AN AUDIENCE OF ONE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
YEARS BACK, MY FATHER, TAKING NOTE OF MY OBSESSIVELY FASTIDIOUS MANNER OF WATCHING MOVIES, i.e., free of interaction with my fellow audience members, remarked that, in a perfect world, I would have my own private projection room, watching films in perfectly controlled environments as a fussy, controlling audience of one. Unfortunately, that dream film-critic scenario never presented itself.
Until this year.
Turns out, if you want to share a movie with a minimal number of people, go see a sixty-year-old French art film in the middle of a weekday afternoon. We’re talking guaranteed crowd control here. Marian and I had driven from Ventura, California to a quaint cinema high in the hills above Santa Barbara, hardly the venue to catch Godzilla XXXIV: The Final Reckoning or any other cinematic Hoover designed to suck in the public by the millions. Upon taking our seats, it soon became obvious that we would have the entire house to ourselves, a true rarity. Additionally, ahead of the curtain time, the theatre was not pumping a firehose of advertisements and idiotic on-screen trivia quizzes into the room, but, instead, bathing us in pure, wonderful silence.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that, there, at that moment, I could take a picture of Marian that would be impossible in 99% such cases. There was that face in the middle of a sea of muted red. The image would compose itself! Three frames and I was happy enough with the Edward Hopper-ish result to sit back down and dig the quiet. I knew I’d stolen something precious out of the darkness.
Fifteen minutes later, a few other people drifted in (the film had a French plot, meaning no plot, so it really didn’t matter when they arrived) and the moment was gone. But I had at least obeyed my instinct and had the great fortune to make a record of it. That is the heart and soul of making a good picture, and I’ll sit through someone else’s lousy one, anyday, to make that happen.
ALIENATIONS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE STRANGEST VISUAL EVIDENCE OF MAN’S PRESENCE ON THE PLANET IS HIS ABILITY TO COMPARTMENTALIZE HIS THINKING, the ability to say, of his living patterns, “over here, cool. Over there, six inches away, ick. You see these kind of yes/no, binary choices everywhere. The glittering, gated community flanked by feral urban decay. The open pasture land that abuts a zoo. And the natural world, trying desperately to be heard above the roar of its near neighbors from our co-called “civilization”.
As seen from Griffith Observatory: park running paths and a smog-shrouded L.A. 1/320 sec., f/5.6, ISO 100, 35mm.
I recently re-evaluated this image of the running paths at Los Angeles’ Griffith Park and the nearby uber-grid of the central city. The colors are a bit muted since it was taken on a day of pretty constant rolling overcast, and it really is not a definitive portrait of either the city or the nearby greenspace, but there is a little story to be told in the ability of the two worlds to co-exist.
L.A’s lore is rife with stories of destroyed environments, twisted eco-structure, bulldozed neighborhoods and political hackery advanced at great cost to the poor and the powerless. In the face of that history, the survival of Griffith, a 4,310-acre layout of parks, museums, kiddie zoos, sports courts, and concert venues on the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains, is something of a miracle. It’s the lion lying down with the lamb, big-time, a strange and lucky juxtaposition that affords some of the most interesting fodder for photographers anywhere in California. Photogs observe natural pairings in the world, but they also chronicle alienations, urban brothers from different mothers, tales of visual conflicts that, while they can’t be reconciled, are worth noting.
thenormaleye 