Sounds, Images

Saturday, October 16, 2010

The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin, 1996)

11 comments:

Jonathan Hohensee said...: Who needs to create content when you can just post tiny jpegs without any context?; October 17, 2010 at 10:13 PM
Anonymous said...: RE: Jonathan H. -- Shut up. Please & thank you.; October 17, 2010 at 11:12 PM
N/A said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; October 18, 2010 at 10:41 AM
N/A said...: I guess you'd be the one to ask, Jonathon. Since starting your blog in September of last year you've shared absolutely no content at all. Though you seem to be somewhat active on you tube

Is this what the "world's greatest filmmaker" looks like?; October 18, 2010 at 10:44 AM
Miguel said...: The "world's greatest filmmaker" should change his name to Jonathan Ho-humsee!; October 18, 2010 at 12:44 PM
Jonathan Hohensee said...: Alright, I can't cop to the quality or quantity of my work being better/more than yours (and I fail to see how responding "Yeah? I'd like to see YOU do better" applies the issue) but the issue still stands.

Sure, posting a single frame has become a part of the film-blogging vocabulary, but when you post a wordless lo-res image that you can barely make out, do you expect your audience to get a genuinely palpable reaction to that? Am I incorrect when I say it's not content?

I mean...I like the rest of your blog and read it regularly, but...whatever, that's my complaint.; October 18, 2010 at 6:09 PM
N/A said...: Well, the image itself literally is content in the sense that is it contained within this blog. So yes, you are incorrect. What you're attempting to get at is the value of the content, which might have been a better introduction than the sarcastic one you posted earlier. That being said, as a regular reader of this blog I can personally say that I quite enjoy the wordless images (be they stills, paintings, details of musical compositions, etc.) as they often give me a glimpse at something I wouldn't have otherwise considered in certain (film related or not) contexts,the context being this specific blog. The image that we're all commenting on for example recalls a similar image from D.W. Griffith's Way Down East. In it, Lillian Gish is forced to go out during vicious snowstorm. So part of the content for me becomes the contrast between Gish's character and Davis' in The Long Kiss Goodnight. And I hadn't even thought of that film since first seeing it years and years ago. Do you not find the image striking? Why or why not? I know the image from the Wilder film below stunned me so much that I set out to look for the film right away.; October 18, 2010 at 9:38 PM
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky said...: Relax, folks!

Jonathan,

Why "tiny JPEGs?"

Two reasons:

First of all, this blog is 400px wide, and I decided about a year ago (after always using fairly high-resolution files) that anything I had posted here had to be able to function at the same width as the blog. If I was posted a screencap, whatever it was that I wanted to bring across (such as what J.B. is talking about in the comment) about the image had to be simple and obvious enough that it would be visible at such a low size.

Second, this blog has a fairly large readership that comes from all over the world. On a given day, it sees visitors from 3-5 continents, and any random sampling of a few days shows visitors from every continent except Antarctica. Though a large part of the readership is based in Europe or North America, I also get a lot of visitors from parts of the world where Internet connections can sometimes be slow and places where they it is common for connections to be set up according to a data usage plan (an "$X per megabyte" plan). This makes, say, 900K images problematic for those particular visitors.

So, while the majority of visitors to this blog come from someplace like Lisbon, the blog should be just as easy to load in Tehran or Lagos.

Also, a portion of the readership are film critics and film programmers, who are often traveling and at the mercy of the often horrific WiFi connections at festivals.

"Content?"

This is a blog, not some corny Web 2.0 business. Besides certain late-capitalist theoretical weaknesses in your logic here ("content" = "that which has obvious / 'monetizable' value"), I should point out Sounds, Images is not intended as some kind of daily provider of information, etc. (though it can be read / viewed that way), but more as a series of footnotes and asides.

It is home to appendices, rough drafts, unfinished writings, etc. It is -- and this is not my own description, but one I've heard from a lot of my readers -- a public sketchbook. It's less a place for "statements" and more one for "subjects for further study." If you "like the blog" but hate the images, then maybe actually reading my criticism might be your thing. I keep an index of the stuff that's available to read for free online here on this site -- it's the top link on the right.

Unasked question: Why that picture above?

Because of the composition, which places a burning car on a plane above a bloody woman getting ready to kill a deer and its borderline Symbolist ideas about the relationship between humanity and nature (hence the NATURE label, which is used here for posts relating to the history of how the "natural world" is portrayed in art -- click on it and you'll find an excerpt from a text about how Eric Rohmer recorded natural sounds and the only great painting John Constable ever painted). And because, while I'm prone to think of The Long Kiss Goodnight as a movie written by Shane Black more than one directed by Renny Harlon, that out-of-nowhere phantasmagoric tableau strikes me as "classically" Harlin -- the Harlin of Nightmare on Elm Street, to be precise (hence the creation of the second label -- RENNY HARLIN, for use in further explorations of what exactly defines him as a director).

Anyway, if you have any further questions, comments, etc., you feel free to keep commentin' here or you can e-mail me (it's the second link from the top on the right).; October 18, 2010 at 9:53 PM
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky said...: (Ah, nothing like a Blogger error -- sorry to those with e-mail subscriptions, etc. who just got hit with a dozen duplicates of the above comment); October 18, 2010 at 9:59 PM
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky said...: Addendum:

Jonathan,

Also, "some corny Web 2.0 business" wasn't intended to be a personal dig at what you do for a living; I didn't know you were a "Web 2.0 consultant" until someone just pointed it out to me (however, the phrase "create content" should have been a dead giveaway).; October 18, 2010 at 10:32 PM
N/A said...: But also, Griffith. Right? RIGHT?!; October 18, 2010 at 11:31 PM

Saturday, October 16, 2010

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