Silent Movies for the Weekend

                          

Why not check out some silent movie classics this weekend? These are in the science fiction/horror vein, because, well, that's the stuff I like best. 

First up: Metropolis. Visually intriguing and very, very weird, this science fiction classic is well worth a look. The design of the city has influenced practically every science fiction film that came after it. Dystopia, social commentary, and a love story: what more could you want?

                           

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is the story of an insane hypnotist using a sleepwalker to commit murder, but more than the rather simplistic story, here, also, the mood and visual style of the film are my favourite part. The sets are striking and twisted, with sharp corners and exaggerated lines, light and shadow used to perfection. The city feels wrong, like something out of a nightmare, but beautiful, too. There's something similar to Tim Burton's work her, I think.

                         

Can't have a list of silent movies without mentioning Nosferatu. The first vampire film ever still feels chilling, so don't watch it alone in the dark. The images linger and get in your dreams.

Need Help Understanding James Joyce's Ulysses?

Yeah, me too. I haven't given up, if you were wondering, but even with the annotations, my reaction is mostly WTF?!?!?

I had trouble believing anyone would put herself through this riddle-wrapped-in-a-literary-Easter-egg-hunt monster if she didn't have to. Students, sure. Anyone just reading for pleasure? Nope.

But I guess I was wrong. There's at least one person on the planet who genuinely loves this book: Frank Delaney. He loves it so much that he's doing a podcast on it. He started in 2010, and now the podcast, called Re:Joyce, has 303 five-minute episodes. (It's up to chapter eight so far, and he does one new episode per week.) The amazing thing is that Delaney actually manages to make Ulysses seem fun. His enthusiasm is catching, and the book doesn't seem so intimidating when broken down into bite-sized pieces.

You can check it out here.

I still have one third of the book to go, plus a few hundred pages of annotations. I figure it'll take me at least a month or two, because I need to read some normal stuff on the side to keep my head from imploding.

I appreciate Ulysses as an intellectual exercise, but that's as far as it goes. There's a beautiful bit of description here and there, a few bits that made me laugh, and I do enjoy hunting for obscure references, but I just can't connect to the story on an emotional level. What about you guys? Did you honestly enjoy reading Ulysses? Why? Tell me in the comments.

Etymology Expeditions: Cinematography

Keeping with this week's theme, let's explore some words having to do with the film industry.

Cinematography (from which we get the word "cinema") comes from the French cinématographe, a word invented by the Lumière Brothers. It's a combination of a Latinised form of the Greek kinema "movement" and -graphy  from Greek graphein"to write." Originally graphein meant "to scrape onto clay tablets." So, new word, but it has old roots.

The word film as in "a thin coating of something" has been around since the 1500s, but the meaning of "a motion picture" is only from 1905.  It's from the Old English filmen "membrane, thin skin, foreskin," through West Germanic *filminjan, from Proto-Germanic fello, originally from PIE *pel- "animal skin."

Camera is Latin for "a vaulted room." Through the term camera obscura, "dark chamber," it was adopted as a photography term in the 1840s. Camera obscura as a term is probably familiar to many (it means a black box with a lens that can project images of external objects), but do you know it has a counterpart, camera lucida?  The camera lucida, "light chamber", uses prisms to produce an image on paper beneath the instrument so the image can be traced.

Celluloid is a transparent plastic made from nitro-celluloses and camphor. The word comes from cellulose, "consisting of cells."

Sources:

http://www.etymonline.com

Méliès Magic

Photo du film "Le Repas fantastique" (1900) de Georges Méliès via Wikimedia Commons

Georges Méliès (1861-1938) was a pioneer of French cinema.  An illusionist, he brought true magic to film by inventing and popularising special effects such as time-lapse photography, hand-painted colour, and multiple exposures. Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) and Voyage à transfers l'impossible (The Impossible Voyage), some of his most famous works, are considered to be the first science fiction films.  

Méliès' path to filmmaking was a rocky one; his family wanted him to continue in the family shoe business, and he did, for a while. His father sent him to London to work as a clerk, and there he started visiting The Egyptian Hall, run by famous illusionist John Nevil Maskelyne. Young Méliès returned to Paris with a passion for stage magic and a desire to study painting at the École des Beux-Arts. His father flatly refused to support that kind of nonsense, so Méliès settled for working at the family factory by day and cultivating his interest in stage magic by night at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. He also started taking magic lessons and performing. 

In 1888 his father retired, and Méliès sold his share of the shoe business to his brothers. Together with his wife's dowry, he used the money to purchase the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. (I imagine this didn't go down well with Méliès senior...) Living the dream got off to a rocky start when attendance at the theatre was low, but Méliès wasn't easily discouraged: over the next nine years he invented over thirty new illusions and attendance improved. But Méliès didn't only perform on stage; he also worked as an editor, writer, and set and costume designer, gathering crucial experience for the years to come.  

On the evening of 27th December 1895 Méliès' world changed forever when he attended a private demonstration of the Lumière brothers' cinematograph and offered the ten thousand francs for it at the spot, but the brothers refused to sell. Méliès finally obtained a similar device from Robert A. Paul in London, and, after some modifications, he finally had his film camera. He developed his films personally and learned the business of filmmaking by trial and error. Technology finally caught up, and in 1987 Méliès was able to purchase a better camera. Between the years of 1986 and 1913 he made over five hundred films and started his Star Film Company.

Photo du film "Le Dirigeable fantastique" (Méliès, 1906) via Wikimedia Commons

The story has a sad ending, though. In 1903 film critics pronounced Méliès' work declining and repetitive. Also, in 1908, Thomas Edison created the Motion Pictures Patent Company to control the film industry in the US and in Europe, and Méliès was obliged to supply it with one thousand feet of film per week. In 1909 Méliès stopped making film, but he presided over the first International Filmmakers Congress in Paris. Unhappy with Edison's monopoly, the filmmakers tried to fight back. In the end, they came up with the idea to stop selling films, leasing them instead. Méliès resumed filmmaking, but the majority of the company's films were made by his brother Gaston, who had left France to start his own branch of the company in the US. 

In 1910 Méliès toured Europe with the stage magic show Les Fântomes du Nil, and made an agreement with Gaumont Film Company to distribute Star Company's films. Then he made the worst mistake of his career: he accepted a large sum of money from Charles Pathé to produce films, giving the Pathé brothers the right to distribute and edit them. As a part of the deal, Méliès handed over the deeds to his home and his studio. 

After many unsuccessful films, and the final insult of Pathé handing over a film for editing to Méliès' rival Ferdinand Zecca, Méliès broke contract with Pathé in 1913. On top of that, Gaston Méliès had messed up: he squandered fifty thousand dollars on his travels over the globe, producing only unusable or damaged film footage. He couldn't fulfil Star Film's obligation to Edison's company, and had to sell the American branch of Star Films. The brothers never spoke to each other after that. This left Méliès with nothing to pay his debts to Pathé.

Then came the First World War, and Méliès' wife walked out on him, leaving Méliès to raise his thirteen-year-old son alone. The army confiscated over four hundred of Star Company's original films and melted them to reclaim the silver and celluloid, which were used to make heels for shoes. In 1923 Pathé was finally able to take over Méliès' studios. Méliès flew into a rage and burned all the negatives he had stored at the studio, and most of the sets and costumes. Only two hundred films were saved.

photo du film "Le royaume des fées" (1903, Méliès) via Wikimedia Commons

A lot of Méliès' films don't have that much of a plot, but they're beautiful and surreal, and you can sense Méliès' bizarre sense of humour in many of them. Like Les Diableries,  these films appeal to the part of me that likes the weird and wonderful.


The images above are from Méliès' films, but stills aren't enough to convey how amazing they are; you need to see them in motion. You can view them at archive.org, but here's a taste:

                                        
                           
Alchimiste Parafaragamus ou La cornue infernale By Georges Mélies (Internet Archive) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Sources:

Wikimedia Commons

http://www.victorian-cinema.net

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Méliès                           

Cthulhu Cuteness

                                 

Want to show everyone's favourite eldritch horror some love? Now you can. First up, the cuddliest knitted baby Cthulhu ever. Made by my super-talented crafty friend from this book. 

                                

                                        Here he is from the back. All together now: Aww!

                                

                         Okay, this bit's kind of girly... Brace yourselves. Lovecraftian nail wraps! 

                              

              Mine are from thinkgeek.com. Sadly, they're out of stock, but if you dare venture into the 

              murky waters of internet shopping, you might find something similar.

                             

Speaking of murky waters, check out these tentacle earrings I got at Finncon a few years ago. I can't 

                        remember the seller's name, but if you want a pair, Etsy is your friend. 

                        

        Is your iPad not Lovecraftian enough? Creep it up with these iPad covers from geekifyinc.com.

                          

       Got the iPad Necronomiconed? Good. Now go read "The Call of Cthulhu"on it. I dare you. 

Etymology Expeditions: Mythological Creatures

The theme this week: things a witcher would kill. Enjoy!

Let's start with the griffin. What? You don't remember what it looks like? Okay, this is the one that has the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. The word comes from Late Latin grypus, variant of gryps, meaning "curved, hook-nosed," so a hooked beak. Gryphon is an archaic alternative spelling.

The basilisk gets its name from Greek basiliskos, "little king." It was supposed to have a crest or spot that resembled a crown on its forehead. The creature became hopelessly mixed up with the legend of the cockatrice (from Latin calcare "to tread"). A serpent hatched from a cock's egg, the traditional way to slay a basilisk is to trick it into seeing its own reflection, because its glance is fatal.

I haven't come across a manticore in the game yet, but here goes... The manticore has the body of a lion, the head of a man, porcupine quills, and the tail of a scorpion. The word comes from Greek mantikhoras, probably from Iranian mar-tiya-khvara "man-eater."

The chimera comes from Greek khimaira "year-old she-goat." It had a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. Yeah, that name's kind of deceptive.

You can find the etymology of vampires, werewolves, and ghouls in previous posts, so I won't repeat them here.

Gotta go sharpen my silver sword. I can probably get in a few hours of monster slaying before dinner.


Sources:
http://www.etymonline.com

Writing Book: The Fantasy Fiction Formula by Deborah Chester

                              

The Fantasy Fiction Formula is a great writing book by Jim Butcher's mentor. I love Butcher's Dresden Files series, and when I saw the book mentioned on his site, I had to get it, and I wasn't disappointed.

This book is geared towards genre writers, and you get what is says on the cover: well-written, practical advice. The examples have to do with wizards and werewolves, and Chester's style is fun and entertaining. If you've read a lot of writing books, most of the information is familiar, but Chester's approach is very useful, with examples that help illustrate the point she's trying to make. The great thing is, you get examples of both the wrong way and the right way, which makes it easier to spot your own mistakes.

I found the book useful and learned a few new tricks, but the best thing for me was that it describes the process of writing a story or novel from start to finish, and it helped me fuse all the information floating around my brain into one concise whole. If you've already written a book or two, you probably don't need this, but for beginners trying to write speculative fiction this is worth every penny.

The first thing I'm going to try is the SPOOC method for testing story premises. The acronym comes from Situation, Protagonist, Objective, Opponent, Climax. When you combine them, you'll get a two-sentence plot summary. So Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone might look  something like this:

Situation: When he finds out that someone is after the Philosopher's stone hidden in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Protagonist: Harry Potter
Objective: vows to keep it safe.
But can he stop
Opponent: the evil Lord Voldemort
Climax: from stealing it and coming back?

The character-building and revision questions are also useful, and the story structure sections are easy to understand.

In conclusion: one of the best writing books I've read. Go ahead and get this if you're a genre writer. Into science fiction or horror? Don't let the fantasy bit scare you off; you'll still get plenty of use from this. Highly recommended.

(If you're a literary writer, you will probably hate this and feel like the book is trying to box you in. If the concept of plot makes you dry-heave, move along. This is not the writing book you're looking for.)