Little Running Bear

I don’t care how big a filmbuff you think you are, if you’re not catching up with Marc Fennel’s new blog about all the film coverage he’s doing on various media, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

One of the things I really like about it, other than its reminding me of the excitement of discovering these film-related ideas for the first time, is that it lets me rediscover some of these things.

In his radio and TV spots (which I download through the podcasts because I don’t listen to the radio or watch TV on a Saturday morning anymore), he talks about the trends in film now and how they’ve come to be. Sure he reviews recent releases but he does a lot more than that, too. He seems to be doing to film what the Channel 9 commentary team did for cricket in the 1980s.

I mention all of this because I was watching his one of his recent TV spots (which I’ve conveniently included below) and in all this talking about shaky camera-work and the way it’s currently he used to distract us from poor writing, he also goes back to de Sica and Bicycle Thieves from 1948.

A long time has passed since I last saw Bicycle Thieves and when I first saw it I was concentrating too much on the low-fidelity sound and the dodgy print that the cinema got its hands on. I could tell it was an emotional story but I was distracted somewhat and not sufficiently concentrating on how the director was putting his story across.

In this tiny clip I saw everything I needed to get me excited about good film again. Yes, I have strayed but mostly because I struggled to find the wonder. But in the clip Marc’s chosen, where the father loses his bicycle and only form of income, everything that needs to be said comes across in the actor’s face. He goes through the phases in about 4 seconds from “hey, that guy stole my bike” to “how am I going to support my family”.

We see enough of the thief himself to know what’s going on, but the story is told in the father’s face. It’s in his reaction and the subsequent choices he makes. In that tiny moment we are given a glimpse into this man’s future and none of us like what we see. It’s a beautiful film moment.

It’s the emotion that tells a good story. It’s the story-teller’s job to strip away all the artifice, all the distractions, and give us the emotion.

For more on directors working closely with actors on portraying the minutia of emotion, listen to John Malkovich on The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell.

For now, please to enjoy Marc Fennel telling it like it is about film.

I used to work at a company that tried to block everything. Our arm of the company was a web-application creation so you can understand our need to communicate with the outside world. It was important to be able to read blogs, access Facebook, IM our peers, and access whatever new web-based stuff came up.

As new things came up, became popular and were subsequently identified in the mainstream media as “time wasters”, the message came down from on-high that it had to be blocked.

I also once worked for an institution that had its own email system and wanted to force all involved to use only that email system. So they blocked as many webmail clients as they could. Nothing else was blocked. Just email. When someone tried to access Gmail, for example, they saw a notice telling them to use the email account given to them by the institution. They were also, quite unhelpfully, told to give all their friends that email address. Unhelpful because they couldn’t access their accounts to download address books.

All of these things say to me that there are people, people in authoritative positions who don’t understand the nature of the internet. They just don’t understand the freedom we’ve been given and subsequently don’t understand the anger we feel at having these freedoms taken away from us.

A business that does not create an atmosphere of trust amongst their staff is actually encouraging staff to find their way around these problems. Really. There will be backlash.

Businesses are in the fairly unique position of being able to choose who becomes part of their organisation. They select their staff. They vet them. If staff members aren’t doing their work then they need to look at the cause of the problem. Checking Facebook several times a day is a symptom of a bigger problem. An employee who is challenged, encouraged and excited by their job will complete work before taking on something extra-occupational.

Adults do not want to be treated like children. The removal of freedoms is the mark of despotism but a good business should be more like a hierarchical community.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about mindfulness. The ability to be aware at all times of what one is doing and why means that the work we do is more efficient, the fun we have is more worthwhile, let the good times roll and may the bad ones keep their distance.

That’s the plan, anyway. It doesn’t always happen like that and often I forget myself and let myself go. The mindfulness I’m talking about requires a lot of energy in vigilance to start with, but the idea is that it just becomes habit.

Mindfulness also means sometimes having to throw caution to the wind and making a quick decision because to debate the pros and cons will create a chasm between the action and its effectiveness.

So with that in mind, I realised today that the enemy of mindfulness is not the chaotic nature of acting without thinking, but small-mindedness instead.

Small-mindedness is the inability to see potential and a fear that deviating from the status quo will only lead to peril. It is a surrender to an idea that because we do something one way, flawed though it may be, it’s better than the unknown future provided by the alternative.

The adage of “better the devil you know” is a perfect example of small-mindedness. It seems like such a good idea but in the long run you will find yourself stuck.

Mindfulness requires confrontation on occasion. Decision-making is a form of confrontation. Passive-aggression is small-minded, petty and downright unattractive.

These are just some thoughts that have been running around in my head. Make of them what you will.

So I decided to upgrade my wordpress installation at about a quarter to midnight. Why? Because of my phone of course.

Of the things I’ve always thought were always holding me back from writing more, the inability to update my blog from my phone was well up there. It really was. I am really that deluded.

Somewhere I know that this new found convenience is not really going to make me write more often but wordpress has an app for the iPhone and when I saw that I thought “yes, at long last I can do what I’ve always wanted”.

Is it really what I’ve always wanted? Of course not. I use these things as a distraction.

Procrastination comes in many forms, my friends. This is just one of them.