’70s. How about Kirk Douglas?

Okay, I looked it up: none other than “Judge Hardy’s madcap son,” Mickey Rooney. Well played. How about this in return? What actor, who had a slightly more pivotal cameo in The Moviegoer, is also the “actor / who died while he was drinking / he was no one I had heard of” in Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” (and was Ron and Nancy Reagan’s best man)? (At least if IMDb is to be believed.)

Rumpus: I have no fucking idea.

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• The Eyeball #35: Un Chien Andalou
• The Eyeball #34: The Thorn in My Heart

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Here’s part 1:

…and part 2:

When I was in grad school, this guy put Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass on my reading list, which led me to Street of Crocodiles, which is of course the source material for the Quays’ film. Years later I was delighted to find myself on the faculty of Goddard’s MFA program with Victoria Nelson, a Schulzian whose superb and heady The Secret Life of Puppets has this to say about the adaptation presented above:

“…Street of Crocodiles draws on the central images of the stories to re-represent the magical, industrialized Gothic universe of Schulz’s Drohobycz. With nothing whatever in it identifiably “American,” this nonlinear narrative is a virtually perfect re-creation of eastern European style and mood.

The Brothers Quay

I agree with Vicki that this adaptation is all about capturing mood, so after I screened the film I asked the class to write an adaptation that captured the feeling of what they’d just seen. Then I read a bit of the source material. Reading Schulz I’m always astounded by the translation. I can’t read Polish, and I have no idea how faithfully this adheres to the original language, but goddamn if Celina Wieniewska’s translation doesn’t knock me out every time. Here’s an excerpt of what I shared with the class:

“While in the old city a nightly semi-clandestine trade prevailed, marked by ceremonious solemnity, in the new district modern, sober forms of commercial endeavour had flourished at once. The pseudo-Americanism, grafted on the old, crumbling core of the city, shot up here in a rich but empty and colourless vegetation of pretentious vulgarity. One could see there cheap jerry-built houses with grotesque facades, covered with a monstrous stucco of cracked plaster. The old, shaky suburban houses had large hastily constructed portals grafted on to them which only on close inspection revealed themselves as miserable imitations of metropolitan splendour. Dull, dirty and faulty glass panes in which the dark pictures of the street were wavily reflected, the badly planed wood of the doors, the grey atmosphere of those sterile interiors where the high shelves were cracked and the crumbling walls were covered with cobwebs and thick dust, gave these shops the stigma of some wild Klondike.”

Now that I’m in the position to do so, I assign the hell out of Bruno Schulz. One of my students, Jennifer Babson, a talented writer based in Germany, traveled to Poland recently and mentioned Schulz to anyone who’d listen.

Jan Svankmajer

From American twins consumed by Eastern European moods we moved to a film by an actual Eastern European, the Czech director Jan Svankmajer. While the Brothers Quay’s stop-motion adaptation of Schulz exists within the shadows of a boxed-in world, Svankmajer’s “Picnic with Weismann” takes place in a spacious, tree-ringed field, where a number of inanimate objects pursue an afternoon of leisure. Take a look.

The film elicited some laughs, particularly during the plum-eating routine. Unlike “Street of Crocodiles,” this short adheres to something of an easily recognizable structure. It’s basically a long joke with a punchline. Not all of Svankmajer’s films are quite this whimsical, though even Lunacy, which is based on de Sade and Poe, has its knee-slapping moments. After screening this short I asked the class to again write an adaptation of what they’d just seen.

Our third and final film was Norman McLaren’s “Neighbours,” for which the Canadian won an Oscar in 1952. Take a gander:

My least favorite of the three shorts I screened, I’m always a bit put off by the heavy-handedness of the capital-M Message of this short.

Norman McLaren

McLaren worked under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada, that great purveyor of classroom films (and namesake of ambient music fixture Boards of Canada), which nowadays makes its entire archive available on the web. McLaren’s work is also collected in a hefty 6-disc boxed set that I have just begun to dig into.

Our triptych of films began with two Americans enraptured by Eastern European melancholy, on to a visual joke by a Czech animator, and finally to a sincere Canadian who urged us to all get along. I still feel like I’m figuring out how to teach a film class. Next week, for our final session, I’m going to hit the class with a little Maddin and Deren. I’m considering making popcorn.

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In previous weeks we viewed films by Buñuel, Brakhage, and Anger, moving westward from Spain to Colorado to Los Angeles. This week we hopped across the Pacific to Japan, where we encountered Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, quite possibly the most psychedelic movie ever to come out of Asia. This week I came prepared. I brought my students beer.

Here’s a really straight-forward description of the film. It’s about seven high school girls who venture to the home of one of the girl’s aunts. The house is haunted. Supernatural events go down. The girls die one by one.

Here’s a better description, written by Grace Krilanovich, whose The Orange Eats Creeps is my favorite book of 2010.

And here’s a trailer, ala YouTube.

After cracking our Fat Tire Amber Ales, we settled in for 88 minutes of glorious pop freakout horror. At no point is this film actually scary, which I think has to do with pacing as much as the craziness of the special effects. Some of the edits are so abrupt, throwing you from one scene of contrived yet inspired ridiculousness into another, equally contrived and inspired and ridiculous scene, that the net effect is just fun. The dippy pop music, the expository dialogue, the trick shots just for the hell of it, it all accumulates in such a wonderful mess. And yet watching it for the second time, the film looked even more meticulous.

When the lights went up I asked my stunned students to write something from the point of view of one of the film’s non-human characters. A couple people chose Blanche the cat. One woman wrote something from the point of view of the chandelier. Brilliant.

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• The Eyeball #34: The Thorn in My Heart

Kenneth Anger in 2008

We started with Lucifier Rising, a 29-minute film informed by Aleister Crowley’s belief that we live in the Aeon of Horus, an era of deep spirituality and child-like wonder. The film was shot partially against the backdrop of pyramids and the Sphinx in Egypt and just exudes a strange sort of cheap grandeur. This opening section is interspersed with mesmerizing footage of an erupting volcano. Before long the film changes location, to the British aisles, where Marianne Faithful makes an appearance as a sort of pilgrim figure. The film alternates between scenes set in Stonehenge and Egypt, with a middle freak-out section featuring a wizard running in a circle in a fog of incense. In the end, flying saucers show up, to which I say: rad. What makes the film truly remarkable, however, is the soundtrack, supplied by Bobby Beausoleil, the convicted murder and Manson family member. It’s an inspired, atmospheric acid freakout, with shades of Mahavishnu Orchestra and a ripping solo in the middle. You read that correctly: convicted murderer. I believe Beausoleil was the one who wrote “Political piggy” in blood on the wall after the Hinman murders.

The film elicited a few chuckles, and the class seemed to enjoy the writing prompt I provided after the film, to “invent a ritual.”

Then we moved on to Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and the class started to squirm. Where Lucifer Rising seems to encompass the whole world and its history, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome gets claustrophobic very quickly. A multi-hued progression of shots of mythic figures doing little but posing and drinking from a goblet, then laughing hysterically, the film began to test our patience about midway through. We did get a laugh when Anais Nin appears with a birdcage on her head. After the film when I pointed out that this figure was Anais Nin, I was met with some blank stares. You know, Henry Miller? Tropic of Cancer? Delta of Venus?I was starting to feel like a jackass.

The writing prompt I provided after this film was to write about a room in which characters behave unexpectedly. They gave it their best shot and those who offered to read their work came up with some cool surrealist material. But overall I got the feeling that I hadn’t done that great a job with this session of the class, that I’d basically given them all a bad trip. So I promised them that next week I’d bring something that wasn’t quite so heavy.

Which brings up an interesting question. I tend to be attracted to a certain darkness in cinema and I suppose I associate “experimental” film with this darkness. The three filmmakers we’ve considered so far have all been drawn to the subject of evil in some capacity. In coming weeks I’m going to approach the question of what experimental cinema that isn’t drawn to darkness looks like.

Related Posts:

• The Eyeball #42: Talking to Tom Nissley About The Most Dangerous Game
• The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren
• The Eyeball #38: HOUSE
• The Eyeball #35: Un Chien Andalou
• The Eyeball #34: The Thorn in My Heart

What better place to start than Un Chien Andalou? You know it as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1929 16-minute… what should we call this? Masterpiece? High water mark of surrealist cinema? Inspiration for a Pixies song? Just watch it:

I have screened this film for two sets of students in the past two weeks and each time we get to the eyeball scene the audible gasps arrive on cue. The disc I own includes a couple bonus features, including an interview with Buñuel’s son Juan-Luis. Juan-Luis describes the process by which Dali and his father generated ideas for the film. They lobbed ideas back and forth and shot down any idea that seemed too obvious, hoping to subvert rationality as thoroughly as possible.

So instead of a man dragging a train, why not have a man dragging two pianos? And what to put on those pianos? Jump rope? No, bad idea. Dead donkeys. Great idea!

Watching this film over the years while I’ve worked with writing students inspired a writing exercise which I’ve revised a bit and which I presented at Hugo House this week. It’s a list of 17 incomplete sentences. The object is to complete each of the sentences three times, and to go down the list as quickly as possible. For instance:

1. A woman walks into a detective agency and says ___________.

Complete three times, then move on to the next one. And so on, through 16 more incomplete sentences.

Every time I conduct this exercise I ask for a show of hands as to who used the word “husband” in some way for prompt #1. Invariably about half the hands shoot up. Here’s another one.

2. A woman sees her alcoholic father for the first time in 20 years. He gives her ____.

A lot of times participants in this exercise will complete this sentence with some mention of a bottle of hard alcohol. I have a theory as to why that is.

When we need an idea, we turn to our subconscious and put in a request. Our subconscious, not wanting to get up off the couch, looks around for something within arm’s reach. In the example above, when one reads alcoholic, one’s subconscious immediately tries to find something that will fit the word. And so it reaches for obvious: “a fifth of Jack Daniels,” “a beer,” “an AA book.”

But what happens when we tell our subconscious to try again? That’s where things start getting unique. By the third completion of an unfinished sentence, the examples being thrown around the room are wildly original. The subconscious rises to the challenge. And what surprised me the first time I conducted this exercise was how the first completions of sentences in the middle and end of the exercise tended to diverge from person to person, as well. The exercise seems to demonstrate how the subconscious quickly warms up and starts playing ball once it understands it is expected to provide original ideas.

I’m going to teach more classes in coming weeks. Next week I’m going to screen some Stan Brakhage. I’m still tweaking the writing exercise for that one and will blog about it here.

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• The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren
• The Eyeball #38: HOUSE

Whether this film will become a new Iron Man franchise I neither know nor care. The trailer makes it look like any other bullshit comic book movie, and I have no plans to see it. Now compare that trailer to this one:

I watched The Thorn in My Heart late at night when I wasn’t patient enough to really watch a movie. There were numerous points when I considered turning it off, but I couldn’t stop watching what is essentially a home movie made by one of our more inventive craftsmen of cinema. The documentary looks at the life of Gondry’s aunt Suzette, who spent her career as a schoolteacher in rural France. We listen to Suzette crack up to the point of tears telling a story about her late husband, meet her son, a gay train enthusiast, and soon we’re plunged into old family wounds and resentments. I think it’s hard to watch this documentary and not start making associations about one’s own family. There’s honesty here where there could have been exhibitionism, joy where there could have been mawkishness, and just enough Gondrian quirk in the form of animated sequences and dippy tech music to glue it all together.

So on one hand Michel Gondry is making bigass movies with recognizable stars, expensive effects, and snarky dialogue, and on the other he has ventured further inward to the origins of his creativity, his family. If he continues to pursue the former to finance the latter, I say good for him. The thing I’ve always loved about this director is his resourcefulness, his willingness to find lo-fi solutions to what could easily be achieved digitally. Case in point being his video for the Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be.” (I’d embed it, but YouTube disabled embedding for it. So you’ll have to search for it yourself.)

Related Posts:

• The Eyeball #42: Talking to Tom Nissley About The Most Dangerous Game
• The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren
• The Eyeball #38: HOUSE
• The Eyeball #37: Kenneth Anger
• The Eyeball #35: Un Chien Andalou