I just happened to be here.

I mentioned it yesterday and couldn’t sleep last night for thoughts of GIFing Hal Hartley’s Trust.  This was easier in Schizopolis in many ways, because Hartleys films are already focused on faces and moments.  But, oh… the faces, the moments.  In the kitchen this morning, in between coffee and rinsing a quart of hair gel off of Annika, I watched the last 3 minutes of the film and bawled.  Schizopolis was our Saturday night party film, the “OMG you have to see this!” film, even though most people passed out or lost interest before the dentist-transmigration.

Trust came on after that, and always ended in tears.  My conscious (but always denied) attempt to live in the stilted Hartley language was certainly a contributor to many of friendship disintegrating fights in college.  It’s an old film – almost as old now as The Conversation was when I first saw Trust in 1998.

Even as the fashion ages into comedy, there emotional core will shift and grow with you.  Here’s my attempt to do some meager justice to this in a handful of frame grabs.

The lines and music under that last GIF add everything.

“Why have you done this?”

“Done what?”

“Put up wth me like this.”

“Somebody had to.”

“But why you?”

“I just happened to be here.”

That’s pop song strength – lines that can grow with you from bleak reflection on relationships into a tear-wrenching reflection on the arbitrary unconditional love of parenthood.  They just happened to be there, and I needed them.

I Believe So Strongly in #ds106

For a few years, I’ve watched the explosion of amazing film-clip GIFs take over the web. Even as the #ds106 crew churned out fantastic artifacts in class after class, I consistently viewed that as a consumer.  Clearly it involves a lot of aestetic judgment and technical skill.  It belongs in the “complicated with Photoshop” bucket, aka the “Not for me!” pile.

WRONG!  Make art!

So while I know that my craftsmanship is weak, at least I can step it up on a curatorial level.  These are all from one of my favorite films, Soderbergh’s cinematic throat clearing excercise Schizopolis!

“I believe so strongly in mayonaise.”

That last GIF is cut from an amazing sequence where Soderbergy runs through a dozen hideous faces in a bathroom mirror, and then snaps back into normalcy in a split second when someone else walks into the restroom.

The other cult gem of my DVD/VHS collection is John Greyson’s Zero Patience.  Sadly, most of my immediate thoughts for GIFs involve incidental or pupet nudity.  I’m living with a holistic public identity, but I recognize the benefits of keeping the bathouse barbershop trio out of my google results.

Oh, and while I’m at it, have a little Fred Rogers.