Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "video"

The video blog Watch the Video features the clip I made for the second of my Palestinian crime novels A Grave in Gaza (UK title: The Saladin Murders). The rest of my videos feature on my Youtube channel.

Many writers make promotional videos for their books these days, as you'll see from the Watch the Video site. Most of them are made up largely of still photos and have quite a lot in common with the narrative voice-over of movie trailers ("In a time of wearing boxers, one man wore briefs..." etc.)

I've tried to give each of my videos for each book a different flavor. For A Grave in Gaza, videographer David Blumenfeld and I chose to imitate the great noir movies of the 1940s and 1950s. We watched Carol Reid's "The Third Man" to study the angles and lighting. I wrote a brief script in which I aimed to deliver my lines in the rasping, hardboiled tone of that period.

We figured the contrast of a style associated with Los Angeles or post-war Vienna with the backdrop of Jerusalem's Old City would be thought-provoking.

I also wanted to show that the book, while based on my factual research and years of reporting in Gaza, was fiction. So I took a less journalistic approach the video than I had with the clip for my first novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title: The Bethlehem Murders).

Next week, David and I will be shooting a video for my next novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN. The book won't be out until January, but we'll be loading the video onto Youtube within a couple of weeks. We're taking a different approach to this book. I'll keep you posted on its progress and, having seen some of David's early footage, I'm sure you'll like it. Meanwhile enjoy the existing videos, which I hope will give you some insights into the locations of the books.

My favorite little coffee shop in Jerusalem’s Old City is just inside the Muslim Quarter, behind the Church of the Holy Sepulcher where Jesus is believed to have been crucified, buried and resurrected.

Once you’ve sucked on the tobacco in this café, even hanging on a cross with nails through your hands and feet would be a relief. It's like smoking a three-foot-long unfiltered Gauloise.

But I keep going back. I like the location -- down the steep narrow alley outside the café, a short walk takes you to the Cotton Souk and straight onto the Temple Mount by the side of the Dome of the Rock. I like the environment, too. The men (only men) puffing on their nargilas are friendly and talkative. The volume on the radio is unpredictable. The electricity keeps cutting out. The plaster’s peeling from the walls, and the toilet is a stomach-churning masterpiece by a coprophiliac Jackson Pollock. Yes, it’s a great spot.

This week I stopped in to shoot a video for my next novel, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which will be out in February. The book’s set in Brooklyn. My Palestinian detective Omar Yussef travels there to visit his son, only to find a dead body in his son’s apartment. The action of the book takes place mostly in Bay Ridge, which is becoming “Little Palestine” due to an influx of Palestinian immigrants. There are also chapters around the U.N. in Manhattan and in Coney Island.


My videographer David Blumenfeld and I decided to shoot the atmospheric background shots in Brooklyn. My pieces to camera: in the café.

As David set up the lights and the two cameras, I negotiated with the fellow who serves the coffee to make the place a little quieter for our recording. I asked if he’d mind turning off the radio (“It doesn’t really work anyhow,” I told him, as the radio cut out once again. “But when it does, people like it,” he said.) and the noisy fan (“What fan?” he said, wiping his sweaty moustache. “Oh, that thing.”)

I hoped the nargila would throw off some atmospheric smoke, as it usually does, giving our shot a noirish quality. The particular brand of tobacco bubbling through the water pipe that day was the nastiest I’ve ever encountered. And no smoke. Just an invisible poison that left me hacking through my script and reaching for my glass of coffee.

(Incidentally, in the Jerusalem accent a “nargila” is an “’argila,” because they often drop the opening syllable of a world. Thus, the only place in the Arab world where they can’t pronounce “al-Quds,” the word for Jerusalem in Arabic, is Jerusalem. They call it “al-‘uds” here.)

After a couple of hours of sucking on the nasty pipe and clearing my throat with thick, cardamom-flavored coffee, I’d done the script in English, French, Italian, and German. I was too jittery to sit there any longer. David and I hauled our equipment to the beautiful Austrian Hospice, a hotel and coffee shop on the Via Dolorosa.

On the roof of the Austrian Hospice, David filmed me reading the opening chapter of THE FOURTH ASSASSIN. It was the height of the afternoon sunshine and I was unwisely wearing a black shirt (trying to look noirish again). David pulled out a big reflector disc to direct light to the unlit side of my face. It blinded me. “Isn’t that how King David defeated the Philistines?” I said.

When in Jerusalem, you know, stick to the Bible.

We’ll be editing the video for THE FOURTH ASSASSIN this month and posting it to Youtube. Meanwhile, you can see the videos for my first three books on my website.

The next in my series of Palestinian crime novels THE FOURTH ASSASSIN will be out early next year. Meanwhile I've made a couple of videos to introduce the book. In this one, I went up onto the roof of the Austrian Hospice in Jerusalem's Old City to read from Chapter One of the next book.

To introduce the next of my Palestinian crime novels, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, my friend videographer David Blumenfeld filmed in New York (where the book takes place). His montages are mainly from Brooklyn's Bay Ridge and Coney Island sections. He then recorded me, looking sweaty and frankly a bit doped up, in my favorite seedy cafe in Jerusalem's Muslim Quarter.
You can view it here, and if you prefer you can watch it in French, German, or Italian. THE FOURTH ASSASSIN will be published in the UK and US in February, but I just couldn't keep my video a secret until then.

While in New York this last couple of weeks, I stopped into the space-age HQ of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp on the Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. Once my eyes had adjusted to the superbright white light everywhere, I settled into a studio for an interview with Jon Friedman (the man known around NY as "Mister Media") to talk about how I researched my new novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN.

Here's a whimsical video explaining why the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo is the best vantage point from which to observe the Palestinian-Israeli conflict -- superior even than a Gaza refugee camp or an Israeli military base. Seriously. And yet not.

In the Royal Navy, there’s only one kind of facial hair allowed. British Tars are either clean shaven or they sport a beard, known in the service as a “full set.” The antipathy to the mustache is no doubt because of its predominance among the rival landlubber officer class (although it could’ve later been its association with a different kind of “sailor.”)

Book authors now fall into similar categories. There are those who do nothing online and those for whom each book must be accompanied by the full set.

Those who do nothing are usually writers who were already well-known before the web became so important. They don’t need to be online, so they aren’t. Or they’re too old to get into a new kind of writing. Me, I have the internet full set. Here’s what I’ve got going on already for my new book, which is out in two weeks in the UK:

First there’s the updated website, www.mattrees.net. The website is, of course, the equivalent of facial stubble. Everyone’s doing it, even those who don’t get around to growing a full set. Some of them are pretty rotten and look like they’d itch… You can tell that the writer only sports the stubble because he thinks he has to – a fashion necessity. He’d get rid of it in a moment if the fashion changed.

I’m very involved in the design of my site. I put lots of Extra Features in it. You can hear much of the music from MOZART’S LAST ARIA, my new book. (It’s a historical thriller in which Mozart’s sister tries to uncover the secrets of the great composer’s death.) I have a couple of brief essays about how I came to write the book; how I researched it; how I structured it to mirror my favorite Mozart piano sonata. A photo tour of all the real locations featured in the novel, and images of many of the real characters from the book.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

For today's release of my new historical crime novel MOZART'S LAST ARIA in the UK, take a look at this two-minute video introducing the book. It features my son dressed as Little Mozart, because I'm even more proud of him than I am of the book... Watch more videos about the book.

The lovely PBS show 'Dinner and a Book' featured my first novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM a couple of years ago. Now the delightful crew at "Michiana's" public television channel discuss my novel MOZART'S LAST ARIA while cooking Wolfgang Mozart's favorite dish. Prepare to be utterly charmed!

Watch Mozart's Last Aria on PBS. See more from Dinner & A Book.