Gus Van Sant

Started by pilgrim, June 22, 2003, 09:33:52 PM

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pilgrim


godardian

It vacillates between To Die For and Idaho. Today, it was Idaho.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

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SHAFTR

Either Drugstore Cowboy or Good Will Hunting, but I'm going to have to go with Good Will.
"Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that i'll probably regret soon"

Ghostboy

Gerry, but possibly only because I haven't seen anything pre-To Die For. One of the many things I need to remedy.

chainsmoking insomniac

Tough call between Drugstore Cowboy and Good Will Hunting...it fluctuates, but I'd say predominantly Drugstore....
"Ernest Hemingway once wrote: 'The world's a fine place, and worth fighting for.'  I agree with the second part."
    --Morgan Freeman, Se7en

"Have you ever fucking seen that...? Ever seen a mistake in nature?  Have you ever seen an animal make a mistake?"
 --Paul Schneider, All the Real Girls

Pastor Parsley

Drugstore!....but have never seen Mala Noche.....how is it?  I like Goodwill, but it doesn't seem like a gus van sant film.

Derek

It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

pilgrim

Quote from: Pastor ParsleyDrugstore!....but have never seen Mala Noche.....how is it?  

Like a lot of first films, it's a prelude.  It deals with the same themes as the next three movies, put simply, screwed up relationships of searching young people.  It's in black and white, so it's not as visually stunning.  It's worth watching if you're a fan.

QuoteI like Goodwill, but it doesn't seem like a gus van sant film

Exactly, it seems that he developed a recognizable style with Drugstore, Idaho, and Cowgirls and was trying to break away from it.  I like Goodwill, but I think it's strength is more in the screenplay than the directing.

Pastor Parsley

Quote from: pilgrimI think it's strength is more in the screenplay than the directing.

I agree.  It's a great screenplay, I was impressed.  The directing seems transparent with no recognizable style.  Maybe it was done so as not to distract from the story.

MacGuffin



For every perfectly normal flick in Gus Van Sant's repertoire, the director keeps another puzzling head-scratcher up his sleeve. As much as you love audience favorites like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, it's the in-between movies that truly reveal the director's style. Take the shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, for instance. What was that about? Or his latest film, Gerry, in which two not-particularly-talkative buddies drive out to the desert hoping to find "the thing," stumble off the path and spend the next few days (about 90 minutes or so in screen time) searching for some sign of intelligent life or, at the very least, a way to make it out of the wasteland alive.

Sure, Van Sant could make a movie just like everybody else. But why would he want to? He's much more interested in testing your expectations about what films should be. So think of Gerry as a dare. Can you follow along with a film that supplies no obvious narrative, with characters who forgo dialogue and communicate instead through expression and action? In the words of Will Hunting, "How do you like them apples?" According to Van Sant, films like this can actually say more than your average Tarantino-style talk-a-thon. Now, in his own words, Van Sant explains the movies that inspired Gerry and shaped his style as a filmmaker...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
(1975, dir: Chantal Ackerman, starring: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte)
Chantal Ackerman is a very experimental art installation sculptor and filmmaker. I've seen some of her other things, and they're always quite different. Jeanne Dielman is about a Belgian housewife -- the husband's gone, and she's a single parent -- and it's about three days in her life. It's the first time that I had seen [a movie] that was so contemplative about things that were outside the ordinary action-driving ideas of what you would call a narrative. [Because] it was about a housewife, they gave very ample time to things that concern a housewife, like peeling potatoes. They are not necessarily the things that you would think of as character-developing moments, which in fact they are. They're just not the standard ones. I think in general you always expect a conversational movie. The talking, the intellectual discussion, somehow overpowers the simple action, and that's apparently more interesting to the viewer. [In Gerry, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck spend the whole film hiking.] When you're on a hike, there are long periods of time that are spent walking. Traditionally, you would chop all that out, but in our case, they stop walking and then they just walk some more, as opposed to using the device where they would stop walking and talk about what they thought of their relationship. We viewed the walking part as an equal to the talking about the relationship part.

Sátántangó
(1994, dir: Béla Tarr, starring: Iren Szajki, Barna Mihok)
Sátántangó is about a commune of farmers in Hungary visited by two leaders who come back and tell them that they have to leave. The things Béla spends time showing you and the way he does that is pretty lifelike in the sense that you spend a lot of time on the farm with these characters in the same type of timeframe they are living. So, if there's a character looking out the window, you might watch him drawing a picture of what's out the window. It's never really "real time" because the story is taking place over a 10-day period, but it's able to go far enough in its attention to those types of details that it's no longer a cipher or a symbol. We get kind of lost when things aren't spoken. Words are so specific that we feel anchored, and it's like, "I know what's going on because it's told." But if [the meaning] is more interpretive because it's an image, the audience can feel like they're drifting, and their own minds start to work as well. With Gerry, we just try and take advantage of that rather than discourage it. At first there's an element of drifting, but then some people start swimming and other people just keep drifting. In some cases, an audience isn't thinking about the right things to be able to drift along, but there's also a good number of audience members [for whom] what they're thinking of is in collaboration with the movie's themes. They're thinking about the right thing in the sense that they're thinking about something that is illuminating them and not basically boring them.

Citizen Kane
(1941, dir: Orson Welles, starring: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten)
The first influence was a very cliché influence, Citizen Kane, but it was true. My English teacher showed it to us when we were fourteen. It was an age where you were ready to see something that had more of an impact than a more passive film, than something that just had entertainment value, like James Bond films, which I think was my understanding of film to that point: just suspense or action. Citizen Kane just had a lot more that it was saying. It was starting to clue into all the metaphors and messages within the message, and the themes that sort of wrap around each other. Citizen Kane is like learning the film vocabulary.

Dog Star Man
(1963; dir: Stan Brakhage)
Right after that, my main interest was not really as a passive viewer, but more stuff that I was reading about, all the '60s underground filmmakers of the time. The Kuchar brothers or Kenneth Anger or Stan Brackhage. The experimental filmmakers, they showed you different avenues of thinking about film. I don't think there was one film -- they're just an influence over all. [But if I had to pick one,] you could say Dog Star Man. I was a painter, so I watched '60s filmmaking. They were films made by painters. Brakhage was a painter. Warhol, who was making films a little bit later, was a painter. With Dog Star Man, Brakhage did all kinds of things to it, so there are different parts to the film. In one part, only one of the layers is going on, and in other parts, there are different applications of printing happening to make the image. It's so abstract. It's not narrative at all. It's a visual piece. I could draw it for you. It's really kind of like a painting in that way, a kind of abstract moving painting.

Spellbound
(1945 ; dir: Alfred Hitchcock, starring: Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck)
In the '60s, I made films that were directly influenced by the experimental filmmakers, [but when it comes to the dream sequences in my films,] I probably shouldn't cite those filmmakers. They did sort of suggest uses of, they weren't really dreamlike images. I guess that came from the surrealist films that I saw at times. In Spellbound, Hitchcock had Salvador Dali design dream sequences for him. There's always been use of dream sequences through Hitchcock's films. But also other filmmakers, narrative filmmakers or Fellini, those were probably more of an influence on literal dream sequences. I think dream sequences have always been kind of like dream-making. The stuff in My Own Private Idaho would be more relatable to dream sequences in conventional films like Spellbound or Vertigo.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

godardian

I'm surprised Todd Haynes didn't also mention Jeanne Dielman, as that was a very direct influence on Safe, more so than 2001, even.

It's disappointing that Good Will Hunting has the most votes as "favorite" van Sant.  :(
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

Pubrick

Quote from: godardianIt's disappointing that Good Will Hunting has the most votes as "favorite" van Sant.  :(
barely.
under the paving stones.

NEON MERCURY

.. i voted for good will..
but i guess that film is more about the great script..and not the direction though....but its my fav. among the others

godardian

Quote from: NEON MERCURY.. i voted for good will..
but i guess that film is more about the great script..and not the direction though....but its my fav. among the others

It's the best of his "sellout trio" (Good Will Hunting, Psycho, and Finding Forrester), but:

A) They're all very ordinary and dull at absolute best when compared to his really interesting films (To Die For and My Own Private Idaho are my faves, and even Even Cowgirls... is more interesting as a failure than Good Will is as something he pulled off).

B) The relative imagination, competence and good faith of Good Will is offset by the fact that it unleashed a Damon/Affleck beast that has yet to die. Or be killed off.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

modage

but the soundtrack is mostly elliott smith.                  ELLIOTT SMITH?
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.