#also the exact dialogue is probably not what i said cause i just paraphrased from memory but it’s close enough probably | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dottie-wan-kenobi · 6 years ago

Note

Hey! A bit ago I saw that you were wondering if anyone was interested in a tutorial on dialogue?? And I just wanted to say that I would totally love to learn how to write dialogue/banter like you do, if you’re still interested in creating that tutorial of course

Hi yes of course I’m still interested!! But before I jump in, let me say that this is by no means a be-all-end-all, and this is just what works for me. If it works for other people, that’s great! If it doesn’t, that’s totally valid! Maybe this could be a jumping off point for other pieces of advice, idk. But anyway, let’s gooooo

Okay so I’m gonna be pulling out a bad example of my own writing, and a good example for each point, which is extra but will hopefully show the differences, & I’ll be doing it without putting anyone else down so yeet!

SAY IT OUT LOUD, MAKE SURE IT FLOWS, MAKE SURE IT MAKES SENSE

Another point to this one is, can you imagine real life people saying it? If the answer is no, then you gotta rework it. If the answer is yes, then yay!

Otherwise I’m not really sure how to explain this. Making sure it makes sense is easy enough, and saying it out loud is too, but making sure it flows is different. What I do for this is maybe not the best advice, but I use less periods. Commas, dashes, and ellipses keep it from being choppy. Also, adding words/phrases such as ‘well’, ‘like’, ‘I mean’, ‘uh/um/er/etc’ can help connect sentences/thoughts together in a realistic way.

BAD EXAMPLE:

“Bruce shrugged. “I knew, but didn’t realize, I guess. I’ve known he was young since I first learned about him.”

Clint, who was blanching, said, “he looks like a kid. Or an underage father. Think about what he had to go through as a kid, though."” - posted on July 1st, 2014

Why it’s bad: (Ignoring the horrible blocking dskljflksdf)

It doesn’t flow! Bruce’s line here feels just a little off, probably bc I was trying to put information where it shouldn’t have been (more on that later), but even without the second sentence, it’s still off. Time to reword, then; I’d change it to “I learned about it when I was studying him, but I kinda…forgot.” Idk about yall, but I can see Mark Ruffalo saying this, shrugging sheepishly. This flows a lot better and in my experience, it’s more likely someone would say this instead of “I didn’t realize, I guess”.

Clint’s lines should be combined, and there should be some diction added in. “He looks almost like a kid, or like, an underage father. God, think about what he had to go through!” Way less choppy & has some rhythm to it, instead of sounding like a robot is saying it.

GOOD EXAMPLE:

““Stop texting me weird stuff so late at night.”

“It’s not weird,” Sam denies immediately, “You just don’t appreciate it.”

“Why would I appreciate—” Steve reads carefully off his screen, “—Buzzfeed’s ‘Which Possible Illuminati Member Are You?’ quiz?”

“Because everyone thinks you’re in the Illuminati anyway, so why not see if you get yourself, you know?”

“Okay, but at four am? What were you even doing up that early?”” - posted on March 2nd, 2019

Why it’s good:

This is one of those I suggest reading out loud to understand the flow. Banter, at least in this case, is like slapstick comedy, and it’s gotta go back and forth without going way off course (unless that’s the desired effect!). Steve says something, Sam picks something specific to react to & adds a comment that makes it seem like they’ve maybe had this conversation before, and from there, they pass the rhythm to each other. Going from the second-to-last to the last lines is part of the flow; Sam makes a point that Steve doesn’t want to refute, so he continues it in another way. “Okay, but” is like the hinge connecting one flow to another. I’m just talking in circles now but anYWAY THIS IS BACK AND FORTH.

TRY TO FIT THE CHARACTER

Think specifically about the character, and if it sounds like something they would say or not. That’s kinda hard at times, so just make sure you aren’t having them say things you can definitely NOT imagine them saying. I’m gonna go with Batman because we all know him enough to know what he absolutely would never ever say.

BAD EXAMPLE:

Batman says, “And I was like, ‘oh my god, is this serious? You’re just turning yourself in?’ And he said ‘hell yeah I am!’ and I almost died from the shock!”

Why it’s bad:

Batman is a character who doesn’t ramble and wouldn’t retell an event like this (by paraphrasing it & recounting exact exchanges). He’s a very stoic person, and this whole thing is more emotionally open and telling than he would be comfortable with. And while this flows, I can’t picture him saying it unless it’s a heavily AU’d version, which is generally not what you want.

GOOD EXAMPLE:

Batman says, “The Joker turned himself in last night. I assume he’s planning something, something big if he’s willing to go to Arkham for it.”

Why it’s good:

This is a lot more subtle with the emotions, and a lot more monotonous, which is what Batman would probably want to sound like when recounting an event like this. He WANTS to sound like a textbook or police report, which are serious and straight to the point. But he can still add his thoughts into the mix, e.g. “something big…”, which shows how he’s kind of surprised and is thinking about what it means.

YA CAN’T ALWAYS INPUT INFORMATION INTO THE DIALOGUE

Sometimes you really want or need to share some information with the readers, and an easy way to do that is with dialogue, right? Sometimes! This, like everything else, hinges on flow & the realisticness of the words. Some pieces of info need to be conveyed through thoughts or actions, and some of it just shouldn’t be shared, no matter how much you might want to include it.

BAD EXAMPLE:

“Bonnie asked, “so…Original vampire? What does that mean, exactly? If you don’t mind my asking, I mean.”

“It means that my siblings and I were turned into the very first vampires after the death of my youngest brother. Also turned were my father, sister-in-law, and nephew. All vampires in existence come from us.”” - posted on March 6th, 2017

Why it’s bad:

The OG vampire in question here is Elijah, and while it makes sense for the character to quickly summarize it, it doesn’t flow. He would probably react firstly to Bonnie’s last sentence, then answer more concisely, “It means that my family and I are the first vampires in existence.” Maybe with an additional comment about them being the source of all other vampires, but not much more. Being so specific chops up the rhythm and makes it harder to understand, almost, ‘cause that’s a lot of people to keep in consideration.

GOOD EXAMPLE:

““What are you talking about, Kev?” Cheryl sets her phone down, the picture of fully-invested. “Schools don’t just shut down in one day.”

Kevin flops into the other chair, breathing calmed for the most part. “Apparently they do. Dad told me they arrested a teacher there for selling Jingle Jangle to students, and when they were going through his office they found meth. The basement was being used as a meth lab. The whole thing’s being quarantined and shut down until further notice.”” - posted on August 2nd, 2018

Why it’s good:

It flows!!! For being secondhand information, it’s clear enough to understand without bombarding readers with extremely specific details. It reads almost like an online article, with enough feeling to make it interesting, while still explaining exactly what’s happened.

DIFFERENT MOODS/DYNAMICS

Something to think about when writing dialogue is what mood your characters are in, and what kind of relationship they have with the character(s) they’re talking to. If person A is in a bad mood and talking to someone they like, they might try to tamp down on the mood in order to be nice. If person B is in a great mood and talking to a stranger, they might be pretty exuberant and friendly. Etc etc. Gonna use Superman as an example (this is extremely cheesy but it shows the difference).

BAD EXAMPLE: (Mood)

Extremely annoyed, Superman tells Lex Luthor, “Lex, you’re crazy! Trying to take over Metropolis with a hair growing scheme is just stupid! I’m leaving!”

He goes on to his date with Lois, now as Clark Kent, and says with a smile, “Sorry I’m fifty-seven minutes late, Lex kept me at work! Anyway, how was your day?”

Why it’s bad:

Okay I know this is cheesy I’m sorry I wrote this at 2 am last night lkdjflksjdfhskjdfhjashf ANYWAY. Superman goes from talking to Lex, who he doesn’t like and is quite annoyed with, to talking to Lois, who he does like and presumably isn’t annoyed with at all. The problem here is that you usually can’t turn moods off like a switch. Even though Superman likes Lois, he wouldn’t walk into the date perfectly happy. The annoyance from dealing with Lex would stay with him (though it would probably fade the longer the date went on). I think instead of smiling, he would be rolling his eyes a little and complaining like, “I swear, he’s so inconsiderate….”, instead of immediately jumping into “how was your day?”

GOOD EXAMPLE: (Dynamic)

Superman laughs as Robin does a flip off his shoulder. “Good job! Maybe next time we could try it from a little higher up,” he winks.

Robin cheers, “Yes! Thanks, Uncle Clark!”

Superman nods and leaves, finding Batman in the hallway. Seriously, he says, “Batman.”

“Superman.”

“Did you get your report done? They’re due by this afternoon.”

Why it’s good:

Again with the cheese that’s my bad lmao. This is mostly to show that characters are gonna sound different when speaking to different people. When talking to Robin, who is a child and quite a friendly one at that, Superman is teasing and joking around. Then, when he talks to Batman, who’s a grown man and also his coworker, he’s more serious and to the point. Both situations fit his character but show he’s got different relationships with different people.

IN CONCLUSION, uhhhhh yeah follow these points and hopefully dialogue will come a little easier. Experiment and have fun with it (these aren’t rules, but guidelines!), and if there are any questions I’m happy to clear them up/answer them/whatever lol.

#long post #writing advice #dialogue advice #writing tag #idk what to tag this as??#shut up dottie #Anonymous

35 notes · View notes

twdmusicboxmystery · 6 years ago

Text

9x16: Details

Okay, let's dive into the details. These are in chronological order (not categorized by subject) which makes them feel a little haphazard. Bear with me.

Let me preface this by saying that I think Beth will return in S10, and probably fairly early in the season. So I think a lot of the details in this episode exist to point to how soon we’ll see her.

For example, we figured out a long time ago that Beth = water, right? So having snow at all, seeing parallels to Them or other previous Beth-heavy episodes except that there’s snow on the ground now, is really telling to me. Perhaps these parallels before, when it was hot = no Beth. Now that we see them again and there’s snow (Beth = water) it shows that she’s about to appear.

During the opening montage where Ezekiel talks on the radio, we see Carol and Ezekiel in their bedroom. They're facing separate directions. This is something the show has used before to show a couple isn't doing particularly well. They did the same thing in S7 with Richonne. We saw them waking up, facing away from one another. That was when Rick was doing as Negan wanted. Michonne didn't agree with his decision. So, they use this to show that a couple is in on the same page or isn't seeing eye to eye about something.

We also see Carol and Ezekiel closing the gates of the Kingdom together. That not only foreshadows their breakup at the end of the episode, but it supports what Angela said on TTD. This chapter of their lives is over. It’s not that their relationship is over and, who knows, the might return to the Kingdom at some point, but they’ll probably never be living happily together at the Kingdom in the same way they did during these past 8 years.

When Daryl gives Lydia food, the plate includes carrots (Carrot Theory) something green (looks like asparagus to me), apple sauce, and something red. I’m thinking maybe they’re kidney beans? So carrots are definitely a Beth thing, especially because of the King of Carrot Flowers thing in Alone. Applesauce is really jumping out at me, not only because of the Apple Theory but because Aaron specifically showed up with applesauce RIGHT after the music box woke up.

I also think we should note parallels between Lydia and Daryl here. She’s acting very much like he did in 5x10, after losing Beth. She even takes off, leaving the group during the journey, to be on her own, much like Daryl did. I think Daryl is taking care of her because he went through this exact same thing once. He knows she needs support right now.

Henry's box with all the cards reminded me of the music box. Which I suppose makes sense from a parallel standpoint. We didn’t see Beth’s music box until after Coda, and we didn’t see this box of Henry’s until after the pikes.

No one's heard from Maggie in a while. I'm sure that will end up playing into next season in some way.

We catch a glimpse of this blonde torso walker. It reminds me a lot of bicycle girl from 1x01. They said on TTD it’s an Easter egg for another movie, but if they were also going for a callback to 1x01, that suggests that perhaps someone (like Rick in 1x01) may be about to awaken.

When Jerry says the huge storm is coming, Ezekiel answers that they're going to have to travel through the night if they want to survive. That's obviously a huge piece of symbolism right there. The night representing trials and their fight for survival. Again, it just reminds me of 5x10, Them. They didn’t travel through the night in that episode, but they stayed awake most of the night, fighting to keep the barn doors shut. In other words, to survive.

Back in Alexandria, they have no power and decide that they need to keep everyone together in three places (the meeting room, Aaron’s house, and Barbara’s) to keep them warm and wait out the storm. We have a rule of 3s there. Also, we see red and green wires coming out of the radio in this scene.

On the road, Alden is somewhat mean to Lydia, and Daryl intervenes, telling him to lay off. @thegloriouscollectorlady is working on a much more detailed meta about this, but this is important because it shows us the contrast between Daryl and Lydia's relationship as compared to Daryl and Beth's relationship. Daryl is being very protective of Lydia and defending her against those who are being mean to her. Obviously Daryl was protective of Beth too, but for the most part, Beth did just fine defending herself.

Beth wouldn't let Daryl bring me to her and got in his face and told him to knock it off. Lydia, so far, is just be taking the abuse. Haters like to say that Daryl and Beth had a father/daughter relationship because of the age difference. This more or less disproves that argument. Daryl does have a father/daughter relationship with Lydia, and it's very different from his relationship to Beth, who challenged him and was his equal, rather than just someone he protected.

When Ezekiel asked Daryl to step back, the phrasing he used jumped out at me, because we’ve heard it before. He says, "I'm just trying to get back a piece of what I lost. What we lost.” In 5x16, Maggie says the same thing to Deanna. In defending Rick's meltdown with Pete the previous episode, Maggie told Deanna that Deanna didn’t understand “what we’ve lost. What we’ve all lost.” I always wanted to read into that, especially where Beth is concerned because that was only a few episode after Beth and Tyrese's deaths. Now, Zeke is using the same phrasing right after Henry dies, and Henry had a gazillion parallels to Beth.

Lydia almost lets the walker bite her and Carol sees. They said on TTD that this was a nod to how Carol died in the CBs, but I think it's more than that too. Carol herself has been suicidal before. She, like Morgan, is not someone who would actually kill herself. She's never tried and I don't think she ever will. But if you remember in 6x16, when she had the encounter with that Savior who shot her several times, and Morgan saved her, she kept asking him to kill her. So, I think part of the sadness of Carol seeing this is that she knows exactly how Lydia feels because she's been there before herself.

Back in Alexandria, Negan uses the line, "it's like Christmas to me." So just another Christmas reference. There have been so many in the last couple of episodes, they’re pretty hard to ignore.

Judith tells Negan that Dog has run off and is lost. She wants to look for him, but of course there's the blizzard. That really jumped out at me as a Sirius/Dog Star reference. Any dog on the show relates back to this symbolism, but here, Dog is specifically lost. Which means he has to return at some point, right? He does, before the end of the episode, but again, we’re literally talking about a dog who was lost for time and then returns.

The fireplace in the meeting room explodes. I really want to read into this, but I’m not sure exactly how. I think it could parallel to big burning events in the past, such as the burning of the prison or Terminus. (I talked earlier this week about how there are major parallels both to Alone and also to S5 before Daryl and Carol go to Atlanta to look for Beth.) So it depends on how you want to interpret it.

Eugene also says that what caused the explosion was that the chimney was gunked up. A mixture of creosote and H20. Creosote is just the black gunky stuff that really will block a chimney if it doesn’t get cleaned out. Obviously they haven’t used this chimney much and it hasn’t been properly cared for. I’m assuming the H20 comes in from the now and the storm. But it’s also interesting that we have a reference to a mixture of fire and water here. (Daryl = Fire, Beth = Water).

(Not to mention, the flashlight beam in the above pic looks a lot like the ones I’ve pointed out before, one of which was around Beth.)

Once the fireplace blows, they decide to squeeze into Aaron's house. I'm wondering if there's some significance to it being Aaron's house. They mention his house several different times, emphasizing it. I mean, they couldn't grant any house or any building. I'm not sure what the significance would be. We know that Aaron's been a proxy for Beth before, and he showed up right as the music box awakened. But I'm still not entirely sure how to relate back to this particular situation. Just something I noticed.

When Daryl and Carol talk at the Sanctuary, we heard the “it’s okay/not okay” theme. We’ve heard similar convos between Daryl and Carol before. In Strangers, for example. *ahem, right before they went to Atlanta to search for Beth; just saying* The two of them tend to say this when one of them is actually not okay but saying they are.

Daryl also says, “We’re gonna make it.” It's a dialogue foreshadow because they do. Maybe that's obvious, but if one of them wasn't going to make it to Alexandria, they wouldn’t have included this line in the conversation. We can always rely on dialogue parallels.

Carol also says she's losing herself and doesn't think she can hang on. I didn’t catch this reference but Angela explained it on TTD and I went back to find it.

When Carol and Ezekiel first got together back at the end of S8 after she saved Henry, she told him about Sophia. She said (and I paraphrase bc I didn’t get all this down in my notes, “I had a daughter. When I lost her, I was nothing. But the people I was with (meaning TF)…I found myself again. Some better version of myself. It always feels like it could just be swept away again. But that doesn’t mean that it will and it doesn’t mean that I couldn’t find myself again if it does.”

So Angela said that’s the real reason she wants to go with Daryl. She wants to be around him and Michonne and those she’s known from the beginning. She’s genuinely trying to find herself again. That was also a foreshadow back in S8 that Carol’s fairytale would be swept away again at some point.

Trying to figure out where to go next, Ezekiel and Michonne talk about what route to take. The mention route B, which has been a big theme in the past.

I also thought it was interesting that Aaron says, "Rick's bridge would have saved us." In way, that makes me look at the bridge symbolism from a different angle. I said recently that the bridge represents the cohesion of the community, and I still think that’s true. But I also think, in terms of individual character arcs, the bridge may represent someone who almost died, or should have died, but something about the bridge saves them.

If you look at past bridges, we have some evidence for that. Rick was blown off the bridge into the river and swept downstream. If he’d been anywhere else, there wouldn't have been a place for him to go. If he'd been cornered in a canyon or something, either the dynamite would've killed him, or the surviving walkers still would've gotten to him. The same could also be true of the bridge in Consumed. Daryl and Carol got trapped on it (from walkers) but they drove the van off it. Again, that was only possible because they were on a bridge and had the option of driving off of it.

Oh, another thing. I know this top pic is hard to see, but Daryl wore his black bandanna again in the storm. We’ve seen it more than once, but he first wore it at the prison back in 4a, and AMC made a big deal about it, even doing a special Daryl figurine with the bandanna. So another callback to S4, and could point to something important coming.

I talked on Monday about how Lydia’ suicide arc parallels Beth’s, and they use walkers in the field to show that. But I also want to mention one more thing about Carol and Lydia, specifically the part where Lydia asked Carol to kill her. (First off, Carol finds Lydia in a BARN, so that could be a thing.)

It occurred to me that at this part, Lydia becomes something of an antiparallel to Lizzie (notice the similar names). In both cases, Carol comes to a point where it's just her and the girl (Lizzie and Lydia) and she has the option to kill them. I think we can all agree Lizzie was pretty messed up. She honestly didn't know what she’d done wrong in killing Mica, and therein lay the problem. Carol told Tyreese it wasn’t safe for Lizzie to be around other people, which is why Carol did what she did. She simply couldn't trust that Lizzie wouldn't kill someone else.

So we have Lizzie who obviously didn't want to die, but Carol killed her anyway because she had no humanity, and that made her a danger to other people.

In this case, Lydia is doing the opposite. She begs Carol to kill her. The thing is, the reason Lydia wants to die is because she does understand how terrible what's happened is, and what her role in it is. She's not homicidal and looking to kill people and turn them into walkers. She's genuinely depressed and understands exactly why Carol blames her. She obviously blames herself a lot.

I don't think Carol would have killed her one way or the other, but understanding the difference between Lydia and Lizzie is probably one of the reasons Carol didn't. She said, “You're not weak,” which is another way of saying Lydia is strong. Of course we can relate that back to Beth, but I think we’re supposed to relate this more to past things in Carol’s arc. Lydia is different than Lizzie. She strong specifically because she’s sad about what’s happened and understands other people’s grief (neither was true of Lizzie).

I’m also reminded of a convo Carol and Rick had in S4. Carol talked about looking back on her time with her abusive husband. She says she didn't understand back then that she could be strong. That she already was. I feel like she’s applying that line to Lydia here. And, in my opinion, it does show a lot of growth on Carol’s part, even if she’s still in a dark place

I really want to read into them crossing a frozen river. I'm not sure exactly how to apply it, but a river is water. Water =s Beth, and water is what often runs under a bridge (not always, but a lot of the time.) So it’s interesting that to save themselves from death, they crossed over frozen river. It also occurred to me maybe we should draw a parallel between the frozen river here and the dry river in Them. I know they’re kind of opposite things, considering the weather, but we had them able to walk in or on the actual river without being swept away by water both times.

Daryl fights a blonde, female walker. It's the one he stabs in the eye with the icicle. I thought it was very Beth-like and made this joke in my group:

The thing is, stabbing in the eye with the icicle (also water) could actually be a Sirius/Dogstar reference. We’ve talked about this a lot in my group, and I’m sure @frangipanilove has mentioned it in her metas. Sirius is the one-eyed dog, and we had the one-eyed dog in Alone. Also consider Denise, who had so many Beth parallels and took an arrow to the eye. Same eye as the one Daryl stabs with the icicle here. So basically anyone who gets in the eye, we think is a Sirius/Dogstar reference.

So why would they make that reference here? As I said at the beginning, I think it’s to show that Beth is about to return. Everything about this storm, the snow (water), the Christmas theme, etc., points to her being the next thing we see.

It’s also worth mentioning that an icicle to the eye is a reference to the classic Christmas movie, A Christmas Story. So more Christmas references there too.

I already mentioned the Negan/Judith/Dog/Alone parallel. Just wanted to add that the “okay/not okay” theme was heard here too. Negan asks Judith, “you okay,” to which she replies, “I’m okay.” It was a theme we saw around Beth at Grady. Details HERE.

When Carol breaks up with Ezekiel, she says, “I'll never regret the fairytale.” In TTD, Angela Kane explained that Carol feels like her life at the kingdom, being queen and having a husband and son was a fairytale. She loved that part of her life, but she thinks it's over now, which is very sad.

When Michonne and Negan talk at the end, they mention Adam. I'm not sure what all these Adam references are referring to, but we’ve heard them more than once in the last couple of episodes. Earl and Tammy discussed naming the baby Adam before Tammy died. I wondered if there was some symbolism in that but I didn't know it was. Now, Negan says it again. The name Adam obviously holds a lot of biblical symbolism, but beyond that, I’m not sure where to go with it. I’ll keep an eye on it moving forward.

We saw Beta whipping Alpha’s arm. Little bit twisted, no? The writers told us the Whisperers migrate south for the winter. I can’t keep my mind from straying to the fact that Atlanta lies to the south, and if they went so far that there was no snow and tons of green while TF pushed through a blizzard, they must have gone pretty far south. Like the Saviors, the Whisperers obviously roam over great distances. So it wouldn’t be at all hard for them to run into a certain blond at some point. Just saying.

When Ezekiel talks to Judith at the end, he uses the phrase, "the winter of our discontent." We’ve talked about this in our group and, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what conclusions to draw from it. It’s a famous line from Shakespeare’s play, Richard III. For those who don’t know, that a play where the main character is the villain. He’s an evil king who kills lots of people, including two children to hold onto his power. In the end, we see his downfall.

We saw a reference to Richard III around the Governor in S4. And it made perfect sense for it to be a symbol of him. Because we saw his ultimate downfall in S4, and he was a villain/evil ruler. I’m even wondering now if that’s why they put in the part where Lily brought him Megan’s body and he shot her. It was such a cold, calloused thing to do, but maybe they were trying to liken him to Richard III and show that same kind of evil.

The thing is, I’m not sure why they’re using this line here. On the one hand, we literally saw the downfall of the Kingdom in the middle of winter. So as a tongue-in-cheek line, it really fits the plot. But Ezekiel isn’t an evil king—quite the opposite—and TWD is usually more specific in their symbolism than that. Not to mention, I think it must foreshadow something. The only “evil leader” we have on the show currently is Alpha, so I’m wondering if this foreshadows something for next season. We just really have no way of knowing what.

We actually had a discussion in my group just today about this and something else (very Beth-ish) that it may point to. I’ll probably post about that later, but I don’t want to get into it here.

For now, perhaps we can argue that we saw the Richard III reference in S4, which was right in the middle of Beth’s S4/S5 arc. Hearing it again now might be yet another way to point to her imminent return.

One thing I know @frangipanilove was super excited about from this conversation is when Ezekiel tells Judith that, “just because we lost our house doesn’t mean we lost our home.” He means that home is where your family is, not where your house is. Guys, that kind of proves everything @frangipanilove said in THIS POST about the Sirius/Dogstar/North star symbolism. It’s about coming home. Returning to family after an absence, and we’ve seen that symbolism around Beth a ton!

TTD:

Angela Kang talked about Ezekiel in the relationship, and it struck me that everything she said exactly what TD has always said. Find that. She also said that Sue think about how she always goes back to those people in that earlier scene.

Melissa also talked about Carol's hair and she said pretty much the same thing we've always said. Courses been confirmed anyway that the reason she grew it out was because she was happy with Ezekiel, but I just wanted to point out that we predicted that here in this post. So just another thing TD was write about.

Angela also said that the voice be heard on the radio will play in the story and asked 10 and it will "turn the story in an interesting way." Kind of interesting that says turn the story. I think that could definitely be a Beth thing. All of our ears perked up when she said that.

In closing, let me just add two more things that might give you hope for season 10.

Credits for the first one goes @bethgreeneprevails. She found this picture, which is a trading card of Beth. Notice how the blood on her forehead kind of looks like an H.

In 9x15, we saw Hilde making the H coins. She specifically mentions her and her husband's five year anniversary. We’ve seen many 5s over the seasons, and I usually suggest that they point back to S5 and Beth’s arc. However, if she returns in S10, that will be exactly 5 seasons after she disappeared. Perhaps the 5s have pointed to that. Remember, Hilde said the H represents both hope and home, as in coming home. As @frangipanilove said HERE, the Sirius/Dogstar/North Star symbolism all represents coming home.

This episode emphasized the lot that home isn’t a place. It's where your family is. Wherever they are, that's home. So between the H on Beth’s forehead, what the coins mean, and paired with the five year reference, were thinking the idea is that she’ll return after five seasons, which will be S10.

Finally, this last thing just occurred to me last night. A non-TDer on IG was asking questions about Beth. In short, the conversation got me thinking about how the writers knew about Rick’s departure since S4, and they both planned for and foreshadowed it.

So I started thinking about that foreshadowing, and something potentially huge occurred to me. While there might have been earlier signs, the bulk of the symbolism we picked up about Rick’s departure came in S7. There was when he fought Winslow and got the stigmata wound

as well as all the stuff in 7x12. Now, Rick didn’t leave until S9, which was two seasons later, but we now know he was originally slated to leave in S8. It wasn’t until they were filming 8b that he asked to push his departure out until S9. So when they put the foreshadowing of his departure in S7, they were planning on him leaving in S8.

Then I started thinking about other foreshadows we’ve already seen fulfilled. We saw this foreshadow in S4

which is obviously a foreshadow of her arm falling in Coda. So we had the foreshadow in S4, and the fulfillment in S5. Same with Tyrese. I’ve said before that his injury to his arm at the prison foreshadowed his death, because he was bitten in exactly the same place. The foreshadow came in S4 and the fulfillment in S5. I’m going to revamp my Red/Green theory next week, and I’ll talk about this more then, but I recently noticed a major foreshadow of Sasha and Abraham’s deaths that came in S6. They both died in S7.

So I’ll admit this may not work across the board (I’m sure some deaths were foreshadowed more than a season in advance) and then there’s the fact that we’ve seen foreshadows of Beth’s return every season (nearly every episode) since Coda aired. But I also think we can all agree that the Beth parallels were more obvious and on-the-nose during season 9 than during any past season. So I’m just saying that, based on precedent, her return in S10 makes more sense than ever.

Whew! Okay that was long. I’m done now. ;D

#beth greene #beth greene lives #beth is alive #beth is coming #td theory #td theories #team delusiona #team defiance #beth is almost here #bethyl

18 notes · View notes

ajabsusbjsbsbanns · 6 years ago

Photo

Warning for some mentions of sexual intimacy and also somewhat cp?.. the intimacy is not explicit by any means. however i go into detail on why their art is bad so just keep this in mind.

please consider reading this whole thing before jumping to a conclusion

(and im aware the screenshots above are somewhat out of context. this was going to be short but it isnt now)

hey! a deviantart user by the name of foxdragonlover drew nsfw art of spyro and cynder. there was some backlash and they had this to say. i really dont have nearly enough energy to read through this fucking novel of a post but i skimmed it. now please pay attanetion to these parts of the post.

“When i drew that picture of Spyro and Cynder, it came from a place of love and strong feelings.If someone draws art of those two as adults being more raw and wild, with the intent of just doing that as part of their story, that's normal!I can imagine Cynder growing into the type who is a little domineering in the sack, whilst Spyro would be more submissive and tender/attentive.These thoughts, through development and story when you treat characters as actual characters and not as pieces of meat, is fine.”

what theyre saying i that as long as they fleshed out the characters and dont just see them as moving pixels on a screen they have a right to draw porn of it because it’s “development”.

now please keep in mind that it has been said spyro in the original games is 12 years old.

now although this doesnt tell us much. spyro is a child. he looks nothing like the other dragons in the game. hes closer in looks to the baby dragons in YotD that any of the elders. not to mention his voice is that of a child-teen. now yes. i understand that this is the original games.

“what about TLOS series you moron” you cry.

fear not. i have done some research on that as well.

in the first game of the legend of spyro series spyro is roughly 12 years old.

the wendy promotional toy that was released when the game was first out comes with a small tag that gives some insite into the characters of the TLOS series.

now feel free to accuse me of editing these pictures. but you’ll see here that they are in fact real.

so what does this tell us? well.. not much i guess. however im not stopping here.

“yea yea spyro is 12. but stupid! he’s only 12 in the first game!”

alright. sure! youre correct in that spyro is 12 for the first game. however he is also twelve for the second. the second game happens almost immediatly after the first. meaning at most spyro is 13 for half of it. along side this, cynder is also the same age as him. same goes for sparx.

“well, but those arent DotD!”

You are correct! They arent! however they give us a clue on how old spyro, cynder and sparx are in the third game!

this comment on a game forum mentions that spyro is 15 in the third game.

“but lolbit you fuggin gnome! some dumb forum doesnt mean anything!”

Once again you are correct! it does not. however the poster on the forum is right. spyro is fifteen as per mentioned in this screenshot of the actual dialogue of the third game.

hunter mention 3 years having passed. which would mean spyro, cynder and sparx are in fact 15. 15 is not an adult. You should not be depicting a minor in sexual situations EVER. you should not be “aging up” a character for nsfw art. and you ESPECIALLY should not be doing this when you are a 23 year old. dont believe me? their Furaffinity account specifies their age here! please be warned there is NSFW art on their account.

now im sure youre asking why im throwing such a fuss over this. well dear reader, fae/fox refuses to awknowledge that they did anything wrong and they continue to argue that “its okay if theyre mature and ive written a story for them”. that of course was paraphrasing. however here is their exact words on the matter. “But when you take young characters that you love inside and out, and develop their lives and their relationships, and mold them into more mature characters (based around the premise of human emotions and sentience), that's normal.Drawing those grown characters doing mature things is normal.Projecting real life stuff onto characters, whether they're canonically only ever shown as children or as adults while working through their story, is normal.There is so much worse to harp on. “

please keep in mind that no where in this paragraph here is it mentioned that the characters are adults. they are stated to be mature. however, maturity does not = age. it means your maturity mentally. spyro is extremelly mature for a 15 year old. he saves the world and handles the fact that he was plucked from his home before he was hatched and was raised by a family that was not his blood family even though he is still a child. a MINOR. cynder handles her corruption and the fact that she was used as a tool for an evil master as well as she can. she’s extremelly mature for her age. but again, she is only 15.

now of course im expecting that legendary comment of

“dumpass. theyre fictional. duhhhh. they aren’t real”

and to you my dear friend I have some links for you to read. i personally would never be able to sum it up in words the way these posts have. here are some links about why fiction does in fact = reality at times.(and thank you to Jade for allowing me to use their blog for these links!)

click here, here, here, and here

now that youre done reading those, im going to analize the post created by fox/fae and discuss some of the points they made.

the first part i analized earlier im going to bring back again for one more talk.

“When i drew that picture of Spyro and Cynder, it came from a place of love and strong feelings.If someone draws art of those two as adults being more raw and wild, with the intent of just doing that as part of their story, that's normal! I can imagine Cynder growing into the type who is a little domineering in the sack, whilst Spyro would be more submissive and tender/attentive.These thoughts, through development and story when you treat characters as actual characters and not as pieces of meat, is fine.”

lets break this apart.

it does not matter if it came from a place of love. what you’re literally saying is you had strong feelings to draw spyro and cynder having sex. thats the raw of it. and yes. it is normal and okay if you would like to draw two consenting adults in a time of intimacy. however you did not draw two adults. theyre children. minors.

“But when you take young characters that you love inside and out, and develop their lives and their relationships, and mold them into more mature characters (based around the premise of human emotions and sentience), that's normal.“

i already discussed the maturity thing. you have not yet called them adults. you said mature. which more or less translates to “im too scared to admit that i didnt age them up. theyre still minors in the picture”. this is scurting around the problem rather than addressing it. and no im not addressing the next part of the paragraph. no one asked your personal views on how tender and soft a literal minor would be during intercourse. and again. they are minors. the characters are portrayed as humanistic and sentient. and fae/fox agrees on that. that is one thing they are right for.

however. that doesn’t erase all else that they’ve done. next.

“Someone even got mad that i hid the comments and acted like i hid the person who accused me only, but really i hid everyone's comment.Save for one from each of two of my friends, which were not hidden because i found them encouraging/interesting.Those are hidden now, though. I hid my comments, too, and part of me hiding that stuff helps protect 1. the commenter and secondly, i just hate looking at all of that sometimes.I counted and there are 20 hidden comments in my section.There will probably be more later. Do you know how embarrassing that is for me?I genuinely hate drama, but damn if i won't defend myself when i know my truth and someone challenges it. If it weren't for the nice things people said to me, i would just disable comments all together and wipe the slate clean, but i guess this has shown me i value the love i receive more than the hate, even if it leaves a scar on my work -- or even my attitude.”

hoo boy. alright.

alright. this is a blatant lie. they have blocked a decent amount of comments but they are lying when they say they only kepts up a few friends. not to mention they say they deleted those after. there are far more comments than 2 from a few friends.

(its scribbled out cause you can actually see the art behind it. which is still nsfw)

“I hid my comments, too, and part of me hiding that stuff helps protect 1. the commenter and secondly, i just hate looking at all of that sometimes.I counted and there are 20 hidden comments in my section.There will probably be more later.”

although yes they did hide some of their comments in order to remove the whole chain its extremelly hard to believe that this is out of a place of safety for the commenter. because they left my comment up and allowed a friend of their to comment on it as well. along side this they blocked me so i couldn’t defend myself either.

and now this isnt me jumping to a conclusion. my comment is from 10 hours ago. thats a lot of time to delete a comment.

“Do you know how embarrassing that is for me?I genuinely hate drama, but damn if i won't defend myself when i know my truth and someone challenges it. If it weren't for the nice things people said to me, i would just disable comments all together and wipe the slate clean, but i guess this has shown me i value the love i receive more than the hate, even if it leaves a scar on my work -- or even my attitude.”

this is a long one but i feel it fits together well enough to analize it all together. but ohhh man. it sure is embarassing to have to hide the comments that are accusing you of drawing CP huh? it really is embarassing? because you hate drama right?. listen. it doesnt matter if its embarassing to you. you drew nsfw art of child characters. and now youre upset that you have to go through and hide the comments of people calling you out for it. do you realize how outlandish that is? and oof. listen. the fact that you wanna “wipe the slate clean” and “disable comments” to hide from the fact that people are calling you out, rather than admitting this and deleting the piece shows that you are quick to hide and shove all of this under the rug rather than addressing it. and as for that last comment. listen... you sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling rather than addressing peoples concerns and listening to their criticism is not you valuing love over hate. its you refusing to awknowledge your misdoings and pretending youve done nothing wrong. thats a horrible mentality to have. and of course this is going to leave a scar on your work. you drew CP and refused to awknowledge it even after people brought it to your attention.

“I know in my heart of hearts what is right and what is wrong, i know what is justifiable and what isn't.I'm not sitting here trying to justify what i drew because i know it's not wrong, but i want it to be known that i am damn sad that someone who said they've "supported me for a few years" suddenly, over one picture they didn't like/didn't understand, chose to accuse me of basically drawing child pornography -- which is a major and very dangerous accusation, by the way, fought me over it, told me to "die mad," and then blocked me . If that were some random troll running by shitting on my art i'd be angry, but after some words i'd just block them and move on.But when a watcher or someone who has enjoyed my work just totally thrashes me or automatically loses faith in/respect for me, it hurts.Yes, it hurts!I'm not made of stone, i'm not used to this level of drama.I hate conflict. It hurts.But i once said i want to go far and wide with my passion, and that's gonna mean taking some low blows along the way.It's just something i have to learn to deal with like an adult.”

once again im going to go through this and explain why its... oh so wrong.

“I know in my heart of hearts what is right and what is wrong, i know what is justifiable and what isn't.I'm not sitting here trying to justify what i drew because i know it's not wrong “

you telling yourself you did nothing wrong and refusing to awknowledge peoples criticisms of you isnt you knowing in your “heart of hearts” that youre right. its you being ignorant to peoples concerns. and how do you know its not wrong? because you say so? because your friends say so? people have addressed this issue by giving you facts and explanations on why its wrong and you deleted these comments. that isnt right at all.

“but i want it to be known that i am damn sad that someone who said they've "supported me for a few years" suddenly, over one picture they didn't like/didn't understand, chose to accuse me of basically drawing child pornography -- which is a major and very dangerous accusation, by the way, fought me over it, told me to "die mad," and then blocked me . ”

Listen. these people who supported you are sad that you’re defending drawing CP. you arent the victim in this scenario. you have no right to be sad when you actively chose to draw this. it is all your doing that these people have removed their support for you. as have I. these people are not to blame because they are disgusted that you drew something like this. and we are aware this is dangerous and a major accusation. however it is true. what you have drawn, by definitions, is CP. and now i hate to be this person. but you deleted all the comments. so there really isnt proof of this. i hate to pull that card but honestly.. this is the definiton of “pics or it didn’t happen”

“If that were some random troll running by shitting on my art i'd be angry, but after some words i'd just block them and move on.But when a watcher or someone who has enjoyed my work just totally thrashes me or automatically loses faith in/respect for me, it hurts.Yes, it hurts!I'm not made of stone, i'm not used to this level of drama.I hate conflict.”

once again. you’re to blame for this. you are playing a pity card yet you drew ths. the whole “it hurts me too” arguement is null. It doesnt work. you drew the art and chose to defend it. you have no right to be upset when people voiced their concerns about it. and conflict wouldnt arise if you actually listened to peoples concerns about this rather than immediately blocking them and playing the victim card.

“It hurts.But i once said i want to go far and wide with my passion, and that's gonna mean taking some low blows along the way.It's just something i have to learn to deal with like an adult.”

first of all you dont need to get poetic here. you drew CP, got called out for it and then made a post crying about it all. and if your passion is drawing porn of spyro and cynder, children characetrs, then youre not a good person. and if you defending CP is really when youre going to act like an adult then you clearly have the wrong priorities.

“I'm not some perfect martyr out to try and prove i can't do any wrong.Hell those of you who watch my side account have seen my ass a LOT, and you've also seen me try to grow from it when i'm wrong.I should not have given that commenter the gratification of pissing me off so much, but it happened.I didn't exactly blow my top, but it's still something i ought to get a handle on because i know this won't be the last time someone harasses me.”

heres the thing. the only people who can vouch for you here are your followers who are defending your actions here. you can’t use your side account as an excuse of “ive grown as a person” when the account isnt public and no one has access to it other than those who you select to. and on the second part. listen. youre 23. youre over the legal age in the states and i believe everywhere else. youre a grown adult. and if you consider people saying “youre disgusting for drawing CP and defending it” as harassment then you truely do need to grow up. you shouldnt be praised for not freaking out at people for calling you out on this kind of stuff.

“As i told someone else who's barked at me, it would also be hella wrong if one character was an adult and was a child and i aged the child up so they could fuck.I HATE that shit.That to me is wrong and weird, but here they're the same age, as adults. To me, it's not weird.Honest to God the worst/weirdest age thing i ever got swept away by was ZaDr, and i've been thinking about that lately and am considering at some point going back and throwing in head canon and trying to make it better so that it isn't "nasty”. I've gotten smarter and wiser since then.So there's definitely some hypocritical material in my folders, too, and i'll go ahead and admit that.I was younger and stupider at the time, but trust me when i say i never have looked at a child character and thought of them sexually.Ever.It's wrong.”

alright first im going start by saying this is in reference to my comment. now when refering to someone, when youre trying to earn peoples pity and understanding, you shouldnt jump to insult them. i wasn’t barking aat you. i was addressing your behaviour. and now. this is the first spot youve addressed them being “adults” in your art. every other time you mention it you call them mature which is a cop out. its only when you’re finally addressing the exact issue that you start to state how you are depecting them as adults. which, aging up a character for porn is still wrong. (which i will explain a bit better after im done this). and also you arent to be praised for seeing that as wrong. thats a normal response. no one was asking if you see it as wrong. and most people assume that until stated otherwise, this is the norm. most people see that as disgusting.

now you say to you it isnt weird. listen. to you it isnt weird because its your art and you dont like being called out for drawing CP. do you see what im getting at? now also i dont know what you’re talkign about here so i wont address it incase i get the wrong impression and speak out of line, however you say you’ve never looked at a child character sexually. yet you drew cynder and spyro intimately. understand this. aging up a character doesnt mean you look at the character in a more adult light. it means you’re attempting to justify to youself and make yourself feel better and safer on the idea of the character having sex. which. is. wrong.

im not addressing the last two paragraphs on the journal as it is just them praising their followers for praising them, however i will address their comment ont their art piece.

“ And since apparently some people don't understand this, S/C are 18+ here.If anyone ever assumes i would draw children having sex, i swear to God... “

from what i can tell this was a saveface. they put this comment once they censored the piece. their fA has the piece as well and they dont address the age of the characters. which means that this was just added on to prevent them from the issues being addressed by commenters.

now from what i can tell. their AU doesnt really exist apart from some world building. i couldnt find a long detailed AU where the characters were aged up and lived a life. the only time ive found them mentioning the AU is when they talked about the art piece. whats that mean? it doesnt really exist. not publicly atleast. which means the “AU” could entirely just mean its an excuse to draw porn of the characters. now that last bit sounds like me picking for straws i understand. however it is very possible. heres a post that explains why its not good to age up characters. (understand that im aware the post is discussing and age gap however it addresses some good points)

heres the post

now if you read it you’ll see this part. “ aging up is taking two characters who would have an inappropriate relationship in canon, seeing their relationship as romantic, and then aging them up because you want some way for them to be together. and in that way you’re romanticizing a relationship between the two characters you saw in canon, and that’s not okay”. now i want oyu to pay attention to this part. “in that way you’re romanticizing a relationship between the two characters you saw in canon, and that’s not okay.”

you’re taking characters you saw in canon, and changing them to fit your view in a way that the public would deem okay. You’re taking something you saw in canon, in this case two children who seem at the most mildly puppy lovish (like a play ground crush), and you’re manipulating it so that you can view the canon relationship in a less taboo way. like i said earlier, aging up a character doesnt mean you look at the character in a more adult light. it means you’re attempting to justify to youself and make yourself feel better and safer on the idea of the character having sex. aging a character up doesn’t change the way you view them or their relationships. no matter how much you insist you are smarter than most and you really do view the character as an adult, you dont. thats bull.

now onto some smaller stuff that they didnt because wow. iconic i guess..

although i usually block out names this is a gross mentality. the entire comment is disgusting. and at the end “i would love to see some more sexy spyro x cynder from you” solidifies it. not to mention that fae/fox is essentially encouraging it. saying they will continue to draw it. meaning they havent learned anything from this experience. youre 23 dude.

and now some abliesm

“but lolbit you stupid bafoon. they didnt say anything themself. duuuhhh”

yes im aware. here they are saying it themself.

ahh.. gotta love that... really gotta hammer in that sparkling personality of theirs.

TD;LR foxdragonlover on deviantart, FaeFierceVulpine on furaffinity and onefiercefox here on tumblr drew cynder and spyro nsfw art (which classifies as CP) and then defended their art all the while blocking people who called them out for it. they claimed it featured 18 plus characters only after they were called out for it. they then made a post about it essentially crying about it and pinning the blame on those who called them out for it. They are a 23 year old. they’ve also said some abliest stuff and have just generally been nasty.

anyway i cant believe i did this. this post is huge and im so sorry. i didnt intend for it to be that big. i wanted to be as detailed as possible and make sure i touched on everything i could. now its 3 am and im tired. if anything looks wrong tell me and i’ll change it. i may address their comment to me later (the comment in the starting pictures). im outa energy

#cp mention #r slur #callout #important #long post #CDL

15 notes · View notes

nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

Text

Hyperallergic: Yvonne Rainer on How Filmmaking Gave Her Language

From Lives of Performers (1972) (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

The inimitable dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer is having a retrospective of her films starting Friday, July 21 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. An instrumental force in avant-garde dance and key player in the inception of the art collective Judson Dance Theater, Rainer took to filmmaking in the 1970s, occupying a unique space that both straddled and rejected the modes of performance art, documentary, essay, and film. Her directorial debut Lives of Performers (1972) tells the story of a love triangle between members of a dance ensemble through lovingly captured rehearsals, scraps of text, and dissonant voiceover. Film About A Woman Who… (1974) probes the norms of romantic taboo by telling the story of an extramarital affair in hushed allusions and repressed memories, the characters known only as “he” and “she.” (In that film, Rainer briefly occupies the role of a lady lion tamer, who says “Martha Graham and Jean-Luc Godard were as responsible for my leaving the circus as anybody”). Across the board, Rainer’s films are formally innovative and disinterested in the established strictures of narrative — which is to say, of cliché.

Rainer’s movies collapse safe boundaries between maker, work, and audience, not just once or twice (for easy, cathartic effect) but consistently throughout, drawing you back to square one and insisting that you take a long, hard look at your own relationship to the screen — a relationship which, like so many others, Rainer does not let us forget is about power.

“I must emphasize that it was language that filmmaking offered to me,” Rainer said over the phone. She describes dance as more “limited” in this sense, but that ever since she recently starting choreographing again, she’s been incorporating text, from art criticism to news articles, that she avidly reads. “I put a microphone up and interrupt what the dancers are doing. I’m like this gadfly, roaming around the stage, trying to get messages out. And it’s all live.”

For an octogenarian art-world legend, Rainer wasn’t just approachable; she was self-effacing, unpretentious, and easy to talk to. Time and again, the artist shrugged off theoretical approaches in favor of bringing conversation back to her means of production and, above all else, the work itself.

* * *

From Film About A Woman Who… (1974) (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

Steve Macfarlane: To quote your own film, Journeys from Berlin: “let’s start somewhere.” In Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), a backdrop of environmental collapse is used to explore the dissolution of a relationship. Around that time you mentioned using the camera to fragment or zoom in on the things that had been unavailable to you as a choreographer.

Yvonne Rainer: Kristina was my third film. Having read this book about oil tankers and the dangers of their capsizing and spreading oil, the havoc they’d cause on the natural world, that was the main topic. My dancing was not narrative; it was abstract, athletic, it had references, perhaps, but to dance history. My M.O. was to deal with a broader range of social, political issues. Filmmaking, the New American Cinema — Hollis Frampton, Maya Deren, and others — it was a way to combine aesthetic concerns with specific social issues. Then there were my contemporaries, Laura Mulvey and Peter Woolen, who made “talking pictures” with a lot of dialogue and didacticism. I knew them; my work was on programs with theirs.

From Kristina Talking Pictures (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

SM: Where were these screenings happening?

YR: Anthology Film Archives. The same situation as today: small film showcases, universities… I’ve never been in the big theaters that show Hollywood films.

SM: So much of the work plays with annotation: newspaper clippings, unattributed quotes, performers almost possessed by dialogues or texts that “break the spell” of the filmmaking.

YR: I must emphasize that it was language that filmmaking offered to me: I could play around with voice, I could interrupt someone speaking with a title or subtitle. Dance at that point seemed very limited to me in terms of my wider interests.

SM: Tell me about the decision to use that Rolling Stones song “No Expectations” in Lives of Performers.

YR: Oh… I just liked the song. It comes in halfway through a series of tableaux vivants — I probably just felt I had to liven up this staid, silent progression.

SM: So practical!

YR: A lot of choices had to do with duration. My feelings at that time were heavily prompted by John Cage: “if you can stand it for two minutes, try it for four.” In Film About A Woman Who…, there’s a long, slow tracking shot that seems interminable to me now. If I’m ever in an audience when it’s projected, I stay just to see when people will walk out! (Laughs) Sometimes the aesthetic adhered to more conventional standards, and then other times it was subject to disruption — the radical juxtaposition I mentioned earlier. If there’s any hard and fast rule, I guess it’s that one. Which I have continued to do throughout my film career.

From Kristina Talking Pictures (1976) (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

SM: If that shot took an eternity in 1972, it can only be more radical now: everything’s faster, shorter, louder, more saturated.

YR: There’s a scene in Jean Vigo’s Zero For Conduct where a boy has to stay after school, alone, in the classroom as punishment. He’s there for quite a while — fiddling his feet or his hands — and we have to stay with him. It’s far longer than you would expect in a film, then or today — and for Lives I took that and ran with it, when Valda Setterfield is sitting on the couch. There’s a cat beside her. She’s facing the camera, her back is against the wall. I let her go long twitching her feet — that was fascinating to me. It’s almost like a photograph. So yeah, I was very interested in what one could get away with. I didn’t feel I was violating any traditional narrative rules. The point was: What minimum of movement could keep you, or me, interested, at that particular moment? The end tableaux all had an exact duration of 15 seconds, something like that, timed with a stopwatch. At the end of each shot, the movement comes and you cut to the still. Like a metronome. And “No Expectations” came in exactly two thirds of the way through.

SM: And before that sequence, you see them rehearsing together one last time. The room empties out and there’s one last intertitle: “Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint. Something is expected of the other person and that makes him (and ourselves) unfree.”

YR: That’s Jung. I always felt other people could say things more accurately than I could (laughs). Now, since I’ve returned to dance, quotation is almost entirely what I utilize. It’s enabled me to come back to choreography; I no longer dance so much as I read. So there’s a continuity from the way I use language in film to the way I use it now, the kind of radical juxtaposition, to choreographic images. That itself is a quotation from Susan Sontag — films are full of radical juxtapositions — language, enactment, imagery.

From Mind Is a Muscle (1963)

SM: Is that something you’ve taken from filmmaking and put back into choreography?

YR: I made seven films, from 1972 to 1996, mainly through grants. Each doubled or tripled in cost, ranging from five to 10 thousand dollars in the early ’70s to $250,000 for MURDER and murder… I wasn’t about to make compromises in making more accessible kinds of work. I still wanted to make narrative films, and I could no longer raise the money.

And I was never very comfortable as a filmmaker; I loved the writing and editing, but the production, with the hierarchy, there was never enough money, and post-production… It was a nightmare to deal with laboratories where things were always going wrong and I didn’t have the money to reshoot. My work wasn’t very polished technically. I was, am, and will continue to be a techno-dummy! So I always knew there was a limited time I could do this. The economics of it create a preordained ending. I had my fill of the technical complications of filmmaking.

I remember arguments with Babette Mangolte, who taught me all about editing and was camerawoman on my first two-and-a-half films. She said, “You’ve done this twice, don’t do it again!” Sometimes I listened, sometimes I didn’t. Peter Wollen always used to say: “They let you make five.” Well, they, whoever they were, the powers that be, let me make seven. And I felt very lucky. But in a way I was very happy returning to dance. I never did my own camerawork, that’s part of my technical inaptitude.

I was always overly dependent on other people. As a choreographer I can relate to the dancers, I can feel more comfortable — to me it’s a much more direct situation in terms of creating something.

From Lives of Performers (1972) (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

SM: Lives of Performers struck me as this quintessentially collaborative, 1960s effort. Then I looked at your book of screenplays, published in 1989, and realized how meticulously your work is written ahead of time.

YR: But Lives was different from all my other films. In the few places where it might seem to be in sync, the speech was dubbed. This process entailed making a rough cut without sound, letting the performers all look at it, and then recording their responses — laughing, commenting. I also assigned them various instructions in this kind of makeshift script: read this. Paraphrase this. So you’re hearing variations in the way they speak. And I was still dancing then. I had a performance at the Whitney: one side of the space I projected a rough cut without sound, while the performers sat in front and read their lines, while other live performers did the same things that you saw in the projected images. I never made anything like that again. The scripts were much more detailed and better adhered-to than that one. So now I am very fond of Lives — it has a kind of impromptu, ad hoc aspect I never tried to duplicate again.

SM: The first film of yours I saw was The Man Who Envied Women.

YR: Where the main character, Jack Deller — as in, “Jack, Tell Her” — is played by two different actors.

SM: Tell me about shooting the lecture scene, wherein Jack (or the two Jacks, as it were) are lecturing on Foucault and Lacan. The camera slowly wraps around the lectern, back to the audience, past the audience, into the other rooms of the apartment… Students are splaying light on them as they ask questions, the audio tracks are blending, the dynamics are all out of whack, untenable.

YR: Oh, the impossible lecture scene. That came verbatim from my friend, the philosopher Thomas Zummer, who had been a disciple of Foucault. I just put his lecture in the mouths of the two actors in front of this very bored classroom, and ran with it. A funny scene, but in hindsight I’m critical of it. Not for the lecture, but because it was in a huge, newly renovated loft I was borrowing from an artist, who hadn’t moved in yet. One of the themes of that film is artists buying abandoned tenements in the Lower East Side. We move from the lecture space to this empty, new kitchen area, and then this glass, brick wall, into the bathroom… I was exploring these icons of real estate development in lower Manhattan. But I don’t think that’s clear enough. If I were to do it again I would put a big banner on the wall: “MOVE UP TO DOWNTOWN.” I saw that banner traveling in Seattle — the real estate agents were encouraging people to buy these newly developed co-ops.

From The Man Who Envied Women (1985) (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

SM: You use yet another framing device when Jack sits and talks about his sex life, and scenes from Hollywood movies from his generation’s childhood are playing behind him. There’s a lot of choreography in that, too.

YR: Well, these are film noirs — all films about women either putting themselves down or being put down, condescended to, by men. Even after Barbara Stanwyck finally shoots Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, she’s apologizing for it! I was very influenced by my becoming conscious of the role women play in patriarchy. All those films behind Jack reflect that.

I was trying to deal with different power relations — the power of the community in the Lower East Side, to shoot down the city’s attempts at making money off of middle-class artists, selling them property, and then the other events going on at that time.

SM: The film also uses Jack’s milieu to interrogate artist communities during the Reagan Administration — there’s a through-line about death squads in Central America, and the ineffectiveness of artists, of “high culture” at large, in standing against something like that. Were you at a point of frustration?

YR: Oh. I never expected my work to change the world in any way. The best I can ask of anything I do is that it gives support and encouragement to like-minded people. Certainly I don’t rule out art’s possibility to intervene, especially in the situation we’re in now. We have to keep making moves against this appalling presidency — I’m signing six petitions a day! Artists have to stay awake, and not belittle small moves. You have to try, to join with other people and get resistance into your work, whatever way you can — even in dance (laughs). I still find that harder to do.

SM: What’s harder?

YR: I’m interested in movements and by moving people around, but it’s still restricted by the norms and history of choreography. Again: language is where I can still make inroads and make allusions to a larger world. I love to switch gears, to keep you guessing, pulling them in and then pushing them away — a Brechtian device. You so easily lose yourself in narrative conventions, the shot-reverse shot; even in the later films, I always try to break that up. And wake you up, so to speak.

SM: Your work is always self-aware in the sense that it shows how film images lie.

YR: Language lies, but there’s a lot of irony to the language I use. Outright description, commentary, etcetera. When quotations are being juxtaposed to the dancers, it’s interrupting what happens on stage. If I were still making films I would probably present this Ghosh quote in a rolling title. I don’t know what the image would be around/before/after it, but you know — sometimes I would have someone read it, or…. But I would get this message out, somehow.

SM: It’s hard not to think of your “No Manifesto” (1965), which included: “No to the glamor and transcendency of the star image”; “No to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer”; and “No to moving or being moved.” Your filmmaking was never about pretty pictures. To you, what is the value of beauty today?

From Film About A Woman Who… (1974) (courtesy Zeitgeist Films)

YR: I’m as susceptible to beauty as the next person. A little bit goes a long way, maybe? I just saw The Beguiled, with Kirsten Dunst and Nicole Kidman. The way Sofia Coppola cuts away to these southern, misty, cobwebby, moss-ridden landscapes over and and over again — well, I thought she overdid it a bit. But, it’s not my aesthetic. It is surprising though, how that male character who seems so seductive and sympathetic in the beginning, all of a sudden he becomes a monster — and I’m such a realist or a literalist, you know, I don’t believe Kidman’s character character would have the expertise to cut off his leg without him dying of sepsis. I found that very unlikely. But that’s what conventional films do: they condense what might be a much longer narrative and you have to go along with it. The devices do draw you in, but I like fewer and fewer movies being made today.

One film I saw recently which excited me was Streetscapes by the German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz. It was an ambitious and captivating survey of his obsessions and personal history with architecture and film. I’m still processing it.

Film noir was wonderful for me — on TV I would sit and binge every afternoon; around 3 o’clock, they were showing film noirs. And before that, in San Francisco, my father, who was trilingual, would take me to see French and Italian art movies. Those were the days! But when you’re younger you’re much more susceptible to those kinds of things — then you undergo a kind of stiffening that prevents you from enjoying what younger people enjoy. After all, I’m 82 years old — I can’t expect to enjoy what a 20-year-old is inspired by.

Talking Pictures: The Cinema of Yvonne Rainer is at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (70 Lincoln Center Plaza #7, Upper West Side, Manhattan) July 21–27.

The post Yvonne Rainer on How Filmmaking Gave Her Language appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2uhAStx via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Hyperallergic

0 notes