My friend Josie directed me to this video:
She saw a longer version of it last month at the Hirshorn, where the scale of the projection and the audio of the ship crushing through the ice added much to the experience. Even at this diminished scale, the imagery is powerful.
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Kentridge in Fort Worth
My wife and I paid a visit to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth today. We drove to Cow Town to see the William Kentridge show, and holy mother of charcoal, the man is much better than I thought he was. I already knew he was remarkable, but the FW show is a revelation. Here's a version of a film that's in the show:
The title is Journey to the Moon. It may be in the exhibit, but my recollection is that this is not the same film. A room with multiple projected videos offers a variety of related pieces, many of which are titled Fragments for Georges Méliès. Méliès was the film pioneer who created Le Voyage dans la Lune in 1902 -- a landmark in early cinematography and filmic story telling. Coming a century later than Méliès, Kentridge's videos locate the 21st century artist in the history of movie making and conflate drawing, performing and filming. Not to mention conflating artist with model, director with performer, and process with content.
I took some notes today, but I need another shot at it all before I can review it. Two and a half hours in the museum wasn't enough. That's one of the troubles with video. Duration is like that -- it just takes time to haul it all in. We'll hit it again tomorrow after we check out of the motel.
The title is Journey to the Moon. It may be in the exhibit, but my recollection is that this is not the same film. A room with multiple projected videos offers a variety of related pieces, many of which are titled Fragments for Georges Méliès. Méliès was the film pioneer who created Le Voyage dans la Lune in 1902 -- a landmark in early cinematography and filmic story telling. Coming a century later than Méliès, Kentridge's videos locate the 21st century artist in the history of movie making and conflate drawing, performing and filming. Not to mention conflating artist with model, director with performer, and process with content.
I took some notes today, but I need another shot at it all before I can review it. Two and a half hours in the museum wasn't enough. That's one of the troubles with video. Duration is like that -- it just takes time to haul it all in. We'll hit it again tomorrow after we check out of the motel.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
More raw footage
PingWire is a live feed of all images posted to one of three sites that host pictures for Twitter users. This means that anything of interest to tweeters for any reason (love, hate, desire, fear, you name it) appears on the site once it has gone through the uploading and publishing process. PingWire offers a glimpse into the collective mind of a significant subset of the Internet -- a visual guide to the unconscious. Like the Internet is dreaming.
Porn is there, of course. So are injuries, tourist destinations, and boyfriends. Last week there were scores of pictures sighted down the picture takers' supine legs at assorted beaches.
It turns out that a sizeable portion of the pictures tweeters share with the world involve food -- eating, cooking, and sometimes growing food. Some photos document a pretty child eating an ice cream cone. Some show empty plates. Others offer scrumptious desserts or elaborate platters of sushi.
Their motives vary widely. Some images appear because a besotted mother wants to show us her son's reaction to (e.g.) a crate of strawberries. Some are offered by disgusted patrons repulsed by the fare at a sub-standard diner. Some are snarky. Some celebrate pleasures.
Many are badly composed and unfocused. Others are professionally exposed ads for restaurants.
Last week I saved as many food and eating pictures as I could during a few hours spread out over four days. I harvested about 1300 pictures during that time. Today, I imported them into a video that turned out to be a little longer than 11 minutes at 1/2 second per image. There is no sound so far, and I'm probably going to rework it considerably, but even the raw footage is interesting to me.
At least it is tonight.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Wretch/retch
Paul Cullum, writing in Vanity Fair, discloses a memo from horrible, horrible factory painter of tepid banalities Thomas Kinkade to the director and crew of his film, Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage. At least that's the title in Cullum's piece. IMDB lists the title as Thomas Kinkade's Home for Christmas. Whatever.
The memo contains 16 items which Kinkade wanted the filmmakers to bear in mind while working on the project. Here's one:
The movie was released on DVD November 11 with no theatrical run, presumably because it's abysmally awful. Iceland, which is bankrupt and starving, will host a theatrical release tomorrow. Poor Iceland.
Warning: viewing the trailer is not advised. It is included here for evidentiary purposes only. Just use your imagination to conjure a feeble Peter O'Toole mouthing "Art is about LIFE." Poor Peter, money must be an issue for him. Just like Iceland.
Painters can make good films. Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and The Butterfly is wonderful and moving.
And Robert Longo's film based on William Gibson's story, Johnny Nmemonic is engaging, proto-steampunk stuff.
But this Kinkade stuff makes me shudder: there's an audience for it. They walk among us and like moss-coated memories of shabby miracles.
The memo contains 16 items which Kinkade wanted the filmmakers to bear in mind while working on the project. Here's one:
15) Nostalgia. My paintings routinely blend timeframes. This is not only okay, but tends to create a more timeless look. Vintage cars (30's, 40's, 50's, 60's etc) can be featured along with 70's era cars. Older buildings are favorable. Avoid anything that looks contemporary -- shopping centers, contemporary storefronts, etc. Also, I prefer to avoid anything that is shiny. Our vintage vehicles, though often times are cherished by their owners and kept spic-n-span should be "dirtied up" a bit for the shoot. Placerville was and is a somewhat shabby place, and most vehicles, people, etc bear traces of dust, sawdust, and the remnants of country living. There are many dirt roads, muddy lanes, etc., and in general the place has a tumbled down, well-worn look.Everything should have a pleasing coat of moss on it. Like Hobbits and really stupid fixer-upper village dwellings in the rain. Jean Baudrillard, writing of the death of reality in "The Precession of Simulacra," says that nostalgia isn't what it used to be. I guess not.
The movie was released on DVD November 11 with no theatrical run, presumably because it's abysmally awful. Iceland, which is bankrupt and starving, will host a theatrical release tomorrow. Poor Iceland.
Warning: viewing the trailer is not advised. It is included here for evidentiary purposes only. Just use your imagination to conjure a feeble Peter O'Toole mouthing "Art is about LIFE." Poor Peter, money must be an issue for him. Just like Iceland.
Painters can make good films. Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and The Butterfly is wonderful and moving.
And Robert Longo's film based on William Gibson's story, Johnny Nmemonic is engaging, proto-steampunk stuff.
But this Kinkade stuff makes me shudder: there's an audience for it. They walk among us and like moss-coated memories of shabby miracles.
Monday, August 18, 2008
A Bit More About Video
As I mentioned, we visited the video program at Conduit Gallery Saturday evening. Here's a schedule of the five-week event. There was a screening of Chinese director/artist Yang Fudong's "An Estranged Paradise," which I failed to connect with except for a few passages of lovely imagery. The beginning of the film, with its disquisition on rules for creating a sense of space in traditional Chinese landscape painting, provided an intellectually stimulating frame for the city landscapes that follow, but an hour or so into the movie it was a tough task to keep painting in mind. Mostly I was reminded of French Nouvelle Vague.
I was engaged in conversation out in the front gallery during the seated presentation of Angerame's "Anaconda Targets" in the back, but I was told the impact was all the stronger for its near-11-minute duration.
My favorite piece of the night was Michael Bell-Smith's "Battleship Potemkin Dance Edit." Bell-Smith re-cut Eisenstein's classic film to a standard house beat dance rhythm. When I first learned of the piece, I wrote one of the curators that the title alone brought back memories of being in a club back in the summer of 1970 and dancing to Crosby Stills and Nash: "Four Dead in
Ohio." Shallow at the core and somehow just wrong, but what's the use of a revolution if you can't dance? And what I imagined of the video suggested a thoughtful take on time -- dance time and cinematic time, as it was conceived by the man who invented montage.
Years ago Peter Halle had a show at the DMA in which he painted two sociological flow charts on the walls next to his paintings. One was a chart of being admitted to prison, the other charted getting into a disco. They looked the same.
But the mechanically regularized pace of Bell-Smith's Potemkin edit was much more than an ironic take on something great from the past or a dry observation on modes of duration and intertextual tempos. The metronome beat -- relentless and industrial and mindless and soulless -- cast the struggles and violence of Eisenstein's work in an entirely irrational universe. Things happened. Sometimes they happened slowly. Sometime quickly. But they only happened. And it became clear that they had to happen.
The organic flow of the original montage was embedded in a moral attitude towards the narrative. Watching Eisenstein's movie, we were invited to judge the unfolding events, and implicit in our very capacity to make a moral judgment about the actions of the characters is the supposition that these events could unfold differently, that the people could behave another way.
The dance edit allows no judgments. Can you judge the ticking of a clock?
I was engaged in conversation out in the front gallery during the seated presentation of Angerame's "Anaconda Targets" in the back, but I was told the impact was all the stronger for its near-11-minute duration.
My favorite piece of the night was Michael Bell-Smith's "Battleship Potemkin Dance Edit." Bell-Smith re-cut Eisenstein's classic film to a standard house beat dance rhythm. When I first learned of the piece, I wrote one of the curators that the title alone brought back memories of being in a club back in the summer of 1970 and dancing to Crosby Stills and Nash: "Four Dead in
Ohio." Shallow at the core and somehow just wrong, but what's the use of a revolution if you can't dance? And what I imagined of the video suggested a thoughtful take on time -- dance time and cinematic time, as it was conceived by the man who invented montage.
Years ago Peter Halle had a show at the DMA in which he painted two sociological flow charts on the walls next to his paintings. One was a chart of being admitted to prison, the other charted getting into a disco. They looked the same.
But the mechanically regularized pace of Bell-Smith's Potemkin edit was much more than an ironic take on something great from the past or a dry observation on modes of duration and intertextual tempos. The metronome beat -- relentless and industrial and mindless and soulless -- cast the struggles and violence of Eisenstein's work in an entirely irrational universe. Things happened. Sometimes they happened slowly. Sometime quickly. But they only happened. And it became clear that they had to happen.
The organic flow of the original montage was embedded in a moral attitude towards the narrative. Watching Eisenstein's movie, we were invited to judge the unfolding events, and implicit in our very capacity to make a moral judgment about the actions of the characters is the supposition that these events could unfold differently, that the people could behave another way.
The dance edit allows no judgments. Can you judge the ticking of a clock?
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Joe
We rented "The Future is Unwritten," a biopic about the great Joe Strummer, and watched it tonight. I fired up the big reactor pile audio system I have attached to the TV for the event. Strummer's story should be experienced loud. Very loud. Kick out the jams (expletive reluctantly deleted)!
The film features disarming drawings by the man himself which somebody animated in a simple, Web GIF animation way, and they were just about perfect. I saw a documentary about Henry Darger a couple of years ago that used an analogous animation technique with his work. But the Darger film was a mistake. Nothing was added to old Darger's hallucinatory visions of child hell by making the odd Vivian girl twitch and wink. A punk rocker's pictures by their nature must twitch and wink. Twitching and winking in hell is just about the whole point.
The Strummer film contains snippets of early bands like the Vultures and most especially the 101ers. But of course it's the Clash that makes the story compelling. The film begins with some decidedly not ironic footage of Strummer laying on the voice track of "White Riot" in the studio. He's mesmerizing. Like the opening sequence of Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces which describes the last Sex Pistols' concert with the incredulous assertion "This is really happening." Incredulous because the writer truly can't believe what he is reporting. Strummer's intensity and passion are bare. There is no "you've been cheated" moment in anything that follows.
"London Calling" has been used to sell Jaguar automobiles in recent times, but once it was a raging anthem of fierce resistance against any such shit. So has punk rock's power to shock been domesticated. The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" sells cell phone contracts and Iggy Pop's drummer entices us to take a Caribbean cruise. The movie follows approximately the same progression from clanging garage band through modest commercial success to stadium rocker status and the inevitable disillusionment of becoming only another part of what the Situationist International used to call the Spectacle.
Spectacle be damned. Strummer remains a man who meant it when he made those harsh noises some may call singing. It was more and less than a commodity he offered his audience.
As Strummer's (and the Clash's) fame grows during the movie, the talking heads commenting on the story get more famous. Early on, it's all ex girlfriends and former bandmates. But soon enough John Cusack, Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese even Johnny Depp offer their stellar judgments on Strummer's cultural bona fides. Who could argue with that lineup? Okay I can argue with Johnny Depp sittin' by a camp fire at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, but who's counting shit like that?
The emergence of the Mescaleros, Strummer's last real band, is a treat for all of us Joe fans. And throughout it all we are treated to snippets of Joe's regular BBC radio show of world music which ranged from Detriot's MC5 to Elvis (on crawfish) to the Clash and the Mescaleros.
Strummer's voiceover as the film comes to an end urges us all to remember that we are all just people and we can change things. People made it so; people can make it not so.
Anybody want to figure out why I persist in cultural work like painting and art criticism? See this movie. If you don't, fuck off.
The film features disarming drawings by the man himself which somebody animated in a simple, Web GIF animation way, and they were just about perfect. I saw a documentary about Henry Darger a couple of years ago that used an analogous animation technique with his work. But the Darger film was a mistake. Nothing was added to old Darger's hallucinatory visions of child hell by making the odd Vivian girl twitch and wink. A punk rocker's pictures by their nature must twitch and wink. Twitching and winking in hell is just about the whole point.
The Strummer film contains snippets of early bands like the Vultures and most especially the 101ers. But of course it's the Clash that makes the story compelling. The film begins with some decidedly not ironic footage of Strummer laying on the voice track of "White Riot" in the studio. He's mesmerizing. Like the opening sequence of Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces which describes the last Sex Pistols' concert with the incredulous assertion "This is really happening." Incredulous because the writer truly can't believe what he is reporting. Strummer's intensity and passion are bare. There is no "you've been cheated" moment in anything that follows.
"London Calling" has been used to sell Jaguar automobiles in recent times, but once it was a raging anthem of fierce resistance against any such shit. So has punk rock's power to shock been domesticated. The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" sells cell phone contracts and Iggy Pop's drummer entices us to take a Caribbean cruise. The movie follows approximately the same progression from clanging garage band through modest commercial success to stadium rocker status and the inevitable disillusionment of becoming only another part of what the Situationist International used to call the Spectacle.
Spectacle be damned. Strummer remains a man who meant it when he made those harsh noises some may call singing. It was more and less than a commodity he offered his audience.
As Strummer's (and the Clash's) fame grows during the movie, the talking heads commenting on the story get more famous. Early on, it's all ex girlfriends and former bandmates. But soon enough John Cusack, Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese even Johnny Depp offer their stellar judgments on Strummer's cultural bona fides. Who could argue with that lineup? Okay I can argue with Johnny Depp sittin' by a camp fire at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, but who's counting shit like that?
The emergence of the Mescaleros, Strummer's last real band, is a treat for all of us Joe fans. And throughout it all we are treated to snippets of Joe's regular BBC radio show of world music which ranged from Detriot's MC5 to Elvis (on crawfish) to the Clash and the Mescaleros.
Strummer's voiceover as the film comes to an end urges us all to remember that we are all just people and we can change things. People made it so; people can make it not so.
Anybody want to figure out why I persist in cultural work like painting and art criticism? See this movie. If you don't, fuck off.
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