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Friday, June 24, 2011
Of Lists and Litanies
Lists can be simple things:
The days of the week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Ingredients in a recipe: 1 hen; 1 tb-sp salt; 1 oz. white fungus; 1 tb-sp sherry (optional).
Planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune,
Pluto.Positive integers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, . . .
Lists consist of items, and an ordering of those items. The ordering may or may not be significant. When I listed the days of the week, for example, I did so according a standard principle for that particular list: temporal order. I could have listed them alphabetically: Friday, Monday, Saturday, Sunday, Thursday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Strange, no? Yet that’s how you’d find them in a dictionary with, however, lots of other items between them.
That list, of course, is English-specific. I don’t know the name of the days in Chinese, but one can, of course, check the web and find out. And what I found out, among other things, is that before the West came knocking, the Chinese week had ten days.
Back to our lists. There’s no particular order to the ingredients list. At least I don’t think so. I listed the planets in order from the Sun out, another convention. Had I used the alphabetic convention, that list, too, would have been odd.
Q. What’s the Chinese equivalent of alphabetic listing?
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Thursday, June 23, 2011
Sacred Things
… that still roaring dell, of which I told; The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep, And only speckled by the mid-day sun; Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock Flings arching like a bridge;--that branchless ash, Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still, Fann'd by the water-fall! and there my friends Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds, That all at once (a most fantastic sight!) Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge Of the blue clay-stone. -- Coleridge, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison
This post began, I suppose, when, upon reading Charles Cameron’s post, Sacred space and the imagination, the “graffiti!” light went off in my brain. Not just any graffiti light, but this one:
Well, not that exact one, but it was a photograph of that same arch, a different photograph. This one shows the graffiti a little more clearly, but it’s not the same graffiti, as graffiti often changes over time, in some places more rapidly than others.
If you look back over Cameron’s images, you’ll see that it’s of a piece with them. And I’ve got dozens of photos of that arch: different times of the day, different seasons, different years, different graffiti, different angles. And that’s not all.
Graffiti and the sacred is a natural, one that hadn’t quite hit me full-on until I’d read Cameron’s post. You see, my first post about graffiti (the images, alas, are gone) was about this piece, which I called the Shrine of the Triceratops:
It’s not that I believe, mind you, that there’s a triceratops cult in Jersey City and that this is where they meet. Nothing like that. Rather, that that image seemed to embody of the spirit of the place, the Japanese word is kami. (That triceratops is now gone. First, eroded by the weather, then other writers went over it.)
I could go on and on about graffiti, but I won’t, because this post isn’t just about graffiti. But I’ll leave you with one last graffiti thought. Graffiti is often likened to cave art. Well, cave art, some of it, perhaps all of it, is sacred art. Not mere pictures, but spirits bodied forth on walls.
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Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Apocalypse 8: Sampan Massacre
As I remarked in the fifth post on Apocalypse Now, this scene marks the dramatic mid-point of the film, though it ends a bit after the temporal mid-point. Whatever Willard may have done in the past – he recalls having killed six people – and whatever the PBR crew may have done, in the context of this mission, they’ve been spectators up to this point. They saw the killing around them, but didn’t actively participate. Now things change. Coppola remarks: “From this moment on, when, really you see blood shed so directly both by the crew of the boat and by Willard in the case of the girl, once life is taken, the path is very very different.”
This scene wasn’t in the original script. It had been inspired by the My Lai incident. Walter Murch suggested to Coppola that they needed a scene like that, the sensless slaughter of civilians by trigger-happy soldiers. This scene fills that ‘slot’ in the thematic fabric.
* * * * *
By this point in their trip, the crew of the boat were on edge and on one another’s nerves. In this tetchy state they come upon a sampan:
The Chief decides to pull along side the sampan and search it, which is standard procedure. Willard protests, arguing that his mission takes priority. The Chief over-rides him: “Until we reach your destination Captain, you just goin’ for the ride.”
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Tuesday, June 21, 2011
The Tree of Life, and a Note on Job
More or less on Michael Sporn’s recommendation, I’ve just seen Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. While I’m collecting my thoughts on this trying, tedious, and rewarding film, I’ll let Michael’s thoughts stand-in for many of mine:
The film starts with a vision of god that moves beyond to a patriarchal dominated family in Waco, Texas. The suggestion of a death leads us back to god and the creation of the earth. From protozoa to dinosaur to the birth of a child, this filmmaker exudes absolute love for every organism he can show us on screen. Yet, right from the dinosaurs onward he creates an ominous tone in this male-dominated power hungry environment. You’re always expecting something terrible to happen in the hands of the children who push the film forward. This is a film that technically has a new way of presenting itself almost through an impressionistic vision. The whispered narration and dialogue mix and blend into one; the sun streamed backlit late-afternoon interiors create a whispered visual to match.
It was the phrase “from protozoa to dinosaur” that got me.
The film is that of a mystic. I know nothing of Malick, though it seems he was born in the Bible belt and studied philosophy, so I don’t know if he is really mystic, but then, what’s really in that question? I once told my draft board that I was a mystic. Really? Really. That’s what comes through in the film: “exudes absolute love for every organism he can show us on screen.”
The film’s explicit religiosity bugged me in the beginning. Am I going to have to say something about this in my review? Am I going to have to declare, for example, whether or not I’m a believer? And then it didn’t bug me, not for the last hour or so. I just forgot about it.
I’ll have more to say about the film later, but I just wanted to dig out some old notes, from 25 years ago, on Job.
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Friday, June 17, 2011
Parallelism in Apocalypse Now, a Note on Lance Logic
David Bordwell’s just done a post on parallelism, which “occurs when characters, situations, actions, or other factors are likened to or contrasted with one another.” in narrative. To illustrate his argument he gives typically lucid analyses of two films, a recent one, Julie & Julia, and one from the 1940s, Enchantment. Each involves two relationships, separated by a generation, but which are narrated in parallel through alternating scenes.
But that’s only one form of parallelism, of which there are many – as Bordwell knows.
Apocalypse Now is a tissue of parallels. I want to look at three. Two obvious ones, and one less obvious.
Let’s start with an obvious one, the end, the double-killing: Willard killing Kurtz, the villagers sacrificing the caribao. The other obvious parallel stalks you through the film from the foreshadowings in the opening montage through those killings: the parallel between Willard and Kurtz. We’re given this one in the voiceover as Willard is choppered to his briefing:
I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn’t even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable, plugged straight into Kurtz. It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz’s memory, any more that being back in Saigon was an accident. There is no way to tell his story, without telling my own; and if his story is really a confession, then so is mine.
Pay attention to that first sentence, which implies that Willard’s voiceover comments are retrospective, from some time after the events took place. They are thus the result of some reflection.
Then there’s that word: “confession.” That cannot be an accident. I rather imagine the term had real resonance for Coppola. And its religious implication certainly resonates with the sacrificial ending.
Given that Willard and Kurtz are parallel character, what’s the difference between them? Yeah, Kurtz went nuts, Willard not. That’s what the story says, but, in that world – in Willard’s words “The war was being run by a bunch of four-star clowns who were going to end up giving the whole circus away” – what’s the difference between sanity and not? And what’s it mean that the sane one kills the insane one, on orders? Or rather, in the logic of myth, how does it work in the mind?
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Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Apocalypse 6: The Opening Montage
Just what kind of two and a half hour movie does nothing in the first seven minutes?
Contrast the opening of Apocalypse Now with the opening of a typical James Bond flick, or one of the Indiana Jones adventures. Those openings are jam packed with action. The opening of Apocalypse Now is jam packed with nothing.
Images, music, thoughts. Plotwise, nothing. Othewise…
In his commentary on the opening scene, Coppola says that it was important to establish Capt. Willard’s character before he embarks “on this great journey.” And, yes, though nothing happens in this scene to advance or even to initiate the plot, those first seven and a half minutes do take us into Willard’s soul.
Those opening minutes do more than just reveal Willard’s soul. They get your neural tissue warmed up for the movie to come. They prime it (Wikipedia entry). What’s that mean? Just keep that notion in mind as we walk through the scene. You’ll find out.
The scene lasts for about seven minutes and 35 seconds and falls into three parts. In the first and third parts the sound track is dominated by The Doors performing The End. In the middle part we get Capt. Willard’s thoughts in voiceover. The patterns of imagery also differ among the parts.
1. Vietnam in the Mind
The film opens on a black screen. Throbbing comes up on the sound track. Jungle. Then a chopper moves across the screen. Music begins.
Flames start at the left, move right across the screen and engulf it. Jim Morrison starts singing: “This is the end, my beautiful friend . . . This is the end, my only friend the end.“
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Monday, June 13, 2011
Apocalypse 5: Précis of the Whole
Apocalypse Now doesn’t work in the conventional story-telling way. It has little plot to speak of:
Willard gets orders to kill Kurtz; he travels up-river to Kurtz’s compound; he kills Kurtz. Things happen along the way.
That’s it. More or less. Sorta.
But don’t let that fool you into thinking the movie doesn’t have a tight structure. You don’t shoot one-and-half million feet of film, 280 hours worth, edit it down to 2 and a half hours — which is a really fierce cutting ratio — and come out with formless mush. Not if you’ve got half a brain and people with skilz.
Coppola had a full-brain head and people with mad skilz. The film has structure. Just not conventional structure.
So we’re going to have to do a bit of work to figure out what the structure is. And even then we’re only going to make a good guess, because these things are not well-understood. We don’t have the concepts or vocabulary needed to do the job.
Description
Still, you have to start somewhere. And we’re going to start in the most pedestrian way possible, by listing the ‘chapters’ on the DVD and commenting on them. I’m not going for anything deep here. I just want to get a crude sense of how the film lays out over time, crude, but better than I can do by simply thinking it over.
Not counting the end credits, the film has been broken into 19 chapters – I’m talking about Apocalypse Now, not the Redux version, which is longer. I’ve listed them in order, using the names assigned to them, and then made a brief comment indicating what happens in the segment. I’ve also grouped them into five large-scale movements; I won’t call them acts, because that’s not what they are. I’ve done this mostly on an intuitive basis and on general principle, that there should be these larger-scale movements. That general principle may well be wrong. So I wouldn’t invest too much in these movements. But I find them convenient.
1. GETTING ORDERS
Duration: 26:01
That’s it; Capt. Willard gets the order to assassinate Kurtz and meets the crew that’ll take him up-river to Kurtz’s compound in Cambodia. What kind of movie spends so much time in which very little happens? Not an action adventure flick.
Waiting in Saigon: The first seven and a half minutes is a montage in which Willard wakes up from a drunk. I’ll analyze this in a later post. In his commentary Coppola says this tells us about Willard’s character, which it does. Then MPs stick him in the shower to wake him up.
Intelligence Compound: We learn of Kurtz as Willard does, sitting around the lunch table with three sly and powerful men. They put roast beef and spicy shrimp on their lunch plates while listening to a recording in which Kurtz talks about snails walking along the edge of a straight razor. No one says anything explicit about killing Kurtz. Rather, Willard’s to “terminate the colonel’s command . . . with extreme prejudice.” Willard agrees the Kurtz is insane.
Willard Meets PBR Crew: Chief Phillips appears to be career military and runs a tight boat (PBR: Patrol Boat, River). The other three crewman are conscripts – “rock and rollers with one foot in their graves.” Chef is from New Orleans and is a chef. Lance is a surfer and acid head from Southern California. Clean is a kid from the South Bronx. Willard opens Kurtz’s dossier (“. . . . I couldn’t believe they wanted this man dead . . . “) while Clean boogies to the Stones and Lance water skies.
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Friday, June 10, 2011
Apocalypse 4: Sacrifice, the Great Availability
At this point I began to realize that this journey up the river was really a journey though time, and that I to the past. At first it was going a matter of years, and then tens of years, taking me to the kind of Indochina period and to the 50s when the French in Vietnam, and then after that it would be going into decades, and centuries and ultimately thousands of years into the prehistory of human beings. It felt that way.
– Francis Ford Coppola
That’s not a shot from a documentary, though I suppose it could be. The animal is real, not a CGI special effect, and the people are real Ifugao villagers, not actors. They’re really sacrificing that water buffalo. And afterward, Francis Ford Coppola says, the people were happy, “like Thanksgiving.” That’s how ritual works.
This particular ritual was filmed by Coppola’s crew as one face of the ending of Apocalypse Now. The other face, of course, is the death of Kurtz. He doesn’t just die, of course, Willard kills him, hacks him to death with a machete. Like a water buffalo.
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Thursday, June 09, 2011
Inference at the Movies
Having given notice of David Bordwell’s article on common sense film theory, I now want to take a look at one of his topics: inference. Inference is important because it’s how the mind gets from here to there. Here might be transducing the array of light impinging on the retinas or it might be sitting back and thinking about “S → NP + VP”. There might be Aunt Betty’s gotten her hair dyed or it might be Uncle Noam sure took linguistics on a wild goose chase. Whatever it is, inference is the mind’s bridge from here to there.
It’s not clear to me whether or not Bordwell and I disagree on inference, at least not at this level of detail. I offer my commentary by way of, well, commentary. These are thoughts prompted by Bordwell’s remarks. Nothing more, nothing less.
The Gibson Challenge
As Bordwell tells it, and I agree, the “New Look” psychologists “held that the stimuli hitting our sense organs were noisy, incomplete, and ambiguous; we needed higher-level faculties to sort them out.” We simply can’t make sense of the world with “bottom-up” strategies that simply assemble sense data into percepts of intelligible objects and actions. We need “top-down” strategies that drive the interpretation of sense data with prior knowledge of and expectations of the world.
Bordwell came to grips with these ideas in his 1985 Narration in the Fiction Film (NiFF). But, Bordwell goes on, there were problems – aren’t there always?
Theoretically, however, NiFF ran into problems in the role it assigned to inference. At the time of writing NiFF, I was aware of the writings of J. J. Gibson and his insistence that perception evolved in environments very different from the impoverished information that New Look theorists assumed triggered perception. In the three-dimensional world in which creatures like us live, the stimuli are not typically partial or degraded; they are in fact quite rich, even redundant. Moving through space, we register an optic flow that specifies the layout of surfaces quite precisely.
Ah, Gibson, fascinating thinker, important ideas.
I first became away of Gibson as something of a rogue psychologist going against the grain of whatever was the mainstream back then – just when that ‘then’ was, that’s a bit vague. Yet, in some ways, he was a deeply conservative ally of, ugh, of all things, the behaviorists. The behaviorists would have nothing to do with mental processes, and neither would Gibson. If you couldn’t observe it, it wasn’t real. Can’t see mental processes.
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Wednesday, June 08, 2011
Apocalypse 3: Finding Yourself Lost in the Jungle
One of the things that hits you smack in the middle of the noggin about Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier (2006) is that Coppola didn’t know WTF he was into when he set out to make this film. Yeah, he had a cast, more or less, a budget, mostly his own money, and a John Milius script. But all that was more or less in jeopardy as soon as Coppola & Co. set up camp in the Philippines to shoot the thing.
As Coppola tells it in his director’s commentary, they shot the Col. Kilgore Valkyrie Chopper Assault scene early in the process. That was in the Milius script: the cowboy colonel, the surfing, and the Wagner. All there. They ran 100,000 feet of film through the cameras to get it, sweated blood over the napalm shots, couldn’t depend on the choppers to be on set when they were needed, and just generally found themselves in hell without the hand basket.
But what footage!
It was during that process that Coppola realized the script’s final scene – a battle extravaganza – wouldn’t cut it. That was out. And if that was out, what was in?
That question plagued Coppola, presumably, until the sucker was more or less edited into watchable shape. How to end the film? Coppola says he “must have written 500 endings.” 500? That’s a good number, more or less synonymous with lots and lots.
He also says, over and over – it’s a motif of his commentary – that he’s a director who likes to be “available” (his word) to whatever happens in the process. And was he ever available.
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Bordwell’s Common Sense
David Bordwell recently published an omnibus article under the title, Common Sense + Film Theory = Common-Sense Film Theory? He wrote it, so the frame story goes, in lieu of making a presentation at the current meeting of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image. He wasn’t able to make the meeting, so he wrote, and posted, this essay instead.
And a good thing, I say. Sure, Bordwell missed the face-to-face interaction with his colleagues from far and wide. But, in karmic compensation, the rest of get this essay, which begins thus:
Start with this question, which I think is one of the most fascinating we can ask: What enables us to understand films?
Bordwell then sets out, not to answer the question, not directly, but to review how his sense of the question, and its answers, has changed over the years, starting with film from semiology in the 1960s and 70s, with its emphasis on codes, to “New Look” perceptual and cognitive psychology starting in the mid-80s, to today’s “newer” psychologies, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and neuropsychology.
That’s a lot of territory and Bordwell doesn’t pretend to cover it all. This rather, is a history of his encounter with those movements. Frankly, it has something of the aura of a deck-clearing about it: Let’s review this stuff, clear it out, and get ready for some real work. What do you have up your sleeve, Bordwell?
I recommend the whole essay. If you don’t know Bordwell’s work, or if you don’t know this material, this is a good way in. If you’ve been over the territory, many times, then it’s a useful vehicle for conducting your own overview, using Bordwell’s review and elaboration as prompts for your own.
* * * * *
And when you’re done with that essay, have a look at his current blog post, Chinese boxes, Russian dolls, and Hollywood movies, in which he speaks to one of my hobby horses, ring forms (though he doesn’t use that term). He presents two films, Passage to Marseille and The Locket, as being stories4, with stories3, within stories2, within stories1. The innermost story (story4) contain the key the unlocks the mystery of the rest, something Mary Douglas pointed out in Thinking in Circles (2007).
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Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Jungle Agency: Apocalypse 2
Not so long after I’d posted some reservations about Apocalypse Now I set about resolving them. I’ve tentatively decided that the film does in fact meet the criterion I’d set for it in that post, that the film should somehow exhibit America’s “need to fight some Other.” That’s hardly sufficient for greatness, which is the judgment that’s in play, but I’ve made it necessary, as that’s an irreducible truth about America’s post-WWII wars.
But I want to set the aside ‘till the next post, in which I’ll compare the parallel killings at the end with the killings almost smack dab in the middle, the killings of the innocent Vietnamese on the sampan. In this post I’m going to concentrate on the jungle, with a closing remark on spectacle, Aristotle’s opsis.
Jungle Boogie, Tiger Rage
As I’d indicated in the earlier post, at the end Capt. Willard says in voice-over, “Even the jungle wanted him [Kurtz] dead. That’s who he took his orders from, anyway.” That’s metaphor, right? I mean, the jungle cannot literally give orders to anyone, nor can anyone receive orders from the jungle, even if it could give them. But this film is Art, and Art is often a tissue of Metaphor. In that tissue, such talk makes sense.
Let’s make sense of it. If the jungle is to issue orders, then it must be an agent. How does Coppola make of the jungle an agent? What artifice does he use to that end?
Look at this, the second shot in the film (the first is just a black screen):
It’s a lush jungle beach, a place you’d like to go on your vacation. Maybe you’d surf, and maybe you’d just sip piña coladas and watch others surf. Whatever. But that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that the second shot in this film is a lush jungle shot. The film will shortly take the lushness and the jungle out of it, but for a moment, that’s what you look at: lush jungle beach.
The film grows from that.
Let’s now skip over a whole pile of film: Willard’s drunk, his mission briefing, and Kilgore’s “Flight of the Valkyrie” surf and destruction mission. We’ve been through that mission and we’re on the PBR (Patrol Boat, River) going up river. It’s dawn on the next day:
Another gorgeous shot, but this time a contrast to the previous cowboy adventureland violence and, presumably, more violence to come.
The camera moves in toward the shore as we hear Chef, one of the crewmen, talking. See that blue spot to the left of center below the midline?
That’s the bucket Chef’s using to wash himself. He’s recounting a fantasy, or perhaps a dream, about meeting Raquel Welch in the jungle. The fantasy involves rubbing a mango pudding on their bodies.
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Sunday, June 05, 2011
Apocalypse Now — too much then?
I’ve watched the film again, though over two sittings one day apart. It’s gorgeous, powerful, perhaps great. But I wonder how it will play in 50 years when no one will have been alive during the Vietnam War and no one will remember eagerly buying The Doors’ debut album, the one with The End as the last track on side two.
That’s the music Coppola uses to frame the film. We open with Willard working on a binge while the Doors preach on the sound track. And we close as Willard terminates Kurtz’s command to that same music.
It works, it really does. But I don’t think The End will survive on its own. It’s not going to become a classic. Perhaps Apocalypse Now will keep it alive. Perhaps not.
The film’s Wikipedia entry provides ample material for those wishing to bank on the film’s enduring value. For example:
In 2002, Sight and Sound magazine polled several critics to name the best film of the last 25 years and Apocalypse Now was named number one. It was also listed as the second best war film by viewers on Channel 4’s 100 Greatest War Films, and ranked number 1 on Channel 4’s 50 Films To See Before You Die. In a 2004 poll of UK film fans, Blockbuster listed Kilgore’s eulogy to napalm as the best movie speech.[42] The helicopter attack to Ride of the Valkyries was chosen as the most memorable film scene ever by the Empire magazine.
In 2009, the London Film Critics’ Circle voted Apocalypse Now the best movie of the last 30 years.
That’s impressive. Heck, the film IS impressive. But will it last?
That same Wikipedia entry quotes Roget Ebert’s 1979 review as saying, “Apocalypse Now achieves greatness not by analyzing our ‘experience in Vietnam’, but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience”. Is that enough for greatness? And from just whose experience is this something being re-created in that film? A soldier who survived ‘Nam; one who didn’t? A mother, a brother? A farmer, a lawyer, a CEO? A draft dodger, a war resister? A stoned hippie? I don’t know.
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Monday, May 30, 2011
Implicit Analysis in Two Texts, a Cartoon and a Romance
It’s been a commonplace for two or three decades that narrative is a mode of thought. It is my impression — though I could be wrong — that this literature takes narrative at face value. Narrative situates things and events in relation to one another in time and space and that’s what narrative thinking is about.
I think narrative is used in a more subtle way. That more subtle mode of thought is the object of this post. Just how this more subtle thinking works, the fundamental mechanisms, that is not at all obvious. That something interesting is going on, though, that is relatively easy to spot.
I want to begin by presenting a more or less contemporary example, the Walter Lantz cartoon The Greatest Man in Siam. After that I’ll offer a suggestion or two about what might be going on. Then it’s on to a second example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I conclude by suggesting that we’re dealing with a computational form that realizes the poetic function as defined by Roman Jakobson.
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Monday, May 23, 2011
Sight & Sound, Toccata & Fugue
I first started blogging about Disney’s Fantasia here, and I’ve continued at New Savanna. Here’s a piece about the first episode in the film, based on Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor."
O ! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where
— S. T. Coleridge, “The Æolian Harp"
Disney’s Fantasia opens to stage empty of everything except risers and chairs for a symphony orchestra. The musicians amble on stage from the rear center and take their places. Then comes the master of ceremonies, music critic Deems Taylor. First he introduces the entire program and then, specifically, the first number, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
He introduces it as a piece of absolute music, contrasting it with music that somehow tells a story. Thus Taylor informs us, the images we are bout to see are those
that might pass through your mind if you sat in a concert hall listening to this music. At first, you are more or less conscious of the orchestra. So our picture opens with a series of impressions of the conductor and the players. Then the music begins to suggest other things to your imagination. They might be, oh, just masses of color, or they may be cloud forms or great landscapes or vague shadows or geometrical objects floating in space.
Much of the imagery in this sequence is semi-abstract and Disney was worried that the audience wouldn’t know quite what to make of it. So he gives them a story that prepares them for the imagery and gives them a way of interpreting it — oh, it’s just things and stuff that come to mind as your mind wanders while listing to the music, just things and stuff, not to worry. We then cut to an image of conductor Leopold Stokowski on the podium, arms raised, ready to deliver the downbeat. As his arms come down and the music starts, the image dissolves into the animation or, as we will see, something a bit different in this case.
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