This fake “movie” by fake director Macy Ta deal with themes of:

- human disconnectedness
- diaspora
- the modern metropolis
- apathy
- image recording technologies vs memory

Instead of the chapters of the movie they will be the student films.

I love these collages by Mies Van Der Rohe. I am going to do something like this, but a movie clip of the movie will be moving behind the window, and instead of stone statues it will be the characters of the movie (miniaturized) walking around (using stop-motion) in this imaginary “art gallery”.

The video makes use of bright colours, a cheery 1970s sound track and an upbeat, positive and empowered narration. The bright primary colours and soundtrack is a reference to poppy Japanese instructional videos, but due to the quirky subject matter and unusual layout, the video makes itself evident that it is a parody or mock-simulation of something. In this case, the ironic tone is to point to the character’s obsessive-compulsiveness with regards to stress-management, and his evident goal of hiding away his fears when confronted by the chaotic facts and occurrences of modern life.

The obstruction of the view by the magazine designed with an obvious gridded layout points to the fact that the alienated, post-modern narrator is actively concealing and shrugging-off his anxieties through pop culture and attention to the mundane and the everyday.

In order to illustrate this hyper-conscientiousness to detail, I am expanding drawing upon the aesthetics of city magazines like Monocle and New York. By making use of this aesthetic, I am also taking leverage of the way city magazines glamorize and romanticize everyday life. City magazines also pay very close attention to small details of life, which is what i am trying to convey with these three book trailers. Since Murakami’s writings have been categorized time and time again as “city-novels”, I felt that this was a highly appropriate approach to take on.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to incorporate it, but I have it down now.

I will shoot bland video sequences of the things that the characters do: cooking pasta while listening to FM radio, ironing shirts, walking past a flower shop, buying groceries, taking in the laundry, etc. I will then super-impose a “city-magazine” (which i will design and print and bind) showing these same actors and same locations in a much more stylized manner, laid out in a swiss-grid. It is as if these actors are “living in a magazine”. The pages of this magazine will flip while the video clip of the actor performing mundane task runs in the background, in a frame-within-frame composition.

The red X marks the motion-video.

I have subsequently shot all the “high-gloss” video for the first Narrator’s obsession with his 12-step method of ironing shirts. These images will be made into a booklet to be used in the video.

The frame-within-frame city magazine will have in the end an advertisement page for the book: “The Elephant Vanishes”.

References for what the “city magazine” will look like

http://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Vanishes-Stories-Haruki-Murakami/dp/0679750533/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266952189&sr=8-1

The opening story is the opener to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle so the work Ive done up to this point is not going to waste.

I just feel that this might be better to do short videos on as it is much more condensed.

I have put together a style guide of the kinds of images

A number of these pictures were taken shortly after the summer. I had finished reading three of Murakami’s novels and his two short story compilations.

Click to enlarge

From this resource:
The Unfinished Cartography: Murakami Haruki and the Postmodern Cognitive Map
Author(s): Chiyoko Kawakami
Source: Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 309-337
Published by: Sophia University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3096769
Accessed: 15/02/2010 14:18

The Trivia of Urban Life
Murakami’s narrative fills the ideological void with the enumeration of all-visible
material things. Early in Murakami’s career, “things” became indispensable
ingredients in his stories. His narrative characteristically grows as it weaves together
“the trivia of contemporary urban life.”

…

Murakami’s narrative makes use of this “parade of trivia” as an intermediary
factor, as something connecting characters who seem too isolated to explore any
social relationship on their own. The degree of the objects’ intervention seems
to correlate to the degree of the characters’ isolation: the more pompous the
“parade of trivia,” the more haphazard and transient the human relations appear.

…

Murakami’s works represent
the “condensed” form of “the massive material of city life” through which
he seeks to present his vision of the contemporary “condition [of
life] itself.” Or, to use Hana Wirth-Nesher’ s terms, things are “what is present”
and thus visible; they are the plenitude through which the city-novel highlights
“what is absent,” that is, in Murakami’s case, the sense of the self.

The main character of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is obsessed with pasta, ironing shirts, sandwiches, and everyday chores such as shopping for groceries. Murakami’s writing style also heightens this over-articulation of the everyday.

“I had cut two slices of bread, spread them with butter and whole-grain mustard, filled them with tomato slices and cheese, set the whole thing on the cutting board, and I was just about to cut it in half when the bell started ringing. I let the phone ring three times and cut the sandwich in half. Then I transferred it to a plate, wiped the knife, and put that in the cutlery drawer, before pouring myself a cup of the coffee I had warmed up. Still the phone went on ringing.”

The pivotal point near the beginning of the novel was a disagreement between Toru and his wife Kumiko over the choice of ingredients and toiletries. Toru notes: “Only much later did it occur to me that I had found my way into the core of the problem.”

Kumiko, who leaves her husband in the beginning of the novel, is described as a meticulous woman who treasures a large collection of well-tailored, tasteful and high quality garments. When Toru comes to realize her absence, he finds it striking that she would leave her wardrobe behind.

I tried some voice-overs but it then becomes quite predictable.
If I only use chord progressions it will lack the structural/narrative element taht I was hoping to reconcile with the addition of a narrated short story.

What to do?

Bill Evans: Peace Piece