Sunday, January 16, 2022

FIERY, COLORBLIND PHOTOGRAPHER EDGAR ORTIZ: CHICAGO NEO-NOIR

Tim Adams' Guardian article provides us with a good overview of Edgar Ortiz's Instagram account, where more than 400 images have been housed over the past two years.

What adds interest (and a tinge of paradox) is the fact that Ortiz is colorblind. 

His fiery images, many of which recycle motifs of lone figures crossing Chicago streets with various, sweeping background vistas, are thus working against his own visual limits. 

Only occasionally does he post a black and white image, but when he does, they are quite striking.

We are posting five of Ortiz's Instagram images from his account "Iamease" (if you have an Instagram account, type that into the application's search engine and you should be able to access his page).

The image that the Guardian selected to feature is one of Ortiz's best--we won't spoil it for you here. 

Be sure to click through in order to discover more about Ortiz's background (he is also a musician, and he is a late-blooming photographer.

As technology allows the movie-watcher greater ability to create still images, we see a stronger connection between the dynamic images in film and the "stop motion in frame" of photography.

As you scroll through Ortiz's images at Instagram, you can see a progression in his work.

Compositional angles become more diagonal and complex...

The same light source illuminates two different but connected image elements...

And he finds new ways to add texture to his images that stem from real-life light sources that take advantage of the weather conditions that are in play when he snaps his picture.

Just how "noir" these photos actually are in the context of "stark imagery" (particularly the high-contrast black & white images handed down to us from the classic "New York school" of street photographers) is open to question.

But it's clear that Ortiz is fascinated by pools of light and the shadows that surround them, and his work is more and more focused on the subtle, varied (and sometimes random) interplay of these elements.

And (below) there are some unusual, offbeat images that show that he has a well-developed sense of humor...
As Adams says, there is a tension in Ortiz's vision of urbanism: in his Guardian piece, he frames this as "one part Mean Streets, one part Yellow Brick Road." 

You are encouraged to follow Ortiz at Instagram, where street photography is one of the main attractions in a world often overrun by self-promotion. Edgar's world is all about what he sees, not how he presents himself to us. He deserves your attention...

Saturday, January 1, 2022

NC PROSELYTIZES FOR NIGHTMARE ALLEY

Thanks in part to the pandemic, Guillermo del Toro spent the better part of four years bringing his version of NIGHTMARE ALLEY to the screen. He is a highly accomplished filmmaker, with a vast reputation for creatively extending themes and visual motifs in the horror genre, which resulted in an Oscar win for THE SHAPE OF WATER at the 2018 Academy Awards.

NIGHTMARE ALLEY was his followup, with del Toro collaborating with Kim Morgan (whom he subsequently married) in an ambitious effort to retool the legendary 1947 classic that starred Tyrone Power as the self-aggrandizing Stan Carlisle, destined to fall in a manner similar to the Icarus myth because he heedlessly "reached too high." Likewise, Kim Morgan aggressively seized an opportunity to step up from film critic to screenwriter, with the ostensible conviction that she and del Toro would be more faithful to William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 source novel.

Meanwhile, the Film Noir Foundation, friendly to Morgan over the years, organized a suite of written content in its house organ NOIR CITY that would focus on NIGHTMARE ALLEY, in part to pay lip service to the original film, but also to exhort its readership to embrace the new version. The film, while technically accomplished, is not substantially more faithful to Gresham's novel, but FNF head honcho Eddie Muller took up the gauntlet for it in a review that (as we noted in the excerpt from a more expansive evaluation of the just-released issue) he probably should have delegated to another writer. 


The excerpt below zeroes in on the thematic and narrative flaws and subversions extant in the del Toro/Morgan screenplay, which fatally compromises the notion that the screenwriting duo were more faithful to the source novel, and that they demonstrated "reverence for the 1947 film version," which is a sample of the whitewashing undertaken by Muller in his review of the film.

And, jumpin' Jehoshaphat, that's just what leads off the issue: carnival noir, as surveyed by poet, culture critic and new NC contributor Brent Calderwood, most recently writing for THE FILM EXPERIENCE. The feature starts well, but runs out of steam just the way that carnivals did (as noted in the intro) when urbanization overtook America's agrarian roots. Reading the feature's footnotes, one senses that they may have been provided by an editor to simulate a comprehensive list of film noir titles that were (even slightly) touched by the carnival. (Alas, two notable examples of classic French noir with strong ties to the "carny world" were overlooked: drop me a PM for the identities of these two films, as there's no reason to simply give away that information to those who don't quite complete their research assignments.)

It's followed by a condensed and retouched interview conducted by Calderwood with Guillermo del Toro and Kim Morgan as part of "the tout" for the new version of NIGHTMARE ALLEY. "Retouched" seems like a good description: del Toro is an eloquent fellow, but reading his responses really gives the impression that they were polished for publication. In it, there is his relentless attempt to connect his film with some form of ongoing political critique of America, while insisting that [William Lindsay] Gresham's novel is highly autobiographical (when it is more likely that Gresham's obsession with the world of the carnival and his fascination with the Tarot had coalesced into a richly lurid fictional depiction of a composite of characters he'd met or who he'd been told about). It appears that the "shut eye" concept--coming to believe in one's own patter about the creative project one is trying to put across to the public--may be enveloping the husband-and-wife team as well.

Finally, there is a review of the new film from Eddie [Muller], where he treads as lightly as possible on the production, positioning himself in the "rave with minor reservations" category. It's an interesting tap dance, where Eddie notes the Icarus theme of the original story but pretends not to notice how that is subverted by the filmmaker/screenwriters into a Oedipal tale (with additional scenes and pseudo-talismanic characters--the "pickled devil baby"--that do not appear in the source novel). He also states that he won't compare performances between the two versions, and--then goes ahead and compares performances between the two versions. (While he praises Rooney Mara to the skies, note that it's Coleen Gray on the cover of the magazine.) Eddie also endorses the "arming of Lilith Ritter" even while he tiptoes into an admission that "superfluous gore" seeped into the film--a significant portion of which came from giving Lilith a gun (and a strange body scar that also was not found in the novel). Frankly, given his friendship with Morgan, Eddie should've delegated the review to his "managing editor" Vince Keenan (Vince is actually "editor-in-chief," Eddie--that was a revealing Freudian slip in the email blast announcing the new issue...) or to someone else with no noticeable conflict of interest.

The new NIGHTMARE ALLEY has many strengths, but they are mostly technical. Even its supporters acknowledge that it is too lengthy; some of these (including Muller) note the strong uptick of violence, particularly in Stan Carlisle, who is not presented that way at all in the source novel or in the 1947 version. Muller attempts to suggest that such criticisms stem from the "churlish" curmudgeons who disdain virtually anything modern; but he simply runs away from the issue of the two films' comparative fidelity to Gresham's novel. He leaves what really matters about the true worth of the film unexamined, possibly in hopes of swaying the wobbly attendance figures that the film has been receiving since its fatefully delayed release on December 17 (originally scheduled for December 3 and no significant challengers at the box office, it lost two more weeks due to delays in completion of the final edit and thus ran into the blockbuster SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME, which obliterated all of its competition from Day One and continues to do so as 2022 begins).

It appears that, barring an unforeseen turnaround, NIGHTMARE ALLEY's box office fate will be entirely left in the hands of what American movie moguls still call "the overseas market." The good news is that as a director originally from Mexico and with a solidly established international reputation, del Toro is solidly positioned to draw robust audiences for the film outside the US. (His Oscar winner THE SHAPE OF WATER, for example, did twice as much business in foreign markets.) He is already at work on his next film, a mixed live-action/stop-motion version of PINOCCHIO. His wife's screenwriting career may be another matter entirely, however.