From UK retailer John Lewis:
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- Caught Up
- The Propagational Library (9): “But What About Me?”
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- Midweek Music Break: David Byrne and Brian Eno, “Home”
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- The Propagational Library (8): Dreamtime
- Who, What, When, Where, Why, How, and Whether to Ask (or Not)
- Midweek Music Break: Cowboy Junkies, “Angels in the Wilderness”
- The Propagational Library (7): Thenward
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I loved that ad, but I feel foolish about the post’s title. Can you help a girl out?
And I see Annie Dillard on the Pantheon list, along with other favorites of mine: Watts (I’ve mentioned but only about ten times), Ackerman, White, Thurber, McPhee, Vonnegut, Heller. I keep re-reading Dillard, trying to find where within her words the magic lies. I finally conclude that it lies between the words…like “the tree with lights in it.”
That ad gave me the chills. I just hope they’re not selling oil, stocks or weapons or something.
Nance: You’re not the first person to ask me about the title!
Basically, I liked the ad for its emotional content (reminded me a little of the old commercials for, um, Kodak? Polaroid? — the ones which had the voiceover singing a song which went something like Turn around, turn around, turn around and he’s a young man heading out on his own… But I also appreciated the technique: intellectually, I knew they HAD to have shot it in multiple takes; but… uh… perceptually, I guess, they edited it and smoothed over all the “seams” so it looks like one 90-second take.
(The one moment at about 0:15 where the little crawling girl goes under a desk and then re-emerges as a schoolgirl sitting at the same desk: that struck me as almost directly inspired by a series of shots stitched together as “one,” using old-time technology, in Citizen Kane — the shot in the opera house where Susan is singing onstage, and the camera travels, without panning, up and up and up to a couple of stagehands standing in the scaffolding, shaking their heads (one actually holds his nose, I think).)
Squirrel: I know exactly what you mean; I hate being sucker-punched by those sorts of advertisers. (I just know we’ll soon see ads featuring BP as a “green” corporation.) As far as I can tell, though, that John Lewis company is no more than a sort of upscale Amazon. (Except that they apparently have numerous brick-and-mortar locations as well. Maybe something on the order of a Macy’s.)
P.S. The “Turn Around” commercials were for Kodak:
The person who posted this on YouTube notes:
John Lewis is one of the oldest department stores in England, founded back in the 1860s. One of the most interesting unique features is that it is run as a partnership rather than a limited company: all members of staff automatically become partners with a share in the profits.
That OK Go/Rube Goldberg video was another one that had me admiring the smoothness of the joins: not one take, but it’s very good at suckering you into thinking it is.
However, what this one put me in mind of – rather unnervingly, since the scene scared the bejayzus out of me when I first saw it as a kid, and it continues to haunt me – is the bit at the very end of 2001: A Space Odyssey where Bowman fast-forwards to old age in the space of a few minutes.
Froog: You mentioned the multiple OK Go shots before but I swear I thought it was all one. Which just confirms the sucker-you-into-it success, I guess!
You must’ve been (and no surprise) a very precocious kid. When I first saw 2001 I was 18, I think, and had no idea what the hell was going on in that sequence. My friends and I argued about it in the car for a while after seeing it — were they all Bowman? were they Bowman doppelgangers? were the “few minutes” of theater time actually decades of Bowman-time? had he broken the speed of light or something?
You should have heard our conversation on the way back from seeing the 3D edition of The Stewardesses. I mean, once we recovered our breaking voices.
The Stewardesses, eh? At last you’ve found a movie I haven’t seen! I’ll keep an eye out for it in the DVD stores. Do you have any idea which version you saw?
I couldn’t swear to it since it is more than thirty years since I read it, but I think the novelization of 2001 suggests that Bowman’s life-cycle is accelerated (through some mysterious agency of the ‘intelligence’ that created the monoliths), because he then returns to Earth as the ‘Star Child’ still in ‘the present’.
2001 was the first, and probably the greatest, of the Life-Changing Experiences In The Cinema I wrote about a couple of years ago. I first saw it on a second run in the mid-70s, when I was only about 8 or 10 years old – a precocious kid, as you say. I still haven’t ‘recovered’ from the experience.