Weekly Reel, May 14
News: HFPA and #DisneyMustPay, The Lighthouse, and Ennio Morricone.
First with yes-you-guessed-it News:
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) has received a lot of angry letters this past week from WarnerMedia, Netflix, and Amazon Studios, along with public outings by Scarlett Johansson and other stars. NBC dropped the Golden Globes, which is the centerpiece of the HFPA and legitimates their existence. The reason for this industry boycott is because the Los Angeles Times published an exposé about the HFPA’s potentially shady financial practices and lack of diversity among its leadership. The HFPA responded recently by pointing out the hypocrisy in the many non-diverse studios/firms/stars publicly criticizing the foreign press association, which is itself by definition more internationally diverse than the leadership of the aforementioned Warner, Netflix, and Amazon Studios. Seems like the Hollywood industry is trying to find a scapegoat for its shoddy history at diversity/inclusion, but I’m not sure picking on the group of journalists that represent 55 different countries is the right mark.
Famously stingy on IPs and lawyer-PR-driven, Disney has been failing to pay authors’ royalties for novelizations of Disney-owned properties. Some of these authors were originally receiving thier royalties from 21st Century Fox, which Disney bought in 2019 but “forgot” to carry over those royalty payments. Others simply stopped received their royalty checks and didn’t realize until the #DisneyMustPay Joint Task Force was launched by Alan Dean Foster, which now counts a dozen authors asking for their money. It’s kind of funny that Disney will most likely spend more money on lawyers looking for legal loopholes instead of just giving creative professionals their earnings.
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, Canada/USA, 2019)
Almost everything about the film’s details (sot on film, black & white, square frame, set on one tiny location, no big-loud Marvel fights, etc.) will simultaneously attract film nerds while repelling everyone else. So it probably helped that Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe were cast in the lead roles and that it received positive reviews from both the critics and audience.
The Lighthouse features a fun 1.19:1 aspect ratio, which is basically a square as can be seen from the image above, for two reasons as explained by the film’s cinematographer Jarin Blaschke:
It wasn’t about trying to make it look like older films but rather choosing a frame that lends itself to the tall and narrow sets and helps you visually withhold information from the audience.
The first point is straightforward. Given the setting, a small, acre-sized rock in the middle of the sea and a tall lighthouse, as well as having only two characters, it makes sense compositionally to not bother with all that extra horizontal space. The second reason is more interesting and reaches further into film-cinematography history. German Expressionist films and filmmakers influenced by the movement were the last to use this 1.19:1 aspect ratio, most notably for F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and Fritz Lang’s M (1931). [A quick technical aside: even the photographic equipment they used to shoot the The Lighthouse matched this era: Blaschke mounted vintage 1930s Baltar lenses on the film cameras and used film stock with an orthochromatic signature, which is sensitive to blue light and used primarily for photography from the 19th century and films before the 1920s once Panchromatic film started to be used, which is instead red light sensitive. Now back to the show:] These German Expressionist films in short expressed psychological feelings visually by providing a sharp contrast between lightness-darkness and emphasizing a feeling of claustrophobia, which a square frame easily accomplishes. For instance, just from the visuals we can feel/internalize the murky grayness of the sky, the power of the lighthouse light, and the inability at remaining comfortable indoors.
On a less technical note, the morality at play between black and white, darkness and lightness, is also a theme evoked in German Expressionist films and can also be seen more explicitly in the religious depiction of 17th century New England in Eggers’ first film, The Witch (2015). In The Lighthouse, Robert Pattinson plays Ephraim Winslow but is actually, spoilers, Thomas Howard, who is running away from his dark past and so becomes a lighthouse keeper alongside longtime wickie Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe). Over time, the stress of the position combined with his unexplained guilt leads to Pattinson-Winslow-Howard psychologically spiralling out of control. What makes the story particularly interesting is its use of mythology, fairy tales, Carl Jung, era-specific dialects, and sea lore in telling the story along with all its binaries and contradictions: darkness/lightness, submission/domination, father/son, sanity/insanity, imaginary/real, nature/humanity, ego/id, self/others, etc.
What I find most interesting, besides, obviously, the authentic sound design of capturing farts and authentic New England lobster cages, is the play on identity. In the beginning we learn about Ephraim Winslow, a fresh, sober, by-the-book first-time wickie who is learning his role as the second. But we don’t know either of their names until well into the story when Winslow feels the need to assert his identity rather than being called ‘boy’ by Wake. We won’t know this until the end, but this assertion by Winslow is the beginning of a slippery slope in which he feels the need to express himself, his past, his identity, and the guilt delicately binding all of those together.
As the story progresses, the ship fails to reach the small island to relieve the two wickies of their duty, which leads to Winslow drinking throughout the day and spiralling further downward. Somewhere between the midpoint and the third act Winslow reveals that Ephraim Winslow is actually not his real name, that it’s actually Thomas Howard, which is the same Christian name as his older partner. Then soon after, we get glimpses and ramblings of Howard’s past, which involved the death and possible murder of his former foreman when he was a timberman in Canada. But by this point Howard is so far gone consciously that we’re uncertain what exactly is being hallucinated or not.
We get the confused (Thomas/Thomas) identity as a psychoanalytical, father/son-like duality in which the son must overcome the father, which is indeed a violent process. In the film it’s expressed through the possession of the light, which in the end is achieved after the older Thomas is killed and the younger one fervently beholds the light. For doing so, the younger Thomas becomes the Prometheus figure as we see his fate tied to a rock with a seagull pulling at his exposed liver. The older Thomas is then supposedly the sea-mythological figure Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, which Jung described as the personification of the unconscious with particular skills in prophesying and shape-shifting. Seen in this context, the elder Thomas may be the personified, prophetic fears of the younger Thomas as his guilt is left unchecked, which includes drinking, isolation, and ageing. The shape-shifting is overt in the fight scene where we see the older Thomas as a sea-creature thing. Furthermore, Proteus holds the keys to power as a sea god, which the younger Thomas steals after thinking he killed the older Thomas and condemns him to his Prometheus suffering.
As is obvious, a lot of problems and questions arise from this film without too many answers, as Eggers had intended. I’ll end this here before getting too deep into other topics like the bizarre sexualtiy/masculinity at play, among other things. It was certainly one of my two or three favorite films from 2019, so I highly recommend if you want to watch something completely different than anything else out there.
The Lighthouse is available for US Amazon Prime members for free.
Article: Beyond the Western, The Staggering Range of Ennio Morricone by Nate Chinen
Ennio Morricone composed the music for over 500 films but is best known for his work in the Spaghetti-Sixties with the three Sergios (Leone, Corbucci, and Sollima). His style of inventive sounds in order to match the visuals led to his use of the harmonica, whistling, and other sounds coming from one’s breathing. This created more intimate and emotive film scores because of its service to the human on the film image.
For an article promoting the films that Morricone scored that weren’t Italian-based Westerns, Nate Chinen writes:
What isn’t noted often enough is the way Morricone adapted many of the signature strategies from his westerns in a dazzling range of other film scores. The soundscapes vary greatly, but the sensibility is one and the same. It doesn’t take away from his landmark accomplishments in one area, then, when we celebrate the richness and depth of the others. To that end, here are several Morricone scores worth crowing about, each from a different decade and cinematic genre—all of them featured in a series of the composer’s work now playing on the Criterion Channel. Along with their ingenuity in terms of timbre and color, they all share an astute awareness of character and plot. Taken together with Morricone’s famous outlaw themes, they highlight a genius perfectly at home in his medium, indomitable and irreducible.
Chinen goes on to focus on four (but I’ll just show two here) influential non-Westerns Morricone scores that showcases his range and influence:
The Battle of Algiers (1966) is a historical-war-thriller about the Algerian attempt to overthrow their French overseers. Below is a sample from the score, which was then used on Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (10 points for whoever can name the scene). The Battle of Algiers score has a militaristic, drum-tapping vibe that raises the plot’s tension and makes for a nice viewing.
Days of Heaven (1978) is Terrence Malick’s second film and is about a love triangle that seems to take place entirely at sunset. To fit the style of the wheat-and-plow drama, Morricone created a more romantic, dreamy score. Below is the main theme of the film performed by the Prague Philharmonic.