When I first discovered Brendan Dawes’s Cinema Redux years ago, I longed to make my own movie DNA. Dawes creates a mosaic of still frames from a film, captured at 1/sec., and lets us see something about a film all at once. This project was recently exhibited at MOMA as part of the “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit, and his updated website on the project led me to what I have been waiting for: the code. Back in 2004, I hadn’t heard of Processing, and I’m not sure I would have understood what to do with it. Recently, however, my Advanced Media students and I have been working with Processing as we consider programming as a media art form. Dawes has links to some applications people have developed to replicate the process and one to a site with updated Processing code. A little more tinkering and, at last, I’m finally getting to make my own! I have been waiting to create one for Michael Mann’s Heat for a long time. Expect to see more.

Trollope’s keen understanding of money, manners and the social networks that they underwrite made him a favorite read of mine in graduate school. If you don’t have time to read the 1000+ pages, the BBC adaptation of The Way We Live Now is a decent substitute and well worth watching in the wake of the recent financial bailout. I highly recommend it. While the novel is, of course, far superior, the adaptation—especially Melmotte’s obscene dinner for the Chinese Emperor—tells a timely story of speculation and its consequences. As a bonus, we get to see the fine character actress Shirley Henderson steal the show in a leading role as Marie Melmotte.

This shot from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) is
a brilliant meditation on how sound works in film. The sequence opens as
sound engineer Harry Caul unlocks several deadbolts in order to enter his
apartment. As he opens the door, we hear the shrill sound of an alarm bell.
Coppola slyly refuses to show us the source.
As the shot switches from the doorway to the apartment (above), the alarm
sound stops as if Harry has turned it off in the hallway that we never see.
Harry enters from frame right and the camera holds on the shot above for
over a minute. Harry wanders in and out of the shot placing packages down
in the kitchen, dialing the telephone, sitting down on the couch. Much of
this activity takes place off screen, forcing us to enter and think about
a world where meaning is made through sound rather than image.

An early post-Watergate film, The Conversation explores questions
about the objectivity of recorded media and the psychology of the eavesdropper.
Highly recommended.

Walter Murch was the supervising and sound editor of The Conversation.
Three short articles about sound by him are available in The Transom
Review at: http://www.transom.org/guests/review/200504.review.murch.html