Free Radical: The Films of Len Lye

Screened twice last week at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD, as the kids call it), this 67-minute program consisted of fifteen experimental shorts by the New Zealand animator Len Lye, made over a period of half a century (1929-79). The crowd I saw it with greeted many of the shorts with derisive laughter, which seemd to me entirely appropriate. The program guide helpfully explains, for instance, that A Colour Box (1935), the second film in the program, "was funded and distributed by John Grierson's GPO film unit on the condition that Lye include some postal messages at the end," which simply means that about three and a half minutes into this four-minute abstract film, in which Lye provides "colour accompaniment" to a piece of Cuban dance music, tacky advertising slogans for the British post office suddenly flash on the screen, at which point everyone at the screening started giggling. "In Venice, the Facists disrupted screenings because they saw it as 'degenerate' modern art," but a more accurate way of describing it would be sublime kitsch.

The program is divided in two parts by a short reel change, and apart from the unfortunate Musical Poster #1 (1940), which I talk about below, the later films are more successful--if that's the word for it--at adapting Lye's talents to commercial ends. In Colour Flight (1938), the triangular shapes that move across the screen suggest paper airplanes, so it almost seems logical that the piece would end with a plug for an airline, with the musical choices--"Honolulu Blues" by Red Nichols and a rumba piece by the Lecuona Cuban Boys--evoking an exotic destination. This seems to me a vast improvement on the film preceeding it, N. or N.W. (1937), a stilted and, in its odd film grammar, highly mannerist live-action narrative, in which a relationship is saved by a friendly postman. The program describes the ending as "a very tongue-in-cheek treatment of the sponsor's message," though the irony was lost on me. The only other live-action piece in the program, Rhythm (1957), which edits black-and-white footage of a Chrysler assembly line to African drumb beats, is at best kitsch Dziga Vertov.

The use of African music in Rhythm, Cuban rumba music in A Colour Box, Kaleidoscope (1935) and Colour Flight, and a blues track by Sonny Terry in Colour Cry (1952-53), which Lye "imagined to be the anguished cry of a runaway slave" (begging the inevitable question: why a runaway slave?), all point to an unacknowledged colonial subtext running throughout his work. His first film, Tusalava (1929), in which the shapes on the screen move between abstraction--suggesting here a world before language--and primitive representation, was inspired by an Australian Aboriginal creation myth with a string of circles on a white background, reminding one of a tapeworm, evolving into a lizard-like creature that competes with early humans (deliberately rendered in the style of a cave drawing on a black background). In The Birth of the Robot (1936), a puppet animation piece comissioned by Shell Oil, a white colonalist drives his convertible over the pyramids. After dying in the dessert, he's resurrected as a steel man; then comes the punchline: "A modern world needs modern lubricants." This dichotomy between the primitive and the modern reaches its most distilled form in the aforementioned Rhythm, where Lye presents industrial labour as a primitive expression of masculine vitality (incidentally, Chrysler hated the film).

Tusalava was originally accompanied by a live piano score by Jack Ellit, which has since been lost, so it's impossible to know how this would've changed the tone of the piece, which in its present form inspires a certain thoughtfulness in the viewer; it was virtually the only piece no one laughed at. Recently, Michael Sicinski argued that Jim Henson improved on his hero, Norman McLaren (a filmmaker inspired by Lye), by making films explicitly for children, and that criticism could just as easily apply to Lye. I learn from the program that he "was adamant that wartime films did not have to be gloomy," and Musical Poster #1 begins as pure abstraction to draw the viewer in before hitting us with a series of paranoid slogans to the effect that "the enemy" is listening to everything you say (one title reads "Don't tell him where you go," and the word 'go' is shivering with fear).

Avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage are often credited with influencing the style of commercials and music videos, either as an indication of their signifigance (1) or in order to illustrate how oppositional art becomes assimilated by the mainstream, so it's amusing to discover how the avant-garde was influenced by advertising. The man who curated the screening, Roger Horrocks, was of course at pains to present Lye as a neglected artist who really had no choice but to whore himself out, and indeed there was a period in the 1960's where he abandoned film to pursue sculpture (a body of work of which I know nothing), though if it were true that every filmmaker had to sell-out just to get ther films made in the first place, I probably would've outgrown my interest in cinema a long time ago. (2) Even in Free Radicals (1958), a black-and-white abstract piece where Lye's scratchings on the emulsion suggest lightning and rain (to my tastes, his greatest work), which doesn't advertise anything, I can't say I felt very challenged by it. How then to explain the enthusiasm of P. Sitney Adams, Brakhage and Jonas Mekas for his work (all three are quoted in the program)? As a classmate of mine put it, the films were probably good for their time.

Footnotes:
1. I haven't seen Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2006), Mary Jordan's feature-length documentary about the maker of Flaming Creatures (1963), though according to the reviews, it credits Smith with being a major influence on mainstream figures like Fellini, John Waters and Andy Warhol.
2. Pauline Kael was an expert at rationalizing the artistic compromises inherent in big-budget Hollywood filmmaking. Of Hud (1963), she argued that the conflict between the desire of the filmmakers to make a noble, liberal-minded message picture and the masses' hunger for a nihlistic western was integral to the film's "Americanness."

Brand Upon the Brain!

Guy Maddin's career has two distinct phases. I've never been a huge fan of his first three features, Tales From the Gimli Hospital (1988), Archangel (1990) and Careful (1992), and I haven't seen his fourth, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), though by reputation it's his worst film and was followed by a three-year hiatus where his future as a filmmaker was uncertain. The turning point in his career was The Heart of the World (2000), a six-minute short commissioned by the Toronto Film Festival that catapulted Maddin from cult figure to international auteur.

All of Maddin's films are pastiches of silent and early sound cinema. Careful, a "pro-repression" Mountain epic set in a village where the characters have to whisper in order to prevent an avalanche, appears to have been inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light (1932), complete with a blond, blue-eyed cast of characters with names like "Johann" and "Sigleinde." Admittedly, this film looks a lot better on second and third viewing (one nice touch: when the characters throw a party, they put sheep skin over the triangle-shaped windows to dampen the noise), though it wasn't until The Heart of the World that Maddin developed a restless, stuttering style of montage to match the delirium of his stories.

It's worth noting that, with the exception of The Saddest Music in the World (2003), none of Maddin's major films have gone through the usual funding channels for Canadian cinema. Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary (2002), his film of a Winnipeg ballet company's adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel, was commissioned for television; Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) was originally a gallery installation where viewers could observe the piece through one of three peep holes; and My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005), Isabella Rossellini's tribute to her father, Roberto Rossellini, was made for the Documentary Channel. Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) was produced by The Film Company, a Seattle-based organization that provides support for filmmakers (as opposed to Telefilm, which merely produces scripts), meaning that Maddin had the green-light even before he had a concept, rather than having to struggle through a long pre-production period as he no doubt would on a Telefilm production. Since 2000, Maddin has worked consistently at a time when the careers of other Canadian filmmakers have either floundered (Denis Villeneuve) or gone of the tracks (David Cronenberg) (1), and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to make a connection between his vigorous productivity and the sustained vitality of his recent films.

I've only seen Brand Upon the Brain! once, so it's too soon to say whether this is Maddin's best work to-date, although such giddy hyperbole seems perfectly appropriate given the spirit of the film. Still, I feel obliged to qualify my following remarks as a preliminary stab at interpretation. Also, this essay contains spoilers, so if you haven't seen the film yet, stop reading here.

In terms of narrative and form, Brand Upon the Brain! feels like a companion piece with Cowards Bend the Knee: both have anatomically-themed titles, heroes named Guy Maddin and, apart from the off-screen narration by Isabella Rossellini in Brand Upon the Brain!, both are non-verbal though far from silent. When Mother/Gretchen Krich wants to call Guy/Sullivan Brown and Sis/Maya Lawson for dinner using her aerophone (a device invented by Father/Todd Moore that allows two people who love each-other to communicate over vast distances), the noise it makes is scratchy to the point of being unintelligable, reminding one of the teachers on the Charlie Brown TV show.

The title of the film refers to the strange puncture marks on the children at the orphanage run by Mother out of a lighthouse. World famous teen detective Wendy Hale/Katherine Scharhon arrives on the island to investiage, arrousing the desires of both Guy and Sis. Finally it's revealed that Father has developed a technique for extracting nectarine from the cerebral cortex in children, a youth potion that acts to reverse the aging process in Mother. A creepy sequence where Father extracts Sis' nectarine suggests an incestuous relationship; deciding she's had enough, Sis murders Father with a butcher knife and later banishes Mother from the island (the story is told in flashbacks with an older Guy/Erik Maahs repainting the lighthouse in anticipation of Mother's return).

Although Heather enjoyed the film overall, she objected to the treatment of women as either nectarine-slurping psychos or sex-crazed hoochies, and while this seems to me a perfectly valid response, I think the central conflict between Mother and Sis is meant to represent the struggle between repression and animal lust with Guy caught in the middle (a not unsimilar mother-daughter-younger brother dynamic can be found in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous from 2000). Mother's need for "nectarine at any cost" is linked with a desire to return to an infantile, sexually undifferentiated state, while Sis' attraction to Wendy (who, in the interest of the case, assumes the identity of her brother, Chance) is seen in terms of personal autonomy. In addition to the aerophone, Mother uses the lighthouse as a means of keeping tabs on her children, and after she's banished from the island, Sis establishes a "reign of terror" (the connection to the French revolution is so obvious it's barely worth mentioning). Wendy, in pretending to be Chance, constructs herself as the subject in her lesbian flirtation with Sis. In order to prevent Sis from discovering her true gender, Wendy agrees to kiss her only while wearing her Kissing Gloves, but Sis turns the tables on her when she gets ahold of Wendy's undressing gloves ("Those gloves could lead me to paradise... Or cast me into hell!").

Maddin's decision to name the protagonists of this film and Cowards Bend the Knee after himself lends both a self-mythologizing quality. (While I haven't seen his latest film, which premiered at the Toronto film festival last month, the title--My Winnipeg (2007)--seems to say it all.) In the earlier film, Guy Maddin/Darcy Fehr was a hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons who abandoned his pregnant girlfriend for another woman, and while the younger Guy in Brand Upon the Brain! is often adorable ("Once again, this was too much for Guy" a title card explains after one of his periodic fainting spells), self-critique creeps into the film through the bookending sequences, in which Guy is no less eager to please Mother as an adult than he was a child, and in both films, self-deprecation expands into a larger critique of over-masculinity (Cowards Bend the Knee) and repression (this film).

Although he's routinely praised for his atmospheric lighting and furious montage, Maddin is less often recognized for his work with sound--perhaps because his hommages to silent cinema discourage viewers from listening too closely to his sound mix, and I'm as guilty of this as anyone. It was only after the screening that Heather pointed out to me that the splooshing sound Guy makes while painting is remarkably similar to the sucking noise of Father extracting the necatrine from Sis and the crunching sound Mother makes when eating Neddie/Kellan Larson, the most adorable of the orphans--an aural leitmotif linking all three activities. And I've already alluded to the role sounds plays in Careful, where the whole film is about the danger of speaking too loudly.

Brand Upon the Brain! is the first Guy Maddin film shot outside Winnipeg, and it seems somehow appropriate that the best Canadian film I've seen in ages (with the possible exceptions of Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee, The Saddest Music in the World and My Dad Is 100 Years Old) was actually shot in Washington state. I enjoyed Atom Egoyan's British-Canadian co-production Where the Truth Lies (2005) for the novelty of seeing a thirty-million dollar Egoyan film and for one of Kevin Bacon's slimiest performances, but on second viewing I find it far less impressive, and in general, I tend to prefer Egoyan's original screenplays--Next of Kin (1984), Speaking Parts (1989), Exotica (1994) and Ararat (2002) being my personal favorites--to his more expensive literary adaptations. Given the current climate, which I addressed in an earlier blog, what little talent Canada has to begin with will surely go elsewhere, and I'm glad there are alternative avenues for personal filmmakers like Maddin (2) (Orson Welles did some of his best work in exile). When Hollywood makes terrible films, one can say "No one's forcing you to see it," but in Canada there's always the issue of the public money that's being squandered. I think once we give up this stupid notion that there is such a thing as Canadian culture, we can see our domestic cinema for what it is: a government charity that exists merely to prop up various unions.

Footnotes:
1. I admired Cronenberg's American-made A History of Violence (2005), which--unlike The Departed (2006)--wanted to be funny, but seeing him direct a perfectly conventional script about the Russian mob with a straight face, as he does in Eastern Promises (2007), makes one wonder why he wanted to make this film in the first place. I'll concede that it's flawlessly executed, like a child colouring inside the lines, but from the director of Videodrome (1983) and Crash (1996), I expect more.
2. The screening of Brand Upon the Brain! was preceeded by a series of shorts from the Winnipeg Film Group that leave one with the impression that Maddin is the only person in Manitoba with any talent at all. If I have to sit through another humorless experimental short of some one's old Super 8 home movies, using the same scratch and dye techniques that Norman McLaren developed in the 1940's, I'm gonna go postal. The guy who curated the shorts didn't even have the balls to show up, they were that fucking bad.

The Pillow Book

As you may have noticed, in our last few entries we've departed from the more measured, "objective" approach I took in my essays on Arrested Development (2003-07) and Artists and Models (1955) in favor of immediate, opinionated commentary. Partly it was because of the film festival and because Heather has a completely different writing style from mine (it's not a competition!), but I would argue that the internet, by its very nature, lends itself better to reviews than criticism. CineAction, which comes out with a new issue only three times a year, has no presence on the internet at all, and while I still depend on Cinema-Scope to keep me informed, their website is merely a supplement to the print edition: it's updated quarterly, like the magazine, rather than weekly. (1)

To use a crude metaphor, the difference between a blog and a journal like CineAction is the difference between video and film. Like film, which has to be sent to a lab to be developed, print media is slow and cumbersome; but with a blog, I just had to hit 'Publish Post' and now any one with an internet connection can read this. If cinema is a long shot (Angelopoulos, Mizoguchi, Tarr), the essence of video is narcissism. (2) In other words, while an academic like David Bordwell or Robin Wood views things from a distance, reviewers are generally too caught up in the now to maintain any historical perspective, which no doubt accounts for the hysterical over-praise of certain films: I'm sure Sideways (2004) looks pretty good next to whatever else was playing at the multiplex that week, but next to an Albert Brooks or Buster Keaton, its timidity and mediocrity are inescapable.

Peter Greenaway began experimenting with video editing in the 80's with A TV Dante: The Inferno - Cantos I-VIII (1989), a ninety-minute video piece for British television co-directed by Tom Phillips, but it wasn't until a few years later that the technology developed allowing Greenaway to utilize the same techniques in film. A TV Dante is a major work, but his subsequent feature, Prospero's Books (1991), while often stunning, is so over-loaded that it never really engaged me either time I saw it: we get one striking image, then another and then another, and I couldn't remember any of them seven seconds later. Forget Memento (2000) (3), this is what it must be like to have short-term memory loss. (Heather, who's seen it four times--for school, not for fun--said it started to grow on her, but you'd have to ask her about that.)

The Pillow Book (1996) represents his most sophisticated application of the editing techniques he developed in the earlier films, once again layering multiple images on top of one another (unlike most filmmakers, who only edit horizontally, Greenaway edits vertically as well), but this time, a picture in a picture--one of the techniques Greenaway uses most often--serves to connect the characters with their past. When Jerome/Ewan McGregor paints his name on Nagiko/Vivian Wu, contained within the present moment is Nagiko's past: a birthday ritual in which her father/Ken Ogata would paint his name on the back of her neck. Later, when Jerome commits suicide, a guesture he's about to make is anticipated in a smaller frame at the bottom of the screen (needless to say, we instinctively read the larger image as more important), which reflects his feeling of disorientation.

The film was made the year before England returned Hong Kong to China, and while this is never mentioned in the film, I'd be very surprised if Greenaway didn't have this historic milestone in mind while making it: apart from the opening and closing sequences in Japan, almost the entire film takes place in Hong Kong, and even more than costume dramas like The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) and The Baby of Mâcon (1993), this is a film about history. The narrative moves between three different time frames and three different writers: tenth century Japan, when Sei Shonagon wrote her Pillow Book; post-war Japan, where Nagiko discovers her father is being blackmailed by his publisher/Yoshi Oida; and Hong Kong in the 90's, when Nagiko writes her own pillow book and plots revenge against the publisher.

In contrast with the other two periods, the scenes of Nagiko's childhood are photographed in black-and-white, which underlines the characters' connection to their past, and by extention, a dysfunctional patriarchy. (Although most of Japan was firebombed during the war, the decor and costuming in these scenes are deliberately old school.) The father's agreement with the publisher--namely, sex in exchange for publication--means that the entire family is dependent on his whims. He chooses for Nagiko a husband/Ken Mitsuichi whose passion for archery has obvious phallic associations. The husband is deeply threatened by Nagiko's interest in reading, much in the same way Spica/Michael Gambon was threatened by Michael/Alan Howard in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). When the husband burns her books in a rage, it's both destructive, severing Nagiko from her past and from history, but also liberating. She runs away to Hong Kong and supports herself with a number of odd jobs before she's discovered as a runway model.

Nagiko's career as a model is worth commenting on because the relationship between the model and a piece of clothing is much the same as the relationship between a piece of paper and what's written on it. It's a natural profession for some one whose fetish is having a man write on her skin. Her search for the perfect caligrapher-lover is a search to find a substitute for her father (early on, we see Nagiko attempt to perform the birthday ritual on herself using a Chinese typewriter and some lotion). Jerome's bisexuality is significant as he constructs himself as both the object and the subject, confounding binary gender roles. He writes on Nagiko and pushes her to write on him, later suggesting she try to have her poetry published. However, the only way for her to get into publication is to offer the publisher Jerome as a barter item; in more ways than one, the publishing world simply isn't interested in female writers.

After she has her revenge on the publisher, Nagiko sets fire to her posessions. In a voice-over, she muses "The first fire took me out of Japan. The second brought me back"--and by extention, brought her back to the past. The closing sequences in Japan are again photographed in black and white, and again the decor is old school, but now Nagiko has achieved something like empowerment. We see her surrounded only by other women with Jerome's baby and tattooed all over. Last night I saw David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (2007) and in both films the symbolism is exactly the same: the tattoo, because it is permanent, represents the past, a secret code explaining a person's life story, and the child represents the future.

Superimposing a woman who lived at the beginning of the last millenium over one living at the end of it, The Pillow Book suggests something of a millennial statement, and as a film about what it means to be a woman at the end of the twentieth century, it's the closest thing in Greenaway's oeuvre to a feminist statement. It's also one of his most formally accomplished, using video editing techniques that often encourage amnesia (I would argue music vidoes and blogorrhea are at least equivilent if not inter-related) to underline the characters' connection to their past and to history. In other words, it's a movie that engages us both vertically and horizontally.

Footnotes:
1. After reading this, Heather said she felt slighted, as if she were dragging me down. That's not what I meant at all; I simply meant to say that the pace of the internet isn't well suited to the kind of criticism found in journals like CineAction. Besides, all of my previous posts are significantly shorter than an academic paper would be, and the shift I mentioned was already evident in my essay against French-Canadian cinema. More to the point, what I liked most about Heather's entry on Inland Empire is how personal and immediate it is, and I deliberately wrote this essay in the second person, rather than an objective third person, in imitation of her writing style.
2. Rosalind Krauss, "The Aesthetics of Narcissism," Video Culture (Gibbs Smith, 1987), p. 179-191.
3. Pun intended.

Inland Empire - It's Easier than Learning your ABC's

I felt I should comment on something that Michael mentioned about my last/first post here at Rancho Notorious. He disliked my implication that our co-blogging was somehow a competition, and I, the implied loser. This of course, was unconscious on my part, but there it is. So, for many reasons relating to this incident, I am going to talk today about Inland Empire, the latest David Lynch monster. Which I liked a whole lot. I won’t be looking at it in its almost three hour entirety, since I spent most of that time tensely upright in the theatre, and I definitely don’t remember all of it.

But the sections that affected me most, while seemingly having nothing to do with what I set out to discuss here, were surprisingly personal for me. These were the scenes involving the ‘white trash girl’ characters, who are later depicted blatantly as prostitutes. They affected me deeply almost every time they were onscreen, for different reasons each time, but created an overarching theme that I am still kind of lost in thinking about. I almost couldn’t believe that David Lynch was hitting on all of this.

Anyway, the first scene in which they appear out of the grimy darkness, they ask Laura Dern’s character if she will look at them, and tell them if she’s known them. This line is repeated throughout the film by different characters, but always female. This premise of the scene, as the girls go on to discuss a man they’ve all slept with (presumably the man Dern just cheated on her nutso husband with), reads kinda like a bad government health agency ad. (ie: you’re sleeping with everyone your partner has…) But the tone is so off (so Lynch, if I may, without knowing his whole body of work), and disconcerting.

The entire scene has the feeling of rape. It’s difficult to justify that statement, having no experience of rape. But we are brought uncomfortably close to these women’s sexual experience which is obviously submissive and objectified. All these women are is their sexuality. They have no dimension, and no desire to be anything more. So creepy. And definitely a comment on misogyny, and objectification, but more deeply a sensitive understanding of the master/slave mentality underpinning this experience.

The next scene of interest is probably my ‘favourite’ of the film, if such a statement can be made of such a tense, grotesque, uncomfortable experience. In this sequence, the same horde of ‘white trash,’ (and please pardon my light use of such offensive terms) create a formation in the dimly lit hotel-looking room and dance to Little Eva’s ‘Locomotion,’

It was funny, in an uncomfortable sort of way, but more so deeply upsetting for me. Of course haunted by that Lynch darkness and dirtiness, the scene had me re-evaluating my formative years, and the gross amount of television I consumed. This ‘innocent’ song choice lays bare the fact that long before Britney Spears, people were making a business of packaging dangerously ‘trashy’ ideologies beneath an innocent façade (that is so transparent it drives me crazy) and throwing it at sweet little girls who just like to dance. “You’ve got to swing your hips now.” “My little baby sister can do it with me.” I loved that song when I was a little girl. The scene ends abruptly at “Jump up,” leaving the audience jarred.

The last scene that really shook me was –well, really, all of these sequences of these girls as whores on the streets of LA. In particular, though, Laura Dern’s lines: “I’m a whore. I’m afraid. Where am I?” The first line delivered with a sobering pain, and the rest twisted into a mocking laughter. I was fighting tears. Full of empathy for the character, and full of pity for myself, and scared as hell for no good reason. Wow. Laura Dern is so great in this film. But I was also reeling from the fact that David Lynch, being both a man and a filmmaker (which is the most basic recipe for misogyny), could articulate something so complex and accurate about women, and their sexuality, and self-image. Especially after seeing Mulholland Drive, which I enjoyed, and it was interesting, but holy crap, why are we seeing those girls make out so damn much (slash at all)? (Michael, I await your retort)

I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days (Inland Empire). It bothered me profoundly that such a dark film had such a personal effect on me. It still does.

Helvetica & Hello

Well, I'm just one in a long tradition of girls to step into her boyfriends blog and take on co-ownership. I wont try to compete with Michael's perceptive and articulate comments on film, past or present, but hopefully my presence here will promote some kind of dialogue that might interest someone other than us!

On that note, I'll start by discussing a film I saw last night that was too low brow for Michael to accompany me to. It's called Helvetica, and it's about Helvetica. So if you are interested in typeface you'll be interested, otherwise you mightn't waste your time. There were some great interviews with some hilariously snobby people. (They were to typography what Michael is to film.) (Passionate, I meant.)

All in all, I couldn’t help but think that the film was a filmic embodiment of what Helvetica is itself, at least as one of the interviewees defined it. Basically a vessel, without its own inherent meaning, designed to carry content. So, I guess that works. But I have an issue with that, which is (a less vehement) parallel to the reason why Michael wouldn’t see the film in the first place. It was a fairly typical documentary, with (really great) interviews, and lots of footage of Helvetica in our lives and streets. But it did nothing creative with the topic, which is incredibly rich. It was exactly what you expected, and the content was great. But the filmmakers made their film in Helvetica font – it did nothing to colour our perception of the content, it simply displayed it for us.

Also, I was expecting some cool graphic stuff, for a film made by people who are presumably passionate about design.

The friend I saw Helvetica with is a designer, and her complaint is that the content was too commercial. I don’t have her background, so I cant fully appreciate her stance, but I would have to say that I liked that it was commercial-oriented. The film was about how the font has snuck insidiously into our cultural awareness. It’s just there. Like air, as one designer noted. You have to breathe, so you use Helvetica. And unfortunately, most of visual communication and design is sunk into marketing, so that’s the appropriate place for this film to have positioned itself, I thought. Although they did spend an awful lot of time in that American Apparel store.

Still, I’d have to say I liked the film a whole lot. It gave me lots of time to think about Helvetica, and typeface in general, and snotty, middle class European designers, and the best part is that it made me laugh at least half of the time. The designers they chose to interview probably were really huge designers, if you know anything about design (I don’t), but they were funny, and fun to watch. The openings credits were the best – an old printer setting the word Helvetica by hand, and grunting unconsciously as he does his work. It was not extremely original, but pretty, and interesting, and funny. Kind of sums up the film in general, so maybe just disregard everything else you just read.