LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Thursday, October 24, 2013

'Gravity' (2013) directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Thursday, October 24, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Fuck outer space.  Seriously.  Up until I sat down to this film I was envious as hell of astronauts; brave men and women who get to spend their days bobbing around, conducting cutting edge research while enjoying the view of a lifetime.  But after about half an hour of Gravity?  Space travel? Yeah, cheers but no thank you.  Cuarón has taught me an important lesson: outer space is a lonely void where horrible death can come out of the blue at any moment, where every single second of survival is to be fought for and they were so right when they said that no-one can hear you scream.

This terrifying environment is the backdrop for an impossibly tense survival film. Astronauts marooned in space with no hope of rescue,  oxygen depleting, desperately trying to get back to earth. There are only two real characters in the film: Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney). From the first to the last shot we spend the entire film with Bullock's Ryan Stone, the audience experiencing her every moment of panic, disorientation and terror.

Bullock knocks it out of the park, creating a complex, detailed character that believably runs through the entire emotional gamut.  It's difficult to think of many contemporary women actors that could pull off the competent 'everywoman' quality that Bullock brings to the character of Ryan Stone, a woman whose intelligence and skill we respect while at the same time utterly empathising with her when she doesn't know what to do.  If she doesn't get a barrow-load of awards for this it'll be a sin.

Performances and plot aside, just in terms of pure cinematic 'wow', Gravity is an experience unlike anything else I've seen.  Cuarón is justifiably famous for his long takes, but new technology and this subject matter grant him infinite room and a virtual camera that can go wherever he likes.  The first shot of the film lasts 17 minutes, the camera moving from wide shots to close-ups of the actors, tumbling freely around an environment where there is no 'up', giving us in the audience a faint, yet exhilarating, simulation of weightlessness.  In a bravura moment, the camera pans from outer space, through the glass of an astronaut's helmet and seamlessly slides into a first person view, then back out into space (with attendant changes in ambient sound).  The effect of this impressive technology is intensified by the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki (Terrence Malick's go-to D.O.P) who creates images of such terrible beauty that they arguably surmount the abstract awe of Kubrick's 2001.  And that is high praise indeed.

This is also one of the vanishingly small group of films you really should go and see in 3D. The technology is used to create depth in the frame, crucial in a film where distance and the way objects move in 3D is so important.  In the first person 'in-helmet' shots the effect is so gripping that, slightly embarrassing for me, I was so caught up in the scene that I automatically put my hand into the air to grab at a handle floating past.  

What I'm saying is that you should go and see Gravity.  This film is a goddamn masterpiece of cinema: a perfect marriage of artistry, technology, philosophy and nail-biting action.  Not only go and see it, but see it in 3D on as big a screen as you can possibly find.  The idea of watching this on a television at home makes me cringe, so go and see it. Alfonso Cuarón occupies a table among the very, very top-flight of modern directors now, and hopefully the success of this film will let him continue to create these wonderful, wonderful films.  To sum up if you haven't got this through your thick head yet:  GRAVITY:  IT'S  FUCKING A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

Now I want to talk about the film as a whole, so if you haven't seen it yet (why haven't you seen it yet?!) don't read below the next picture.


Gravity is on general release from November 7

★★★★★

Right, first things first: Gravity isn't about space.  Sure it's set in space and has all the trappings of a space action film, but it's really supremely unconcerned about the scientific potential or physics of space travel.  Instead, this is a deeply layered film about spiritual awakening, how life is a constant, vicious battle against a death-trap universe.  It ends up as a guide to dealing with all the horrible shit that life throws at you.

We learn that Ryan Stone is a deeply unhappy woman fairly early on in the film.  Her young daughter died in a freak accident: tripping in the schoolyard and hitting her head awkwardly. She's numb, tortured and deeply depressed - buffeted by chance, enduring whatever slings and arrows are thrown at her. Underlining the atmosphere of depression is Stone constantly seeing safe environments violently torn to shreds in front of her and her physical connections between people severed.  Outer space thus becomes an externalisation of her numbness, a vast blank suffocating nothing: the ultimate silence. The image of a person, floating helplessly into infinity, an insignificant white dot being swallowed by inky blackness is chilling in its simplicity and horrifying in its implications.  

So how can does she get over this?  It's Clooney's Kowalski that points her in the right direction, both in a literal and spiritual sense.  Whereas Stone feels like an interloper in space, Kowalski is totally at home, cool, calm and collected even in the face of pants-shitting disaster. This is his last scheduled mission and though he's jokey and genial you realise that there's not much down there for him on Earth.  When he sacrifices his life to save Stone we begin to put the pieces together of what the film is telling us.  Dully trudging through life is a living death, what matters is self-actualisation: making your own choices and making them count.  In the act of untethering himself he lays it all out for Stone - let go - let go of him, let go of the grief, let go of the self-loathing, let go of your guilt about your daughter.  His last words as he floats serenely away are “You should see the sun shining on the Ganges. It's amazing...". The Ganges is of course the most important river in Hinduism, a symbol of death and rebirth.  Orbiting the earth, Kowalski thus accepts his participation and place in Samsāra - the great wheel of life.

That said, it's important not to mistake Gravity's spirituality as promoting of a particular religion.  Though the film is stuffed full of religious symbols; Buddha; Jesus; and an orthodox icon of St. Christopher, equal credence is given to each, organised religion merely a symptom of spiritual ideology rather than and endpoint. As a neat aside, though the environments are filled with clutter floating in microgravity all the religious totems are firmly secured to surfaces, impressing their permanence upon us. Perhaps the most omnipresent religious element is Stone's constant commentary to "Houston in the blind", Kowalski assures her that it's important she keep talking on the radio because even if they're not there, someone might be listening. That she keeps this up through the entire film makes her later remark that no-one ever taught her how to pray slightly ironic. 

This radio chatter also marks the moment she starts developing into someone that can survive this shitty situation.  Earlier in the film she explains that she spends a lot of time driving back home with the radio on, listening to any music and avoiding hearing people talking. Compare this to later in the film, where she's desperately sending out her own voice over the airwaves and collapsing with uncontrollable emotion when she finally hears someone, anyone talk. When she makes contact with an Inuit nomad, she hears dogs barking in the background and is dragged back from the state of living death she's been in for the entire film, embracing an all-life - ecstatically barking along with the dogs.

So, Stone has realised the importance of life, and finally on some level understood the connection between all living things.  Unfortunately for her she's still freezing to death in a space capsule with no fuel.  It's at this point that Kowalski returns, but of course, it isn't Kowalski.  This friendly spirit is a manifestation of Stone's will to survive and the fact that she can create this illusion wholecloth indicates that she's matched his state of enlightenment. Like a bodhisattva the path she must now take is clear as day, she solves her problems and with precise, confident movements makes her way to the final Shenzhou escape pod.  From this point rather than 'surviving' she's 'living'.

Within Shenzhou (Chinese for "Divine Vessel of God") she plunges into the atmosphere, purifying flames licking around her.  She sits secure in the knowledge that she's done all she can possibly to do to survive and, bathed in bright light, trusts herself to fate.  As triumphal music plays she soars through the sky: a shooting star burning a trail through the heavens - humanity transformed into divinity.

As she lands she undergoes a universal rebirth.  The film up this point as been jam-packed full of birth imagery, umbilical cords everywhere, foetal position posing and constant bursting in and out of tight passages.  As water rushes into her capsule she undergoes a final, ultimate 'all-birth'.  With stunning economy, Cuarón places a single human existence within the grand tapestry of evolution.  As she thrashes out of her heavy space-suit a fish swims past, then a frog.  Kicking up towards the surface she swims to a muddy shore, crawling out of a primordial sea like the first creature venturing onto land, and finally defying gravity by standing on her own two feet. Stone's spiritual transformation comes not from a particular religious awakening, not even from a uniquely human happiness - but from grasping a simple pleasure in 'being'.  

Life is fragile, unlikely and dangerous - the simple fact of your existence in the first place hinges on one sperm cell amongst hundreds of millions of competitors winning a race.  The deck is stacked against you from minute one.  The world will throw a million catastrophes at you at once, death is hiding behind every corner and yeah, we actually are floating in an endless inky black void - but that don't mean you gotta be glum, son.  Change what you can and accept what you can't.  Don't be afraid to live and don't be afraid to die.

Gravity is a masterpiece.  It's certainly one of the finest experiences I've had in a cinema to date.  I'm sure as sure can be that there's much more to meaning to mine from this film and boy you'd better believe I'm going to see it on IMAX as soon and as often as I reasonably can!

Friday, October 26, 2012

The Sensual Universe – Sound – “Harmony in the Universe” by Jean-Phillipe Uzan, 25th October 2012

Friday, October 26, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

In space no-one can hear you scream.  Or anything else for that matter.  So how do you give a lecture examining sound in space?  I found out last night at the latest ‘Sensual Universe’ lecture at Imperial College London, a public lecture series which takes the five senses of the human body as its starting point.  Every single one of these lectures so far as been fascinating, and also somewhat intimidating.  Astronomy and astrophysics are a bit outside of my area of expertise, but nonetheless each and every speaker so far as presented their subject clearly, entertainingly and compellingly.  Previously in the series I’ve see Dr Saralyn Mark on the subject of ‘Sex in Space’, and Dr Subhanjoy Mohanty on ‘Beer in Space’, covering touch and taste respectively.

Tonight’s speaker was Prof Jean-Phillipe Uzan, a French cosmologist and director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris.  He works in theoretical physics, studying the makeup of cosmology at the very beginning of the universe, in particular cosmic background microwave radiation, the topology of the universe, scalar tensor theories and alternatives to general relativity as well as writing six books and hundreds of scientific papers.  As far as cosmologists go he comes across as someone dedicated to making science understandable to the general public.  To this end he’s written two children’s books, and made it a mission to explain cosmos to the public through music and art.

Prof. Jean-Phillipe Uzan

It’s the meeting point between science and art that’s the focus of Uzan’s lecture.  The two can sometimes seem impossibly at odds with each other; art being almost entirely subjective and science ideally being objective.  But when it comes to demonstrating how the universe works, scientists either turn to or become artists to best communicate their ideas and discoveries.  Conversely, many artists find inspiration in the poetry of the cosmos or appreciate the similarities between pure mathematics and music. 

Uzan begins by explaining that to perceive the universe, humanity needs to “find new eyes”.  Sight is perhaps our primary tool for understanding the universe, but when it comes to viewing space, it can only show us a small part of the picture.  Much of astronomy involves observing the universe through different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays, though x-rays all the way through ultraviolet, microwaves and radio waves.  Stars in particular emit vast amounts of electromagnetic waves through the entire spectrum.  Uzan shows us a picture of the Sun viewed at different frequencies to illustrate how we might perceive our sun if our eyes were attuned to, say, the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum.

The sun as seen from across the electromagnetic spectrum.

So, if our perceptions of the cosmos are artificially filtered, if the public image of space is constructed of computer coloured and edited photographs, then why not try and understand it through another of our senses?  What is unscientific about translating the grandeur of the universe into sound and music?

Uzan begins by giving us a quick outline of the relationship between musical theory, mathematics and astronomy.  He tells us the story how Pythagoras came to understand the principles of musical theory and developed the idea of integers in musical notation.  Now, a lot of this went over my head, especially as I am rubbish at both musical theory and mathematics.  But this was an  important foundation for understanding where this lecture was going, Uzan used Pythagoras as a launch pad to explain the history of harmonics, and how scientists have historically attempted to translate the movements of the solar system to musical notation. 

We touched upon Johannes Kepler and his quest to discover organising principles of harmony in the movement of planets within the solar system.  Throughout his career, Kepler fruitlessly tried to correlate the movements of the planets with the concept of nested solids.  Eventually he produced a series of notated “planetary songs”, of which Uzan played some portions of for us.  This is perhaps the first historical example of a scientist accurately translating real cosmological observations of the universe into music, and completed the Keplerian Laws of Planetary Motion, which formed a solid foundation for future scientists, notably Isaac Newton, to work upon.

Kepler's Planetary Songs

Uzan next moves onto describing the concept of natural musical instruments.  The example we’re most directly familiar with is the sound of thunder caused by lightning, but here we some examples that we might not have considered before.  I hadn’t realised, for example, that aurora borealis causes mysterious sounds that scientists are yet to fully explain.  There are many folk tales that describe distant noises, thumps and crackles that accompany the northern lights.  As aurora borealis is the solar wind impacting upon the earth’s atmosphere, and, as a result (and if you’re feeling poetic), these sounds could quite appropriately be described as the sun ‘singing’ to the earth.  More prosaically we also hear sounds recorded from with sand dunes, complete with someone ‘playing’ the dune like a musical instrument.  These sound weirdly organic, footsteps on a beach sound remarkably like a dog barking, and a person sensually rubbing their hands into the sand elicits bizarrely sexy moans and sighs from the dune.

This process of transmuting something into sound is further explored in the next section of the talk, when Uzan looks closely at artists that have attempted to answer questions like “Can we see sounds?” and “Can we listen to colours?”  Uzan shows us the work of Charles Blanc-Gatti, whose paintings of music supposedly influenced Walt Disney in the production of ‘Fantasia’ and Paul Klee, who aims to translate the musical theory into a single image. We see musical instruments constructed that create paintings as they’re played.  All of this proves Dr Uzan’s simple point, the process of translation between mediums, from sound to light, or light to sound allows us to view the world around us from a fresh perspective, with all the attendant benefits.

L'Orchestra - Charles Blanc-Gatti

This process is fun and interesting, but does it have any practical benefit in increasing our knowledge of the universe?  We’re played a recording of the Vela Pulsar, which rotates about 11 times a seconds.  We can appreciate the frequency to some degree just by viewing a waveform of the signal emitted by the star, but it’s only when we actually hear it that we can get a real handle on how it behaves.   It sounds frantic, but is also disarmingly regular.  The recording played reminded me of morse code – an SOS message from the debris of a massive star that exploded 10,000 years ago.  We’re also given a brief overview of the science of asteroseismology, which Uzan describes as hearing stars “beating like drums”.  These sounds allow us to study the internal structure of the stars.  We heard the distant thrum of Xi Hydrae and HR3831.

These recordings from across the universe are the basis for a number of interesting compositions by various musicians.   The example played for us was 'Stellar Music No. 1' by Jeno Keiler and Zoltan Kollath (as heard in the video below).  

Signals from across the cosmos like these have provided inspiration for various musicians throughout the 20^th century.  Some of these pieces, like Philip Glass' 'Orion' are maybe a touch subjective using astronomical data as more of an inspiration, an artistic component of a wider statement rather than something intrinsic to the structure.  On the other hand, there are composers who attempt to directly translate data into music, like John Cage's 'Atlas Eclipticalis'.  This uses as a score an atlas of the stars, with musical notes superimposed over the stellar bodies.  The brightness of the stars is directly translated into the size of the notes in the composition.  As such, it's theoretically possible to imagine this piece as containing the same information as the visual star chart itself.  

If we can listen to star charts, what else can we listen to?  Uzan mentions people creating music from theoretical physics, translating the Higgs Boson in music.  He points out that current theory says that subatomic particle vibrates, and these vibrations can be directly translated to music.  Every visualisation of these particles other than as mathematical formula is an artistic interpretation.  Why instead of confusing diagrams of something that can't really be drawn can't we hear them instead?  

Lady Gaga is probably working on it right now.

At the beginning of this lecture I had thought we lived in a vast, silent and lifeless universe.  What Uzan has demonstrated is that the universe sings to us with an infinite choir.  Our limited human perceptions may not be able to perceive all of these voices, but the cosmos is filled with music, from the pounding pulse of a star's heartbeat to the tiniest trill of the subatomic particle.  So if we're the audience of so much celestial music, what are we giving back?  Well, our radio waves are propagating out into to space, but perhaps more immediately concrete is the Voyager gold record "Sounds of Earth".  This contains a playlist of music that scientists thought put humanity's best foot forward to any extraterrestrial species that might come across it.  You can listen to the full playlist here, and it's comforting that somewhere out, far out in the emptiness of the interstellar void travels Voyager 1 & 2, charting a lonely course away from home.  Affixed to the side is a record containing this:

Those aliens are gonna think we're so cool.

I'm really enjoying this lecture series, and I can't wait for the next one on 'Light', which will take place in January.  My only complaint is that they're not coming fast enough!  It's been 5 months since 'Taste' and after this I'm itching for more!

(If I've ballsed up any of the science here let me know in the comments or email me and I'll correct it.)