The Hooverville Hexagon: Visual Technology and Its Discontents

Movies and other things that make pictures in our heads.

 

Slow Death by Narrator

by DG

'This 1921 photo looked cheerful—until the window reflection showed someone who wasn't alive!' That's what the Youtube title said. By the time you were finished listening, you wished you weren't, either.

 

They're everywhere on Youtube these days: the videos that ask provocative questions. That promise intriguing 'deep dives' or the uncovering of a years-old mystery. Isn't it amazing that, just when the world comes up with a way for the do-it-yourself investigative reporter to make a few cents per view, so many ancient unsolved mysteries reveal their answers to deskchair researchers?

 

Isn't the internet wonderful?

 

Of course, the longer the mark…er, valued audience member spends reading, the more advertising you can offer. So it's important not to spill the tea too quickly. Don't ever reveal that promised factoid too soon, oh, no. The vital skill – the one all the real experts (and their AI assistants) possess – is the ability to stretch out a story to the crack of doom.

 

You remember Uncle Frank? How he could take all afternoon to reminisce about the time Aunt Alice went into the root cellar and the snake bit her? 'I remember it was in June of aught-nine, or was it aught-eight? Naw, aught-nine, because Jimmy Lee had started first grade and we'd just got that yeller dawg, what did we call him? Oh, yeah, Old Yeller, and so Aunt Alice was a-makin' pancakes, and…'

 

Your memory isn't faulty: it really did take him next to forever to get to the punchline, which was that Aunt Alice thought she'd been bitten by a rattler, but it was only a startled rat snake with a bag of dried hickory nuts.

 

The internet is familiar with Uncle Frank's style, and is trying to bottle it. With a horrible amount of success, I might add. These people make my editorial fingers itch.

 

Take the video I linked to above – the one about the dead woman in the photo. Anybody with a scintilla of imagination can guess what happens in that story: not much, other than, oh, yeah, somebody took a photo and got an extra sitter. A ghost, no less. Cue spooky music. And nobody ever figured out who she was or what she was doing in the photo. Major ghost fail.

 

But why in the name of all that's unholy and pixelated, does the time-counter on that video say 34:35? Because this is some expert-level Youtubing.

 

Here are the rules:

1.    Use only AI photos. Also a snooty-sounding AI narrator, AI-generated music, and an AI-made narration.

2.    Instruct your writer robot: Never let a noun go by without at least one adjective or a verb without one or two adverbs. Always assume point-of-view. Don't tell us what happened – tell us what the people were feeling when it happened. Don't tell us what they said without first explaining the entire thinking process that led to the utterance. Never let anyone go in or out of a room, or up (or down) stairs, without stopping to notice at least three unnecessary things…

3.    …and etc.

You don't believe me? Here's part of the (AI-generated) transcript, at about 58 seconds in:

Thomas Hartwell had just returned from 3 years abroad, working as a textile merchant in Manchester, England. His wife Margaret had maintained their stately home with their three children during his absence. Now reunited, the family decided to commission a photograph, a formal documentation of their togetherness, a visual testament that the family was whole again. The photographer they chose was Edwin Chambers, a respected professional who had operated his studio on way Bosset Street for nearly 15 years. Chambers was known for his meticulous attention to detail and his ability to capture not just images but moments. His reputation was built on precision and he rarely made mistakes.

On October 14th, 1921, the Hartwell family arrived at their home's parlor where Chambers had set up his equipment. The room was spacious with high ceilings and large windows that faced the street. Heavy curtains framed the glass panes, and the afternoon light poured in generously. Margaret had chosen this room specifically for its natural illumination. She wanted the photograph to feel warm and alive. The family arranged themselves carefully. Thomas stood at the center, his hand resting on a carved wooden chair. Margaret sat beside him, her posture elegant and refined. Their three children, Dorothy, aged 12, William, aged nine, and little Catherine just six, stood in descending order of height. Everyone wore their finest clothing. Dorothy had on a white dress with lace trim.

The counter now reads 2:32. You've got a long way to go – pace yourself.

Now: tell me how AI is the wave of the future that will enrich our lives. I double-dog dare you.

Cinema? Bah, Just Read a Book

by Paulh

The Boston Public Library: imposing and inviting at the same time.

 

Garden Glimpse:

Hosta

by DG

Elektra's responsible for how nice these are: she discovered that the white-tailed deer don't like Irish Spring soap. Look how pretty these are when the Bambis don't regard them as a salad bar.

 

Count the Dogs

(Video: Only 21 seconds!)

by DG

Buddy the giant puppy and Pepper decided to play a trick on me when I went to take their picture.

 

Swinton Without End

(Film Review)

by Awix

 

Editor's Note: We are fortunate to have Awix to explain this film. I saw it when it first came out, ages ago. I found the movie only marginally less confusing than Virginia Woolf's prose. Read this and you'll be able to keep up with the highbrow conversation without the mental discomfort of sitting through all this.

 

To the classiest cinema left standing in the city centre once more, this time for a screening as part of its 'Film Club', which is a chance to enjoy (or re-enjoy) 'some of the greatest films of all time', which are apparently 'expertly curated' by the cine-minions responsible. Leaving aside the bemusing question of what inexpert curation looks like and how it differs from the expert kind (this kind of infelicitous use of adverbs always reminds me of a caption at a military museum I once visited, which described how a particular warship 'bravely sank to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean'), I feel a slight inclination to activate Smug Mode as I've seen more of the films on the current list than I would have expected – 13 Assassins, Parasite and Mustang are all there, though what the latter two are doing in the 'action' season I have no idea. Actual smugness probably isn't warranted as I still can't bring myself to go and see Babette's Feast, The Double Life of Veronique, or Être et avoir. I guess I'm just a plebe and a philistine.

 

So I suppose I must only have gone to see the Film Club revival of Sally Potter's Orlando out of an irresistible urge to see Tilda Swinton's nude scene on the big screen, not because this is one of the wittiest and most imaginative British films of the 1990s. Although it is based on a novel by Virginia Woolf, it doesn't have the slightly starchy, stifled quality you sometimes find with literary adaptations, possibly because Potter sets out to do something largely different with the idea.

 

 

The film opens in the year 1600, where a handsome young nobleman named Orlando (Tilda Swinton; stay with it) catches the eye of the aged and declining Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp). Yes, Orlando is not a film that has much truck with the tedious goblins of naturalism, as the plot confirms: the queen is much taken with Orlando and grants him a title, an estate, and a big pile of money, but all on the condition that he never gets old, and that his beauty never fades. Which Orlando agrees to. This is one of the easier routes to immortality depicted in cinema, to say the least, but there is a bit of a twist later on. (And if you're still not convinced, Potter later explained that one of her main jobs when adapting the book was adding material suggesting why things happened – Woolf's original is not strong on causes for its more improbable events.)

 

Now untouched by the ravages of time, Orlando explores a doomed romance with the Russian ambassador's daughter (Charlotte Valandrey), considers becoming a poet (or at least a patron of the arts), and is given a job as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire by William of Orange. (In a characteristic visual coup, what has previously seemed to be a fairly modest little British movie suddenly includes scenes filmed in the remote Uzbek city of Khiva – turns out this was an Anglo-French-Russian co-production all along.)

 

Orlando is a successful ambassador on the whole, but there is a siege and a battle in which he is exposed to violent death for the first time. Possibly as a result of this shock, he falls into a deep sleep and wakes up as – well, as the film puts it: the 'same person. No difference at all… just a different sex.' I think many people would say that this is pushing through disingenuousness into the realm of actual mischief, but I'm equally sure that many would hail the film as being well ahead of its time.

 

The plot, such as it is, rolls on. It is quite noticeable that the second half seems to be actively interested in gender and feminism in a way that the first isn't, but no doubt you can read this as an implied commentary on the nature of male entitlement. Even so, the court case which threatens to deprive Orlando of her estates and income mostly happens off-screen; on-screen events seem to be getting more and more abstract – at one point Orlando appears to spend a hundred years running around in a maze, this presumably representing her difficulty in navigating Regency society as an unmarried woman. Then she finally gets around to discovering the pleasures of intimacy (the modern viewer is permitted a brief 'uh oh' when imported star Billy Zane turns up to help her out with this, but he's hardly in it, so to speak), and then the bulk of the twentieth century passes in a brief, impressionistic blur.

 

There are a couple of wry little flourishes at the end that help to bring a sense of closure: Jimmy Somerville, who plays a minstrel at the court of Elizabeth at the start, reappears as an angel singing an appropriately androgynous-sounding musical number, while Heathcote Williams, who early on plays a poet who is dismissive of Orlando's verse but happy to take his patronage, turns up as a publisher interested in Orlando's life story. The ending itself manages to be triumphant and uplifting without anything actually happening to warrant that effect: a neat piece of cinematic sleight of hand. Clearly a Swinton performance and a Somerville track, when put together, go a long way.

 

These days Tilda Swinton seems fairly well established as a deliverer of high-value supporting roles and cameos – though I suppose she was a lead in The Room Next Door, Three Thousand Years of Longing, and Memoria quite recently too. But this is surely one of the defining films of her career, not least because it's almost impossible to imagine anyone else playing her role. Orlando could almost have been conceived and constructed as a delivery system for Swinton's unconventional, almost unearthly beauty. She switches back and forth between sincerity and archness with absolute deftness.

 

This clearly isn't a film meant to be taken entirely seriously, but neither is it really a comedy. One might almost mistake it for a strange, unique oddity, without precedent in British cinema – but then the closing credits pay tribure to Michael Powell, who died years before it was made, and suddenly you remember that this is not quite the case. It has all of Powell's playfulness and wit, and the same sense of a questing spirit having fun in the telling of a memorable story. Orlando's through-line of a transition from male to female, and then from subservience to liberty, may be very modern and progressive, but it also feels like a film with a great respect for the past. A great treat to see it again.

 

cu in the funny papers, Dmitri Gheorgheni, Editor