Hacker Cinema
Upstream Color
2013 · Film · 96 min
Directed by Shane Carruth
A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the lifecycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.
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22 comments on Hacker News
This article made me think of Shane Carruth. He's best known for his debut film Primer, but his follow-up Upstream Color is very Malickean.
My theory about the more widespread use of subtitles when watching modern film and TV productions is that it is in large part due to screenwriters trying to write (and directors to direct) more realistic dialogue. Just by itself, everything else equal, realistic speech is necessarily harder to grok than “played out” theatrical. In real life people who can hear generally benefit from drastically higher fidelity and wider dynamic range of sound, as well as many more cues and context compared to a linear film (plus the ability to ask someone to repeat). This clashes with screenwriters having to[0] put crucial information in the dialogue, the rule of only saying something once, and other writing and production practices (which also exist for a reason). Realistic dialogue that is easy to grok requires cooperation from many sides.
That said, technical aspects matter, recording practices, mastering for loudness with little dynamic range (so that compressed voice blends with foley and the rest), and indeed encoding can definitely affect the ease of understanding human speech. Speaking of encoding… I couldn’t find it on the site, is Streamliner a one-time purchase?
[0] Well, not every film has to (Upstream Color comes to mind, as an example of a film with relatively little plot-advancing dialogue), but it seems that the majority of productions rely on dialogue and it isn’t going away.
Strong agree: Upstream Color is poetry
Stanley Kubrick did something similar in `2001: A Space Odyssey`. In a scene where staff were being transported in a taxi... on the moon... 100% of the dialog is meaningless. They're discussing the merits of this or that sandwich, not how wonderful the Earth looks from space, or overcoming technical challenges.
It's so refreshing to be living in an environment vs being spoon fed.
Even better is very old or even silent movies ("M" is fantastic: modern-ish thriller from 1931 where sound is a character; Metropolis)
Also dialog-less movies: `Koyaanisqatsi` is incredibly beautiful and has a specific plot, even if there's no understandable dialog nor words.
In theaters _right now_ is `Flow`. No dialog, and no _human_ characters! It's all animated cats and dogs and other animals. It's startling how directly the characters transmit their goals and agenda and emotions.
I do generally separate the art from the artist, it just sucks given that Seimetz starred in Upstream Color, which is definitely proximal.
For example, I recently watched It Ends with Us, a book-turned-movie about a woman, played by Blake Lively, dealing with physical and sexual abuse from her boyfriend, played by Justin Baldoni, who also directed the movie. Well, it just came out that he and other staff sexually harassed her constantly throughout the filming of the movie. That would make any rewatch significantly more difficult for me, as I know that Lively did not enjoy the process and that the director, someone with power over her, treated her as such.
Personal issues aside, Carruth ultimately had a professional responsibility to Seimetz which he broke, and his subsequent behavior and general rejection of the Hollywood apparatus means we likely won't get any more films from him.
However, I don't want to derail the discussion away from Upstream Color or Carruth's other work. Just mentioned that because it saddened me.
If you enjoyed Upstream Color, I highly recommend checking out Carruth's previous project, Primer, if you haven't already. It's a movie that takes a dozen rewatches to make full sense of. Natural dialogue, organic cinematography, and no hand-holding.
Upstream Color was a great movie as well, it's a shame what happened between Carruth and Amy Seimetz.
I enjoyed Upstream Color a lot as well, but yeah it's certainly not for everyone.
And agreed on not being spoon fed.
A prime example to the contrary was when in the Joker, spoiler alert, they had a recap showing his delusion. The movie would have been so much better if they had cut that entire segment, and just have the neighbor female act all surprised and weirded out like she did when he entered the apartment.
One of my favourite films is called Upstream Color.
Below is not a spoiler, but I like to avoid reading anything about a good film before watching it, and I recommend to do the same here. You like it or you don’t.
This film has no staged speech that tries to explain anything. The little dialogue that it has is what would naturally arise given the situation. For the same reason, most characters have no names or no full names. No situation in which they would formally introduce themselves takes place.
Do I fully understand it immediately, or even after watching it once? No. Does it mean I dislike it? Rather the opposite. Actually, I enjoy being treated as an adult who can make conclusions without having given any pre-digested explanation.
- Ghost in the Shell (1, then 2)
- Children of Men
- Stalker
- Solaris
- Blade Runner 2049
- Devs (a brief tv show, but just one shot the whole series)
- Contact
- Under the Skin
- Paprika
- Annihilation
- Arrival
- Ex Machina
- The 5th Element
- The Substance
- Primer
- Tenet
- Upstream Color
- 12 Monkeys
- Her
American History X was pretty jarring for me. Fight Club too. More subtly: Primer, Upstream Color, White Oleander, The Virgin Suicides - those 4 films gave me a lot to think about as a young man.
Yes, Arrival was terrible and bloodless. The central conceit was what I called the sundered triforce but this tropes page calls the Dismantled Macguffin [1]. It was Villeneuve's first real stepping out into becoming whatever Hollywood needed him to be and it shows every step of the way.
> This is the easy way out. Revering the old is easy. In 40 years people will be saying how new films don’t compare to Dune (2021) or Blade Runner 2049.
Startlingly rare within our generation means what I say. I would expect there to be a strong corpus this round given film history but it defied my own expectations. That doesn't mean I don't think good examples exist just that they're, well, startlingly rare.
Upstream Color was courageous I'll give you that. But I think it took real moxy from Carruth to make it happen: he did the music, shot the film, wrote it, directed it, and starred in it and for basically no money just like Primer. And I think directors like Ana Lily Amirpour who did A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night are the courage we need to see. The problem doesn't appear to be a lack of directing talent so much that the media machine takes that talent and corrupts it absolutely.
Look what happened to Ridley Scott or Taika Waititi. They became owned and operated by the industries behind them which must ensure a broad appeal for the highest ROI. It's market forces at their most efficient at a global scale we've never seen before.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DismantledMacGuffin
You only chose older films to contrast with Dune (2021). Blade Runner being the newest at nearly 40 years old. It’s a lot easier to bring up old media. Be it music or movies. People revere the old, the classics.
Apocalypse Now, which is amazing, in my opinion, didn’t get amazing reviews upon release.
Fall from grace means you didn’t like Arrival too much either? I loved Arrival as I loved Sicario and Enemy.
> Alien or Blade Runner?
I love the concept of time so personally I enjoyed Arrival more than either of these. Same with Ex Machina, Annihilation, Primer, and Upstream Color. I also think these films are better too. I admit I must have a bias against glorifying the classics because of it being done so much. Obviously everyone has biases.
> There is good cinema within our generation but it is startlingly rare. Most of what makes it to the theaters is bloodless, drained of anything to say about anything at all.
Yes. This is the easy way out. Revering the old is easy. In 40 years people will be saying how new films don’t compare to Dune (2021) or Blade Runner 2049.
You said what makes it to theaters. Not wide release films. That would include a lot of indie and other films. In that case, I completely disagree. I believe it has gotten better. I get to see movies with a wider range with the easier access and technology for smaller films that get to be made. Same with music.
The great thing about Primer is that most of its important events don't even appear in the movie itself.
If you like Primer, I highly recommend Shane Carruth's other movie, Upstream Color. Very different from Primer, but similar in that both movies let viewers figure things out for themselves.
Not op but I'll throw in some that I've really enjoyed and that made me go "hmmmm", roughly ordered by year
The Double Life of Véronique (1991) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1600-la-double-vie-de-v-ronique
Strange Days (1995) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/281-strange-days
Upstream Color (2013) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/145197-upstream-color
Under the Skin (2013) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/97370-under-the-skin
The One I Love (2014) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/242090-the-one-i-love
Welcome the Stranger (2018) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/413852-welcome-the-stranger
Segfault (2018) (the less you know the better) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/463594-segfault
Possessor (2020) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/435615-possessor
I've noticed for a while that Netflix seems to be making it a lot harder to rate content and find high quality content. It's like they want you to watch junk. Maybe junk has lower licensing fees so it increases their margins.
I've found some amazing gems digging through Netflix and relying on user ratings. They were films I probably never would have found otherwise. A few somewhat recent examples that come to mind are Enter the Void, The Discovery, Upstream Color, and A Dark Song.
"Upstream Color"[0] by Shane Carruth, the writer and director of "Primer"[1] is another example of this kind of filmmaking. He aspired to create a film that you could watch in the same way one listens to albums/CDs over and over again and discover something new with each listen.[2]
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U9KmAlrEXU
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8
[2]http://www.indiewire.com/2013/04/interview-shane-carruth-talks-trying-to-make-the-perfect-album-film-with-upstream-color-99842/
Shane Carruth, the guy who gave us Primer and Upstream Color, wrote a screenplay for a movie that would have been called A Topiary. It's essentially an exploration of this idea. It starts with a traffic engineer in the 80's finding strange patterns in accident data, and ends with a group of adolescents building a device of non-human design. The key idea is that spectra are the manifestation that ties it all together. The screenplay is available online and would make an excellent SF novel.
Nice !!! just browsing through the indy scifi section showed Primer and Upstream Color, two of my favorite movies :)
I've thought for years that fundamental technological innovation basically stopped around 1970, and that almost everything since then has been refinement and broadening existing technology.
I've observed a similar thing in areas like film: most of today's films are reboots, rehashes, and remakes or at least are exploring themes and plot templates already laid down. Musical innovation lasted longer but seems to have effectively stagnated since the late 1990s. I haven't heard anything in a long time that doesn't just riff on something pioneered before the year 2000.
There are pockets here and there: films like Primer and Upstream Color, experimental electronic music, deep learning. But none of these things are quite as dramatic as, say, the film 2001, Pink Floyd or Kraftwerk, or the integrated circuit.
There's objective evidence of something "breaking" around that time in economics, too. Wage growth basically stopped shortly after 1970: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-HY153_realwa_G_20150417085212.jpg
I've wondered if future historians might not look back at ~1970 as the end of the enlightenment and the beginning of the next dark age.
But what happened?
I haven't got a clue. Explanations I've toyed around with include things like:
- Philosophy: the 1970s saw the rise of both religious fundamentalism and its secular "Skeptic" counterpart -- dogmatic, fundamentalist ideologies that assert that we already know everything and there is nothing new to discover. When I go back before 1970 I'm often struck by the boldness and fearlessness of scientists and other intellectuals back then. The rise of "new age" thinking, which is also hostile to reason and enlightenment ideas, might also play a role. It seems like since 1970 people have become either total woo-woo new-age flakes (no rigor) or closed-minded fundamentalists (no creativity or imagination). Before that time it seems like you had more who were both rigorous and visionary.
- Economics: did we "cancel progress" by shifting from a progressive economic system that invested in the future to a conservative one that only invests in the present? Or was the decoupling of wages from productivity the actual root cause of the rest of the apparent stagnation?
- Psychological: did we experience "future shock" and double down on retro and nostalgia? This sort of fits in with what I discuss under philosophy.
- Television: before the popularity of TV people read books and interacted socially and kids played outside. TV is a passive medium that pulls people in and then feeds them all the same information, and it takes time that people might otherwise spend on interactive, social, and exploratory pursuits. Did TV make us stupid? The generation who grew up watching TV started to enter the workforce around 1970.
- The War on Drugs: To what extent were the geniuses of the past "augmenting" with over-the-counter amphetamines, easily obtainable psychedelics, etc.? I've heard anecdotes but has anyone ever even asked this question in anything approaching a rigorous way? Or is it too taboo? There was a general worldwide crackdown on mind-altering substances around 1970. Perhaps the kind of crazy creativity and extreme achievement we saw during the glory days is simply not something the human mind tends to do in its natural state.
- Slow Malthusian Collapse: was the "limits to growth" more or less correct, but the effect is unfolding a lot slower than predicted and with strain and collapse manifesting in less obvious ways?
- Bureaucratization: Was there a shift during that time toward a more bureaucratic academic and scientific community that is more hostile to "maverick" thinkers and new ideas? Do today's researchers spend more time sucking up to grant funding and tenure committees and making sure to walk the straight and narrow to avoid being labeled "cranks" instead of really thinking and investigating? Or do the systems for selecting for scientific careers select good bureaucrats over geniuses? The same processes might be at work in other areas, e.g. the takeover of music and film industries by "MBA thinking" over people who actually care about art.
- Educational System Decline: Did we over-bureaucratize or otherwise compromise education somehow? Were older teaching methods better?
- Demographics: We're having smaller families, which might affect both growth and parenting styles (more "helicopter parenting"). Nothing obvious here but who knows?
Shrug. But it is alarming to say the least.
Edit: here are some explanations I don't buy:
- Political Correctness / Diversity: There's a wing of the right that thinks that runaway equality and diversity ideology has some responsibility for this. If that's true then why are some of today's most innovative places also left-of-center culturally and why are the bastions of Red State America not centers of innovation? At best I see no correlation in either direction.
- Dysgenics: Even if "stupid people" are breeding more, genetic changes are too slow to account for this. Then you have things like the Flynn Effect, which argue the opposite. Again I see at best no correlation.
- Lack of War: Was it all WWII? I personally don't buy it. WWI didn't result in anything close to the postwar boom, and before that we had millennia of running around and hacking each other up with swords without inventing any integrated circuits or jet engines. Why didn't the Crusades or the endless wars of late Rome lead to a technological explosion? Why didn't Genghis Khan or the Aztecs land on the Moon?
This hardware obsession when it comes to photographic equipment is so silly. A skilled cinematographer can do magic with extremely limited equipment; a mediocre one can't be saved by the most expensive camera in the world.
Just look at Shane Carruth's Upstream Color for example, shot on an $800 camera (a modded Panasonic GH2) yet it looks better than tons of movies shot with equipment worth two orders of magnitude more.
As the interminable stream of kitten free videos demonstrates, entertainment does not need to be expensive.
I like me some kittens as much as the next guy, but it's a different sort of product. When I want to watch a movie, 2 hours of kittens aren't a good substitute, the same way that I sometimes prefer to curl up with a good book rather than spend more time reading comments on HN or tweets on Twitter.
It's not that you should be sympathetic to those media with higher costs, as that such art forms couldn't come to be absent some system of copyright in the first place, and the fact of consistent demand over the last century shows that those kinds of entertainment have huge economic utility for consumers. Again, I'm not arguing for the Disney perpetual copyright approach here, but especially in this era of virtually cost- and effort-free digital copying, you can't realistically plan to recoup your production investment without some sort of way to assert authorship.
film a relatively minimalist production of "Hamlet" for less than the cost of a new economy car (assuming your small cast and crew work for shares of revenue)
You can, indeed. But this is itself a problem: actors and crew need to work to gain experience and exposure, but more and more often they're asked to work for free. It's very very hard to get those shares of revenue to turn into anything resembling cash, especially if you don't have a budget for marketing, and so people, especially crew, are constantly being asked to work long days without even getting paid minimum wage, because returns are so uncertain. Without some sort of reasonably robust copyright system, the incentives to do that get even worse.
I think critically successful movies like "Primer" and "El Mariachi" demonstrate that rather well.
Not as well as you imagine; bear in mind that the tiny #s you hear about associated with films like this are part of the marketing in just the same way as big budgets on blockbuster movies. Primer is a very good idea in a pretty bad film - a fair bit of its apparent complexity comes from obscurity, eg the scenes at the party later in the film are hard to figure out because you can't see what's going on on the screen very well. I like reading the script more than watching it. And I think it's kind of significant that despite the success of Primer Carruth has only made one other film, Upstream Color, which most people outside the experimental film community find incoherent at best.
El Mariachi got nearly $1m of additional post-production work (paid for by the distributor) to fix the soundtrack - originally the scenes were recorded without sound and Rodriguez had the actors repeat their lines into a tape recorder afterwards - and to do a proper film transfer, vs the videotaped version shown at Sundance. But nobody outside of the filmmaker community talks about that (although it's no secret, Rodriguez detailed it at length in a book he wrote and is great about sharing his knowledge in general). Plus, even the figure for production costs are a bit deceptive; Rodriguez got loaned a lot of equipment for free, and shot in a town in Mexico where he was able to borrow guns from the local police through a personal connection, among various other freebies.
The Primer director, Shane Carruth, released a new film last year - Upstream Color. Exceptionally strange, beautiful film. One of my favorites for sure.
I also dealt with RED very early on, the post was a nightmare and still isn't as smooth as it could be. But the dark footage was mainly the fault of film trained DPs who were used to underexposing and pushing during transfer (hence the noise). I was amazed when we'd get footage from Academy award winning DPs that looked awful, then get footage from DPs who had never shot much film, but tons of HD. They understood you didn't underexpose but expose to the right, bringing it right up to the edge before it blows out, that's when the footage looks great. The guys used to film were shooting with a tool they didn't know how to use, hardly the fault RED when the video guys were killing it (don't use a light meter, use a waveform and histogram). And the footage coming out LOG shouldn't have saturated colors, it's supposed to look muddy (have film transferred flat and you'll have the same result). That gives all the power to the colorist as far as the final grade as opposed to DPs locking in a look (another major reason that Hollywood DPs hated digital, it was taking away much of their power). RED was ground breaking and had a huge affect on the market, although, for my 2¢, the Canon 5D has had a bigger impact overall (with an image that's much worse than RED).
And RED fans are fanatical. Take the biggest mac fanboy and cross him with a Patriots fan, that might get you close. There is also a very vocal group of RED haters who spew bs for no apparent reason. The cameras should be the tools, not the owners.
Full disclosure: I've never owned a RED, but spent quite a bit of time in post with the footage (worked post on some of the first major commercials shot with the RED) and used it to shoot some of my own work. I've owned a 5D since it's release and have Blackmagic Pocket and 4K on order to finally replace it. I learned on film, spent a decade as a news photog shooting betacam before moving to post for features and commercials (nuke/flame and fcp/avid). I prefer working with the Alexa when at all possible, but that can increase the budget considerably (at least for me as i know plenty of great DPs that own REDs).
And imho, the most beautiful film release this year was Upstream Color, which was shot on a Panasonic GH-2, current retail for that camera is about $1000. And the most daring was a tie between Computer Chess which was shot on 80's era tube cameras and the experimental narrative Escape from Tomorrow shot on Canon 5D/7D at Disney World without Disney's permission.