If you’ve read his book James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction (reviewed here) or watched his accompanying series, you can tell that James Cameron is first and foremost an artist. With an artist’s eye he has created some of the biggest science fiction movies ever made, from The Terminator to Aliens to The Abyss and Avatar. For the first time Cameron is revealing the contents of his sketchbooks and personal art archives and discussing his creative process and inspiration. Insight Editions’ giant chronicleTech Noir: The Art of James Cameron, arrives in bookstores next week and available for pre-order here. Fans will find a collection of rare and never-before-published art that reveals how this award-winning director has translated his ideas to film, often employing advanced film-making technologies to realize his unique vision. But as readers will find, it all begins with pen, pencil, and paint.
Merging art with science and technology the Victoria and Albert Museum in London put together an exhibition celebrating more than 100 years of the car. That exhibition has been documented and is now available as a history of the car, combining historical objects from the museum with thirteen essays that show the impact of this cultural achievement (both the good and the bad) on people around the world. Prepared by the museum’s researchers, the book Cars: Accelerating the Modern World is a history of the automobile and a nostalgic look at the marketing of cars through hundreds of reprinted advertisements and vintage photographs.
The book examines the need for speed looking at early and modern races, including early women in racing. From the 1890s to the 2010s style has been supreme when it comes to the love of cars–it might seem obvious, but in one graphic readers can see a comparison of cars, planes, trains, phones, and even chairs, clocks, fashion, and swimsuits, all trending toward more streamlined forms across the decades. Along with favorite cars is the quest for greater safety. Manufacturing, assembly lines, industry, regulations, and the development of roads and highways, all led toward a key component that makes road travel possible: standardization.
As with everything else, the history of the car is interspersed with politics, profits, corporations, and The growth of an industry of cars for work tracked cars for personal use and even luxury purposes. And along the journey was a new class of sales, marketing lifestyle and image to the consumer. It’s also the movement from the stately black early cars to choice for the consumer via new, vibrant colors for interiors and exteriors. One Saturday Evening Post excerpt champions new color combinations from DuPont in the 1920s. Fashion plates compare what women should wear in their new cars in the early days of the automobile.
For the 40th anniversary of Alien,OVID.tv is streaming a stunning, eye-opening documentary about the life and visual creations of H.R. Giger, who won an Academy Award for his design work on the science fiction/horror classic. Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s Worldfeatures interviews with Hansruedi “H.R.” Giger (pronounced geeger) at his home and during his travels in the weeks before his death in 2014. Interspersing archival footage and interviews with those who knew Giger best, his wife Carmen, his ex-wife, a psychiatrist, his former partner, his agent, the archivist of his personal collection, and others (even his Siamese cat Müggi makes several appearances), writer/director Belinda Sallin assembles a picture of the complex man, his unique creations, and his influences.
If you’ve viewed footage of Guillermo Del Toro’s vast collection of horror memorabilia (via interviews or in books like his At Home with Monsters), all housed in a lavish setting, imagine a home as fabulously creepy but built like an old abandoned grotto, centered around Giger’s horror paintings and statues, complete with dark corridors, and those eerie squeaky doors and stairs of a recluse’s hovel in a vine-covered corner. His “biomechanik” artwork, sculptures, and storage drawers are wall-to-wall, his book collection haphazardly stacked on shelves and in the bathtub, (real) skulls are tucked into nooks and crannies, a set of doors inside the modest front door is covered with paintings of his trademark human-alien hybrid characters, and an Academy Award is filed between dusty objects on another shelf. A mini-train ride through the vines outside the house take visitors on a haunted house ride through birth, life, and death. This is a haunted house, but devoid of spirits. Ray Bradbury’s attic in every way, only it isn’t. It’s Hansruedi Giger’s house.
Artists of any genre and fans of the Alienfranchise can get an unprecedented, detailed, personal look at a man known for his disturbing imagery. Dismissed for decades by the mainstream art scene for Giger’s popular status in Hollywood, Alien indeed made Giger famous just as Giger made Alien famous. The influences behind his often dark and grotesque images will not be surprising: his father bought him his first human skull at the age of six, and his sister took him to a museum to scare him by showing him an actual mummy. Both of these things frightened the little boy, but he forced himself to look at these things repeatedly until, as he says in the documentary, he overcame his fears. But the nightmares never seemed to dwindle. He speaks of his dreams as a key influence, but he told a psychiatrist that the frightening images he saw lost their power when he committed them to canvas. He also acknowledges LSD use as the prompt behind some of his work.
Around this time last year, my good friend Steve suggested that we check out A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) at the Silent Movie Theater here in Los Angeles and I had no clue what it was. I briefly checked the description, saw a positive Metacritic score and thought to myself, “Why the heck not?” I ended up seeing a fantastic slow-burning film that made the vampire genre fresh. I also saw one of the best images to portray a character in a long time.
Early in the film, the co-protagonist girl vampire decides to go home with a drug dealer who had previously threatened the other protagonist as well as a local streetwalker. As he bursts into his lair, he walks by a large fish tank and gives it a smack. Seconds later he’s doing lines of cocaine on a glass table, a mounted deer head and a mounted antelope head on the wall behind him, before turning on the annoying techno. He sits on a couch draped with a blanket of what looks like tigers that would jump out under black light. In the corner there is a hookah. As the girl vampire explores the rest of the pad, she finds a set of drums just below a large marijuana leaf poster. I laughed to myself as I immediately realized I had in those brief seconds already characterized this asshole in my mind with no redeeming qualities. Sure, the actions earlier helped, but that apartment spoke to me clearly and it screamed into my brain “HE IS A DOUCHEBRO.”
Those items and that music might not mean the same thing to every person. Maybe to others they see a seedy drug-dealing criminal. Some may see a guy that is definitely more current in his musical taste than I (as Clem Snide and The Replacements play as I write.) Others may see an advocate for marijuana besides business reasons that has been stigmatized due to its frequent use by hippies and non-WASPs. (I put myself in the advocate camp, by the way, as the criminalization and the imprisonment of many people in jail due to marijuana related offenses seems to be one of the many effects of the inherent racism in our justice system. But, that’s for another discussion at another time by others much more qualified than I. Check out Deray McKesson on Twitter to start your journey on that front or some of the great essays in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the soon-to-be author of the Marvel comic Black Panther). I just know that for my viewpoint, the more the scene unfolded, the more it verified my judgment.
Such is the magic of great set design. As a background actor, I get to see lots of set design up close. Items might not show up distinctly on camera, but choices get made in the costume, prop and set departments that impact the feel of a scene. The care that the professionals take in these aspects of filmed entertainment mesmerizes me more than most things.
