18-11-03 Spent yesterday working out on the hill above Paekakariki – driving back afterwards showed that there’s a massive area to work on between there and Pukerua Bay if it’s only four people. I came out stinking of diesel, with ripped clothes and scratches over my forearms. The work itself was actually quite fun – boxthorn is such a nasty weed that it’s fairly easy to get the psychological motivation to remove it, and you can see the way it climbs up through the other plants to smother them out. Also as a conservation project there’s the motive that it’s work in a good cause. And it’s good to be out of town, looking down over the sea. Still, it’s only my first day – I could get sick of it before too long.
Staying busy out of town is a good thing to do to keep occupied since I can’t be looking for romantic action these days – an alternative outlet for my energies.
Lined up to remove a fence with the Poneke DOC staff today but got told I won’t get paid for it. I’ve got to the point where it’s bothering me the amount of volunteer work I do that doesn’t lead to anything.
27-11-03 Put up the ‘sex & death’ description on Stonesoup – a chance for public humiliation? Probably more of a confession thing, it’s not fun carrying around a dark secret. I can’t spend all my time thinking about it or it will destroy my life, and I’ll find out in the new year whether I got away with it. Overall I’m feeling pretty good & positive towards life. I’ve got a temporary flat for the summer with a great view down over the city & harbour, and I spend half the week out of town in Paekakariki in the bush up on the hills. Since I got the job with DOC earlier this year (followed by another period of underemployment in which I made my ghastly error of judgement –unemployment really is soul-destroying - and now work again for a community group trying to regenerate the native bush on the hills above Paekak) I’ve developed a new appreciation for nature, and going into bush is a chance to see an ecosystem up close – everything is alive and moving, interacting constantly. The weeds don’t belong because they crowd the other plants out, so hence we remove them. It’s great to have time out of the city especially over summer; Wellington feels cramped in hot weather. It’s also so geographically enclosed – having grown up in New Plymouth it’s good to be able to see sunsets over the Tasman again.
It’s a good stimulus to be having a career change. At just shy of 25 I’m not too old. Trying to get work in film got too frustrating, and conservation work is a good buzz though not as well paid. I have to start all over again (on beginner’s wages) but there’s so much interesting stuff to learn.
Working in Paekakariki on Monday is the perfect excuse not to go to the Lord of the Rings parade. It’s a Roman triumph, the conquering general appearing for the plebs once again. I went to the Two Towers one which is plenty for me. I took a photo of Peter Jackson – a little figure in the centre of the frame surrounded by hundreds of faces. The trailer was great but the film itself was a bit of a letdown (the last forty minutes suck: Sam’s speech about ‘stories that matter’, the sanitized violence, the smothering music, the cavalry arriving to save the day - euch). This time somehow I find the idea that you can pay $112 for a grandstand seat – to actually get a decent view of the stars rather than catching glimpses through the masses of people in front of you – something of a turnoff. The problem with bringing Hollywood to New Zealand is that with it comes all the dodgy ideology, inequality, superficiality etc, and for everyone who makes it there are fifty who don’t.
I don’t want to come across as churlish. The LOTR trilogy is on the whole a great thing to have happened, there’s some marvelous artistry gone into it, it provided a lot of jobs – I even got something like $700 for my nine days as an extra (I spent the money learning to scuba dive) so I got an inside look and subtracting say $70 for tickets to see the films a couple of times each I still come out ahead – and Peter Jackson is a genuinely talented guy. He’s always been good at playing with NZ cultural iconography – the sheep getting blown up with the rocket launcher in Bad Taste is brilliant. His cameo in The Fellowship was also very clever, belching at the camera in greeting (his Two Towers cameo, throwing a spear is pretty meaningless), and the first hour or so had me spellbound – suspension of disbelief was unfortunately stopped by Hugo Weaving’s delivery of the line “welcome to Rivendell, Frodo Baggins”, which almost singlehandedly ruined the film. Overall I guess I was a bit disappointed that unlike my favourite films (a fairly predictable list – pretty much the best of Kubrick, Scorsese, Gilliam, Lynch, Cronenberg, Eisenstein, The Marx Brothers and Woody Allen) the first two LOTR movies failed to get better or reveal anything new on the second viewing. I’m naturally suspicious of the media frenzy surrounding the films - a case of the emperor’s new clothes? Couldn’t they get the odd bad review in the NZ press? There’s a definite surrealism in the idea of the parade for the premiere – a hero’s welcome for a bunch of rich people going along the street, their destination to sit down and watch a movie???
I have a lot of problems with the film industry in general. The means of production are so complex and expensive that corruption & compromise are part of the territory, built into the system. Productions operate within a market system, necessitating money – the production cannot bite the hand that feeds it. So films, particularly high budget ones tend to support the ideology of their producers, and in Hollywood that means big corporations, supporting globalization / corporate feudalism etc.
Crews are structured according to a pyramid shape, directors and stars at the top, senior technicians below, down to extras & grunts at the bottom. The power structure ensures that only the senior people are in a position to make decisions, while the juniors are working on things too small to have any measurable influence on the final product. Most of the crew aim for their work to be unnoticeable, self-effacing – it is only noticed if done badly (eg boom in shot). To become a senior technician requires years of experience ie indoctrination so no threat is posed.
The working conditions on films are bizarre: long hours = little sleep. Sleep deprivation is a classic technique in political indoctrination/brainwashing.
The filmmaking process micromanages every tiny detail to give the illusion of reality - which is achieved through complete artifice. Just as much work goes into what is not seen in shot as to what is seen, as the crew have to cover their tracks. Performers use their bodies as compositional elements. Repetition of takes is a profoundly strange thing to watch, creating parallel universes with minor variations. What effect does all this have on workers’ psyches? Another irony is that the faster the editing on screen, the longer the editing takes to complete. Multiple camera setups allow a scene to be broken down into several shots but require more setup time.
At root, filmmaking is the art of forgery… That’s the theoretical stuff anyway. I did some media studies and film papers at university – not a good way to break into the film industry since it creates mutual suspicion on both sides. I just never had the right kind of aggression & ego to break into the industry, and have too many ethical hang-ups about not selling out. I do have polytech qualifications in film, and I can use a camera, edit, write, record sound etc – but of course it’s not what you know but who you know that matters in getting work. I was able to get casual work piecemeal but never a living. I was going on some very muddled theory that as I’m somewhat creative & interested in the arts it would be a natural career. Seems pretty naïve now but suppose I had to go through it. I asked one professional sound guy how often he gets to work on interesting projects or programs that he’d actually want to watch and he said “very rarely”. I dislike most tv and strongly dislike advertising so why would I want to be a part of it? There was also the way it drove a huge wedge between my girlfriend & I last year when she got a tv job and I didn’t…
Anyway I’m out of it now, learning about stuff like biodiversity and community groups instead. My creative outlets are still prose-writing & music. I’m actually giving a talk at Victoria University this Friday (2pm, the Gamelan room at the music department) about the improvised music scene in Wellington. I’m slightly nervous, need to spend the rest of today preparing for that. I’ll sign off with a few quotes I wrote down from the set of the last short film I worked on (I was the boom op, but not very good at it)…
1st AD: On Jackson’s Wharf we had people travelling up to five times a day between the two main shooting locations, costume changes, eating lunch in the car – madness. People would go work on Rings for a break.
Continuity: Well Matt’s my boyfriend but I’m friends with Ralf and he wanted us to be more than friends and I’m networking with him, so…
Director: I feel sorry for the DP and the AD – they’re not enjoying it.
Boom op: Do all the honours students get to work with pro crews?
Director: No just the select few.
Grip: (indicating the heavy dolly which has to be unloaded) Welcome to my world.
Boom op: What’s the scene?
Art dept: They find this guy asleep in the freezer in his boxer shorts.
1st AD: (after 40 minutes in the cold rain) OK we’re making a weather call.
Boom op: Do you wear the headphones or do I?
Sound rec: No, you don’t.
Boom op: What background are you putting into the greenscreen part?
Director: Pure white
1st AD: The pizza arrived but it all had meat and some of the crew are vegetarian so they went hungry.
Director: Oh shit.
PA: Remember I said your call-time was 6.30am at the train station? It’s been changed to 5.45.
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Posted by fiffdimension at November 27, 2003 01:40 PM | TrackBack