Film Archive

How Roger Ebert Got his Voice Back

By Amy Thibodeau, March 9, 2010, 9:55 pm in Film, Medicine, Present

Recently, Esquire published an exquisite cover story on film critic Roger Ebert, who is best known for the decades he spent debating great and not-so-great films with his counterpart Gene Siskel on the popular television programme, At the Movies. Since the article came out last month, people can’t get enough of Ebert. His blog, which was already popular, has developed cult popularity, he has well over 100,000 followers on Twitter, he’s recently created a Fan Club (inspired by an old friend who also happens to be a successful web porn entrepreneur) and he was a guest on Oprah.

Although there are hundreds of hours of footage of Ebert’s voice in At the Movies, it seemed very unlikely, if not impossible, that he would ever be able to speak again, using anything other than an artificial voice that bears no resemblance to the original. Recently, a Scotland-based company called CereProc used archival recordings to recreate an artificial voice that sounds like Ebert. Although it is still in beta, it even has the potential to eventually take on emotional inflection. CereProc is “an advanced voice synthesis company… [which] creates customized text-to-speech software. Instead of producing flat computerized voices, the company says its voices include realistic, animated and emotional dimensions.” (source)

The company undertakes a great deal of research on, what they call, the emotional continuum to stimulate realistic emotional states in voice reproductions:

CereVoice uses two separate techniques to simulate emotional states. The first is to select tense or calm voice quality. This compares closely with the perception of negative and positive emotional states (however, it also has an active/passive effect to some extent). The second is to use digital signal processing (DSP) techniques to alter the speech to active or passive states. Active states involve: faster speech rate, higher volume and higher pitch, Passive states involve: slower speech rate, lower volume and lower pitch. (source)

Pretty inspiring stuff!

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Humphrey Jennings

By Sian Prescott, January 17, 2010, 11:25 am in Culture, Film, History, Past
Humphrey Jennings

Humphrey Jennings

A new exhibition at South Wales based Ffotogallery looks at the work of Humphrey Jennings, the English documentary film maker during the 1940s. The exhibition focuses on his 1943 propaganda film The Silent Village, set in Wales but based on Nazi atrocities in Czechoslovakia.

Humphrey Jennings has often been edited out of analytical cinematic theory, yet his influence should be appreciated as a critical figure in British war-time film making. He was called not only a film maker, but “a poet, a painter, an intellectual and an anthropologist”.

After graduating from Cambridge University with a double First in English, Jennings worked as a painter, photographer and theatre designer. In 1940 he joined the GPO Film Unit, which became the propaganda film branch of the Ministry for Information. Jennings’ films may remain in shadows of appreciation, but their importance to British cinema are paramount. Listen to Britain is often regarded as one of the best British films ever made. However, The Silent Village is perhaps one of his most powerful works.

In the Czechoslovakian mining village of Lidice, on June 10th 1942, 340 villagers were murdered by the Nazis. It was a shocking massacre of human life, either by firing range or suffering the horrors of the gas chambers. The barbaric act sent waves of anger and sympathy across the western world. Just days after Lidice, the Ministry of Information and Jennings set to work on a propaganda film based on the events, only set in the South Wales mining village of Cwmgiedd near Ystradgynlais. Using real villagers of the South Wales community, the miners felt a strong connection to their Czech counterparts.

The drama-documentary film is almost underplayed. Jennings does not use violence or action, which makes it all the more effective. We are shown Nazis taking control of the Welsh village. There’s a clever montage of shots – particularly of the small details – which emphasise the lives of the people, the reality. This is then alongside images and audio (one of Jennings’ technical strengths) of menacing messages to the villagers. The Welsh language is banned; the songs, are forbidden. Slowly, the oppression and fear creeps towards the front; the menace and threat seeps through the threads of mundanity to almost an inevitable horrifying conclusion. The line of innocent children, holding hands, being lead off towards a terrifying fate is one of the most potent scenes in British cinema. Jennings ends the film with the singing of the Welsh National Anthem, sung stoically. It is this British spirit that is captured so triumphantly and sensitively by the director.

That Jennings tragically died so young – in an accident in Greece in 1950 – arguably robbed British cinema of one of its finest ever talents. Like the lives of the people Jennings set out to portray in his films, Jennings himself is remembered in these very works. The poignant drama-documentary film The Silent Village is not only a cinematic tribute to the tragedy in Czechoslovakia, but also a lesson in how propaganda media is still important to study now, for it documents the past, illustrates what we could have lost; a reminder to us all of how these atrocities could easily occur close to home, to anyone of us, wherever we are.

The Silent Village exhibition at Ffotogallery, South Wales runs from 16th January to 27th February 2010.
Illustration by Sian Prescott

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Orson Welles on Privacy, the Passport and Personal Rights

By Amy Thibodeau, December 27, 2009, 7:58 pm in Culture, Film, Past

orson-welles

Orson Welles was best known for his work as an American film director and actor – Citizen Kane being his pivotal career piece, which he co-wrote, produced, directed and starred in.

In 1955 Welles did a series for the BBC called Sketchbook where in six, 15 minute shows he drew in a sketchbook “to illustrate his reminiscences for the camera … [he] served as host and interviewer, his commentary including documentary facts and his own personal observations.” Perhaps most interesting to the contemporary viewer, weren’t his memories of movie stars and film making, but rather his very modern and apt observations about privacy, the passport and personal rights.

I wonder why it is that so many of us look like criminals in a police lineup when we have our pictures taken for a passport. I suppose it’s the unconscious foreknowledge of the scrutiny to which our likeness will be subjected that gives us that hangdog, guilty look. Really, theoretically, a passport is supposed to be issued for our protection. But on how many frontiers in how many countries I’ve handed over my passport with all the emotions of an apprentice forger trying to fob off a five pound note on the Bank of England. Guilty conscience, I suppose … Think of all of those forms we have to fill out, for example, you know what I mean, by police forms, we get them in hotels, on frontiers, in every country all over the world we’re asked, state your sex, male or female, for example. Well obviously, I’m a male, I’m a man, why should I have to answer that? State your race and religion in block letters; well, now why should I have to confide my religion to the police? Frankly, I don’t think anybody’s race is anybody’s business. I’m willing to admit that the policeman has a difficult job, a very hard job, but it’s the essence of our society that the policeman’s job should be hard. He’s there to protect, protect the free citizen, not to chase criminals, that’s an incidental part of his job. The free citizen is always more of a nuisance to the policeman that the criminal. He knows what to do about the criminal …

I’d like it very much if somebody would make a great big international organization for the protection of the individual. That way, there could be offices at every frontier. And whenever we’re presented with something unpleasant, that we don’t want to fill one of these idiotic questionnaires, we could say “Oh no, I’m sorry, it’s against the rules of our organization to fill out that questionnaire.” And they’d say “Ah, but it’s the regulations,” and we’d say, “Very well, see our lawyer,” because if there were enough of us, our dues would pay for the best lawyers in all the countries of the world. And we could bring to court these invasions of our privacy, and test them under law. It would nice to have that sort of organization, be nice to have that sort of card. I see the card as fitting into the passport, a little larger than the passport, with a border around it, in bright colors, so that it would catch the eye of the police. And they’d know who they were dealing with … The card itself should look rather like a union card, I should think, a card of an automobile club. And since its purpose is to impress and control officialdom, well, obviously, it should be as official looking as possible. With a lot of seals and things like that on it. And it might read something as follows:

This is to certify that the bearer is a member of the human race. All relevant information is to be found in his passport. And except when there is good reason for suspecting him of some crime, he will refuse to submit to police interrogation, on the grounds that any such interrogation is an intolerable nuisance. And life being as short as it is, a waste of time. Any infringement on his privacy, or interference with his liberty, any assault, however petty, against his dignity as a human being, will be rigorously prosecuted by the undersigned …

Read the entire transcript here or, better yet, if you are in the UK, you can watch it on BBC iPlayer.

Orson Welles Image by Patrick Charles.

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The Slow Creep of Monsters

By Amy Thibodeau, December 4, 2009, 9:36 am in Culture, Film, Present

Monsters are a part of our psychological life. In childhood we are afraid of them and as adults we turn our enemies into them (axis of evil, anyone?). Recently, Spike Jonze took on the monsters of childhood in his film Where the Wild Thing Are, based on the North American classic by Maurice Sendack. Although the monsters in the book are initially fearsome, Sendack empowers his little readers when the protagonist Max stares bravely into their yellow eyes, conquers them and becomes the king of the Wild Things.

During the last decade or so, our perception of monsters has gradually shifted. Instead of being something to fear or kill, they are also, in some cases, something we covet, that we want to become. The Twilight Series is a good example of this (though it’s preceded by the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles, Angel from Buffy and others). Vampires, which are traditionally regarded as disgusting, rotting, flesh-eating villains, are now the dream date of young girls world wide. Instead of seeing them as monsters, cloaked in the bodies of beautiful boys and girls, we see them as not so bad; just a little bit misunderstood.

In a recent book published by Oxford University Press, Stephen Asma examines our history with monsters, chronicling the encounters that have happened across recorded history and delving into their psychology – why we create them and what purpose they serve:

Monsters embody our deepest anxieties and vulnerabilities, Asma argues, but they also symbolize the mysterious and incoherent territory just beyond the safe enclosures of rational thought. Exploring philosophical treatises, theological tracts, newspapers, pamphlets, films, scientific notebooks, and novels, Asma unpacks traditional monster stories for the clues they offer about the inner logic of an era’s fears and fascinations. In doing so, he illuminates the many ways monsters have become repositories for those human qualities that must be repudiated, externalized, and defeated. (source)

I would love to know how the world’s love affair with Twilight fits into this psychology.

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Re-Creating Famous Movie Scenes in Powerpoint or Keynote

By Dan Zambonini, November 21, 2009, 4:20 pm in Film, Present

Microsoft Powerpoint and Apple Keynote have come a long way. Now, rather than boring people with presentations that are full of bullet points, you can bore people with presentations full of pointless transitions and effects (as I often do).

The side-effect of these features is that you can easily create some relatively sophisticated animation. So I thought it might be interesting to re-create famous movies scenes using nothing but Keynote or Powerpoint. Above you’ll find my first attempt at the Stay Puft scene from Ghostbusters: you can download the Keynote file I used to create it (Creative Commons licensed – do whatever you want with it).

I’ve thrown down the gauntlet; will you pick it up? Let’s see what you’ve got.

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