Timing Is Everything

New Year’s Eve means counting down the minutes and seconds of the year’s close. And the end of the year also means lots of “best of” lists.

There is a movie that you won’t find on the end of year movie lists but has everything to do with time.

The film The Clock is a 24-hour mash-up of more than a thousand movie and television clips, each featuring a clock or characters discussing time.

The film runs 24 hours in length.

In The Clock, director Christian Marclay organized/edited the movie clips so that so that each one features characters discussing the time, or shows a clock in the frame with the actual running time of the showing. If the clock tower, wristwatch, alarm clock or cuckoo clock says 8:30, then it’s 8:30 in the place where you are watching.

Yes, it does sound like a gimmick without reason. Art for art’s sake. But the 24-hour montage unreeling in real time has been popular at its screenings. Most of those showings have been at museums and galleries rather than your local multiplex. 4000 people went to a screening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And reviews have been good – “an abundant, magnificent work” (The Financial Times) “relentless and compelling” (The Guardian) and “utterly transfixing” (The Huffington Post).

Obviously, the original storylines are gone. The clips are from different historical periods and genres, but viewers and reviewers have found a new unified narrative about time itself.  The film “conflates cinematic and actual time, revealing each passing minute as a repository of alternately suspenseful, tragic or romantic narrative possibilities.” (http://www.paulacoopergallery.com/exhibitions/497)

Christian Marclay is an artist whose work includes sculpture, photography, collage, painting, performance and audiovisual collages. He has said that he hopes that the film makes people think differently about time and he doesn’t expect that most viewers will need to see all 24 hours for that to happen.

Extremely long films are not a new thing. The Clock reminded me first of Andy Warhol’s **** (Four Stars) which was a twenty-five hour movie made up of shorter film segments.

There is also 24 Hour Psycho which was an art installation by Douglas Gordon that I read about in Don DeLillo’s book Point Omega. The installation used Alfred Hitchcock’s 109 minute Psycho slowed down to approximately two frames per second from the normal 24 fps so that the film lasts exactly 24 hours.

Harold Lloyd in Safety Last

Studio 360 did one of their radio programs on The Clock which piqued my interest. So many of the clips are films or TV that I love.

There’s the great Harold Lloyd hanging from that clock in Safety Last. There’s western classic High Noon. Robert Redford as a baseball player in The Natural smashes a home-run into the scoreboard clock. 5 pm brings a string of quitting time images of time clocks. Orson Welles gets killed by a clock figure knight in The Stranger. Plus, shots from The Simpsons, The Office, Sex and the City, and my beloved The Twilight Zone.

No showings of the film near Paradelle yet, but I’m ready to go. I can just hear the film buffs in the audience trying to identify the clips.

I think I have a better chance of making it through The Clock than I do watching Modern Times Forever (Stora Enso Building, Helsinki) which came out this year and is currently the longest film ever made. It runs 240 hours (10 days). Over the 10 days, the film was projected on that Helsinki building showing what thousands of years of decay will do to modern architecture by speeding up the decay of that particular building.

Harmonies of the World and Spiritual Science

I noticed on an almanac site that December 27 was the birthday of German astronomer Johannes Kepler, born 1571. Kepler intended to become a theologian, but when he read Copernicus’s Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs, he changed paths.

Copernicus’ writing put forth the evidence that the planets revolve around the Sun, not the Earth. That was not only a radical theory in its time, but it was one that questioned the religious views at the time.

New Astronomy 1609

Science and religion continues to clash on many issue today, with topics like evolution being the best known examples. That’s what I like about Kepler’s story. He  saw Copernicus’s theory as evidence of a divine blueprint for the universe. He decided to prove the theories through scientific observation.

Like Darwin, they were religious believers who hesitated to publish theories that would overturn beliefs. But the evidence was overwhelming.

Kepler’s defense of Copernicus, The Cosmographic Mystery (1596) was his start, He would eventually posit three laws of planetary motion. The first two were published in 1609 in New Astronomy. Johannes Kepler’s book, outlining his theories of planetary motion, made the radical claim that the planets move in ellipses, not perfect circles. Kepler’s second theory is that an imaginary line joining the planet and the Sun would sweep out equal areas during equal periods of time — in other words, the planet moves faster during the portion of its orbit that is closest to the Sun. His final law, published in Harmonies of the World (1619), describes the mathematical relationship between the distance of a planet from the Sun and the length of the planet’s orbital period.

Kepler’s theories were based on data collected by astronomer Tycho Brahe. He had to make thousands of calculations to work out the peculiarities of Mars’s orbit, describing the experience as “my war with Mars.”

I also owe Kepler for his role as “the father of modern optics.” We share poor vision (his from a childhood case of smallpox). He explained the mechanics of vision in the eye, and also explained how both eyes work together to produce depth perception. He then developed lenses to correct nearsightedness and farsightedness.

Thanks Mr. Kepler, for helping us see more clearly, literally and figuratively.

It’s Still A Wonderful Life

I was watching  It’s a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve with my family and  my oldest friend, Ron. Ron and I are film buffs and he wondered if there was a real town that the film’s Bedford Fall is based on. I thought I remembered hearing that there was a town in New York that was the basis for it. Being that it was the Eve, I didn’t immediately jump online to check. But this morning, I was watching CBS Sunday Morning, as always, and, as synchronicity often does, Bill Geist went to visit the town that has the best claim for being the basis for the film’s setting.

The film was produced and directed by Frank Capra and it was “based” (it’s just a frame for the film’s story) on the short story “The Greatest Gift“, written by Philip Van Doren Stern. It has been 65 years since the 1946 film was released and it certainly gets more showings now than it did at its release.

The film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man whose life did not go as he had planned it. He has a good life, but not the one of adventure and creativity that he dreamed as a boy. The heart of the film is the increasingly terrible Christmas Eve day that brings him to the point of considering suicide.

The film is pretty dark for a holiday film and I have heard it argued that it has many elements of film noir. But the ending is pure joy (what some critics have called “Capra corn”) because the intervention of George’s guardian angel, Clarence Odbody allows him to see what the world would have been without him.  George sees all the lives he has touched and the contributions he has made to his community.

Some historians think that Bedford Falls is just a amalgam of some small town America that is set in New York state. There is no evidence in the director’s archives that he had one town in New York state in mind. There are a bunch of towns with “Falls” in their name that could be candidates, but Seneca Falls has the edge on the others.

Frank Capra had signed a contract for the film a few weeks before and was still planning the film when he visited Seneca Falls. He visited an aunt in nearby Auburn. The he stopped in Seneca Falls. He got a haircut. The town barber, Tommy Bellissima, recognized Capra when the movie came out and saw the name on the movie poster and remembered that he had talked with the director about immigrating from Italy.

What else might Capra have seen in town that clicked for his upcoming film?

A mill town with a grassy median that George could run down, with a movie theater along the way and lots of  Victorian architecture. It’s in the right geographic location – Buffalo is nearby, so that fits the location of George’s sister-in-law’s father glass factory, and Sam’s plan to build a factory outside of Rochester, and the bank examiner wanting to get home to Elmira.

George’s family business, the Bailey’s Savings and Loan Association, is known for building low cost housing for residents in Bailey Park. Maybe he heard that in Seneca Falls, there was a similar effort that is still known as Rumseyville.

From the barbershop, he probably went over the steel truss bridge to get to the main part of town. Remember George Bailey’s almost suicidal moment on the bridge? On the Seneca Falls bridge, Capra would have seen a plaque honoring Antonio Varacalli who had leaped into the icy waters of the canal to rescue a girl who had just attempted suicide by jumping off the bridge. Movie George jumps in, not to end his life, but to save Clarence.

That’s the big moment of the film’s plot and it is the heart of the short story “The Greatest Gift” and Capra would have been a bit amazed at the connection.

It seems like Capra based Bedford Falls on Seneca Falls. Maybe it was unconscious.

Today, Clarence wouldn’t recognize the boutique hotel that carries his name.  It’s where plenty of tourists stay when the make the pilgrimage to Seneca Falls (especially at Christmas time).

It’s a Wonderful Life was not a blockbuster at its release. A combination of  high production costs and stiff competition. Not a flop, but not a hit either. It was nominated for five Oscars, but it didn’t win any.

Of course, now it is a holiday classic and on the American Film Institute’s list of  the 100 best American films ever made.

Maybe after a December visit to Seneca Falls, I might head to Indiana, Pennsylvania, the birthplace of my mom’s favorite actor, Jimmy Stewart, and the home of the Jimmy Stewart Museum.

When my wife and I were driving through North Carolina a few years ago, I saw the sign for Mount Airy and had to take the exit. So we visited Andy Griffith’s hometown that became the basis for Mayberry, the fictional setting for The Andy Griffith Show and Mayberry R.F.D.

But that’s another exit on the tour.

It’s a Wonderful Life has clear connections to Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. You could write a paper for film class about the use of an alternate universe in films. A person revisits their life and their potential death or total non-existence, aided by some supernatural agents, and ending with some positive revelation. The 2000 film, The Family Man, does a nice job of following the road to discovering your wonderful life.

Albert Einstein said that “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”  Maybe you can discover that in the “real” Bedford Falls.

A Planet For Christmas

This month a planet, properly known as Kepler 22-b, was revealed by NASA.

They have discovered thousands of planets outside our solar system using the Kepler space telescope. But this one is the most Earth-like world discovered so far.

It is in an area nicknamed by astronomers the Goldilocks Zone. That’s because it’s not too hot, not too cold, but just right for life.

And the planet has been nicknamed the Christmas Planet because three photos of a planet are needed to be sure that 22-b was for real. A 22-b year is 290 days long and confirming photo number three came during the 2010 holiday season, so…

The Christmas Planet is 600 light years away. It is about twice the size of Earth. The average surface temperature is 72 degrees Fahrenheit, which sounds pretty nice right now compared to Paradelle.

Tracking Santa Through His Time-Space Continuum

In Paradelle, we still believe that Santa Claus is alive and well in the hearts of people throughout the world. And what more evidence do you need than the fact that NORAD is using its super-high-tech equipment to track his Christmas deliveries.

Santa’s sleigh and reindeer show up quite clearly on their radar.

The Countdown to Christmas Eve at started on December 1st and will continue through Christmas Eve. You and any other kids in the room can track Santa live as he makes his journey around the world. You can also watch videos from NORAD Santa Cams of Santa and his reindeer.

I know what you’re thinking. If Santa’s list gets bigger each year (check out the world’s population right now) and Santa has to deliver more toys in the same amount of time, according to NORAD’s calculations, he would have to limit each of his stops at homes to two to three ten-thousandths of a second per home.

And yet, for 16 centuries he has been getting the job done.

Obviously, Santa’s 24 hours are not the 24 hour day we operate within. Santa functions within a different time-space continuum than the rest of us.

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Visions of the Year 2000

Power skates - like the ones you wore in 2000

It is the end of the year and that’s a time when we always see predictions of what is to be in the coming year, decade and beyond.

I came across an online arts magazine called Zouch. One of their features is “Art Shots” where they showcase contemporary visual art.  They ran a feature in their “Art Retro”  section that is illustrations from rare comic book-like images created in 1910 by obscure French artist Villemard. He was imagining the world of 2000.

I think that almost every prediction of our future world I have seen that looks further than ten years into the future ends up being way off. We never get it right. Luckily, for the predictors, people don’t usually check back on their accuracy.

1910 was a time of big scientific discoveries. In France, there was Pierre & Marie Curie and it was the Machine Age. So, it is no surprise that the illustrations (which were titled “Utopie – En L’an 2000” – Utopia – in the year 2000) are of a world full of Jules Verne machines.

 

School in 2000