Whitney and I spent yesterday writing — a process that envolves emphatically not writing anything for as long as possible.

We wanted to watch an avant-garde movie but Kim’s is far and I dunno — where can you watch avant-garde movies for free? Does EAI have a screening room or something? We’re too embarrased to ask them.

As usual, TV came through bigtime. First cheerleading championships on ESPN (which would be way avant-garde if you slowed em down or something) and then TCM hits us with Mr. Buddwing.

Mister Buddwing ( 1966)
Black and White
A man suffering from amnesia confronts a series of women in his
search for his memory.
100 mins.
“Drama”, “Melodrama”, “Socialites“, “Pregnancy“,
“New York City–Harlem“, “Suicide”, “Students”,
“Mistaken identity”, “New York City–Central Park”,
“New York City–Greenwich Village“, “Hospitals”, “Marriage”,
“Gambling“, “Composers”, “Amnesia”, “Actors and actresses”

Besides all that’s awesome about that, the movie has three major things going for it:
1) Being shot at forreal locations in 1960s Manhattan.
2) Really interesting flashback sequences. First, the half-remembered girlfriend character is played by different actresses in each flashback — way Nowadays. Second, while the movie is generally naturalistic, the actors play the flashback scenes in a highly mannered anti-method style. The change-in-style stresses the memories’ emotional/subjective weight.
3) Amazing old timey tough New York hipster talk. Some steal-able lines (paraphrased from memory) include:

(Black man invites Mr. Buddwing to a craps game in Harlem)
Black man: That is, unless you're a segregationalist.
Buddwing: I am. I wanna segregate all that money into my pocket
where it belongs.

Jew at diner: Don't be ashamed to say you're jewish. Some of the
best Christians are jewish, believe me.

Washington Square Park Queen to Cop: Arrest my mother! She's a pusher!

Actress: My instrument was blocked.
Her 'AC/DC' Friend: Your instrument was groovy!

(Mr. Buddwing whistles)
Grace: What's that?
Buddwing: The slow movement from my jazz octet.

Taxi driver: This drunk blonde started relaxing all over the place.
I mean her dress was up to here! (The blonde later shows up!)

And there’s a hair-cut scene on the beach. And the movie’s AKA The Woman Without a Face. And in one 3 shot sequence, a girl gets pregnant, leaves her boyfriend and then climbs the stairs to Welfare Island. That pun probably does better now that we’re unfamiliar with the name Welfare Island, but still…

Mr. Buddwing’s so weird and so awesome we couldn’t believe we’d never heard of it. It’s definitely on some next-level Carnival of Souls/Night Tide/Detour akward postwar Hollywood avant-garde shit. Bad news is it isn’t on tape or DVD. But that just means you have to be lucky with your TV, which is easy.

Anywayz, a google search for “Buddwing underrated” doesn’t hit anything worthwhile. So we figure this is value-added blogging.

Just watched The Fury and I don’t care what The Fury thinks — with his natural ease and ethnic good looks, John Cassavetes is a hero. Kirk Douglas can run around saving his weird son all he wants but he’s obviously just a creepy, leathery villian.

All the bad things you’ve heard about me just aren’t true. I’m not a bad man. All I want is for you to trust me. Time will take care of the hurting; that’s the simple truth.

Tears are good. Don’t be afraid to cry. Tears are just what we need right now.

Dammit, those are the words of a person to love.

L

     A shot on a goal was a felt experience. With
each effort, the crowd audibly drew in its breath,
and then, after another athletic save, exhaled with
equal exaggeration. […]
     And then the game — having succeeded in
apprehending me so — played with me as it played
with everyone else. It teased and manipulated and
encouraged and frustrated. It had engendered this
heightened feeling and, equally, the expectation
that it would be satisfied: that there would be
gratification — or not. That the team would
score — or be scored against. That there would be
victory — or defeat. Climax — or dissapointment.
Release.

 - Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

Watching movies involves our entire bodies. When we watch we sit a certain way or with certain people, eat candy or do drugs, and all of that changes the movie. But movies also physically change us. A scary movie makes our hearts beat fast and a quiet movie calms us down. Exercise videos can literally re-shape people’s bodies. I watch The Royal Tennenbaums just to make myself cry.

It’s even possible to have sex with a movie.

Let’s say a straight man is masturbating to a movie. Suddenly the movie cuts to a close-up of a penis. Maybe the shot turns him off or maybe it excites him more than he’d expect. This is different (more fun?) than masturbating to a fantasy. The man’s arousal isn’t entirely up to him. It’s being negotiated.

Or consider the famous night-vision scene in One Night in P_ris. As P_ris H_lton screws Rick Sal_mon, her eyes never leave the video monitor that’s off-screen-left of the camera. Par_s places herself in the shot so as to block R_ck’s body almost entirely. That’s because she isn’t interested in him — he’s just a prop she’s using to fuck the movie.

I give these examples to demonstrate the wide range of ways that movies can be experienced physically. Further along the continuum is the guy eating popcorn at a multiplex, sweaty-gross-awesomeness warming his face. Further down still is me sleeping through a movie (one of my favorite ways to watch and way underrated, btw).

The point is to be aware of all possible methods, physical and mental, of watching movies and to understand how these methods shape a movie’s meaning. Then we can make more conscious & creative watching choices. And from there, movies might get a lot more interesting.

L
Creative Miswatching 1
Creative Miswatching 2
Creative Miswatching 3

So it’s been a minute since the last installment. Part of the reason is that the value of Creative Miswatching by Altering the Movie seems relatively self-evident.

The ways to do it are countless (zoom in on the DVD, turn the TV upside down, eff with the colors, scratch the film …) And the long tradition of artists altering existing movies proves the method’s worth. (This Slow Jamz vid is a particularly good illustration, since it draws an analogy to the vurrryy accepted/important practice of altering music recordings).

What can I add? Only that the even tho the stuff we make isn’t very “funny looking”, creative miswatching through altering movies is key to my and W’s work — especially when it comes to sound. Many of the unusual treaments of the sound/image relationship in our movies (see J.C.!) come from paying attention to the potentials that come from watching other movies with the sound “wrong”.

One clear-cut example is that watching Count Yorga: Vampire on mute while listening to Books On Tape’s album inspired the opening sequence to our BoT music-video. (The results of that experiment in creative miswatching are illustrated above).

Mental (Mis)watching

Plenty of times, academics, movie critics, IMDB and Critereon Collection boxes encourage (mis)watching. They instruct us to ignore the ending of Brazil, to imagine additional scenes in The Magnificent Ambersons , and they tell us Peeping Tom is about the politics of representation. Reading that tricks our brains into watching movies in new and different ways.

All this is OK, but it isn’t creative (mis)watching, it’s learned (mis)watching. Instead of letting an advertiser or theater tell us how to watch a movie, we let Leonard Maltin (or somebody fancier). Sure, we could all do our own research and analysis. But can we skip all that film-school work and still creatively (mis)watch using only our brains?

Totally. Take camp – the method of creative (mis)watching Hollywood (or other mainstream) movies as Queer expression. What’s awesome about camp is that it provides a method that can be readily applied to a broad range of films. One downside, though, is that the range of potential meanings is somewhat limited.

A different, more flexible strategy is inventing mental games that force creative (mis)watching. It’s like what film critics do – only without needing evidence, theory or logic. For example Whitney and her boyfriend Oliver recently got a kick out of watching History of Violence as if it was a real-time documentary. Like all games, mentally creative (mis)watching takes a sustained imaginative effort. And some games are bound to work better than others. Still, this method frees the mind and, for that reason, is rich with potential.

Last post, I wrote, “I can’t imagine someone loving a movie without creatively (mis)watching it”. Obviously, everybody who loves movies doesn’t play mental tricks on themselves like Whitney. Probably the most common way of mental creative (mis)wathching is identifying with characters. The Fresh Prince isn’t about you. By watching it as if it is, the show’s meaning changes. It becomes is something very different to you than it is to the general audience of watchers. The same goes for having romantic or sexual feelings for characters – the dudes and girls who see Herbie for Lindsay Lohan’s jiggle are creative (mis)watchers, big-time.

More on them in Part Four. Next time: altering a movie. And a final note on academics and critics: the best of them are heroes of creative (mis)watching. And while it is necessarily to be rigorous with theory and evidence, its also important to remember that audacity scores a lot of points – at least with me. I’d definitely read a gender studies critique of Pluto Nash before a Marxist critique of Godard. Scholarship started out in temples, mosques and monasteries…academics ought to take some leaps of faith!

L

William S. Burroughs stole Lev’s idea!
Lecture on Creative Reading Part I, Part II

NOTE: I didn’t study film theory at college and I’m happy about that. But, especially in this intro post, I might be doing work that’s already been done better. Whatever. Oh, and when I say “movies” I mean films, t.v., digital, fiction, documentary, surveillance footage, etc. It all moves.

All movies are interactive - it’s up to us movie-watchers how much. Different kinds of movie-watching allow for different levels of engagement.

The low level of engagement is “seeing” a movie. It’s based on the false idea that every movie has an intrinsic and concrete meaning. So all we have to do is “get” that meaning, and then like it or not. Because of the one-way relationship between movie and watcher, I call this level “un-creative watching.”

For people who like un-creatively watching movies, the worst thing is “miswatching” a movie. It can happen because the DVD skips, because there’s too much noise in the theater, or because the movie doesn’t mean what it’s expected to (”That comedy wasn’t funny!”). For whatever reason, they don’t get the movie they paid for (with time if not money). So miswatching is a failed transaction. That’s why people who like “seeing” movies are so finicky at the theater.

But, if the meaning of a movie is up to the watcher, then there isn’t one right way to watch it. Done consciously, miswatching enriches the meaning of movies by making our creative control explicit. It allows us to explore new ways that movies can mean things — and so, new meanings.

“Creative (mis)watching” is what I call this high level of engagement. It affirms that movie-watchers are producers, not consumers. Creative (mis)watching is a bit of a weird term, but it’s a very common thing. I can’t imagine someone loving a movie without creatively (mis)watching it.

There are countless kinds of creative (mis)watching; each determines different degrees and kinds of engagement. Over the next three posts, I’ll identify methods of creative (mis)watching and explore how they work. The posts will be organized into
three categories of creative (mis)watching: mentally altering a movie, physically altering a movie, and physically altering yourself watching a movie. In other words, soon we’ll get to all sorts of weird shit. I promise.