meta credits

So you may know that I watch film credits pretty voraciously. I love the loopy rhyme of Loop Group as well as the name of such a post-production sound group that I have seen credited a number of times: Sync or Swim. Sometimes, the folks responsible are called Crowd ADR or just ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement). I just watched Going Down in LA-LA Land and was amused by the credit for Expendables. Those responsible for expendables were Studio Depot, The Expendables Recycler, Bulbtronics, and Expendable. I glanced over the YouTube comments and someone noted that they really enjoyed watching the credits because "The ADR then is hilarious." Here's the two leads getting to know each other:

P.S. Emma Kantor also reads the end credits: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/magazine/closing-credits-movies.html

rhymes and homonyms

One of the last credits for Woody Allen's film "Zelig" is to Adele Lerner, now retired from the archives at the Cornell Medical School. Adele and I saw each other twice a year during the 1980s when we'd each represent our respective subject library associations at the Council of National Library and Information Associations meetings. Since the excitement of seeing Adele's name in the "Zelig" credits, all the endless credits, I've watched them for all movies. It's a little upsetting when the film locations are not given or even hinted at.

I've just finished watching "Being Julia," the 2004 film directed by István Szabó, written by Ronald Harwood and Somerset Maugham, and starring Annette Bening. (More credits can be seen on imdb.com by clicking on the link under the film name above.)

My favorite credit for "Being Julia" is:
Loop Group - Sync or Swim
Who knows (who cares) what a Loop Group is? And of course it never hurts to have Jeremy Irons and Miriam Margolyes in the cast.

sink or swim: words, words, words

Some years ago, I wrote a blogpost entitled "rhymes and homonyms" about watching film credits and the marvelous things you can find there. I specifically noted the credit in the movie "Being Julia" for Loop Group to Sync or Swim. The rhyme in the credit caption and the homophone in the company name were just delightful. I now watch for loop group credits and don't see them very often. Just a handful in the ten years since that cited blogpost. The loop group, by the way, creates the crowd sounds in post-production on a film.

I was rewatching the "Downton Abbey" movie last night. Fade out. Cue the credits. Imagine my surprise to see there, there, was the Crowd ADR credit for Sync or Swim. It will not surprise you to learn that I had to look up what ADR meant: automated dialogue replacement.

This little revisit to Sync or Swim led me to study the distinction between homonym, homophone, and homograph. "Sync" is a homophone but not a homonym. And, besides, "homophony" is apparently only used in music. I was going to use "homophony" in the third sentence of the first paragraph.

P.S. Of course, the next day, I saw a Loop Group credit for The Loop Squad, in season 1, episode 1 of "The Chair" on Netflix. And 38 drivers!

P.P.S. Two months later, I decided to watch the final episode of "Downton Abbey" again (season 6, episode 9) and guess what. The Crowd Artists were Sync or Swim.

the things you learn in the credits

As you may know, I'm a bit obsessed with film credits, especially Loop Groups aka Crowd ADR. And filming locations, both cities and buildings.

Prince Charles is played by Dominic West in Season 5 of The Crown. As I was watching the credits of an episode today, I noticed that the actor playing Prince William was Senan West and wondered if he was related to Dominic West. A little googling indicates Senan is Dominic's eldest son. Television imitating life.

Prince William and Prince Charles, The Crown, Season 5

(Senan West and Dominic West)

(photo: Keith Bernstein/Netflix)

(from the Netflix Tudum site)

Dominic West also played a role in Downton Abbey: A New Era, the second movie based on the television series. He played Guy Dexter, a silent film star, part of a film being made at Downton Abbey. Fictionally, he will rescue Thomas Barrow from his closet.

resonances and connections

As you may know if you read this blog or talk to me about life and art, I love it when life wraps around and makes connections. The house above is Carlton Towers in Yorkshire, one of the homes of the Duke of Norfolk. It is the setting for the movie "A Handful of Dust" (1988) based on the book by Evelyn Waugh and directed by Charles Sturridge. It stars James Wilby and Kristin Scott Thomas, along with Rupert Graves, Judi Dench, Anjelica Huston, and Alec Guinness. I cannot remember who recommended the film but I was delighted to see the actors' names as they appeared in the opening credits. I'm quite a fan of Kristin Scott Thomas but Wilby and Graves will always be favorites because of their roles in "Maurice."

So why the opening reference to connections? You see I was looking through The Victorian country house by Mark Girouard (Yale University Press, 1979) just the other day which includes Carlton Towers among the featured houses in the second half of the book. It's got a grand tower with an outsized and rather awkward Mansard cap. As often happens in movies, the interior shots don't seem to have been done at Carlton, or at least they seemed to use a different staircase and what's a country house movie without the right staircase?

Not only the house but when Tony, the owner of Hatton as the house is called in the movie, is "kidnapped" in South America, some of the scenes were shot near some dramatic falls which reminded me of Iguacu Falls which were part of one of my ARTstor cataloging assignments. I guess it wasn't Iguacu Falls since the closing credits claimed the movie was shot in Venezuela and Iguacu Falls are on the border of Brazil and Argentina. Details, details. What good are resonances without a bit of slippage?

At any rate, Tony ends up in the hands of a Barbardian-Indian fellow who just wants someone to read to him. He gives some potion to Tony who falls asleep for two days and misses the English adventure hunters who are given his watch and other mementos which will convince them he is dead. They will go back to England and tell the family that Tony is dead. His widow is ruined, I guess, though it would appear that she marries Jock. And now I wonder if there is a fate worse than being lost in the jungle and having to read for your meals.

Those aren't the only resonances. One could revisit the Klukas plan for my country villa, built like Carlton Towers on an ancient foundation. One could talk about how "resonances" and "connections" are both based in French and there have been a lot of French statuses in Facebook recently, thanks to Jonathan Walz and others. But we'll stop and go to bed. By the way, the next movie that Netflix has brought me is "Desperately Seeking Susan" so I'll probably reflect on Sue Sylvester as that flashes before my eyes.

The picture of Carlton Towers at top is from the Ryan Browne wedding photography site.

catering by Hantsport Baptist Church Auxiliary

As you may know, I'm a fan of watching the credits until the very end of a movie. I just watched "Cloudburst," a 2011 Canadian-American film starring Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker. The catering was done by several groups including the Hantsport Baptist Church Auxiliary. Here's the Hantsport Baptist Church in Hantsport, Nova Scotia.

(screen grab on 4 May 2022 from Google Street View, image capture 2018)

Hantsport is in the West Hants Regional Municipality. "Hants" is an abbreviation for Hampshire in England. The Wikipedia entry for Hantsport does not mention a connection with Hampshire but you wonder (or, rather, I wonder). The article does say that the native Mi'kmaq people called the area Kakagwek which meant "the place where meat is sliced and dried" and the town is still home to a small Mi'kmaq community.

teary meltdowns in Cefalù

We stayed in Cefalù as we neared the end of our month's circumnavigation of Sicily in 2013. Our hotel was away from the center, near the sea. This view was from the deck outside our room. I was feeling quite teary about the impending return to the U.S.

The days before Cefalù had taken us from Taormina and the landscape around Mount Etna, through the mountains, along the northern coast, visiting several sites of the Fiumara d'Arte.

I am often taken back to Sicily in my thoughts, sometimes just flashback memories, sometimes by reading or films. I just finished watching From Scratch on Netflix. It's a love story of a Black American woman and a Sicilian man. She's an artist, he's a chef. He grew up in a small town not far from Cefalù. We didn't go through Pollina where his native town scenes were filmed but we were close. There was plenty of Florence and Sicily as setting, along with Los Angeles. They also thanked the town of Termini Imerese in the credits; we drove through Termini Imerese and discovered this wonderful 18th-century bridge.

At one point in the film, after Lino and Amy have moved to Los Angeles and before Lino has found his place in the sprawl, he notes that he is flummoxed by Los Angeles because there is no center. In Italian towns, even the small ones, the Centro is important. Amy, naturally and beautifully, says that she will be his center as he is hers.

Plenty to get sentimental about, as well as being tear-jerked by the story of Lino and Amy. I checked the IMDb page for Zoe Saldaña, the female lead and producer for From Scratch. She is also a June 19th-born person.

separated at birth = elective affinities

I was looking at the September-December 2019 issue of Visual resources, a special theme issue on "Art and the periphery: in memoriam Foteini Vlachou." Vlachou died in 2017 at the age of 42. The obituary essay in the issue included a mention of her blog - https://iknowwhereimgoing.wordpress.com/ - which is still available, without new entries. I went to look at it and was intrigued by her series called "Elective affinities" in which she did about three dozen posts with a pictorial comparison or reflection. The last one, done two months before she died and marked "hors série," was a book cover for Estrela solitária by Ruy Castro compared to the Barberini Faun.

"Separated at birth" just seems so mundane relative to "elective affinities" and "hors série" is pretty esoteric too. Still, I really enjoy doing my "separated at birth" posts and won't appropriate "elective affinities" though I'm really glad I found Vlachou's posts. She credits the comparison to Arthur Valle who used the juxtaposition on his Facebook page.

connect the dots

At the ARLIS/Western New York (aka the "upstate" chapter) meeting last week at the Watson Homestead, we had two artist talks. One was by Chris McEvoy who described the methodology he uses to make his paintings. It was intriguing. Here's "Some Kind of Nature" (2011) from his website:

I was doing some maintenance in the Scholes catalog and came across several forms of name for Mary McInnes, one of the art history professors here. One of the books attached to her name is Telling Histories: Installations by Ellen Rothenberg and Carrie Mae Weems, the catalog for an exhibition at the Boston University Art Gallery, 1999. It turns out that Chris McEvoy was a preparator for the exhibition, according the credits in the catalog.

I was sorely tempted going to see the Carrie Mae Weems show at the Cleveland Museum of Art which closed just a few days ago. I didn't make it and it is some consolation that it will be at the Guggenheim early next year. Weems has done a wide variety of work and is one of the new MacArthur fellows this year. If you don't know her work, I recommend a trip to her website and here's one of the "African Jewels" from 2009:

I saw some of Weems's photographs of Timbuktu at the Brooklyn Museum some years ago so it was especially troubling when the rebels were battling there. And that reminds me of Chris Huemer who went to Timbuktu one year for Christmas. Chris was then the librarian at the American Academy in Rome though I met her in 1969 or 1970 when we were both at Cornell libraries.

The other artist who spoke to us at ARLIS/WNY was Paul Bartow. Mostly he is involved with social practice and collaboration, with several projects having a nature and science bend. The last book I finished reading was What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation by Tom Finkelpearl (Duke, 2013). The social practitioners are strong around Alfred and I was surprised by a colleague's dismissal of Bartow as not an artist. Oh, well. I enjoyed Bartow's talk and Finkelpearl's book.

And if you read about my enjoyment of the Kyle Abraham concert at the beginning of the school year, it was good to read that he too was selected as a MacArthur Fellow this year.

separated at birth: the lady doth not protest

When I saw Lady Rosse, Antony Armstrong-Jones's mother in Season 2 of The Crown, the actress was so familiar but I could not place her. She rides to Westminster Abbey with her son for his wedding to Princess Margaret. As they ride, he excoriates her for not loving him as much as her other son(s).

Checking the credits, I noted the actress's name is Anna Chancellor. Off to IMDb to look at her list of roles. But, of course, she played Lady Anstruther in Downton Abbey. 

Lady Anstruther stops by at Downton Abbey, partly for a tryst with her former employee Jimmy. He is now a footman at Downton Abbey. That is naturally the night that Lady Edith throws the book and her bedroom catches on fire. Lady Anstruther gently tells Lord Grantham that she'll leave before breakfast.

Ladies and abbeys. Both delightfully juicy roles, juicily played by Anna Chancellor.