Yasmin Ahmad, Malaysian director of such films as Sepet (2004) and Mukshin (2007), died recently and suddenly. She seems to have been described variously and ‘controversial’ and ’sentimental’, but this seems to be because she told Malaysian stories with characters reaching beyond the usual categories of race and culture. I’ve not seen all her films, but to know there will be no more is stark and sad.

[image: James Lee, 'Yasmin Ahmad – filmmaker. Sepetang, Perak 13th October 2005']

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You can get a sense of her voice by reading her blogs, The Storyteller and The Storyteller Pt 2.

There are also a couple of interviews available as podcasts from The Centre for South East Asian Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, which you can also find by searching for ‘Yasmin Ahmad’ on iTunes.

Talking with some friends on the weekend, we all agreed on how annoyed we get when a novel that has been adapted to film is reissued with a new cover to match the movie poster. Often great cover design simply vanishes and is replaced with an image that looks suspiciously like the last movie, and the one before that. Coincidentally, Chris Cagle on his blog Category D has a recent post where he notes this sameness with movie posters. He makes the point that genre needs to be communicated quickly and efficiently, and, like genre cinema itself, the posters need a balance between repetition and originality.

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[book covers from LibraryThing]

These two examples above are of books whose movie adaptations are marketed as dramas with very similar tie-in covers. The Atonement movie cover (note McEwan’s original title) also has a variation with the characters reversed. It’s graphic design by the numbers which suggests a similarity between the films that’s not as close as it seems. And how evocative the original covers are! The French edition of Bauby’s book speaks of isolation and a small small hope, while the English one, with the size and shape of the typeface, suggests the dominance of Bauby’s isolation from locked-in syndrome (the diving-bell) alongside his persistence in imagining himself beyond it (the butterfly). Both have hand-drawn typefaces, a visual analogue to the painstaking process of constructing sentences blink-by-blink, letter-by-letter, that Bauby adopts.

Books are themselves sold by genre, but the shelves in any particular section of the bookstore show a much wider design range than the video store shelves, with their dark red action and horror sections, and happy blue comedy titles.

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Look at the similarity of the movie covers from The Road and The Children of Men (this movie has ‘the’ dropped from the title; notice how it almost disappears here). The original The Road cover has its red letters bleeding starkly into the black, and the original PD James cover with its isolated and empty pram says quite a lot about the major detail missing from the otherwise nearly-recognisable near-future world she creates. For a movie poster I quite like the Children of Men image with Clive; it’s simple and evocative. But do all stories of that ilk need the dark browns and stoic man treatment?

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The movie covers are mostly all photographic. I think it’s less to do with the medium of cinema, though, than with the need to sell the film with its stars. Books, as physical objects, can still count on thoughtful design to do this.

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Book covers do use a lot of photography of course, and, like the wide design vocabulary with original covers in general, the photographs that are used are themselves extremely varied. I’m pretty sure I’ve got covers of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas here in the order, from left to right, in which they were issued. The first one is simple and suggestive but still mysterious. The second one, with what is clearly a Holocaust photograph, gives some of the plot away, and I have to admit, made me concerned when I first caught a glimpse of it on the shelf. How could a real picture of a real boy who was the victim of such a terrible crime be used to illustrate a fictional story, no matter how serious? As I looked closely, though, the fact that his anonymity is preserved I think keeps the book from making this too-presumptious connection, while still evoking the horror of the contextual events. And though the movie cover has no major stars calling out to us, it still falls back on the more literal design style of the movie poster.

Most movie tie-in book covers aren’t as frantically busy as a lot of full-size movie posters (The Category D blog points us to this example), but they do cluster template-like around similar themes.  They make the book cover into something less interesting, so much so that I’ll rush to get a book before the movie cover is issued, fearing that the original great design will disappear forever. Luckily there are sites like The Book Cover Archive and Covers to remind us what great book design looks like.

The pleasures and terrors of Cloverfield (2008) seem to have receded somewhat, and, even this early in the year (can I still say it’s early in the year?), other, more weighty, movies have crowded it out of view. (But who can say how accurately I’m glimpsing the zeitgeist from here in Adelaide anyway?) Still, I was thinking about it recently as I was reading an essay by Victor Burgin on how the viewer constructs a sense of cinema from memories, VCR freeze-frames, and still images. He talks about a cinematic heterotopia, where “we encounter displaced pieces of films: the Internet, the media, and so on, but also the psychical space of a spectating subject that Baudelaire first identified as ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness’.” (166)

Most of the films we consume now exist in this kind of space, with viral marketing campaigns and fake websites adding to the mix, but Cloverfield depends much more on this sense of being made up of accumulated bits (this site allows you to shuffle through some strange photographs that actually tell you nothing). If you’ve not seen Cloverfield I don’t need to tell you much beyond the fact that it’s a monster movie set in New York. You probably know that it’s shot with a moving camera that judders and shakes its way along. But it’s the fragmentariness of the narrative, rather then the camera’s behaviour, that is the dominant aesthetic of the film.

[image: Sam Emerson/Paramount Pictures]

It’s interesting to note that I’m talking about a film of fragments (well, two fragments, really; the main action is taped over something else) which is constituted – in the story world – of a whole unedited tape. This is the basic paradox of cinema, of course: fragments of still images run together allow us an experience of a continuous whole, but also in a larger context, the conventions of continuity editing do this for the narrative. The frame of Cloverfield is that of the video camera wielded by Hud, one of the group of friends making its way through the chaos of a trampled-through city. He seems reluctant at first to take the camera, then comes to relish the idea of shooting everything. He intrudes on a lovers’ conversation and when caught justifies himself by saying “I’m documenting.” Later, once the chaos becomes apparent, he says he needs to film it to show others “how it all went down.” Another time, when his friends are planning a hasty passage across some collapsing buildings his contribution to the proceedings is “okay, I’ll document”. This commentary on the ubiquity of cameras is clear, but this all also reminds me of the diary entries that make up Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That story is told through fragments, disparate and by different characters. Because it’s not told in hindsight by a narrator who must somehow have lived through the events, it heightens the suspense – sort of like: I’m writing this diary at the end of a long and strange day, but oh, I can hear some scratching at the door, I’m just going to put my pen down to investigate. Is that it? Is that character now dead? Something similar happens with Cloverfield. The camera could stop at any time, no-one’s editing this, it’s just been found. Unlike a novel or a feature-length film, a diary entry or just buttoning on the camera has no rules about long it should last. (yes, I know I am actually talking about a novel and a feature film; play along.)

I’ve yearned for a while for a movie trailer that is simply a fragment of the film it’s advertising, not a précis of the whole plot. Why do we need to be told the story before we are told the story? The first Cloverfield trailer did just that: a desultory meander through some guy’s farewell party is interrupted by some loud something. The camera runs outside to see distant explosions and the careening head of the Statue of Liberty. We don’t even know the title of the film.

This gives us what I think is one of the compelling things about Cloverfield, and for me one of its main pleasures: the rigorous first-person view gives us little sense about the facts of the larger event. There’s a monster in New York, but how did it come to be? And why is it so annoyed? Most other movies would explicate all this, show us the origins of said creature, detail the military’s response, but here the plot narrows almost purely to what we can see in front of a single camera, and this too adds to the sense of suspense and unease and expectation: what’s going on and what will happen next?. The glimpses of news footage on TV seem superfluous. The monster is like one of Hitchcock’s maguffins: we don’t really need to know why it’s there, it just is, now let’s just enjoy watching the characters jump.

[yikes. I just jumped. Writing alone in my quiet office, I left 1-18-08.com (one of those Cloverfield websites) open, waiting for a little effect that happens after about six minutes. I forgot about it until a minute ago.]

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Victor Burgin. “Possessive, Pensive and Possessed” in Joanna Lowry and David Green, eds. Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image. Photoworks/Photoforum: Brighton, UK, 2006. 165-176.

Away From Her, the new film from Sarah Polley, gives us Fiona (Julie Christie) and Grant (Gordon Pinsent), a couple dealing with the progression of Fiona’s Alzheimer’s. It deals with love and memory, of course, and we experience memory in at least three ways. In the way that stories do, things that happen later in the narrative remind us of events from earlier on. Grant drives past a National Parks sign and waits (as the audience does) to see if Fiona recalls something she said, right at that location, earlier in the film.

Secondly, characters recall events that have happened before the narrative. An earlier time that Grant and Fiona drive past the sign, she says, “Remember when . . .”. The effect is maybe as strong for us as it is for Grant. Maybe she’s not disappearing, after all. But we know she is. This is a memory in relief against the decline that’s much broader.

And of course, there is the flashback. Polley has talked about resisting setting up a sentimental happy past against which the current story can lie. Instead, what she’s done here is provide us with brief flashbacks, not of events, but of moments. The young Fiona, light and happy against a sunlit sea. The image is silent, or played under conversation from the present. It’s fuzzy but quite vivid. She looks at the camera and says something. What is it? “What are you thinking?” Maybe. It’s a flashback that, by showing us the young Fiona, tells us of the long line of decades that they have had together.

There are other flashbacks. Those that suggest events from the past that have an emotional resonance now for both characters. Another time, Grant stands in front of a mirror. Cut to a flashback of a younger him and Fiona standing in front of a mirror together. It’s a flashback that doesn’t tell us anything new (yes, they were a young couple together), but it makes the change imposed on the present a little starker.

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There’s a slight jolt in looking at flashbacks of younger versions of characters. It’s rare that the actors are the same, so there’s a moment of recognition (is that meant to be her? yes) and a moment of acceptance (is that her? yes). Sometime soon it’s going to be possible for postproduction to do this convincingly.