UPSTREAM COLOR, a new film from Shane Carruth (Primer)

at the latest you can snag the digital download on May 7th.

this sounds amazing, I have no idea when and how I am going to be able to view this but I sure hope it is sooner than later (not likely)

I want to see it in the theater. There's a screening near me on May 10.

http://erbpfilm.com/film/upstreamcolor#screenings

http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2013/upstream-color

IZ DED

this is so teal and orange

the whole thing turned on the brutal exploitation and torture of a woman so maybe avoid if that's gonna not set well with you

:|

just bought tickets for the Sundance London screening. extremely excited. anyone else who's interested over here had better hurry up - two of the three days are sold out

Carruth appears to be having a moment.

hoo, this movie

reaching for the cosmic with Thoreau and piggies

I wasn't remotely bored, but I got nuthin otherwise

re body horror, more sci-fi to me, but "Cronenberg througha Malick strainer" zipped through my mind.

if either wanted to be baffling, that is.

I liked it a lot!

i dunno about this one

(i didnt really know about primer either)

kind of a bunch of "hogwash" if u ask me

i got "love story" much more strongly than "horror" or scifi from this

"tortured woman must rebuild her shattered life" trope as a way to kick off a story.

this is exactly how id say it also - sure it's disturbing on screen but its essentially a stand-in for any past trauma imo

i dont think i get the field sound recording scenes

there's a lot of stuff in this film i'm not sure i "got" in the sense that I could explain it to someone but very much in the Lynchian sense where it makes logical sense within the body of the film and I don't really care about it cohering outside of the narrative setting of the film

yeah I never felt very compelled to figure out Primer but I was happy to vibe to it. Hope this is similar.

it's way more vibey than Primer. Primer definitely rewards untangling of its gimmick; this can be grokked on the first watch, and the puzzle-hunt details really are just details

Yeah, I didn't feel confused about anything here bar a couple of details.

a good non-spoiler tip i think is to just take everything completely literally

this movie was great -- i saw it last weekend but didn't realize there was a thread. cronenberg-via-malick is appropriate, i really liked it. i think after i saw it i had a lot of things to say about rituals and people's habits and worms and plants, but it's all gone now. that's probably for the best. i liked this movie a lot.

i should see this maybe? it's playing here, shockingly.

you should see this, almost definitely. it's at worst a little disorienting and silly, at best you'll love it.
nobody else vibed the philip k dick comparison?

so good

feel like the obliqueness of his ideas really keep ppl from talking about his filmmaking--the look of this, the editing, the sound editing were all insanely high quality.

it's funny, he's been pretty open in discussing this but the sampler character is still such a major monkeywrench to me. i think everything baffling about this film ties to that character in one way or another.

It's simple, the Sampler controls the people through their bonded pigs by playing them his environmental field recordings

I was really impressed w/ Carruth's score; don't remember taking note of the music (was there any?) in Primer.

there was music in primer but he's gotten better. i'd need to double check but i thought there was a bit toward the very end of this that was a lot like the music at the very end of primer

IFC is selling the score on vinyl

so I thought this was...something. really looking forward to seeing it again but this first viewing left me feeling rather aloof from it all. but maybe I was just tired.

I think part of my failure to engage was due to not really feeling the visual style of the film. even the shots with a bit more visual flair felt a little flat to me--but again that maybe ties back into feeling like the movie was at arm's length to me.

Also uh SPOILER but.....

that piglet at the end was her "baby" wasn't it?

Was there some indication that it came from a new litter from "her" pig, is that what you're saying? If so, I missed it. Just seemed like it was probably a random piglet from the time after the victims took over the farm.

I didn't notice any explicit connection but pondering that final image and the bit about pregnancy earlier it certainly "felt" like that. obviously that's a shot in the dark!

Also uh SPOILER but.....

that piglet at the end was her "baby" wasn't it?

― ryan, Friday, April 26, 2013 11:11 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so tired of people asking this question after films

well the first litter of piglets that her pig gave birth to were all drowned but that doesn't mean it couldn't be from a new litter.

saw this. look after your spirit pig.

also you must kill the one within who reduces all of Nature's vast system to mere...music *spits*

good advice xp

wasn't entirely sure about this. mostly looked and felt like a honda commercial, which detracted from the (interesting) ideas. dialogue, what there was of it, felt a bit cod at times. I think the most lucid observations were about human relationships - putting it closest to a romance, as said above

but I'm glad they finally killed the nefarious blue stuff cycle that was helping that dastardly thief. and I'm glad they killed whatever damaging cycle of personal emotion it stood for in metaphor.

the field recording bits were amazing. could have watched 2 hours of that very happily.

but...but he is REDUCING it, see, turning it to UGLY MUSIC with his HUMAN BOX

pfah

man where are you getting this MUSIC < NATURE, FOOLISH HUMAN stuff from? I didn't have that take-away at all.

dunno, trying to rationalise the purpose of the field-recording guy. a guy who records and stores the stuff of life in his giant pen/his music box, inert and expendable, and sometimes chucks it off a bridge. he perpetuates the cycle of striving that brings damage to the main characters. if only he could *embrace* his pig and his sounds. yo.

actually the music he did make with his downtuned scraping noises was really cool. wanted more of it.

maybe carruth was making a documentary about the local eccentric at the same time and ended up splicing the footage together idk

well one of the things Carruth discussed in one of the interviews I read with him (likely linked upthread somewhere) is that when Jeff and Kris kill the Sampler, it's basically an error, because he's not really the source of their trauma. Their actions end the parasite lifecycle, and free their spirit pigs, but it's not really a proper revenge, or whatever.

Also the Sampler and Jeff & Kris have some really similar behaviors as a result of the worm's influence. The share an apparent obsession with or hypersensitivity to sound, and you see all three characters do the thing where they graze their fingers over the things they pass (CDs/spirit pigs) trying to get some sense of them.

One of the unsolved puzzle-box parts of the movie for me is how Jeff and Kris are experiencing time during the middle part of the movie. They seem to have the conversation where Jeff admits to his fraud repeatedly, in different locations; there's a few other scenes where they seem to acknowledge that they are repeating a particular vignette that they went through before. Like in the cafe, Kris says something about "we save a few weeks doing this". Makes me think that the middle part of the movie shows us Kris and Jeff repeating the same patterns over and over, getting "further" through some sequence each time, but all cut together so the audience only travels once through the whole routine.

that bit was str8-up eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

"free their spirit pigs" -- new favorite phrase

Their actions end the parasite lifecycle, and free their spirit pigs

dammit, this isn't playing anywhere nearby. i feel i have missed out on a generation-defining experience.

he made a point of saying that none of the characters are really amoral except for "the thief" which seems weirdly reductionist? probably good not to assume the creator completely understands his own work.
I think i mentioned this upthread but he also said that the walden connection was totally by accident and happened once they started filming more or less. so there's a lot of happenstance, as in all art.

He’s another good example of the sort of person whose main outlet is seeking attention and is prone to sudden reversals of favor in relationships and a propensity to feeling persecuted.

Lol.

Trying to picture Hitchcock being kicked off as director after an 'incident' and acting out on his own twitter.

the literal only upside of this is finding out that Seimetz has a new movie and it looks sick

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/07/amy-seimetz-abuse-allegations-shane-carruth-1234576617

it seems like she's hooked in with Benson/Moorhead and possibly the Coatwolf people now which is neat to me

and as others mentioned I can't recommend Girlfriend Experience s1, which she co-wrote/directed with Lodge Kerrigan, highly enough. (fair warning that Carruth briefly cameos as...a dead-eyed psychotic sex pest :/)

Go with what you know.

Anyway all these years I've heard 'these films are incredible, you've got to see them' and thought "Okay one day" but I did hear a very indirect rumor a couple of years ago via a Twitter friend that he was at the least pretty shitty and thought "Hm, maybe not." After all these past few days I shrugged and finally just read the Wikipedia summaries and hopefully I won't think of the guy much again. Life's too short.

I screened Upstream Color to/with different friends and the reactions were always delightful. no ugliness on Carruth's part will diminish the specialness of those experiences. but as brad said the nature of the situation and the fact that the movie is almost entirely an intimate Carruth/Seimetz two-hander makes a rewatch very difficult to imagine. and certainly I would never again be an evangelist for it as I was then even if I'm more flexible on the art/artist issue than some/most.

yes it's truly an amazing film. it's too bad it's tainted now due to his fucking shitty behaviour.

Anyway

Shane Carruth, the director of independent films “Upstream Color” and “Primer,” was arrested last week at the home of his ex-girlfriend on allegations of domestic assault. https://t.co/6kCVq1sRgd pic.twitter.com/oFfT6TF2rH

— Variety (@Variety) January 19, 2022

Ugh!! This guy is SO awful — makes me wonder how he made it as far as he did.

being awful probably helped 🤮

So unusual for awful people to be successful in film.

valuable insight jimbeaux

xp you have a pretty rangey definition of “successful in film”

It doesn't ALWAYS hold true, but given this and several other recently documented cases, there's definitely reason to be, shall we say, hesitant about men whose art involves 'the brutal exploitation and torture of a woman', as Forks put it way upthread long before anyone suspected a thing about him. Waving those red flags where everyone can see 'em

xp Yeah, I stretched it for purposes of the joke, but otoh Primer is still pretty fucking good.