AM I LIVING IN A BOX? [496]

For as much as the film “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1920) is celebrated for bringing German Expressionism to cinema, while providing the foundations on which the horror film genre were built, the first thing it brings to my mind was its having been filmed entirely inside a studio whose floor measured only six by six metres, or about twenty feet each way – I don’t know if it was a cube.

Finding the space to make a film is never a concern for anyone watching the finished work, but it may dictate if that film can be made at all, whether by availability, permission or cost. However, knowing it is perfectly possible to produce a multi-layered work of art, encompassing many locations and actors, within the dimensions of a large living room, means that nothing is impossible, so long as you can scale your production to that space.

To that end, the theatrical painted backdrops of “Caligari” work to provide setting, mood, light and depth, although not necessarily depth of field – if it were not for actors appearing in front of them, the backdrop props and floor could have appeared to be one painting. They are surreal, almost medieval, and designed to unsettle, appearing like stark, monochromatic prints from woodcuts.

There is conjecture about how “Caligari” came to be portrayed in a German Expressionist style, as it was not stipulated in a surviving script, just as there is conjecture over whether its framing story, planting the tale of a doctor using a somnambulist to murder people into the mind of an asylum patient, was mandated to make the story easier for audiences to handle. To me, it doesn’t matter: the film’s imagery is burned into my retinas, just as the eyes of the somnambulist Cesare look through you.

Few other films look like “Caligari”, but its constricted studio size and low budget adds to a notion that the film’s bold artistic choices were made due to the practical concerns of when it was in production from 1919-20. Lighting effects were also much harder to achieve in the silent film era, making the painting of contrasting blacks and whites onto the backdrops – and, through make-up, onto the actors – an easier path to achieving contrast. 

The small Lixie-Film studio, located in the Weissensee area of Berlin, was originally built in 1914, at a time when many film studios were still essentially greenhouses, trying to catch as much natural light as possible, in any way possible – attempts in chiaroscuro in early silent films would have been made with natural light. Carbon arc lights were only introduced in 1912, entering theatres before being adapted for filmmaking, and with film stock at the time being insensitive to red light rendered tungsten-based incandescent lighting as useless. The manufacture of film stock sensitive to the whole colour spectrum would begin in 1927, just as adding sound to motion pictures became a further headache for studios to overcome.

The expressionistic effect of “Caligari” has taken on a different meaning for me on more recent viewings. I initially saw it in rather poor public domain prints, the outlines of what the art direction intended reducing details down to shades and impressions of light and darkness. Subsequent restorations of the film, and Blu-ray and 4K home editions, means that individual brushstrokes can be properly admired, painting light as much as painting with light.

I SEE THE PEOPLE WORKING, AND SEE IT WORKING FOR THEM [495]

It may be strange that I even have notes to share on using a laptop computer, as more people than not will have a computer in this form. However, I have only started using one in the last month, which was not by choice, and my experience has reinforced why I would not do so willingly.

The computer I use at work was initially a desktop computer, a “tower PC” housing a large motherboard and spinning hard drive. This was later replaced by a “thin client” desktop PC that used a smaller solid state drive, used less power, and more similar to the specifications you can find in a laptop computer – as battery capacity has improved, and as processors’ power consumption has been reduced, any remaining gaps caused by compromising for a more mobile form factor have been reduced or eliminated.

The local final step has been reached, and I have now been given a laptop computer to use. I have never been given a laptop to use before, and I have never considered buying one myself, and I remembered looking at this thing like I was a caveman discovering fire. My immediate thoughts were that I hated the tiny keyboard and trackpad – I really can only use a full keyboard and mouse, having the space on a desk to do that – and the screen was too small, despite being of average laptop size.

This laptop was not for me to work from home, as I don’t do that, but it does keep me at work marginally longer by physically taking it out of a locked drawer every day, then packing it away at the end. The secure internet connection that was required was easier to implement through software, but it means more manually logging into programs and remembering login details to work.

Instead of having two screens on my desk, I have now also been introduced to the idea of the monitor-based docking station, the keyboard and mouse from my old computer now plugging into the one monitor left on my desk, to which the laptop connects through a USB-C cable and becomes the secondary screen, half the size of the one it replaced. It looks odd, and it makes me want to get an eye test despite being due one anyway.

On top of this, I am afraid of breaking the thing. It has a plastic case, and I have already once dropped it into its locked drawer harder than I expected, so I am dreading when I will fracture a corner, or break a hinge, or open and close the laptop enough times to over-flex the ribbon connector between the screen and the rest of the unit. The act of locking, in an eclosed space, an electrical device still warm from over eight hours of use, still gives me reason for concern – the desktop unit stayed in the open.

Of course, this is all nitpicking. Advances in computing, components and miniaturisation mean that the components of the average consumer computer will be similar regardless of whether you have a desktop or laptop model, and previous compromises that had to be made for a more mobile form factor no longer apply, battery capacity on laptops now allowing for all-day use on one charge – the difference between desktop and laptop is now down to personal preference, unless you require a gaming PC with enough fans to keep the processors cool.

But when you are given a situation where wireless internet connections drop out because you need to log back into a program to re-establish it, or when you realise the USB-C connection wasn’t charging the laptop at the same time, or the mouse suddenly stops working for some reason, you realise that solutions for many still involve compromises for some. For me, thankfully having the space at home for a desktop setup, desktop computers are the simpler choice because they cause less anxiety - mostly because I only have to use them, not handle them.

YOU CAN'T PUSH IT UNDERGROUND [494]

Lately, I have come to feel that I am always running out of time. I may start the day with a to-do list in my mind, and the best of intentions, but deadlines abound: what do you need to get done, or have ready, before you leave home, start work, or before you go to bed? What free time does a working day leave you, and how much drive you possess to use that time productively as well? Or should you wait until the weekend, and will you have the energy to do anything about it then?

This predicament nearly derailed my attempts to put something out this week. For the record, and in case I ever change it, I put out a social media message every Friday to say what I will be writing about for the coming weekend - this is a practice I picked up from old 1950s drive-in films, particularly Ed Wood films like “Glen or Glenda” and “Plan 9 from Outer Space”, where the poster would be created first to generate the interest, and hopefully funding, to make the film. This time, I realised that at no point during the preceding week, I had given any thought, or put aside any time to think, what I could possibly be writing about next.

When I first thought of squaring the circle, of addressing the problem by making it the subject, I initially dismissed the idea as a pathology that needed to be worked out in its own time, and not as a discussion to be reasoned with towards a conclusion. For me, it boils down to a feedback loop: an anxiety over not being productive enough with my own free time, and the linear nature of time itself, where every moment is a moment you won’t have again, which creates anxiety. In terms of addressing it, this will again be something to ringfence time to properly address it – ironically, that might also be the answer.

Two resources have been sent my way to address these from different angles: “Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing” by Robert Boice, a book with comprehensive diagnostic tools to assess productivity problems, and to build and maintain – I got a laugh from randomly opening at a page where someone had told Boice, “My God, you’re asking us to change our whole lifestyles!”, only to be told that they were the ones in control. The other was an article by Oliver Burkeman titled “The unproductivity challenge”, attempting to address the “completionist urge” by setting aside time to do nothing at all: “You’ll be claiming your right to exist, and to enjoy existing, regardless of your productivity.”

I may not be able to shake off the feeling that everything I have written here is a placeholder where a better idea for an article would have been, but this is the problem when you have an obligation to yourself to produce something new each week.