The Lytro camera lets you take a photograph and then focus it.

"The Lytro camera [has] a special sensor called a microlens array, which puts the equivalent of many lenses into a small space.... [It has] sophisticated software that lets a viewer switch points of focus.... '[Photographs] become interactive, living pictures,' [Ren] Ng said. He thinks a popular use may be families and friends roaming through different perspectives on pictures of, say, vacations and parties posted on Facebook (Lytro will have a Facebook app)."

Digital cameras already let you see what part of the image is the focus point, but you don't always have time to look at the display, and in bright light it may be hard to see. Also, when you get your images uploaded into the computer and start to work with them, you might see details that you'd like to crop and focus on, perhaps things that you didn't even realize were in the shot... like in the movie "Blow-Up," when David Hemmings sees what may be evidence of murder in the blurry background shrubberies photographed with a film camera. I can't find the scene where he's blowing up the blowups of the blowups, so here's the scene with The Yardbirds:

Let's discuss this album title and cover art from 1968.

Quick. Before I freak out.

Here's the Amazon link for the album, which I encountered after random breakfast-table conversation led inexorably to the singing of "Indian Lake."

NOTE: 1968 was the pre-mime-hating time. AND: Damn! The clip from the end of Michelangelo Antonioni's highly respected film "Blow-Up" no longer works. Take my word for it. It's full of mimes, and mimes are deep:

[A]ttention to the visual dimensions of perception underscores the subtext represented by the mime troupe. If words are indeed superficial to the photographer, they are totally superfluous to (and consequently discarded by) the mimes. The mimes are presented to us as a framing device—they open and close the film. At the beginning, they are seen gadding about the bustling streets panhandling; at the end, the same troupe engages in a mock tennis match. At the beginning, the photographer simply finds them a momentary amusement; by the ending, however, he actually shares their experience. It is, in fact, the mime troupe that serves as the spiritual barometer by which we measure the photographer's transformation. The act of miming is crucial for Antonioni and Blow-Up because it is the mime who brings our attention to objects by their absence. For the mime, the imaginary tennis ball is every bit as "real" as the evidential photograph is "illusory."

It is of course, significant that the tennis match takes place at the end. It is less a conclusion than a speculation. The photographer, an outer-directed man in the beginning, would never have retrieved the tennis ball and thrown it back at the outset of the film. He is only able to perform this act of assistance to the players because of what has happened to him in the interim. However, Antonioni does not have him abandon his camera as he fetches the ball; rather, he carries it with him. What the photographer has learned is that the camera and the tennis ball can (and do) exist in the same plane of perception—reality, illusion and appearance do not fall into neat and convenient categories.

Nothing is taken that seriously anymore!

"Is that James Dean gazing downwardly at a pastry case that looks like a jukebox?"

Says EDH, in the comments over here.

Play G-72 for me Jimmy, will ya, just for old time sake.

Or just get me a bear claw, if it ain't.

He's looking at this photograph...



... and I see what he means. Like David Hemmings in "Blowup," I enlarge the phantom image and tweak it as much as I can:



Yes, I think the ghost of James Dean walked in Madison last Friday. He had his collar turned up against the cold.

"Play The Quietus' Album Cover Quiz Game."

Hilarious... even if, like me, you can hardly guess any of them. (Via Metafilter.)

Come on! It's funny. Don't say you "hate mimes." Hating mimes has been a big cliché for more than 30 years.

From the pre-mime-hating period, the supposedly profound ending to highly respected film:



AND: I just want to send my love to The Hello People.

"What do you think playground bullies grow up to be?" "Right-wing Republicans."

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich answers a question.

Actually, when I decided I was going to blog this little interview, I planned to feature this line about why our drilling for more oil isn't a good solution to high gas prices:

When you consider that the oil we pump goes into a global oil market, offshore drilling makes no sense. We take the environmental risk, but we’d have to share the negligible price gains with Chinese consumers and every other user around the world.

He's right about that, isn't he? I love the way lefties sometimes get bracingly chauvinistic. Suddenly, it's screw the rest of the world!

Oh, I know... the gains are only negligible anyway. But read the whole interview. Reich is obviously happy that the high gas prices are pushing people into mass transit at long last. If the environment is your primary concern, of course you don't want more domestic drilling, and, what's more, you welcome the high gas prices that make people consume less.

I'm calling Reich a lefty, but I note that he lives in Berkeley (where he's a professor of public policy) and he says "here I am on the right of most arguments."

And this is good. He's asked about whether he dated the college-age Hillary Clinton:

To call it a date is an exaggeration. She and I went out to see Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.” The only thing I remember is that she wanted what seemed to me to be an extraordinary amount of butter on her popcorn.

Yes, very tasty! Yes! I like it! I like it! Go on!



You know, if a woman indicates she wants extra butter, that means something:

Only an economist could go on a date and study trends in butter consumption. Isn’t that a kind of wonky thing to remember?

Yes, it is. I recall the extra butter costing more.

If the man balks at giving her extra butter on her popcorn, if he seems to calculate the expense, I think she can make some predictions about what any sexual relationship will be like. Later, when Bill took Hillary to the movies — maybe it was "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" — I bet Bill was all come on! Double extra butter! And Hillary fell in love. I wish I could find a clip of that scene where Julie Christie pigs out on eggs in front of Warren Beatty and he therefore knows she's quite the woman.

Now, Reich is also very short — 4-foot-10 1/2 — and he notes that he's "much more economically and environmentally sustainable."

I exhale less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I use up less space. I have a little house.

In the future, you will have to buy carbon offsets if you want to be tall or fat.

Anyway, it's at the end of the interview that we get to the quote that I highlighted above. Reich says that because he was short, he was bullied a lot as a kid.

People frequently tell me in interviews that they were bullied as children. But no one ever steps forward and says, “I was the bully.” They don’t want to admit to being a bully.

This provokes the questions-and-answer used as the title of this post.

As for Reich's answer, isn't it more likely that kids who were bullied grow up to be bullies themselves? You're very short and/or weak, but you're smart and you study... then you figure out how to crush your erstwhile tormentors by winning in business or politics. Right?

As my ex-husband used to say — maybe he's still recycling this line — "Life is 'Revenge of the Nerds.'"

Exiting through the door marked 2007.

The NYT Magazine has its annual "Lives They Lived" issue, with short essays on a wide range of individuals who died in the past year. A blogger gets a farewell essay this year. Steve Gilliard:

Though Gilliard, unlike many bloggers, always used his real name, few readers knew much about him. They didn’t know, for instance, that at age 39 he had open-heart surgery to repair an infected valve. They didn’t know he lived alone in a small apartment in East Harlem. And, although Gilliard often wrote about race and alluded to his own perspective, a lot of readers never realized he was black.... The paradox of Gilliard’s existence is a familiar story on the blogs, where people often adapt avatars that are more like the selves they imagine being. Online, he was vicious and uncompromising. In person, Gilly, as his close friends called him, was reserved and enigmatic.... He lamented that he didn’t know what it was to “wake up naked in a strange bed,” but, he wrote, “at 35, I’ve figured out that this is it, at least for now. Anything I do, any life I make, is going to revolve around words and computers and strange, bright people.” [T]he few dozen mostly white bloggers who came to Harlem for the funeral saw for the first time the stark urban setting of Gilliard’s childhood, while his parents and relatives groped to understand what kind of work he had been doing at that computer and why scores of people had come so far to see him off.

There was Brett Somers, one of "The Match Game" celebrities:

She wasn’t Mae West, 80 trying to act 20, or an embalmed Gabor, but rather, with her Elton John glasses and Toni Tennille hairdo and saucy answers, an average-looking menopausal woman with a healthy regard for sex. In one of the most memorable broadcasts, Somers’s husband, Jack Klugman, was on the panel and seemed to be rushing the host, Gene Rayburn, along, as if to say that he and Somers had something better to do.

There was Mary Crisp:

Crisp testified before a Congressional committee on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1973 without really thinking about it much supporting the E.R.A. had been a Republican Party position for nearly 35 years. (The Democrats had been more split, some worrying that the amendment would wipe out hard-won but ultimately counterproductive laws protecting women from things like working overtime or lifting heavy objects.) But in 1978, Crisp ran head-on into the new insurgent right, which had built its grass-roots strength on issues like opposition to the E.R.A. and abortion. Once it became clear that Reagan was going to be the party nominee, she knew her time was just about up... The Republican Party made Crisp nonexistent at the convention she had helped organize. Her name vanished from the program. She left her Detroit hotel clutching a big pink stuffed elephant inscribed, “Go Mary!” which, alas, she could not fit into the airport taxi.

There was Robert Adler, the guy who invented the object some people hold in their hand more than any other object. Two animals got recognized — a parrot and a chimpanzee — because they almost, maybe, cared about talking to us. And here's a list of the famous people who died in 2007. As usual, it's a diverse group of people thrown together by the happenstance of death occurring around the same time. It excludes those who died too close to the publication date — but Benazir Bhutto made it — and those — it could be you or I — who die in the last few days of the year. We do have 3 days left. The new list starts with January, so, the spiffy look of the list is more important than acknowledging those who slipped into eternity through the closing door of the previous year.

Denny Doherty, 66, Mamas and Papas singer.... Frankie Laine, 93, hit-making crooner.... Anna Nicole Smith, 39, famous for being famous.... Kurt Vonnegut, 84, novelist who caught the imagination of his age..... Don Herbert, 89, "Mr. Wizard" to science buffs.... Tammy Faye Bakker, 65, emotive evangelist.... Michelangelo Antonioni, 94, Italian movie auteur. Ingmar Bergman, 89, master filmmaker.... Luciano Pavarotti, 71, tenor of his generation.... Joey Bishop, 89, last of the Rat Pack.... Norman Mailer, 84, towering writer with matching ego... Evel Knievel, 69, legendary daredevil... Ike Turner, 76, R&B singer and former husband of Tina Turner.

Don't you picture them traveling together into the afterlife? Didn't I see a movie with a diverse group of recently dead persons making the passage? I remember them in black and white, on a small boat, and arguing. Let's check this list:

1. Between Two Worlds (1944)... passengers on a shrouded luxury liner visit with The Examiner, who hears their cases and tickets them for their next destination, depending on who they were and how they died....

Close. It's a boat, but it sounds too large.

2. A Matter Of Life And Death... (1946).... the differences between Brits and Yanks—when the latter arrive in heaven, they stampede straight to the Coke machine....

I'm sure I never saw that, judging from the clip at the link, with David Niven sitting on the escalator to heaven.

3. Black Orpheus (1959)... following the rhythm of Carnival and the belief that the barrier between life and death can be easily, almost playfully circumnavigated, for those with the right attitude and the right paperwork.

This is one of those classics I always felt I should see back in the days when I was fulfilling the obligation of seeing all the classics. But I've never seen it.

4. Defending Your Life (1991)... After dying, mortals go to a big, bland city full of big, bland courtrooms, where their lives are examined to see whether they've conquered fear enough to be ready for the next stage of existence....

This is a pretty good Albert Brooks movie with Meryl Streep that got many viewings chez Althouse in the 1990s. It always irritated me that getting into heaven was an entirely 1990s American idea of self-actualization. "Self-actualization" isn't the right word, though, is it? People stopped saying "self-actualization" more than 15 years ago, I think. It sounds self-indulgent, but nevertheless more challenging than "self-fulfillment," which is what we'd say now. Imagine access to heaven depending on whether you'd fulfilled yourself on earth.

5. Afterlife (1998)... government workers... operate out of a run-down rural facility where the newly dead spend a week among peeling paint and bargain-basement furniture, selecting the memory from life that means the most to them. Then the facility staff recreates those memories on film for the dearly departed, who take nothing but that memory when they move on to whatever comes next.

This is an elegant movie, focusing on what is being left behind and not the arrival in the next world. We see a strange little place of transition.

6. Corpse Bride (2005)... the dead seem to hang out in skeletal or zombie form in a big Burtony goth-tinged paradise full of aggressively animated "inanimate" objects and spontaneous song-and-dance routines.

Not what I'm trying to think of, but it sounds cool.

7. Beetlejuice (1988)... recently dead couple Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis wind up haunting their old house... Davis and Baldwin have to acclimate via a handbook titled Handbook For The Recently Deceased, and because they’re held in place by an apathetic, overworked, hostile bureaucracy full of people whose bodies clearly and comically display the marks of their ugly deaths.

Excellent. I've seen this one many times. But it's not the one I'm trying to remember. Perhaps I'm thinking of an old "Twilight Zone."

8. The Rapture (1991)... Michael Tolkin’s oddball meditation on apocalypticism. After Mimi Rogers, suffering in the desert waiting for the second coming, performs a mercy killing on her daughter, she winds up on a featureless, vaguely otherworldly plain.

I remember Siskel and Ebert raving over this one back then.

9. Carousel (1956)... starts off with Gordon MacRae already dead and reaping his eternal reward, as part of a crew hanging up glittering stars in a space that might represent the sky, but which more resembles the auditorium in a particularly well-funded high school during a “Starlight Express”-themed prom.

That's not it.

10. Flatliners (1990).... the afterlife is a terrific place, full of Elysian fields or giant naked boobs, depending on the proclivities of the people who go there.

Fine-tune your fantasies, people, before it's too late. Make sure it's something you won't find tedious after a billion years.

11. What Dreams May Come (1998)... heaven ... has kindly guides to help newcomers adapt and understand the next phase of their existences, and it even adapts itself to its inhabitants' personal interests and tastes....

This was an early CGI film that was enough to make me never want to see another CGI film. And I only saw the trailer for it.

12. Don't Tempt Me (2001)... Heaven is a deserted, black-and-white version of vintage Paris where everyone speaks French, and a deserving soul like Victoria Abril gets her own private ’30s nightclub where hundreds of illusory patrons hang on every note she sings and beg for more...

In the audience, perhaps, Denny Doherty, Frankie Lane, Ike Turner, and Luciano Pavarotti.

"I don't want an egg at this hour."

ADDED: It's always a Fellini film chez Althouse. We're watching this one.

MORE: Martin Scorsese has this in today's NYT:

[Michelangelo Antonioni's] “L’Avventura” gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies, greater even than ... “La Dolce Vita.” At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked “L’Avventura.” I knew I was firmly on Antonioni’s side of the line, but if you’d asked me at the time, I’m not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini’s pictures and I admired “La Dolce Vita,” but I was challenged by “L’Avventura.” Fellini’s film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni’s film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless. (It was two years later when I caught up with Fellini again, and had the same kind of epiphany with “8 ½.”)...

I crossed paths with Antonioni a number of times over the years....

But it was his images that I knew, much better than the man himself. Images that continue to haunt me, inspire me. To expand my sense of what it is to be alive in the world.

I'm in the Fellini camp -- can we go to a place called Fellini Camp? -- where the images continue to haunt me and inspire me and expand my sense of what it is to eat an egg or a banana.

AND: Right under Scorsese's piece, Woody Allen writes about Antonioni's death partner, Ingmar Bergman:

To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: “Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?” or “You think it will be interesting to make a movie where the camera never moves an inch and the actors just enter and exit frame? Or would people just laugh at me?”...

I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one. Bergman made about 60 films in his lifetime, I have made 38. At least if I can’t rise to his quality maybe I can approach his quantity.

Because, among other things, size matters:






That's from "Sleeper," and note that Woody Allen also made a film called "Bananas."

Now, let's compare two men -- Woody Allen and Marcello Mastroianni -- as they encounter the banana:





It's true that Woody has the bigger banana, but I'm going with Marcello!

AND: The weirdest part of it is that Woody Allen has a movie that is entirely about a recipe for egg salad!

"In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places our hearts ..."

Yesterday, we read that the great film director Ingmar Bergman had died. Today, the morning's news is that Michelangelo Antonioni, another great director, has died. He was 94.

The critics loved ["L'Avventura"], but the audience hissed when ''L'Avventura'' was presented at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. The barest of plots, which wanders through a love affair of a couple, frustrated many viewers for its lack of action and dialogue, characteristically Antonioni.

In one point in the black-and-white film, the camera lingers and lingers on Monica Vitti, one of Antonioni's favorite actresses, as she plays a blond, restless jet-setter.

''In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting,'' Jack Nicholson said in presenting Antonioni with the career Oscar....

Asked by an Italian magazine in 1980, ''For whom do you make films'' Antonioni replied: ''I do it for it an ideal spectator who is this very director. I could never do something against my tastes to meet the public. Frankly, I can't do it, even if so many directors do so. And then, what public? Italian? American? Japanese? French? British? Australian? They're all different from each other.''

Were Antonioni's films important to you? Although reading of his death did not make me cry -- reading about Bergman did -- I remember seeing "Blow-Up" in 1968, when I was 17 and being very affected, mainly because I hadn't seen all that many movies, and it was the first movie I'd ever seen that showed the actors naked and having sex and, beyond that, it was by far the only movie I'd ever seen with so much psychological and philosophical depth. "Blow-Up" was set in the 1960s London that was so important in pop culture in those days, but I had a pop, teenage idea of it, and "Blow-Up" darkened that picture.

In college, we saw "L'Avventura," and I can't remember what I thought of it. I don't think I was on Antonioni's wavelength. I tried to watch "L'Avventura" again recently and thought it looked great and felt interesting, but something came up, and I didn't watch to the end. I still feel like I'm in the middle of watching it, but I have to admit that it's been about 2 years since I paused that particular DVD.

The only other Antonioni movie I saw was "The Passenger." I was extremely vulnerable to reviews in those days and would go to anything that got a great review -- or maybe it was anything that got a great review in The New Yorker. "The Passenger" was raved about. It must have been Pauline Kael doing the raving. I still remember her going on about the scene in the end that begins shot through a window and later ends up, in a single shot, outside of the window. I expected grand aesthetic excitement over that, but in reality, I rejoiced when we got to that window because it meant that the movie would soon be over.

And now the movie is over for Michelangelo Antonioni. Goodbye to another artist.

The color of movies.

Martin Scorsese just came out with two lists of ten films that have the best use of light and color.

English Language Films

1. Barry Lyndon (1975, Dir. Stanley Kubrick; Cin. John Alcott)

2. Duel in the Sun (1946, Dir. King Vidor; Cin. Lee Garmes, Ray Rennahan, Hal Rosson)

3. Invaders From Mars (1953, Dir. William Cameron Menzies; Cin. John F. Seitz)

4. Leave Her to Heaven (1946, Dir. John M. Stahl; Cin. Leon Shamroy)

5. Moby Dick (1956, Dir. John Huston; Cin. Oswald Morris)

6. Phantom of the Opera (1943, Dir. Arthur Lubin; Cin. W. Howard Greene, Hal Mohr)

7. The Red Shoes (1948, Dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger; Cin. Jack Cardiff)

8. The Searchers (1956, Dir. John Ford; Cin. Winton C. Hoch)

9. Singin’ in the Rain (1952, Dir. Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly; Cin. Harold Rosson)

10. Vertigo (1958, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock; Cin. Robert Burks)


International Films

1. Contempt (1963, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard; Cin. Raoul Coutard; France/Italy)

2. Cries and Whispers (1972, Dir. Ingmar Bergman; Cin. Sven Nykvist; Sweden)

3. Gate of Hell (1953, Dir. Teinosuke Kinugasa; Cin. Kohei Sugiyama; Japan)

4. In the Mood For Love (2000, Dir. Wong Kar-Wai; Cin. Christopher Doyle, Mark Lee Ping-bin; Hong Kong)

5. The Last Emperor (1987, Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci; Cin. Vittorio Storaro; Italy/United Kingdom/China/Hong Kong)

6. Red Desert (1964, Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni; Cin. Carlo Di Palma; France/Italy)

7. The River (1951, Dir. Jean Renoir; Cin. Claude Renoir; India/France/United States)

8. Satyricon (1969, Dir. Federico Fellini; Cin. Giuseppe Rotunno; Italy/France)

9. Senso (1954, Dir. Luchino Visconti; Cin. G.R. Aldo, Robert Krasker, Giuseppe Rotunno; Italy)

10. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964, Dir. Sergei Paradjanov; Cin. Viktor Bestayev, Yuri Ilyenko; Russia/Ukraine)

This is clearly a very idiosyncratic list. Just look at the dates: Scorsese is pointing to the films that influenced him in his impressionable years. We already knew how gaga he is for "Duel in the Sun" (a cheesy Western sometimes referred to as "Lust in the Dust").

Maybe in the comments you can come up with some alternatives. Is there a movie that springs my mind for its color? Not really. Those extra-vivid Technicolor movies like "Vertigo" and "The Birds" crowd out more subtly colored recent movies that I find more appealing. Any ideas?