Shooting a Wilder film like an Ulmer film. A dreamy Classical Hollywood feature immortalized for its iconic scene between two iconic actors with one of the most iconic songs of all time, but it’s shot like a Poverty Row picture. So, who is the real winner, so to speak? The low-budget, the DIY, the underground (not that Poverty Row was even the underground, those studios were still commercial and an important part of the Hollywood Golden Age).
I think young people forget how much a counterculture needs an overculture. Counterculture isn’t utopia, it’s antagonism that burns and fades, subsumed until it’s a husk. Or maybe we have no desire for a counterculture, maybe the culture of vibes and pick-and-choose aestheticism is the only liberation we’re gonna see in our lifetimes. We can all be punks or goths or lesbian fairies who live in little houses or whatever it is that alternative signifies now. But, I can’t help feeling there’s gotta be a better way. This geist without the zeit, this zeit without a geist. Reanimated ghosts of the last century’s greatest hits, reheated twice, thrice over for your instantaneous pleasure—hot and ready. The better way is not an exit, it is more a matter of taking what we’re stuck with and making it work better for the moment.
And so, it is the job of the critic, the academic, the intellectual, to elevate the mediocre and exalt the masterpiece. That is precisely why the best critic is a contrarian, not a dickrider. It takes a mind attuned toward, abused into, kneejerk skepticism and opposition to find the worthiest works in the wasteland. Not only is it better scholarship, but it is simply more interesting.
The underground harbors the formal creativity borne out of necessity, that is, industrial austerity and pop neglect. But, the impact or cultural relevance of such B pictures has been revived and brought back into the discussion because of the digital. The Internet made an underground impossible, it scattered us all into little tribes. God’s punitive wrath at the Tower of Babel. Without YouTube, I would’ve never already watched Ulmer’s Detour twice, and without my Film Noir and the Western class’ online Canvas site, who knows if or when I would have been exposed to this film, if not for that weekly response paper that was not even mandatory.
What a fantastic finale to one of my favorite films. We ripped our shot straight from Detour, this film’s peculiar device for the odd—but overall, very noir—obsession with lingering on objects, commodities, stuff. So, once we learned that we could manual focus on the camera, it was a gamechanger. I would have loved to shoot it myself, but I was an object for the lens on this one. But my cameraman nailed it after several takes of trial and error and playback, achieving the fluid, graceful feel of the soaring camera-man cyborg. We kept riffing and adding elements and it ended up awesome. After that, we were getting pooped. The almost 3,000 calories of Publix fried chicken and Hawaiian rolls between us, in conjuction with the sticky 83+-degree inside temp, made us sluggish, but we kept going till almost one in the morning. I think this shot will really blow people away, I want people to say, “how did they do that?” We resume after work again.
videophage.com 
Leave a comment