A Fourth Generation Camera: Kodak Brownie

My aunt gave me my Grandmother’s Kodak Brownie camera last November. It turns out it was actually my Great Grandmother’s camera and she photographed my Grandmother as a little girl with it. It’s absolutely incredible to me. I feel this connection that goes back almost a century through this little box camera. Here’s a picture of my Grandmother when she was a young woman taken with a Brownie:

Here’s what I’ve learned via the internet:

The first Brownie went on sale in 1900 for $1.00 and was designed to be as simple and easy to use as possible. The birth of the Brownie = the birth of the snap shot. Kodak sold a quarter million the first year.

Snap shot was a term borrowed from hunting that described an unplanned shot from the hip.

Kodak thought the Brownie would appeal to children so he named it after a popular children’s character, which was often featured in the Kodak print ads.

In 1930 Kodak gave away a special edition of the Brownie camera free to any child who turned 12 that year. (see the ad here)

The really exciting thing about this camera though is that it still works. It uses 120 film, which is readily available. Below are a few test shots I took with it. I love the aspect ratio and I learned that subjects have to be pretty far back to get sharp focus. There are no controls, only a lever to flip a spring loaded shutter. I can’t believe I’m taking photos with my Great Grandmother’s camera! It's at least eighty years old probably closer to 90.

New Photos: Michigan

Here are a few photos from Christmas in Michigan with my parents: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5457370034/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5457370120/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5456763491/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5456763583/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5456763615/

Valentines Day Movie Options on Netflix

My favorite romantic film of all time is Dr. Zhivago. I’m heavily biased towards E. European/Russian themes but I still think many people will agree that it’s one of the greats. It’s long though, be ready. (Oh Laura) If you’re feeling weary of romantic love and looking for an antidote then you should probably just go straight for the strong stuff and watch Kramer vs. Kramer. Problem solved.

If you’d rather not commit to either extreme then I suggest In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai. You’ll survive it no matter where you stand; in or out of love. It’s a beautiful movie.

All are streaming on Netflix.

A trailer for Dr. Zhivago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAWrXTn5Www

New Stuff on Netflix

A Prophet is now available on Netflix (streaming and DVD). It's a French crime/prison film. It's damn good, promise. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyOyUwwKgvc

Black Swan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaI1XOB-bs Black Swan is a visually striking, tightly structured, high tempo melodrama about an ambitious but sensually naïve ballerina’s ascent to the top spot. The story, which was written by four men and directed by another one, is a male fantasy of what happens when a young, beautiful and well-behaved woman releases her Id to please her virile young director and for the consumption of her dance loving audience. Nina, played by Natalie Portman, lives in a cloistered apartment with her controlling over-the-hill-dancer mother. She sleeps on childish pink bedding while Mom strokes her hair, a music box pings tinny notes and a porcelain ballerina turns. This is probably the weakest part of the film since their mother-daughter relationship is an on-the-nose stereotype but considering the tradition of melodrama the film belongs to, probably not a big deal.

Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, Requim for a Dream) puts enormous faith in Portman’s acting skills since much of the story is told in close up on her. Nina’s desires stream through Portman’s face so authentically it will make you wonder about Portman’s own experiences as an actress and her similarities to the character. It’s also interesting that Portman’s real mother is, like her character’s mother, an artist who is heavily invested in her daughter’s career. This might be turf that Portman really really knows. I guess that’s why the simplicity of Nina’s relationship with her Mom, or better yet the predictability, is kind of disappointing. But I’m harping on a little thing.

Vincent Cassel isn’t bad as Thomas Leroy, the ballet’s director and puppet master, but I blame Aronofsky and Portman that he isn't better. Aronofsky let him slide in some scenes that he looked a little lost in and Portman is so good that someone is bound to look bad next to her. High marks to Mila Kunis, who we know from “That 70s Show” for holding her own next to Portman in full bloom. Black Swan is a top shelf melodrama.

Bush League: Voice Over

These papers are about one third the total it took to draft out the final voice over for Bush League. I never thought it would be this much work to hone it down. I reworked the opening during the holidays to make the first act more accessible and had to reopen this can of worms. Filmmaking is really hard but I never imagined I could love something this much. But what a pain in the ass. Really.

A Few More Photos

These are from Venezuela 2010: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5365991519/in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5365991577/in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5366604770/in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5365991753/in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5365991883/in/photostream/

and one from Tel Aviv:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5365992041/in/photostream/

Street Photographer Vivian Maier

Here's a great little video about a street photographer from Chicago named Vivian Maier who worked as a nanny but spent all her free time shooting street photos. Amazing street photos: (Thanks Hani)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWEDOnBfDUI&feature=player_embedded#

Trucker Buddy

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/2652858758/ There are some people in life who you meet and you can’t and don’t know why but you just love them right off the bat - that’s how I feel about my friend Danny Kupkie. He and I worked in Iraq for almost two years together. At that time he was putting a lot of his income into his heavy haul trucking business back in Illinois while I was working to pay off my student loans. As I got to know him I also heard a lot about the Peterbilt truck he had back home. He told me that it had gold flake paint and custom 9/11 murals on three sides, which I found impressive. I got to see him and his truck when he was passing through San Diego last spring, which resulted in the video below.

Danny is headed out to Afghanistan this month to work. I’m wishing him success and a VERY safe return.

http://vimeo.com/13119379

More photos from Venezuela and the Revolution Will Not be Televised

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5307394038/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5307382952/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5307382812/

The man with the sugarcane is in an area called Los Llanos in the SW of Venezuela. It’s an expansive plain veined with wetlands, there are giant rodents called capybaras, snakes, piranha, fresh water dolphins, cayman and birds birds birds. The dog is in Caracas, poor devil, that’s a tough town even if you have teeth. The flowers are on the road going from Los Llanos toward the Andes. Three weeks and at least a thousand miles by car around Venezuela and we didn’t bump into Hugo Chavez once. I would have liked to.

The Revolution Will Not be Televised is a documentary film about Chavez and the coup that temporarily took him out of office in 2002. It captures his overthrow from inside the president’s mansion, which is an incredible filmmaking feat. But the most important part concerns the Venezuelan people’s reaction to his removal, which is stunningly democratic. Less directly, it’s a comment on the American popular narrative of Venezuela and the willful misinformation campaign(s) that shape it. Man we get some whack information here. I actually thought he was a dictator until I went. That said, don’t listen to Oliver Stone or Sean Penn either.

Unfortunately it’s not available on Netflix or available on Amazon but you can watch the whole thing free here.

And here’s a YouTube clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id--ZFtjR5c

Best Books of the Year

These are the best books I read this year. The Shadow of the Sun is non-fiction written by Poland's only foreign correspondent during the cold war. This book is a collection of his best stories about Africa from the 1960s all the way through the late 1980s. This man saw a lot in Africa and he writes beautifully.

Absurdistan is a novel about the obese son of a Russian oligarch who is waylaid in the fictional Central Asian republic of Absurdistan as it falls into civil war. If you've been to Iraq or Afghanistan and have a hard time expressing to yourself and others the absurdity of what you witnessed, this book is like a love letter. It's Catch-22 for the last decade. (I love you Gary Shteyngart)

The Dirt is about Motley Crue. I didn't like them until I read this. It turns out that Nikki Six is kind of an American hero. This book is not written by the band members so it is legible but it's filthy enough to make you think they wrote it themselves.

New Photos: Venezuela

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5305366166/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5304770895/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cykuck/5304770853/

When I met the soldier at the top he asked me where I was from. In bad Spanish I said I was from the States to which he quickly and casually replied, "Oh, so you're an imperialist." I think I'm still trying to decide if he's right or not - though it's certainly not how I think of myself.

Venezuela Jan 2010

Restrepo and The White Ribbon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DjqR6OucBc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE_ByB2ocVk

I watched these two films the same week, which I don't recommend doing without a prescription, but I do recommend both films. Both are streaming on Netflix.

Of the doc films I’ve watched about the wars I think Restrepo might be the best. These guys, both the soldiers and the filmmakers, have giant balls. Sorry to muck it up with locker room talk, but I don’t know how else to say it. It’s a frightening place they’re in. There’s a lot of heart wrenching stuff here, the soldier’s lives are terrible both because of the danger and their loss but also because of the emotional damage they profess. I was also disturbed by the strange culture collision that’s depicted. The soldiers and locals in the film belong to drastically different cultures with drastically different value systems and they also seem to belong to completely different centuries. Maybe even millennia. Formally speaking, the filmmakers didn’t need to frame the film around the charismatic young soldier “Restrepo” quite the way they did but they kept that part light enough that I never yelled “trite!” I only mumbled “device”.

If Restrepo doesn’t send you rushing to the pharmacy for a late night serotonin bump, then try The White Ribbon to provoke that emotional freefall. This is a beautiful but austere drama that’s set in Germany just before the start of WWI. Michael Haneke is an Austrian director that I would describe as meticulous and utterly fearless. He tackles the scariest, darkest, harshest corners of the human psyche with agonizing delicacy. If Van Trier is the enfant terrible then Haneke might be his wise, steady handed Grandfather. And as a family they may need to check into to a clinic to find out if their chauvinism is hereditary. Von Trier, I think it’s very fair to say, is inclined to use vulnerable female characters as dramatic devices not as a point of view. Give him a gentle female willow and he’ll have her bleeding before the second act. Haneke might have something similar going on, but I’ll withhold judgment. I’ve only seen two of his films. I’ll watch another one soon to determine exactly what type of crazy he is.

The White Ribbon is also a tableau of European peasant life before WWI (in this respect, a family member of The Tree of Wooden Clogs) that if you don’t know, and I don’t, seems absolutely authentic. While watching I found myself reflecting on my time in Lithuania imagining the brutality of that life and the easy jump from there to the later horrors of war and holocaust in what otherwise appear to be charming villages. And I also found myself revisiting my high school Hawthorne education; The White Ribbon is channeling the same puritanical essence, albeit more critically and less allegorically than Hawthorne, but the brutality is a match. And perhaps this is where my suspicion of Haneke’s chauvinism comes from – like Hawthorne, in the telling of pathologically austere religious (Western) societies one inevitably ends up back in the Garden of Eden, where women always commit the original sin. But that’s just a hunch, like I said, I need to see more. Either way, he’s a phenomenal director.

In terms of the trauma these films will wreak on you, using my proprietary ICB* scale I would give Restrepo a 40 and The White Ribbon a 25. Yes it’s sad but true, fiction often hurts more. I would recommend a buffer of at least a week between them.

*The ICB scale is based on the novel In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. To experience 0 on the scale read ICB in the depths of an Eastern European winter night (preferably a Post Soviet society) with a hangover and supplement your horror with at least six tracks from Radiohead’s Amniesiac album.

The Invisible Cure

I got to thinking about Helen Epstein last night on my drive back from LA. She wrote The Invisible Cure, which is a remarkable book about HIV/AIDS in Africa. For anyone interested in the nitty gritty of this subject or just in Africa in general, this is a very good resource. It’s full of insight but she’s also a very good story teller.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFVCwEnFTjI

Fernanda Rossi

Fernanda Rossi made a big impression on me last summer. She's a story consultant for doc films and also kind of a philosopher. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6-GcH3oFqQ&feature=player_embedded#!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I don't know how Jay found a turkey in Zolokere, Malawi but he did. Then he bought it and we ate it. Here is our pilot episode of his cooking show Roughing It, which we must have made on a down day during the Bush League shoot. He's got his own place in Vermont now, his cooking is amazing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sEPPHTcxrY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wci-o3rYr-M

Grandma Cookie's Kodak Brownie

I'm trying to cool my jets on the Victor Bout deal but seeing how things work in Iraq would turn anyone into a zealot. I saw a clip today of a U.S. Gov official saying we "inadvertently used" Victor Bout's (the Russian arms dealer) aircraft to ship material into Iraq and Afghanistan. Bull. This is why the privatization of the military is such a problem; no one is responsible for anything. The company that did it just dissolves away and the agency that should be responsible just shrugs. Sorry if you're here checking Bush League out and getting this stuff about arms dealers and Iraq, it's because I worked there for 21 months after I shot Bush League to pay for post production. Yes, that's weird, I know. Desperate times.

Now that's off my chest, take a look at this: It's a Kodak Brownie No. 2, which was manufactured sometime between 1924 and 1933. It was my grandmother’s and it's amazing. This particular model took 120 film, the same film I shoot in my Pentacon Six, which means it's still completely usable. The sticker inside looks like it was added by the retailer in Texas (Grandma was a Texas girl) and is charming all by itself.

I saw some of my grandmothers many photos last week and she was really talented. I never thought of her as a photographer but she was.

She passed away last week, I loved her so much.