Good and Evil on Holiday Conclusion

(this essay begins here: https://4kdirector.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-and-evil-on-holiday-introduction.html )

Conclusion

Holiday is an experiment in story development and film making technology.  The storytelling offers a deconstruction of the standard Good versus Evil and only came into being because the cost of production has been reduced to practically nothing.  This technological achievement points to a radical shift in the way the film industry will function in the future.

Obviously, my interest is in justice, not abduction.  What does justice look like?  For almost all abduction thrillers, justice looks like judgment and revenge.  Is there some other possibility?  Holiday considers justice absent judgment and revenge from within a genre that demands those elements.  The narrative is not a simplistic anti-judgment, anti-revenge filp-side to the abduction genre, but rather, something else.  Justice need not look like judgment, but that is difficult to imagine.  Alternative narratives such as Holiday are a mechanism to keep that conversation going.

Notes

1.  Cook, Robert.  Holiday.  On-line, Amazon.  Directed by Robert Cook.  Los Angeles: Shami Media Group, 2018.

2.  Gilles, Deleuze, “To have done with judgment,” in Essays: critical and clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1997), 135.

3.  Ibid., 129.

4.  Ibid.

5.  Ibid., 130.

6.  Ibid., 134.

7.  Ibid., 132.

8.  Ibid.

9.  Ibid., 133.

10.  Ibid., 127-128.

11.  Ibid., 128.

12.  Ibid.

13.  Ibid., 135.

Deleuze and Holiday Part 3

(this essay begins here: https://4kdirector.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-and-evil-on-holiday-introduction.html )

Cruelty versus Infinite Torture

This fifth Deleuzian point of conflict is explored throughout the story via Graham and Anne.  Deleuze articulates a doctrine of judgment that finds its extreme limit in subjugation to an infinite law, beyond our appeal.  He asserts we must move away from judgment, although it risks physical cruelty.  Within such system of cruelty, debts are marked on the body, but the debts are finite.  Deleuze lays out a history where justice begins with this system of cruelty and develops into a doctrine of judgment:

There exists a justice that is opposed to all judgment, according to which bodies are marked by each other, and the debt is inscribed directly on the body following the finite blocks that circulate in a territory.  The law does not have the immobility of eternal things, but is ceaselessly displaced among families that either have to draw blood or pay with it.¹⁰

This system of cruelty, in its extreme would be anarchy with its corporeal pain and suffering.  That force is opposed to the mental infinite torture of judgment.  The promise of judgment is eternal existence and corporeal peace.  But that comes at a price.  Within this seemingly more “humane” doctrine of judgment Deleuze writes: “In the doctrine of judgment, by contrast, our debts are inscribed in an autonomous book without our even realizing it, so that we are no longer able to pay off an account that has become infinite”.¹¹

We judge because we are judged and it feels “just”, but judgment crushes creativity and possibility.  Deleuze warns: “The bookish doctrine of judgment is moderate only in appearance, because it in fact condemns us to an endless servitude and annuls any liberatory process”.¹²  Deleuze is speaking to our engagement with the world—from our brutality as apex predators to our capacity for infinite subjugation to an unknowable power.  These are not opposing magnetic poles, these are dynamic forces that are part of existence.

Anne’s character expresses affectation of all the opposing forces through her constant state of what Deleuze calls “becoming”.  She is Helen, weaving her story, willing to dominate and then express a will to power, to ally with War, then return to combat.  She allies and resists to the end, without judgment.  She doesn’t insist justice is about personal revenge on Graham.  Justice, first and foremost is about freedom to choose.  Deleuze states this requires combat, not only against external powers, but more importantly, internally, asking the question, “who is one being in the world?”  Anne’s acts of violence are not revenge or judgments, they are a manifestation of a will to live.

As Graham spirals down into himself he aligns with the forces of judgment and Death.  The specter of War haunts him as he passes judgment on all around him, most importantly, himself.  He lives an immoral life and can never escape the face of Death.  Eventually Graham becomes Death, although refuses to take accountability by imagining “the Russians” delivering the fatal blows to all but the hermit.  For this murder, Graham exacts his revenge for stealing his property, Anne.  In the end, he feels Death very close, but manages to slither away into the grass.

This conflict between Anne and Graham is also represented visually, but with an ironic twist.  Anne is in a constant state of becoming someone different, although visually very little about her changes.  For most of the narrative, Anne wears only one outfit.  In contrast, Graham is seen with numerous looks, from his early 30’s with tattoos and a shaved head, to early an early forties wealthy beach bum, to a late 40’s man on the run, to finally a grey-haired, middle-aged salesman, all while solidifying himself internally into a monolith of paranoia.

Graham’s need is the same as Anne’s—to escape.  But instead of looking to others as Anne does, Graham only sees himself and his own thoughts of Death.  There is no escape for Graham as he finds himself subjected to infinite torture in his war with Death as judgment.  Deleuze states: “Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence”.¹³  Anne will keep growing, Graham will keep dying.

These characters embody a conflict not based on Good and Evil.  These conflicts help us to consider justice, rather than judgment, as motive that is a significant departure for the abduction genre.  The project itself is an inquiry into nature of genre narrative and whether there might be a different way to represent justice.

Deleuze and Holiday Part 2

(this essay begins here: https://4kdirector.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-and-evil-on-holiday-introduction.html )

Act Three: Will to power versus Will to dominate

The will to power as a force, is expressed through Anne in this act as she moves from forced intoxication into the reality of Graham’s dream of judgment.  What that looks like is Anne takes on new affects influenced by Graham, such as strategizing, pretending, attacking, forces she would not have allied herself with in the past.  This allows her to escape.  She is then able to run, hide, and evade Graham.  This is what a Nietzschean will to power looks like in its most healthy sense.

Graham expresses the madness of judgment, a drive to control, and an extreme will to dominate.    Graham trudges his way across the countryside as his imaginary vision of Death closes in, the epitome of a will to dominate becoming a will to nothingness.  After being let down by his Mexican helper, Rosa, he is forced to buy a junk car in town, returns to find Anne gone and chases her down with fury, his power and authority being called into question.  

By the end of act three, Anne endangers herself by still believing in the safety of Divine intervention, finding temporary reprieve in a hermit’s cave.  She feels she has defeated Graham.  Unfortunately, such a feeling of domination over Graham drains Anne of her power and she once again becomes vulnerable.

Act Four: Combat versus War

For Deleuze, resistance to judgment means perpetual combat: “Combat is not a judgment . . . but a way to have done with . . . judgment”.⁶  One who is in action, in combat, creates who one is in the world, a creative becoming as a force against judgment.  Deleuze distinguishes combat further into combats-against and combats-between.  Again, these are not good or evil forces of combat:

Combats-against tries to destroy or repel a force . . . but the combats-between, by contrast, tries to take hold of a force in order to make it one’s own.  The combats-between is the process through which a force enriches itself by seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble: a becoming.⁷

These “becomings” for Deleuze are the affect of forces in an alliance that generates combats-against that push against judgment in favor of justice.  The law is not eternal, but finite and malleable.  And what is important is not the combat against authorities, so much as the combat going on within the individual:

Combat appears as combat against judgment, against its authorities and its personae.  But more profoundly, it is the combatant himself who is the combat: the combat is between his own parts, between the forces that either subjugate or are subjugated, and between the powers that express these relations of force.⁸

It is the combats-between that we negotiate each day that ultimately determine the nature of the combats-against in pursuit of justice.

Early in act four, Graham locates Anne and carries her away.  From Graham’s point of view the war is over and he has won.  For Anne, there is only combat, a continual becoming.  Deleuze makes a distinction between combat and war:

Combat is not war.  War is only a combat-against, a will to destruction, a judgment of God that turns destruction into something “just” . . . judgment is on the side of war, and not combat . . . war is the lowest degree of the will to power, its sickness . . . Combat, by contrast, is a powerful, nonorganic vitality that supplements force with force, and enriches whatever it takes hold of.⁹

Graham’s judgment of himself leads to a demand for domination.  Emboldened by his recapture of Anne and the power he alone has over her, Graham becomes the extreme of War, soldiering forward, eventually disguising himself as the opposite of a warrior: a middle-aged salesman.  His closure on himself and self-loathing costs him the deal for the girl and almost costs him his life.  Death, the god of Judgment, sits in his black limo pursuing him, all powerful yet never able to leave the darkness, alone and separate from the world, beyond appeal.  Anne, on the other hand, aligning herself with combat, first sat waiting for opportunity, then willing to inflict harm escapes, and finally runs to safety.  Anne is the will to power as becoming, via combat.

Deleuze and Holiday Part 1

(this essay begins here: https://4kdirector.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-and-evil-on-holiday-introduction.html )

 

From Judgment to Discernment

Holiday replaces the abduction standard of Good versus Evil with five conflicts.  The five conflicts dramatized were borrowed from 20th century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s essay, “To Have Done with Judgment”.  These conflicts necessitate discernment, as opposed to judgment.  For Deleuze, judgment inhibits life and shuts down creativity, “Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge”.²  Arguing for the need to do away with judgment, Deleuze offered five conflicts of forces.  They are neither good nor evil, but forces that are in opposition to each other.  The conflicts are: 1) vitality versus organization, 2) intoxication versus the dream, 3) the will to power versus a will to dominate, 4) combat versus war, and 5) cruelty versus infinite torture.

Beyond Good and Evil in 5 Conflicts and 4 Acts

Act One: Vitality versus Organization 

Anne allies herself with what Deleuze would refer to as forces of life and vitality, while the abductor, Graham, allies himself with organization.  These forces express themselves at the level of the body, our physical, corporeal existence.  The energy of vitality and the compartmentalized control of organization are not good or evil, and are harmful in the extreme.  In political terms the limit of one would be anarchy and the limit of the other a fascist dictatorship.  In aesthetic terms one could be expressed as raw, unfocused creativity, versus rehearsed mastery.  The extreme of either is limiting at best and madness at worst.

As an expression of this conflict, Graham strategizes and seduces in the first act, while Anne finds herself joyously overwhelmed with the vibrancy and life of Venice Beach, allowing it to take her where it wants her to go.  Her energy and curiosity counter Graham’s organizing schemes.  In the middle of the act, Anne’s youthful innocence almost allows her to slip away from Graham’s gaze.  Graham delays the abduction by providing beauty and admiration from Anne.  By the end of the act, however, the forces of organization overwhelm Anne and she is abducted.

Act Two: Intoxication versus the Dream

In act two, Anne is lost in drugged intoxication, while Graham lives in a nightmare dream of reality, haunted by Death.  Spooked by a flash of Death at the beginning of the act, Graham changes plans, calling his client to move up the sale, then pilots his boat all night to get Anne to Mexico.  Graham imagines the Russians plotting against him with phone calls to his accomplice in Mexico as memories of the Tattooed Woman sweep back into his consciousness in waves.  He has trouble discerning what is a memory and what is his imagination in his waking nightmare.  Exhausted, but finally in Mexico with Anne under control, Graham falls asleep and dreams the Russian calls the Indian Industrialist to plot against him.  He wakes after an hour or two, only to have to clean up Anne, imagining Death, as pure judgment, on his way.

For Deleuze, “The world of judgment establishes itself as in a dream”.³  Judgment “imposes limits and imprisons us” by erecting walls and creating shadows on the walls we take to be Truth.⁴  The appearance of Death for Graham creates walls on which he projects the immorality of his acts and tries to escape.  He stays awake all night only to dream of the Russians plotting against him, of judgment closing in on him.  He is reminded of the Tattooed Woman and her loss.

Opposed to the force of the dream, Deleuze offers intoxication.  Deleuze writes:

What we seek in states of intoxication—drinks, drugs, ecstasies—is an antidote to both the dream and judgment . . . Whenever we turn away from judgment towards justice, we enter into a dreamless sleep.⁵

Such states should be the affect of our own choices, however, or they become their own form of control by an external source.  Anne’s intoxication is not voluntary and she suffers for it.  Midway through the act she drifts back into consciousness only to find reality more terrifying than the intoxication.  Graham knows this state of almost conscious, dreamless sleep is a challenge to his control and force-feeds her more drugs.  By the end of the second act Anne finds herself moving from child-like dream to semi-consciousness, sliding back and forth between the nightmare of the intoxication and the nightmare of reality as she is washed and cleaned up.  She eventually loses consciousness and Graham moves on, further fulfilling his destiny.

Deleuze suggests we negotiate between the ecstasy of intoxication and the dream of judgment.  This negotiation of forces is the path to justice and Anne follows that path.

Derrida and Holiday Part 3

(this essay begins here: https://4kdirector.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-and-evil-on-holiday-introduction.html )

Conflict Engines

On a rudimentary level, a Good versus Evil conflict exists in Holiday.  Anne’s choices are innocent and harmless enough.  Graham’s choices are calculating and malicious.  But the Good versus Evil conflict is marginalized by the intentional blurring of boundaries between those two categories.

The softening of good and evil categories in Holiday is a deconstructive turn that pulls on the lynchpin of this genre’s underlying power structure validating its existence: judgment of Good versus Evil.  Abduction narratives are all about a victim’s loss of power and how that power is regained. In these stories, the powerless Good overcome their weakness and destroy the powerful Evil.

Today we sell Good versus Evil in narratives where the powerless are seen as victims seeking righteous justice.  Audiences love them, but why?  Because we know Good triumphing over Evil rarely happens in the real world, and the categories are never cleanly defined.  These stories contain corrupt power relations at their core and require complex human relations to be reduced to simple judgment calls.

We like Good versus Evil because we project ourselves onto the "good" character.  And Good versus Evil is perfect for sex trafficking stories because anyone with even a minimal sense of justice would agree that the abuse, sale and/or ownership of people is wrong and destructive.  But Good versus Evil carries with it the damaging baggage of judgment, specifically judgment to a higher authority for which there is no further appeal—the need for one who is above the law.  This can be very disturbing to those disenfranchised by the law who seek regress. 

I have no intention of creating sympathy for abductors and rapists with Holiday—quite the contrary.  What I'm calling for is discernment instead of judgment.  What I'm telling is a story about a man and a woman who dream of being/doing something else.  In both cases, everything goes wrong.  Each reacts consistently with their character, one being self-empowering, the other self-destructive.

Derrida and Holiday Part 2

(this essay begins here: https://4kdirector.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-and-evil-on-holiday-introduction.html )

Abduction narratives and the Abductor

The abduction of women as an opportunity to create a bit of entertainment is creepy, as in perverse creepy.  Yet the "loss of a loved one" revenge plot usually developed out of these abductions has always been a crowd favorite.  Despite the fact that these plots require gross simplification of the world around us, what is even more dangerous is that these stories reinforce a view of revenge as a means to justice.  I assert revenge only leads to death and collateral damage, never justice.

Culturally, abduction narratives are dangerous.  Any injustice perceived balloons into a righteous cause for revenge and death.  We love these stories, but they validate acts of unspeakable violence by assurances of easily defined good and evil. 

Furthermore, the abduction narrative is certainly one of the most rooted in misogyny and violence.  In most of these narratives, just as in the story of Helen, the women abducted are inconsequential to the story.  Many times they even die by the end of the second act, justifying a third act full of righteous rage and revenge.

These women are a pure commodity object, just like Anne in Holiday.  Anne as an individual human being is irrelevant.  Her dark, challenging journey spirals down into a hallucinogenic nightmare, only to wind back out into reality with real consequences—an adolescent Alice through the looking glass in all this popular genre’s brutal adult horror.  However, unlike popular abduction narratives, Anne is on her own—no man with a gun is on his way to rescue her.   She must figure everything out for herself.

Holiday lays bare the power relations in abduction narratives and how those narratives feed into the culture more broadly as either validating or normative.  The film confronts the audience at every turn: a beautiful assault on their conscious.  They should feel repulsed and shaken out of their suspension of disbelief into the real horror of a young woman being abducted and forced into a conflict she had nothing to do with, all for others’ entertainment.

Holiday is not a story of hope, of Good triumphing over Evil, or the virtues of revenge.  In fact, the only revenge narrative in Holiday might appear to be between the Russians and Graham, but there is no self-righteous revenge for Graham, only Death.

Death

Death is the extreme limit of our corporal existence.  If you are lucky enough to live to fifty years old, Death will seep into your thoughts.  This is often manifested in males as “middle-aged madness.” Most abduction tales involve men 35-55 years old avenging a younger female “loved one lost.”  The predictable result: a story about a woman close to half the man’s age who truly loves him—lover, spouse, daughter—it’s all the same.

In Holiday, Graham’s internal, middle-aged madness churning his thoughts throws him off his game.  Anne reminds him of another woman from his past—the tattooed character—Graham’s “Helen”.  Ambiguous as to whether he seduced her, kidnapped her, or she pursued him, this personal Helen haunts Graham as a woman he once dared to have feelings for.  What’s more, he is lost in a soul-sucking, dead-end job working for wealthy people who view him as disposable.

The Russian character might be misunderstood as a rival for the tattooed Helen, a modern day King Menelaus out to reclaim his property and power, ready for revenge.  But the Russians only exist inside Graham’s head.  Pure and simple: The Old Russian is Death riding into town in a black limousine, instead of on a black horse.  He advances slowly and without emotion, creeping closer and closer to Graham.  Graham feels it.  It’s in his head.

Everyone the Russians meet or speak to dies.  Graham dreams the Russian and the Indian Industrialist plot against him.  It is Graham who murders Timo and Rosa, but imagines it to be the Russians to absolve himself of blame as splinters of guilt burrow into his armor.  When the Russians are in their closest proximity to Graham, he is closest to dying.  But there are no Russians, in reality.  We are watching Graham have a mental breakdown, of him feeling Death closing in on him.  The memory of a woman he might have cared for has been triggered by his latest, and hopefully final, abduction.  That sliver of empathy he feels festers and grows in his head, potentially costing him his life.

Derrida and Holiday Part 1

(this essay begins here: https://4kdirector.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-and-evil-on-holiday-introduction.html )

 

Abduction plots, Middle-aged male madness, and Death

For Holiday, I was offered the use of a remote location in Topanga Canyon and had access to an actor who wanted to play a character that seduces a young woman, drugs her and takes her to Mexico to be sold to a rich Indian industrialist.  In order to develop these plot points into a story I returned to one of the abduction ur-texts, Helen of Troy.

Abduction narratives and the Abducted

Helen was first abducted as a child by Athenian, Theseus, and then sold off to the King of Sparta, Menelaus.  As a teenager, Helen had several children with Menelaus.  While Helen was in her early twenties, the Olymipian goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, demanded Zeus declare who was the most beautiful of the goddesses.  Zeus, being wise about the potential wrath of the two losers, promptly appointed Paris, a Trojan prince, to be the judge.  In order to win, Aphrodite offered Paris the most beautiful woman in the world as a bribe.  Shortly thereafter, Paris chose Aphrodite as the most beautiful in Olympia.

Aphrodite did not mention that Helen was already married to the most powerful king in the world.  Paris travelled to Sparta and met with King Menelaus.  Paris then either raped or seduced Helen, kidnapped her or eloped with her to either Egypt or Troy, where later she was captured, rescued, killed, or escaped, all depending on who tells the story.  Helen’s story remains ambiguous because her character was not the point of the story.

Helen, ironically, “This face that launch’d a thousand ships” as Christopher Marlowe wrote almost two thousand years later, was actually quite insignificant to the story.  What was important to the Greeks was to have an opportunity to tell a great war story.  Helen was coincidental.  Collateral damage.

Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, kidnapped as a child, sold off at puberty, and given away as a prize, had no say in any of her life.  In Holiday, the abducted young woman, Anne, is merely a business opportunity with no say in her soon to be new life as a bride of a rich Mumbai industrialist.  No one really knows if Paris’ techniques were any different than the abductor in Holiday. 

As with the Greek myths, in Holiday, Good and Evil are not important distinctions. Was Paris evil?  Graham is a man haunted by his own reality.  Does that make him evil?  Anne is not a metaphor of Good.  These judgments of who is good and who is evil are culturally dangerous—a point I will return to shortly.  Anne is, however, a victim and thus due justice.

Keeping humans captive is nasty business and unfortunately has not been eliminated in the world.  Is it shameful, oppressive, and unacceptable?  Absolutely.  Is it Evil?  I’m not sure—that demands judgments.  God-fearing Christians kept Africans as property for centuries on this continent with no moral conflict, long after the formation of the United States, even after all other industrialized nations had outlawed the business.  Abduction and slavery of people is harmful, so what happens if we shift away from Good and Evil?  Does that make slavery acceptable?  Are all things relative at that point?  Absolutely, not.

The Good and Evil categories in Holiday are merely feathered soft on the edges—this is no relativist equivocation.  I'm not suggesting the young woman is not a victim.  What I am asking is, can we tell an abduction narrative without judging the act Evil?  A victim narrative not defined by the victimization.  Is that possible and still not condone the act as anything but harmful?  What would that look like?

Marx and Holiday Part 2

(this essay begins here: https://4kdirector.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-and-evil-on-holiday-introduction.html )

iPhone Aesthetic

All formats have limitations.  For the most part, my iPhone 4S and GoPro cameras did what they did and I went with it.  The image I had in the editing room was the image I worked with.  All the shots were pre-visualized and I began planning shots as I always do, by asking myself, “If I’m sitting in the editing room, what are the shots I want to see?”

Using an iPhone creates an aesthetic with its own calculus, especially for such an image-driven project like Holiday.  What might be considered a disadvantage, however, can be turned into an advantage.  For example, the “reality show/documentary” style of shooting via a hand-held phone creates an immediacy that disturbs audiences.  They prefer a more “cinematic peril” disconnected from the reality of kidnapping and selling human beings as entertainment opportunities.  That style meant that sometimes the phone image was high quality and sometimes the light contrast was more than the phone could handle.  Or the focus drifted.  Or I couldn’t see what I was shooting.  For example, the GoPro was great for wide-angle shots, car shots, and tight spaces, but for most set-ups, I couldn’t see the shot as the camera rolled.  In the end, however, these “flaws” became features of the aesthetic.

I avoided less than technically well-executed images whenever possible, but included them when needed.  The most important question was: "Does the image effectively convey the emotion of the moment?"  Emotional content supersedes image quality, especially at this level of filmmaking.

The iPhone aesthetic is still most certainly an "outsider aesthetic", due to certain technical specifications that, when compared to studio output simply can’t measure up.  However, phone imagery is rapidly becoming the norm.  With the transition from scheduled network television to internet-based delivery there is a growing appetite for content—but with a production value acceptance level much lower than in the past.  We are already at the point where people spend far more time consuming free cat videos on social media than purchasing tentpole movies.

Fulcrum Moment

With the development of digital technology we have hit a major fulcrum point in the history of filmmaking.  Holiday is but a single marker of that fulcrum.

The studio sees in Holiday the future problem of generating revenue in a market flooded with product.  With billions of people owning a cell phone and their children growing up with that technology and its constant improvements, they will be taught how to make videos in grade school.  As this next generation becomes adults there will be an endless supply of product out there.  Most of that product will be of modest quality and the studios will continue to release a few tentpoles a year.  On the upside, in twenty years there will be endless opportunities to promote your digital feature work on-line.  Unfortunately, it will be very difficult to distinguish your product as anything more than a drop of water in a vast, unforgiving ocean.

Also keep in mind that popularity is currently measured in digital “likes” and the internet favors the lowest common denominator.  Almost all projects are guaranteed to generate some revenue in the future, the problem will be making a living creating something other than funny cat videos.   This flood of product has already happened in the professional photo world and the music industry.  Instagrammers can reach ever-wider audiences while the ability to make a living as a photographer rapidly disappears.  Spotify bands can record and upload new tracks, but seeing any revenue is rare.  The same will happen with filmmaking.  Soon.

Marx and Holiday Part 1

(this essay begins here: https://4kdirector.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-and-evil-on-holiday-introduction.html )

Placing the means of production in the hands of the proletariat

Holiday, with its miniscule production budget, is not a product the studios are concerned about, as a singular case.  Audiences know the difference between a $4,500 movie and a $4.5 million dollar movie.  Of course, Holiday was not created to compete with studio products in theatrical release.  This project was born in the digital world and was picked up for distribution in the direct-to-digital market.  Cyberspace is where it belongs.  That used to be a bad thing since digital used to be the dumping ground for failed films.  But that was before most people under 25 consumed their entertainment on mobile devices, not television or movie theaters.  There is no longer a need to create content in IMAX if it is never seen on anything bigger than a home theater system.

Don’t get me wrong, the IMAX film format is amazing.  Great image size, beautiful cameras and lenses.  Rich.  Powerful.  On the other hand, my iPhone shoots images that look great, even projected in a theater.  And a phone has two advantages over IMAX to be exploited: low-cost and fast.  This is what keeps movie studio executives up at night.

Expense

Until very recently, filmmaking was an expensive process, especially if you wanted to project the image in a theater.  Only a few wealthy companies, primarily the Hollywood studios, could afford to front the huge production costs, thus few people knew how to make them, and even fewer had significant experience in the process.  As such, a very exclusive club of high-priced specialists using specialized equipment developed.

Video was never competitive in the theatrical release world due to its low resolution.  But by 2010, 1080HD was what phones were recording—a format with enough quality to allow large projection.  Today many phones shoot 4k.  Anyone with a laptop and video editing software can create a feature.  The studios know this.  The IMAX “experience” is what they sell now.  But of course technology will improve and production costs will drop even further.  Soon the studios’ massive investment in production infrastructure is going to look very costly on their balance sheets.  These corporations have seen the impact of digital technology before.

Most of the movie studios are attached to a music company, somewhere up or down the corporate chain.  In the 90's the studios watched those companies begin to go under, one after another, as audio software and hardware improved to the point where anyone could build their own home recording studio.  To most people, these recordings sounded no different than the best Capitol Records studio.  Today, due to a massive drop in the cost of production and post-production, the movie industry revolution is already in play.

Speed

Ninety minutes is a long time to hold an audience’s attention with projected images.  It takes a story, thousands of hours of work, and a massive amount of images.  The final cut of Holiday is a sequence of roughly 1,400 shots, selected from about 6000 takes with either an iPhone4s or a GoPro 3.  With the lightweight tech I was able to do an enormous number of shots—an average of 100 per four-hour day, roughly one shot every 2.5 minutes.

Principle photography for Holiday amounted to 60 “days” of shooting between February and December, 2013.  However, all but two of those days were only half-day shoots because there was no budget to feed people and the free sunlight was best from 2pm to 6pm.  Using a standard 60-hour, six-day production week, production worked out to about a four-week shoot.  So, while it is true that we shot for almost an entire year, down at the granular, day-to-day level, we were moving quickly.  This project would have taken a decade if it had been shot on IMAX.

Good and Evil on Holiday introduction

Good and Evil on Holiday

In 2013 I borrowed $4,500 from my life insurance and began shooting a feature-length video. The project was an intellectual inquiry, as opposed to the usual emotional journey highlighted in the abduction genre. The result was Holiday, a deconstruction of the abduction genre with a score by world famous percussionist, Bobbye Hall.  In 2017, Holiday won Best Feature awards at the Hollywood Film Competition, Los Angeles CineFest, and the Los Angeles Mindfield Film Festival, as well as Best Score at the Culver City Film Festival.  In 2018, the project was offered representation and released.¹

Holiday was an aesthetic experiment at three levels: form, content, and expression.  Formally, Holiday mimics and re-imagines the abduction thriller structure.   For example, instead of seducing the audience into complacency, Holiday pulls the audience into the story’s world, then repels them back to awareness of being an audience.  Also, the tension builds in long, eight to twelve minute sections, instead of the genre’s shorter two-minute dramatic blocks.  At the content level, the story gives equal time to both the abductor, as he imagines himself stalked by Death, and the abducted woman, concerned primarily with “how do I escape?”  Finally, on the level of expression, unlike most abduction thrillers, Holiday does not attempt to be a victim narrative.  These directorial choices will be disturbing for lovers of abduction narratives who will certainly find Holiday frustrating.  That’s fine.  The project was meant to be confrontational, not entertaining.

What follows are some of my thoughts on the project at the levels of form, content, and expression.  First, I consider the implications of the project’s material conditions and mode of production within a particular moment of cinematic history, then I discuss the story’s deconstructive turn of the abduction genre at the content level, and finally, at the level of expression, I elaborate on Holiday’s replacement of the genre’s standard Good versus Evil conflict engine with a multiplicity of conflicts.