{"id":2874,"date":"2009-11-16T22:53:10","date_gmt":"2009-11-17T05:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.candlelightstories.com\/?p=2874"},"modified":"2009-11-16T22:57:52","modified_gmt":"2009-11-17T05:57:52","slug":"paris-filmmaker-in-1929-shows-us-what-a-camera-is-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/2009\/11\/16\/paris-filmmaker-in-1929-shows-us-what-a-camera-is-for\/","title":{"rendered":"Paris Filmmaker in 1929 Shows Us What a Camera is For"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is an odd post and I’m not entirely sure I can pull it off. The film above is called Montparnasse<\/em>. It was made in 1929 by Eugene Deslaw<\/em>.\u00a0 I watched the film and want to write about it cold, without looking up Mr. Deslaw on Google.\u00a0 I’ll check up on him after I’ve posted this and see if I’m even in the ballpark.<\/p>\n

Watch the film all the way through.\u00a0 If you think it’s just a collection of boring tourist shots in Paris with nothing happening, then stop reading and leave now because this post is for the four out of one hundred who catch the drift of the camera work.\u00a0 Deslaw was shooting in the Paris of Pablo Picasso and Matisse.\u00a0 He appears to have had a close connection to art and the cafe life of the city.\u00a0 His film is full of odd angles and closeups.\u00a0 He runs up onto a balcony in order to shoot straight down at some tabletops.\u00a0 He catches a woman applying makeup at about the 13-minute mark and makes a shot that is worth paying for.\u00a0 He films traffic and buildings, windows, curbs, chairs, newspapers, smokers, drinkers, snake-handlers, paintings, and water.\u00a0 He’s fascinated by his city and by his camera.\u00a0 He’s making art.\u00a0 He set out one morning with his camera and went around making art.\u00a0 Everyone was happy to be alive there in Paris in 1929 and he was playing his part in it.\u00a0 Films made at that time tend to have this cheerful experimental quality.\u00a0 Deslaw is nearly drawing with his camera.\u00a0 It’s an immediate act of finding visual meaning.\u00a0 He was walking and was struck by something and filmed it in an excited state.\u00a0 He was consciously being an artist.<\/p>\n

The film he made is beautiful.\u00a0 It’s very hard to make a film with its kind of beauty today.\u00a0 Think about it a little.\u00a0 What would you do?\u00a0 Go to a Best Buy and look around for a brand new digital camera.\u00a0 You know, one of those shiny silver things with the HD viewfinder and all the buttons.\u00a0 One of those?\u00a0 Then what?\u00a0 You’d march out into the neighborhood with this gleaming tourist gizmo and look like a ninny bending over to film trash as it floated down into a storm drain?\u00a0 You’d walk up to a guy behind a news stand and ask to film him?\u00a0 Really?<\/p>\n

Yes.\u00a0 That’s what you’d do.\u00a0 You’d get a little camera and do just that.\u00a0 And here’s your assignment: you must do this with the total conviction that you are about to make the greatest film ever made about your subject matter.\u00a0 Set out for a particular street corner and make a magnificent short film or a long one about that corner and everything on it.\u00a0 Spend an entire day doing only that.\u00a0 Skip lunch.\u00a0 Just stay there and make your film without ever entertaining even the slightest doubt that you are working on something of incredible importance and value.\u00a0 It’s going to be very hard to do.\u00a0 Some people will walk by and giggle.\u00a0 Some will become belligerent and tell you to stop.\u00a0 Film those people.\u00a0 Run away if they chase you.\u00a0 Then come back and continue your work.\u00a0 Remember that you are an artist on a mission to make something and absolutely nothing will stop you.\u00a0 Then come back home and figure out how to edit it and then put it online.\u00a0 Tell me about it even and I’ll watch it.<\/p>\n

In 1929 it would have been recognized by the maker of this film that a camera is a camera and it will make your film if you want it to.\u00a0 Ever wonder why you don’t ever see Steven Spielberg out and about with his little camera making a movie for himself?\u00a0 It’s strange isn’t it?\u00a0 Could you imagine Pablo Picasso or David Hockney never carrying a sketchbook to make some quick pictures while having coffee or dinner?\u00a0 I couldn’t imagine such a thing?\u00a0 So when was the last time you ever heard of a Spielberg or Scorsese out with a camera making little films for their web site?<\/p>\n

You could almost think of all the decades of massive budget film production and the studio structures built to support the film industry and film schools as an organized effort to confuse the issue and make people forget what a film actually is.\u00a0 We think of screenwriters and producers and agents and superstars and all the talk shows.\u00a0 But it’s very hard for the artist to walk out with the camera and go make a film the way a painter would work alone on a canvas.\u00a0 The Montparnasse<\/em> film should help to illuminate the proper use of the camera for anyone who’s interested.<\/p>\n

The film comes from UBUWeb<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is an odd post and I’m not entirely sure I can pull it off. The film above is called Montparnasse. It was made in 1929 by Eugene Deslaw.\u00a0 I watched the film and want to write about it cold, without looking up Mr. Deslaw on Google.\u00a0 I’ll check up on him after I’ve posted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[287,116,4],"tags":[2510,668,566,2494,2521,228,2507],"class_list":["post-2874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-film-comment","category-movies","tag-art","tag-camera","tag-experimental","tag-film","tag-filmmaking","tag-paris","tag-photography"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2874"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2881,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2874\/revisions\/2881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}