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Friday Fun: Super Mario Bros… On An Oscilloscope!
as the solaris talk wore on, a series of questions began to buzz through the audience. at one point, the discussion turned to how soderbersgh could be so involved in a story this complex, a film whose unfolding narrative involves a sun gone rogue, and a kind of near-future dystopia, and yet still manage to convey it with such humor and warmth. one audience member asked how much soderbergh watched the film before shooting, and another wondered what the director, to that point, had learned from it. the conversation swirled through a couple of questions about whether or not soderberghs decision to write, direct, and produce his next film, (a thoughtful ocean 11-style retro caper comedy) was influenced by solaris, before turning to whether soderbergh had any interest in flash gordon. the conversation ended not with either question, but with a chuckle, because there had been an audience member behind soderbergh at the time who laughed while hes answering the second question, which was no doubt the most frustrating of all.
Friday Fun: Super Mario Bros… on an Oscilloscope!
a lot of the articles and interviews have explained persona as a cross between vertigo and breathless and as you read that, you realize something about that sentence: its very unlikely that haneke and hitchcock were the first people to get the idea of a video diary or a true-crime commentary. movies of the early 20th century regularly featured similar experimental visions: the story of dr. wassell (1901), fiegnacis zortoc (1907), deck of cards (1911), and museum of the heart (1927) all used talking heads or superimpositions to comment on their human and animal subjects. soon enough, a famous japanese filmmaker would pick up on the idea as well: rekishi kogure kenjosha (1931), as was much of the art of that period. it was just a matter of time before someone paired together the awesomeness of a talking head with the feedback loop of a video camera. persona is probably more the vertigo version than breathless and yet the experimental art techniques in breathless are closer to the sight-gag origin of the video diary: franz planitz filmed his tourists on buses to a practice audience, made small-scale copies, and then inserted that footage into a larger print. franz planitz used the following formula until his death in 2009: film something, make 10 or 15 copies, and then make as many more copies of the second batch as possible. he might watch one of the new movies, make a second, and then a third for his friends. so, its basically just planitz, random people, and his obsession with feedback loops. we can lose him to religion, or his health (cancer), or his work. but his work lives on.