Spring Break with Jambalaya and Friends and Why I Love Faces (and Portraits!)

What’s the best feature of the photograph? Portraits! Photos capture faces. And I’ve appreciated faces lately — especially during this recent Spring Break-cum-Easter time and so on.

I made jambalaya and fed it to a few friends to
celebrate that we're all vaccinated and can now
officially hang out together (and of course, that does
not mean we are lax with social distancing and mask-wearing). 

As vaccinations against Covid-19 are more widely distributed, people are congregating with each other to celebrate. While mask-wearing and general social

In Diversity Plaza in Queens
on a Spring Day

distancing guidelines are still in place, being vaccinated means I can hang out with folks I haven’t been with since March of last year. I saw my friend Michelle and her family, and I made jambalaya for a group of teacher-friends. By the way — the jambalaya was lit 🔥.

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Cinema as Portraiture in Dovzhenko's Zvenigora and the Ukraine Trilogy

Anthology Film Archives in New York City is a fabulous place to watch movies. I try to go to their ongoing "Essential Film" screenings — of movies that have been curated from their vault and deemed important to the history of cinema. Just the other day I went to see Alexander Dovzhenko's Ukraine Trilogy — well, at least two films from that set: Zvenigora and Arsenal.
The movies are haunting, disturbing, and beautiful. They're also hard to follow if Russian is not your native language — so I recommend you snag a copy of the synopsis before watching it. The opening scene of the trilogy, Zvenigora, is a hallucinatory, slow-motion shot of men on horseback moving across the screen. Perhaps today it is not a significant effect that a filmmaker would use slow-motion — it is easy enough to do on an iPhone! But seeing it on the silver screen — and in such a glorious presentation — I fell in love with cinema's basic ability to simulate motion. Movies simulate motion by projecting a series of individual images on the screen at a rapid rate. If you take a look at a movie reel you can see each individual frame. Each frame is essentially a photographic image. Now, of course, movies made today, for the most part, are filmed on digital cameras so looking at a movie reel is not possible — but the idea is similar. Thousands of images strung together in a line. Each one is slightly different from the next. Have you ever played with a flipbook — that is what it is like. Most movies are intended to make you forget that what you are seeing on the screen is a series of spliced together individual photographs. But Alexander Dovzhenko's movies, particularly his Ukraine Trilogy, made me aware of the cinema as a series of individual photos. Dovzhenko was a Soviet filmmaker. He made Zvenigora in 1928 — and on the surface, it tells a story about the relationship between Ukraine and Russia, and between technology and nature, superstition and belief, protest and allegiance, father and son. It's a propaganda film. But Dovzhenko was able to use those limitations to make something really incredible. I am not going to dwell too much on the narrative aspects of the film; rather, I want to focus on one aspect of the movie that struck me. The movie has a series of long shots that feature figures of people. Not exactly close-ups but more like photographs — but in a movie.

Creating the On-Screen Cinematic Portrait
Not all of the movies' shots are slow and extended — actually, the movie combines lots of different cinematic effects, close editing, shots looking up at a person from below, to give the effect of being dominated — images layered on another to create dream sequences and quite a few action shots.

Also, the movie plays with parallel images — a mother beating her son contrasted with scenes from war. And there are quite a few close-ups — in one sequence a man is gassed, reminiscent of the trench warfare that plagued the first World War (which is the movie's thematic launching point). For several takes, we see his garish expression, his horror, and his elongated response to the visceral horror of biological warfare. Dovzhenko’s faces reminded me of Carl Dreyer's faces of Joan in the movie The Passion of Joan of Arc — but not as intense a close-up. What I call portraits shots in the Ukraine Trilogy last about five to six seconds — so they are long enough to notice the figure in the frame. And in these shots the figures do not move much, but rather, they stand as if posing for a portrait. I don't think I have ever seen a movie capture portraiture in a moving image quite as Dovzhenko does in Zvenigora.

Nor has a movie made me stop and reflect on the photographic nature of cinema — especially in its early days. By definition, a portrait is a still image. Portraits were done by painters, often of important people, or commissioned by patrons — such as the portraits one can see in a place like The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Or if you were to look through a family's photo album. The characters in Dovshenko's movie are portraits of peasants. They are portraits of soldiers. Of villagers. Of the proletariat. Of a mother and child. Of father and son. I am not sure how Dvoshenko arranged for his casting; but, I would not be surprised if he just took people off the street and filmed them — the movie, despite its flights of fantastic fantasy - has an air of the documentary to it. As if I were perusing the photographs of an anthropologist's field study. The figures in the film are costumed in folk dress; often mustached or bearded, for the men, and dressed in traditional thick woven garments for the women. Some of the facial expressions are exaggerated — for effect. The horror of war. The anger and jeer of a crowd. A startled glance. A loving look. A man without a nose.  It's all there. But the more striking portraits are the ones of just looking on, of reflection. I imagine in the age of the GIF I could take any one of Dvoshenko's portraits, pluck it out of the film and make a five-second animated photograph. Or, I could pluck out some of the portraits (in the few I selected for this post one can hopefully see what I mean).

Aesthetic Thursday: Two Handsome Models Read Books Together

Two models seated side by side read books in silence. Ain't that amazing?!

Charlie France, Models Reading

The model on the left is reading a Terry Pratchett novel Pyramids but I cannot make out the title of the book the model on the right is reading, but I am positive this photograph is not intended for a public library's reading advocacy program. It's pretty boys reading. And I am totally fine with that arrangement.

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Photograph: I Love NYC

Fast cars and adorable group shots — I love 'em all.

Fast Cars, Manhattan, "I Love NYC"

Walking on busy Manhattan streets, especially streets lower than Fourteenth Street, it is easy to spot classy, fast cars. I have no idea the make and model of the one above, but I love this meta-moment of capturing other people being captured in front of a car. And I love love love the boy wearing the iconic I heart ❤️ NYC tee.

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image credit: Greig Roselli

Aesthetic Thursdays: Two Versions of Judith Slaying Holofernes

Judith Slaying Holofernes
Judith is a hero of late Jewish antiquity who slew the Assyrian dictator Holofernes, by first seducing him, then decapitating him while he slept. Check out these two very different artistic representations. What do you notice?

⬆️ Artemisia's version in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy

⬆️ Caravaggio's version in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome

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Family Photo: Brother Brother

In this post, I share a photograph of my younger brother and me.

My brother Nick and I chillin' in New Orleans

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Photo: A Portrait by Casey

A family member took this photo of me when I was younger (c. the 1990s). Maybe I was ten years old? I still have the photograph. So here is a copy of it (after it went through the scanner).

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Opinion Poll: Do Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and Virginia Woolf Look Alike?

For all you Virginia Woolf fans out there, here is a nice picture of her in youth. And then there is a photograph of Thérèse of Lisieux, the Catholic Carmelite saint. Am I the only person who thinks Woolf has an uncanny resemblance to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux?

Photograph of Virginia Woolf as a Child

Thérèse of Lisieux dressed up as Joan of Arc

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Photographs: "Eugene, OR"

Eugene, OR
In this post, I showcase photographs of people I know and not know from Eugene, Oregon.

Phoenix's Kids

Ruy Hiding

Chagamland

Crystal Falls

Water Lily

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