T H E VV E S
November 30, 2016 10:05 PM Subscribe
The Witch as a Wes Anderson movie (Single link YouTube fake trailer)
Black Philip's problem is he's offering you a solid deal on some butter and fucking hell, human, why would you be turning that down?
posted by Artw at 10:13 PM on November 30, 2016 [20 favorites]
posted by Artw at 10:13 PM on November 30, 2016 [20 favorites]
This doesn't even come close to undoing the devastating psychic damage wrought by my one and only ever viewing of The Witch, but at least I was able to LOL in the face of my perpetual torment.
posted by vverse23 at 10:13 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by vverse23 at 10:13 PM on November 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
I loved The Witch, but I've just had one niggling thought that's slowly over time wrecked it for me: the dude is the most hyper-Puritan of the hyper-Puritans, he sees the corrupting hand of Satan everywhere around him, and yet at no point does he find it a little troubling that his children are claiming that their black goat is speaking to them? This is like 101-level Revelations shit.
posted by Itaxpica at 10:29 PM on November 30, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by Itaxpica at 10:29 PM on November 30, 2016 [7 favorites]
I dunno if it's just because I know what The Witch is about (I won't be watching it anytime soon), but even Wes Andersonized, that trailer was sort of creepy.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:34 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:34 PM on November 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
Didn't try hard enough, IMO. That said, I'm not sure it's possible to try hard enough to do what the fake trailer is trying to do.
vverse23: This doesn't even come close to undoing the devastating psychic damage wrought by my one and only ever viewing of The Witch, but at least I was able to LOL in the face of my perpetual torment.
I'm glad it helped. For what it's worth, speaking as someone who has been unexpectedly traumatized by a number of movies, I found The Witch to be a horrific, tense, but ultimately subversive, liberating, and exhilarating experience -- in a pretty profound way that's made it one of my very favorite films. That probably has to do with some stuff in my past around Christian fundamentalism and the winding path I took to finding my own truths. If you'd ever like to talk about about your experience and/or trade notes, please feel free to mefi mail me. Hugs.
posted by treepour at 10:59 PM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]
vverse23: This doesn't even come close to undoing the devastating psychic damage wrought by my one and only ever viewing of The Witch, but at least I was able to LOL in the face of my perpetual torment.
I'm glad it helped. For what it's worth, speaking as someone who has been unexpectedly traumatized by a number of movies, I found The Witch to be a horrific, tense, but ultimately subversive, liberating, and exhilarating experience -- in a pretty profound way that's made it one of my very favorite films. That probably has to do with some stuff in my past around Christian fundamentalism and the winding path I took to finding my own truths. If you'd ever like to talk about about your experience and/or trade notes, please feel free to mefi mail me. Hugs.
posted by treepour at 10:59 PM on November 30, 2016 [10 favorites]
It doesn't really work for me at all as a Wes Anderson parody, but it does point out that there's a bunch of slapstick-y stuff going on in the film, which might be an avenue for a grad student to explore.
posted by naju at 11:01 PM on November 30, 2016
posted by naju at 11:01 PM on November 30, 2016
Wes Anderson needs to do a remake of The Conqueror Worm (aka The Witchfinder General).
posted by philip-random at 11:19 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by philip-random at 11:19 PM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
It's not so much the slapsticky stuff that interesting to me as it is the way The VVitch uses some of the same filmmaking techniques as Anderson. The creator of the trailer had a good eye for catching some significant similarities between the movie and Anderson's work.
The VVitch makes use of planimetric framing, or a close relative of it, instead of explaining what that means myself, here's David Bordwell on it:
How to characterize it? The camera stands perpendicular to a rear surface, usually a wall. The characters are strung across the frame like clothes on a line. Sometimes they’re facing us, so the image looks like people in a police lineup. Sometimes the figures are in profile, usually for the sake of conversation, but just as often they talk while facing front.
Sometimes the shots are taken from fairly close, at other times the characters are dwarfed by the surroundings. In either case, this sort of framing avoids lining them up along receding diagonals. When there is a vanishing point, it tends to be in the center. If the characters are set up in depth, they tend to occupy parallel rows.
Now The VVitch doesn't employ the same level of self-conscious technique as you'd find in Anderson's films, where the camera placement and framing purposefully distances the audience from the story by drawing attention to itself in its construction of what we see. It's singularity of effect makes it akin to a visible narrator rather than the more usual "invisible" conventional approach to filming which lets the audience more easily suspend their disbelief and slip into the story without disruption.
And here's a couple other quotes from Bordwell about that kind of framing and Anderson:
By employing the planimetric strategy, Anderson gains a somewhat awkward formality, a sense that we are looking from a distance into an enclosed world that sometimes looks back at us.
These apparently simple framings often evoke a world of childhood. ...
Anderson’s dollhouse-room frames make adults seem to be toy people arranged just so
From that, perhaps, we can see a tentative connection between The VVitch and Anderson's films, which also regularly are set in a grey area between childhood and adulthood, or in a zone between childishness and adult awareness. The self-consciousness then can act as a marker for that boundary, where the character's in story awareness of their situation is set against a sort of external narrative awareness that sets the tone for what we see.
In other words, the movie is, in essence, aware of what it's relating and acts as a moderating influence on how we perceive the events. With Anderson, this is, largely, used for humorous effect, with the distancing acting more as a buffer to the serious elements in the story while providing a diagram of sorts for the underlying issues at stake. In The VVItch, the extra-awareness is more malevolent or threatening, but it still highlights the liminal space that is the area of contention in the film. In this case, Thomasin's impending adulthood and growing discontent with her lot in life.
The VVitch obviously doesn't really feel all that Andersonlike as a whole, anymore than it does something like, say, Meek's Cutoff, but the similarities pointed out in the faux-trailer do go a ways towards pointing to larger cross-film techniques that are used towards similar ends, and it was an interesting case study from an unexpected point of view towards what makes both The VVitch and Anderson's films work as they do, even if none of that was the intent of those who made the trailer.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:31 AM on December 1, 2016 [20 favorites]
The VVitch makes use of planimetric framing, or a close relative of it, instead of explaining what that means myself, here's David Bordwell on it:
How to characterize it? The camera stands perpendicular to a rear surface, usually a wall. The characters are strung across the frame like clothes on a line. Sometimes they’re facing us, so the image looks like people in a police lineup. Sometimes the figures are in profile, usually for the sake of conversation, but just as often they talk while facing front.
Sometimes the shots are taken from fairly close, at other times the characters are dwarfed by the surroundings. In either case, this sort of framing avoids lining them up along receding diagonals. When there is a vanishing point, it tends to be in the center. If the characters are set up in depth, they tend to occupy parallel rows.
Now The VVitch doesn't employ the same level of self-conscious technique as you'd find in Anderson's films, where the camera placement and framing purposefully distances the audience from the story by drawing attention to itself in its construction of what we see. It's singularity of effect makes it akin to a visible narrator rather than the more usual "invisible" conventional approach to filming which lets the audience more easily suspend their disbelief and slip into the story without disruption.
And here's a couple other quotes from Bordwell about that kind of framing and Anderson:
By employing the planimetric strategy, Anderson gains a somewhat awkward formality, a sense that we are looking from a distance into an enclosed world that sometimes looks back at us.
These apparently simple framings often evoke a world of childhood. ...
Anderson’s dollhouse-room frames make adults seem to be toy people arranged just so
From that, perhaps, we can see a tentative connection between The VVitch and Anderson's films, which also regularly are set in a grey area between childhood and adulthood, or in a zone between childishness and adult awareness. The self-consciousness then can act as a marker for that boundary, where the character's in story awareness of their situation is set against a sort of external narrative awareness that sets the tone for what we see.
In other words, the movie is, in essence, aware of what it's relating and acts as a moderating influence on how we perceive the events. With Anderson, this is, largely, used for humorous effect, with the distancing acting more as a buffer to the serious elements in the story while providing a diagram of sorts for the underlying issues at stake. In The VVItch, the extra-awareness is more malevolent or threatening, but it still highlights the liminal space that is the area of contention in the film. In this case, Thomasin's impending adulthood and growing discontent with her lot in life.
The VVitch obviously doesn't really feel all that Andersonlike as a whole, anymore than it does something like, say, Meek's Cutoff, but the similarities pointed out in the faux-trailer do go a ways towards pointing to larger cross-film techniques that are used towards similar ends, and it was an interesting case study from an unexpected point of view towards what makes both The VVitch and Anderson's films work as they do, even if none of that was the intent of those who made the trailer.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:31 AM on December 1, 2016 [20 favorites]
Anderson's problem is that he appeals to a class of hipsters who think that making superficial fun of art by others is the same as making art.
That sounds like maybe it's your problem.
posted by maxsparber at 4:35 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]
That sounds like maybe it's your problem.
posted by maxsparber at 4:35 AM on December 1, 2016 [7 favorites]
Needed musical selections that would unfortunately cause it to be taken down with extreme prejudice, but the timing and shot choices (apart from a missing slow-motion dolly with The Byrds playing) were pretty spot on.
posted by Celsius1414 at 6:50 AM on December 1, 2016
posted by Celsius1414 at 6:50 AM on December 1, 2016
I lost it at "A bunny".
posted by Mister Moofoo at 6:57 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Mister Moofoo at 6:57 AM on December 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
I dunno if it's just because I know what The Witch is about (I won't be watching it anytime soon), but even Wes Andersonized, that trailer was sort of creepy.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:34 PM on November 30
Creepy like ironic misogyny. Given that 'the Witch' is some kind of 'liberatory' 'revenge plot' re-telling of the Malleus, and more erasure of European botany and healing traditions in 2016, this ha-ha just seems like laughing while standing on (European) women's unmarked graves.
posted by eustatic at 12:00 PM on December 3, 2016
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:34 PM on November 30
Creepy like ironic misogyny. Given that 'the Witch' is some kind of 'liberatory' 'revenge plot' re-telling of the Malleus, and more erasure of European botany and healing traditions in 2016, this ha-ha just seems like laughing while standing on (European) women's unmarked graves.
posted by eustatic at 12:00 PM on December 3, 2016
why not take the opportunity to make the joke that the witch coven was just saving the babe from hypothermia, and indoctrinating the kid into its lesbian separatist herbalist colony? that would be funny, neurotic, and real and more Wes Anderson-y
posted by eustatic at 12:04 PM on December 3, 2016
posted by eustatic at 12:04 PM on December 3, 2016
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