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hearthesilence wrote:A bit late to this thread, but this kind of thing has been bothering me in the past year or two, even before the brouhaha over Girls and coinciding with the time I moved here to Brooklyn/New York after spending much of the previous years around Illinois and then downtown and the South side of Chicago.

Los Angeles Plays Itself just ran at the Whitney - I saw the last 25 minutes there for the first time, and I'm glad the timing was so perfect, because it really nailed everything that's been bothering me about cultural isolation/tunnel vision in the way filmmakers present (or worse 'romanticize') urban living:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UMFdvgq ... ure=relmfu#" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

then

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wszUJVlw ... el&list=UL" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Just to stray from topic more Light Industry played his Red Hollywood last week. It's not as epic or philosophical but it's definitely worth seeking out. Not as thesis oriented as much as a sort of mixtape of left wing dissent in Hollywood during the blacklist.

hearthesilence wrote:A bit late to this thread, but this kind of thing has been bothering me in the past year or two, even before the brouhaha over Girls and coinciding with the time I moved here to Brooklyn/New York after spending much of the previous years around Illinois and then downtown and the South side of Chicago.

Los Angeles Plays Itself just ran at the Whitney - I saw the last 25 minutes there for the first time, and I'm glad the timing was so perfect, because it really nailed everything that's been bothering me about cultural isolation/tunnel vision in the way filmmakers present (or worse 'romanticize') urban living:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UMFdvgq ... ure=relmfu#" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

then

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wszUJVlw ... el&list=UL" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

About 8:50 into the first clip hits the nail on the head when it comes to Lena Dunham.

Interesting thing about Chicago - the City owns about 20,000 lots that used to be houses and were deeded to the city. People call up the city and ask the city to take their property. (the City won't take it btw). I look at our maps and see a sea of orange in some neighborhoods. (orange signifies a city owned lot). The south side and the west side (which is the worst area by far - unless you go past about 100th and state street) is about the furthest you can get from "urban" living. It is what I predict the suburbs will be like in about 50 years after those cheaply built houses start to fall apart. It is a sea of overgrown lots and abandoned houses in disrepair dotted with small groups of people who refuse to leave their homes no matter how bad it gets because they are too poor, too stubborn or stay out of some sense of community.

First, for comparing her to Woody Allen: She has only done enough to be compared to What's Up Tigerlilly and Take The Money And Run.
It is completely unfair to compare someone who had mad one professional films to someone who has been making films since the early 70's.
I don't find her particularly good but the choice of comparisons is ridiculous.

Aren't you the one who brought up the comparison to Allen?

zeroman987 wrote:Interesting thing about Chicago - the City owns about 20,000 lots that used to be houses and were deeded to the city. People call up the city and ask the city to take their property. (the City won't take it btw). I look at our maps and see a sea of orange in some neighborhoods. (orange signifies a city owned lot). The south side and the west side (which is the worst area by far - unless you go past about 100th and state street) is about the furthest you can get from "urban" living. It is what I predict the suburbs will be like in about 50 years after those cheaply built houses start to fall apart. It is a sea of overgrown lots and abandoned houses in disrepair dotted with small groups of people who refuse to leave their homes no matter how bad it gets because they are too poor, too stubborn or stay out of some sense of community.

Off-topic, but aren't you describing Detroit now?

zeroman987 wrote:

hearthesilence wrote:A bit late to this thread, but this kind of thing has been bothering me in the past year or two, even before the brouhaha over Girls and coinciding with the time I moved here to Brooklyn/New York after spending much of the previous years around Illinois and then downtown and the South side of Chicago.

Los Angeles Plays Itself just ran at the Whitney - I saw the last 25 minutes there for the first time, and I'm glad the timing was so perfect, because it really nailed everything that's been bothering me about cultural isolation/tunnel vision in the way filmmakers present (or worse 'romanticize') urban living.

About 8:50 into the first clip hits the nail on the head when it comes to Lena Dunham...

...during which the narrator says,

Thom Andersen wrote:How can I say this politely? It’s hard to make a personal film based on your own experience when you’re absurdly over-privileged. You tend not to notice the less fortunate, and that’s almost everybody. If you ridicule your circle of friends, your film will seem sour and petty. If you turn their problems into melodrama, your film will seem pathetic and self-pitying.

I love Los Angeles Plays Itself, but at this moment in the film, I always wonder what would be an ideal alternative if simply having access to a professional camera is a privilege in itself (which, under Andersen's terms, it must be). Even a Watts resident like Charles Burnett operated for a time in a highly rarefied environment as a student in the UCLA film school, part of a cohort that included the other two so-called "neo-realist" black filmmakers Andersen cites: Haile Gerima and Billy Woodberry. It's not that I don't agree that all three offered a valuable corrective in their focus on working-class worlds in Los Angeles, but rather I think the very act of putting a vision on screen is a hugely privileged act, no matter what your background might be; as soon as you have access to a camera, you have entered that privileged realm, and you are providing material most likely for equally privileged audiences. It seems to me as though Andersen is painting himself into a corner and implicating his own work with this kind of attitude.
Also, within the rhetoric of Andersen's words above, couldn't he say just as easily (if not accurately), "When you decide to notice those less fortunate, your film seems condescending and touristic"? This doesn't seem any less sweeping or vaguely true given his perspective, and I am absolutely certain such a remark would be leveled at Lena Dunham if she attempted to represent the experience of African-Americans in Brooklyn, for example.
What alternatives are left, except perhaps enlisting folks on the street to determine your film, not unlike The Mysterious Object at Noon? I mean, that would be fine by me, but I doubt Andersen, let alone Dunham, would willingly relinquish control of future work to this extent.

Humility is necessary. Anyone can have it. With her it seems to be hidden behind ironic pettiness. Contrary to what she (and most people) might think, admitting your petty faults with an ironic tone does nothing. Do it straight, compromise yourself and then people might respect you. There's no humility in irony. Always a cop out. Plenty of great directors were privileged.

"Admitting" and exploring the characters' faults in a straight and humble way, without a trace of irony, doesn't sound like the best idea for a comedy series to me.

Mathew2468 wrote:Humility is necessary. Anyone can have it. With her it seems to be hidden behind ironic pettiness. Contrary to what she (and most people) might think, admitting your petty faults with an ironic tone does nothing. Do it straight, compromise yourself and then people might respect you. There's no humility in irony. Always a cop out. Plenty of great directors were privileged.

That's fine by me, but I'm not sure Andersen would view humility, however that's interpreted, as compensation for privilege's blindness. (And I would actually disagree that plenty of great directors were humble; humility is anathema to feature-length cinema, in most cases.)

Gregory wrote:"Admitting" and exploring the characters' faults in a straight and humble way, without a trace of irony, doesn't sound like the best idea for a comedy series to me.

Sound rather like Mikio Naruse's methodology -- and despite his reputation for dourness, most of his films have quite a fair amount of humor. Of course, Naruse came from the poorest (and lowest class) background of any of the major Japanese directors during the classic era -- and continued to rent a room from downwardly-mobile friends even after his career success had been assured.

I'll have to disagree with the Thom Anderson-implied assumption that filmmaking is some kind of rarefied privilege. Even if it once was, which I'm not sure I buy (more privileged than oil painting? or architecture? or any number of other arts that require specialized and expensive knowledge, training, tools, materials), it's certainly not now. Nobody with half a brain who wants to make a film is prevented from doing it...unless they actually have half a brain and are literally too retarded to work a camera. Or unless they are beset by unending social chaos, like a generations-long war in their backyard -- though that would make a great subject for a film.

I would agree with you, although posting cellphone films on Youtube is one thing, but getting feature-length work into film festivals--as Dunham, Andersen, and Burnett have--is quite another (and requires another stratum of technology, coordination, time, and effort beyond the reach of most people). I love the potential level playing field offered by digital technology (as much as I simultaneously love celluloid), but in my argument above, I have disingenuously borrowed the dubious logic of Thom Andersen in which, among other things, owning a car to cross Los Angeles is a rare privilege.

How is what you say any different from the way artists come up in any medium or the great world filmmakers of the past made it in their respective social/national conditions? Nobody had it easy. I'd say that access to the means of production of big scale studio filmmaking is actually rather meritocratic. You have to prove yourself every step of the way. How is it different from any business? Success gets rewarded. Smart ambitious hungry people tend to succeed. I've made films and had friends get their work into festivals like Sundance and Cannes. I've screened submitted films for selection at Sundance. And I can tell you what getting a feature-length work into a festival requires: that it's good, that it doesn't suck like 99.9% of the stuff out there, that it has some vision and spark of life. None of that has anything to do with socio-economic privilege, but it has all to do with artistic talent and achievement. Which also a part of what makes any YouTube video a hit. And filmmakers like Ben Wheatley are already coming up who've started there. So it's a goofy argument, even if you don't really agree with it.

Making a film is a privilege that has trickled down to the middle class, at least- the tools available are limited, but a camera, editing software (and a computer) are in reach for the motivated. But all that gets you are some YouTube videos (an approach taken by Dunham, to her credit). Reaching an audience, being on Criterion and HBO is still a privilege, and that's where class and connections seem to come in- and where lack of devoted humility galls a little.

I think Anderson's argument is always going to be problematic because privilege is a sliding scale. He loads the dice by saying "absurdly over-privileged", which seems to mean little more than "more privileged than me," but even a marginal documentary filmmaker in the USA is absurdly over-privileged compared to the next Lav Diaz, say.

I think intellectual curiosity and imaginative empathy are far more relevant considerations, and you also have to allow for the possibility that some socially privileged filmmakers might just happen to make great cinema about their own class, myopia be damned. There's the unignorable tradition of 'privileged' filmmakers such as Ray and Visconti and Renoir and Bunuel making masterpieces about the less fortunate, but those filmmakers were no less perceptive and masterful when they turned their attention closer to home.

I can certainly see where Anderson's coming from, as I've had to suffer through way too many self-regarding movies made by filmmakers with what appears to be a crippling lack of perspective, but that's a fault that goes way beyond class distinctions, and there are so many obvious exceptions and qualifications for the narrow class-based argument Anderson makes that it ends up not being very helpful.

It's as if HBO and Criterion aren't getting anything out of the relationship? Or Dunham doesn't have skills pleasing a certain audience (decidedly not us)? Really, as if the world of arts and entertainment were like Yale admissions 50 years ago, where you can be an idiot like Bush Jr., as long as your Dad went there. Do you really think anyone would bankroll her or continue to if she weren't making them money? Dunham's art may portray a privileged world, but her opportunity to make it is certainly not the birthright of everyone who grows up in Manhattan or goes to a college like Oberlin.

All I'm saying is that art is difficult for anyone to succeed at. To achieve any measure of success you have to be some combination of good and lucky to connect with an audience, but it's never the same combination twice. Chalking the success of a non-genius like Dunham up to mere privilege because of her class background or because she's connected with a market that doesn't demand the kind of talent we'd all like to see from someone in her position really seems weird to me. I don't get it. Her work may be bad and boring. But that doesn't mean she's been handed all her continuing opportunities on a silver platter without risking for them or earning the right to continue.

But the larger point I'm trying to make is that, for at least half a century or more depending on how you view cinema history, the tools have been available to the motivated and it's silly to pretend otherwise. The members of the French New Wave hustled film financiers, scrounged equipment and stock and innovated new shooting methods. Herzog stole cameras and film stock. Cassavetes scrimped and saved his acting money and made films in ways he wasn't supposed to and nobody gave him permission to. Chris Marker deliberately imagined a film with a single moving picture shot because it was all he could afford at the time. Those who really couldn't figure out a way to direct straight away started with writing or editing or some other film-related craft. There's an entrepreneurial necessity at the heart of most plastic art forms that I'd argue almost favors those from a less privileged background who often naturally tend to be more innovative with less.

zedz wrote:I think Anderson's argument is always going to be problematic because privilege is a sliding scale. He loads the dice by saying "absurdly over-privileged", which seems to mean little more than "more privileged than me," but even a marginal documentary filmmaker in the USA is absurdly over-privileged compared to the next Lav Diaz, say.

I think intellectual curiosity and imaginative empathy are far more relevant considerations, and you also have to allow for the possibility that some socially privileged filmmakers might just happen to make great cinema about their own class, myopia be damned. There's the unignorable tradition of 'privileged' filmmakers such as Ray and Visconti and Renoir and Bunuel making masterpieces about the less fortunate, but those filmmakers were no less perceptive and masterful when they turned their attention closer to home.

I can certainly see where Anderson's coming from, as I've had to suffer through way too many self-regarding movies made by filmmakers with what appears to be a crippling lack of perspective, but that's a fault that goes way beyond class distinctions, and there are so many obvious exceptions and qualifications for the narrow class-based argument Anderson makes that it ends up not being very helpful.

Nicely said. I'll second all this too.

I have to agree with Andersen about filmmaking being a privilege, but I understand warren oates' point. Starving artists cover a lot more than filmmakers, but that has more to do with one's choice to live that lifestyle.

First, let's focus on film before digital took over. The cost of making a film starts out fairly high - film and film processing, which can grow astronomically depending on how much you shoot. Ask any film student from the '70s through the '90s how much it cost to shoot their thesis films. It's undoubtedly worse in the '90s, when private school tuitions went through the roof.

Even in the digital age, filmmaking isn't necessarily cheap. It's romantic to think having a phone or a cheap consumer camera is all you need, and it's not hard to see why - a lot of great documentaries were done with cheap equipment. You can have commercially viable narrative films (most likely films trying to mimic cheap documentaries) that can be done the same way. But those are very specific kinds of films, mostly in documentaries (which has very different expectations). How many narrative filmmakers, or better yet how many financiers or film distributors out there are willing to limit themselves to making films on that sort of equipment?

Finally, equipment rentals and insurance cost even more - unless you're among the lucky few who know someone who's willing to lend you camera equipment for free or cheap. (Or if you're part of a co-op, but I think that was tied more to the film era - not sure if there are many in the digital era.) Then there's labor - are you going to have actors? A cameraman? Sound? For most film projects, there's a number of positions/aspects of production that can make or break a film, and again, if you're lucky, you have friends who will work for nothing. Or you can exploit people. But then someone else is paying the price (working themselves towards poverty) for your gain. Regardless, it's a very costly enterprise - someone pays that price somehow.

warren oates wrote: But the larger point I'm trying to make is that, for at least half a century or more depending on how you view cinema history, the tools have been available to the motivated and it's silly to pretend otherwise. The members of the French New Wave hustled film financiers, scrounged equipment and stock and innovated new shooting methods. Herzog stole cameras and film stock. Cassavetes scrimped and saved his acting money and made films in ways he wasn't supposed to and nobody gave him permission to. Chris Marker deliberately imagined a film with a single moving picture shot because it was all he could afford at the time. Those who really couldn't figure out a way to direct straight away started with writing or editing or some other film-related craft. There's an entrepreneurial necessity at the heart of most plastic art forms that I'd argue almost favors those from a less privileged background who often naturally tend to be more innovative with less.

I'm not sure about that. Look at Cassavetes, he had a profitable acting career that financed his life - his mortgage, his babies, etc. That helped a lot. Even if you take that out of the equation, this is still someone who had to address the enormous cost of filmmaking. You will always find individuals who are willing to scrimp, sacrifice and save to get around it, but it's prohibitive enough that it will keep most people from doing it, moreso than other costly arts. It's easy when you focus on the success stories, but that's a small percentage of people who work in film. Even the success stories aren't that successful either - Cassavetes' films got much better distribution than any of his indie contemporaries (still crappy compared to Hollywood films, but pretty damn good compared to other indies), and even with his acting career, he still had to struggle with money until the day he died.

Oh, I'm not saying it's easy, but ridiculously possible. Just because many of the films with which most people are familiar nowadays cost 50-200 bajillion dollars, people tend to assume that all fiction features must break the bank, but that just isn't true, especially for anyone starting out. I hate to bear the bad news, but there probably aren't thousands of undiscovered underprivileged filmmaking geniuses whose work is being suppressed so we can all be force-fed Transformers and the occasional Tiny Furniture.

Actually, hearthesilence, all you need is a great script and a vision. Naturally if you're smart your vision will skillfully incorporate your budgetary limitations. As for exploiting free labor by using friends and getting key crew positions and actors gratis (usually deferred) or borrowing equipment, in my experience all of the above are happy to be exploited if your schedule is reasonable and you're making something truly good, which is already presenting just about everyone working on it with an opportunity they don't normally have -- something it's hard to put a pricetag on. Since nobody starts out making effects-laden epics (though some effects guys like the directors of Monsters or District 9 are even starting to do this on the cheap), what more does one really need?

Assuming one can't pull together an Indie production starting out, well then just write something good enough and relatively cheap and in some way commercial and the mythical THEY might even let a first-timer direct it. Or the one after.

Really, it's as if we were discussing architecture and somehow the standard for the beginning architect were building a cathedral.

Gregory wrote:"Admitting" and exploring the characters' faults in a straight and humble way, without a trace of irony, doesn't sound like the best idea for a comedy series to me.

I don't think that is what Mathew2468 meant. I think that every self deprecating comedian had a measure of humility in their material. Isn't this essentially what she is aiming for? Self-deprecating humor? Something like Woody Allen?

I saw one episode of girls and this is what happened: A girl begs her parents to support her in NYC they say no; she tries to play hardball with her boss when she has no leverage and gets fired; she has awkward sex with an awkward "artist"; she goes to a dinner party where "drama" ensues; and she gets drunk and begs her parents to support her.

That is it. None of this is funny. It is literally "bad" things happening to her and her complaining about it. It isn't even amusing. When someone offers a solution to her problem, she scoffs. She is incredibly unlikable and pathetic but fails to even realize it even when people tell her.

The reason she isn't offered a full time job at her internship is because she didn't learn photoshop. Let that sink in. She didn't learn something that 14 year olds can use and she had two years. No one can be that inept (actually they can, but that is a different story - most of my generation pretty much sucks).

This sounds funny right? I read it and think it is hilarious. However, the execution is so horrible that I don't even chuckle to myself. It is horrible because for the rest of the show she complains about it like it is something that actually matters. She wasn't getting money from the internship, she wasn't going to get a good reference and she wasn't getting any skills. It sounds like a worthless internship to me, so nothing was really lost.

zeroman987 wrote:None of this is funny.

Yes it is.

zeroman987 wrote: She is incredibly unlikable

No she isn't.

This is not productive grounds for discussion.

starmanof51 wrote:

zeroman987 wrote:None of this is funny.

Yes it is.

zeroman987 wrote: She is incredibly unlikable

No she isn't.

This is not productive grounds for discussion.

I am not trying to be a jerk, I genuinely want to know why people find this character likable. Yet, no one will tell me. Instead they insist that she is without giving a single reason. You are entitled to your opinion and you don't have to divulge the reason for your opinion. However, when you post it publicly and "call someone out" for not sharing your opinion, you should at least explain it.

I'm not crazy about the humor in Woody Allen's films, but he himself is hilarious and you buy it. The ironic self-deprecation I'm talking about is something everybody does to a degree. Example: I would make incredibly cynical jokes about how pathetic I might be at something. Everyone laughs, it's funny and it's true. But inside it doesn't feel funny. I let myself off the hook by admitting it but I don't truly commit to it. The words are true and yet I'm being insincere.

Making jokes about your greed, your childishness... it's not sincere most of the time. It's this: "If you ridicule your circle of friends, your film will seem sour and petty." It's incredibly phony.

-Mathew (sic)

Hi. I just thought I would chime in on this discussion. All though I have not seen Tiny Furniture, I have seen the first 4 episodes of Girls and have enjoyed this show just as much as when I first started watching Six Feet Under, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The United States of Tara or any other well written contemporary American drama series.

zeroman987 wrote: I genuinely want to know why people find this character likable. Yet, no one will tell me.

To me it is kind of weird how the most interesting/funny/abrasive female characters also seems to be the most despised by the audience. Whether its Brenda or Claire in Six Feet Under, Jackie in The Sopranos, Kate Winslet in Mildred Pearce, Hannah in Girls or the chicks from Sex and the City, people seem to be very eager to hate the characters (and for that matter the writers and actors) in a way that doesn’t seem to be directed towards the Tony Soprano’s and Don Draper’s of the world.

I find so many of these female characters a lot more interesting than the pretty Mariel Hemingway’s or for that matter Diane Keaton’s that are the love interests in the Woody Allen films that has been mentioned earlier in this thread. In fact the comparison to Woody Allen is pretty apt. He is allowed to get away with murder, as far as self-centred obnoxiousness is concerned, while Lena Dunham is crucified for aspects that seem to be more related to her personality and background than her actual work.

If writing stories about white, self-centred and privileged characters was a crime Whit Stillmann and Noah Baumbach should have been tarred and feathered long ago.

Personally I not only find it refreshing to see young female spoiled upper class (or upper middle class) brats instead of male ones. One thing that really empresses me are the scenes when Hanna’s “boyfriend” casually makes fun of her weight, and also when she gets her tits out in the last episode to pose for a iPhone photo that is not done to be sexy, either for a male viewer or a woman to want to be like, Its just kind of sad and desperate, totally in tune with her character. Hannah is the kind of character we don’t often see on TV. It is certainly not something one would see in a Woody Allen film where all women tent do be pretty sex object for Allen to accost/fall inn love with/etc.

In the same way that I follow Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, Holden Caulfield in Catcher in The Rye or Orville Pym in In Youth is Pleasure, I also enjoy following the flawed/funny/cool/stupid/fat/sexy protagonists of Girls. In my opinion they certainly don’t need to be anymore likable or any less pathetic or entitled than the other characters on TV.

Anyway, I find Hannah and her friends entertaining, believable and very funny. Not despite the fact that they are privileged, spoiled, white and oblivious to the opportunities that they have been given, this is just another part of their characters. And bloody good characters they are.

As a TV audience member I dont feel I have to approve of their way of life any more than I have to approve of Tony Sopranos murderous ways. But they make me laugh and they seem true to life, atleast in the stories they figure.

To me thats what constitutes a character that i like and that I want to watch on TV.

(edited for spelling)