tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-134836692024-03-05T23:28:57.083-06:00Photographic Apparatuscharleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.comBlogger159125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-3781145384345400602012-06-16T12:36:00.000-05:002012-06-16T13:17:45.460-05:00Sesame Street in Guantanamo Bay<img src="http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100930161404/muppet/images/thumb/1/1d/Cerf-ernie-henson.jpg/300px-Cerf-ernie-henson.jpg" />
<img border="0" src="http://www.allgov.com/Images/eouploader.8589bd61-bb80-495a-a109-57901ce4bb2c.1.data.jpg" /><br />
<a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2012/05/201253072152430549.html">Al Jazeera reports</a> that the songs of award-winning Sesame Street composer Christopher Cerf have been used to torture detainees in Guantanamo.<br />
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I guess it goes to show how meaning and affect are contextual, and songs that are unequivocally joyful and redeeming in one context, can be weaponized and effectively torture in another (hooded prisoners, tied up, wearing headphones blaring the same songs for hours or days on end).<br />
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In other words, we artists are in the same boat as scientists and technologists: once we release our creations into the world, we can't control the ways they're used by others – nor, ultimately, the meaning that other people will find & make once our creations are out of our hands.charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-51660354996328590412012-05-29T09:42:00.000-05:002012-05-29T09:42:43.858-05:00Darren AronofskyQ.<br />
How did documentary films end up influencing your fictional features?<br />
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A.<br />
I first started studying film when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, with Ross McElwee and Alfred Guzzetti, and they are the guys who pioneered first-person documentary — probably what’s now turned into the entertainment that Michael Moore has turned into mainstream cinema. But it started off there, with “Sherman’s March” and other things. And the program that I was in was very documentary-based. My approach to “Pi,” my first film, came out of our first assignment: we took a 400-foot roll of Tri-X black-and-white film and had to make a portrait of one person. So I tried to turn that into a narrative film.<br />
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<img src="http://www.newschool.edu/uploadedImages/Divisional_Events/NSGS/pi.jpg" />
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Q.<br />
Do you still see the lessons of that education resonating in the kinds of movies you make now?<br />
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A.<br />
Definitely. If you look at “The Wrestler” and “Black Swan,” I took these movie stars and stuck them into real worlds and tried to surround them with people from those real worlds. “Black Swan’s” maybe more stylized [laughs]. Reality television is an extension of documentary as well, and that’s taken over TV. From “Cops” to “Storage Wars,” it’s basically that. It’s hard to make narrative that rings really truthful. And now dramatic, independent films are really disappearing and dying, and most narrative films are these real high-end fantasy superhero films that don’t exist. There’s something amazing about seeing real people in real, dramatic situations. And that can be “I Used to Be Fat,” [laughs] which is a great, great, great show.charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-1210441554446781802012-05-26T10:58:00.001-05:002012-05-26T10:58:55.488-05:00<p class="p1"><a href="http://www.felkercommalori.com/Imperceptihole.html">Imperceptihole</a> - </p>
<p class="p1">What it must feel like to be a 16mm camera on mushrooms.</p>
<p class="p1"><img height="480" src="http://www.felkercommalori.com/hole.png" width="720" /></p>
<p class="p1">sound is sync, sound is direct, just not from our dimension... like an audiovisual translation of the sensual experience from a deaf and dumb person: frightening and urgent, though always sensually incomplete - we never get a complete or clear image. ... or a document from one of the parallel worlds that overlaps with ours in the spiral of time: the sounds and images are incidental with ours; tangential; but they lead off into incomprehensible dimensions.</p>charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-32100390871235379782012-05-26T09:59:00.000-05:002012-05-26T09:59:08.350-05:00Leonard Retel Helmrich<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/movies/leonard-retel-helmrichs-documentaries-capture-closed-spaces.html?pagewanted=all" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img src="http://yourisepp.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/stand-van-de-sterren-spoobrommer.jpg?w=422&h=316" /></a></div>
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“His camera glides through spaces in a way that just seems impossible,” said the documentarian Robb Moss, a film lecturer at Harvard. “Sometimes you stop looking at the movie and look at the shot. But I think it’s delightful. It may be distracting, but I’m all for it.”<br />
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To Mr. Helmrich, whose trilogy will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art beginning Thursday (with a Sept. 28 showing of “Position Among the Stars” on HBO2), his innovations — like the SteadyWing, a camera mount with handlebars, and the placing of a camera on a bamboo pole (to get that trestle scene) — arise out of a philosophy that he calls single-shot cinema.<br />
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“It happened when I stopped thinking in shots, and started thinking in camera movement,” the Dutch-born director said via Skype from a film festival in South Korea. “I don’t want to make the camera movements in anticipation of the editing. I want to make the editing in celebration of the camera movements. I want to have complete freedom in how I move the camera. When you start thinking that way, you come up with shots that are never done before. And shots that can only be done with equipment that doesn’t yet exist.”<br />
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Like a tripod made from floor dusters. Or a bamboo “crane” with which he shoots the painters on the roof of a mosque. Both of those were devised on the fly when he found himself in unusual shooting situations. “He has this remarkable ability to see the world with a camera,” said Mr. Moss, who asked Mr. Helmrich to shoot “Nuclear Underground,” a coming documentary, “and then to build this equipment out of basic household items and make shots you’ve never seen before.”charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-67060523836787466062012-05-26T09:17:00.000-05:002012-05-26T09:17:39.097-05:00re: "the different ways people inhabit, and work with the tv that's meaningful for them"<img src="http://s4.hubimg.com/u/2424503_f260.jpg" />
Diane Winston: "Part of why tv has become even more powerful as a place for working out social and cultural issues is that we are no longer isolated intelligences watching in our own homes. I'm struck by the number of blogs [or twitters] that work on issues around Dexter, around zombies or vampires, asking 'what does it mean to be human,' 'what is morality,' 'how does justice figure into love' 'how do i know what is spiritual,' 'can people change?' "charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-24020613164606020192012-05-22T09:08:00.001-05:002012-05-22T09:09:38.817-05:00Gallery - London Festival of Photography<a href="http://www.lfph.org/gallery/international-award-2012/8605/60723#image">Gallery - London Festival of Photography<br />
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I've railed against the way this app traffics on nostalgia to make up for the technical limitations of the iPhone... but these are some really nice pictures.<br />
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<img src="http://images.londonstreetphotographyfestival.org.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/36/60723_large.jpg?1326380029" /></a>charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-9284573816224316222012-05-20T14:11:00.001-05:002012-05-20T14:11:41.480-05:00<a href="http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/three-womens-stories-an-interview-with-michael-glawogger?utm_source=digest&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digest45">Three Womens' Stories: An Interview with Michael Glawogger on Notebook | MUBI</a><br />
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<img src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/post_images/6890/mexico.jpg?1315948461" /><br />
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DANIEL KASMAN: Did you always conceive this film in a three part structure?<br />
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MICHAEL GLAWOGGER: No. Like all of my films, I only know after the first filming. Once you have something you get a feeling for the whole project. Before that you want to look, you collect, you conceive things—but you don't know. I wrote a book this thick [indicates a big, fat book] for financing with many, many places I researched. There was Naples in it, there was Vienna, there was Nepal, and later on I went to Africa. But after the first sequence you know more what you're looking for. I knew when I filmed Bangladesh that I had done something quite...it was a manifesto, it was substantial, and I knew I couldn't break it down to 20 minutes, so I knew the film had to be something different. And the whole religion thing started to come up also in the research. So then I thought it should be like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, it should be like an alter; the only difference then was to have three different cultures, three different religions. And then I knew what I was looking for; I knew I wanted a left side, a beginning that is more lightweight, that is more glamorous, with Buddhism in a more easy-going surrounding, and I knew I wanted to end on something heavy, deep and Catholic.<br />
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...KASMAN: And what were the reactions of the Bangladeshi and Mexican audiences?<br />
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GLAWOGGER: In Bangladesh it was quite ethnographic in a way...almost two years had passed since the filming and they didn't realized the authenticity of image of themselves. One mother would see herself on the TV screen and she was a little, almost..."what is this?...What this woman here says is absolutely true and the whole world should hear it!" And then she'd reflect for a second and then realize "Oh, that's me!" It was very interesting in that sense, obviously while we filmed she was not aware of the outcome of what the project would be, but at the same time she was proud of what she said. In Mexico, also like in the movie, they are the most reflexive people, philosophical people. They would really watch the whole movie, they think Thailand is hell, they say "we pray we get to live in Mexico because we would never want to sit behind glass and not be able to communicate with our customers. How would we be able to know if we liked or disliked them?" They were very aggressive about Bangladesh, saying "what is this bullshit with the children there?" And all this without understanding the language because I only had English subtitles and they don't all speak English. Vana, the one who was so explicit about the rimming and the ice cubes and everything, she said "yeah it's great what I say there, but are my tits ok? I was a little ashamed but I think they're ok for my age, don't you think?" It was so human, it was very nice in that human sense, and we discussed the film for a long time. They really loved the music, the Mexican girls said "oh this song, I don't know her but she has a great voice, she's shouting out and we love that."<br />
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...KASMAN: What was it like interacting with the clients?<br />
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GLAWOGGER: Mainly, I wouldn't have thought it would have come up that much because I thought getting them to talk would be very difficult, but it came up by itself. Because I was going again and again and leaving the place and coming back trying to convince the girls, the regular customers came up to me and asked what the fuck I was doing. So I explained the movie and they cursed at me say "oh you journalists, you pissers, you always give us the red card and say we are the horrible guys and criminals and blah blah blah, are you one of them?" I said "come on, my film is a stage for these things, if you feel about prostitution and you have the balls and the guts to speak up, be my guest, I'm here." The moment that started I couldn't free myself from them! If they did not have a family or a job to lose they would all want to speak up. Sometimes they are stupid little kids, but I couldn't hate them, when I was nineteen I probably behaved like that too, in a way they were fun. <br />
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...KASMAN: I can imagine the entire pre-production of the film was fraught with negotiations. How difficult was it to shoot these private-public interactions, business being carried on, with a crew, you, cameraman, sound guy, how'd they let you do this?<br />
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GLAWOGGER: [laughing] I don't know! I think they got so tired, they just said "just do it, get the fuck outta here!" No, I mean, in a way it's easy too; as you can imagine most of these places are controlled by some kind of mafia. These are people, you can say they are criminals, on the other hand they are pretty straight-forward in their deals. The Mexican mafia demanded that they wanted to watch my films, so I came there with DVDs and they watched the movies, and they said "You did this in the film? What does it mean when you do this?" The funny thing about Mexico was that they said I could do anything but not to do drugs or sex in the film [the Mexican section in the final film includes both].<br />
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KASMAN: I take it you didn't show that part of the film to them.<br />
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GLAWOGGER: Oh yeah I did! They didn't care anymore, it was a straight deal, they wanted some money for it, they got it, and they stick to their thing.<br />
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...KASMAN: That's fascinating to me, because I would assume that due to the secrecy and shame involved in filming prostitutes and their stories, this subject would be one of the most difficult things to comprehensively film.<br />
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GLAWOGGER: It is difficult, but there's one thing I hate which is filmmakers who brag about the difficulty of their shooting, I really hate that with all my senses, so I'm not going to do it!<br />
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KASMAN: But between Workingman's Death and this, they're films that with almost every scene as an audience member you are aware of how the filmmaker had to get into the position to film what's on camera. We're conscious of that very difficulty.<br />
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GLAWOGGER: Otherwise I wouldn't stand with a short lens so close to them! I mean look at this American film that I think even got an Oscar, called Born into Brothels, which actually bullshits you because it beats around the bush all the time and the director sent children in to take pictures where she should actually film, so she's never there where the film has to be, but everyone thinks this is a charming idea when it's chicken shit, you knowcharleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-54068789504753920712012-05-20T11:43:00.001-05:002012-05-20T14:25:48.011-05:00Darren Aronofsky’s Anti-Meth Ads and the re-release of Shirley Clarke's The Connection<a href="http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/158563/darren-aronofskys-anti-meth-ads-are-horrifying-video/">Darren Aronofsky’s Anti-Meth Ads Are Horrifying (Video) | Death and Taxes<br />
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<img src="http://deathandtaxesmag.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/darrenmethad.png" /></a><br />
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These anti-meth ads are tremendous, disturbing. I'm (still) thinking a lot about portraiture, and about how gazing directly into the camera (and thus into viewers' faces) can draw us (viewers) into an empathic relation with the subject / character. That makes for a neat strategy when the character then reveals him/herself to be utterly mad because of his/her meth addiction.<br />
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Curiously, these anti-drug ads echo Shirley Clarke's approach to filming The Connection (1962), wherein the characters look straight into the camera and deliver monologues straight to the viewers. The Connection was made about the life of heroin addicts, and the actors were all addicts playing characters much like themselves.<br />
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<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/04/29/arts/29DARGIS4/29JPDARGIS1-popup.jpg" />
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A restored copy is presently visiting cinemas, in anticipation of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/movies/the-shirley-clarke-project-by-milestone-films.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120429">Ms. Clarke's much-deserved and too-long-awaited revival</a> (a DVD boxed set is forthcoming!).charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-77733465363510682982012-05-20T11:27:00.001-05:002012-05-20T11:27:21.032-05:00Amos Vogel: Life as a Subversive Art | Idiom<a href="http://idiommag.com/2012/04/amos-vogel-life-as-a-subversive-art/">Amos Vogel: Life as a Subversive Art | Idiom</a>:<br />
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<img src="http://idiommag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/amos_vogel630-600x386.jpg" /><br />
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..."Vogel’s underlying vision [as a programmer]: to challenge an audience’s understanding of film, and thereby produce a new appreciation and heightened social consciousness. For Vogel, film programming could be used as a vehicle for education, in the broadest, most liberal way, and thus serve as an edifying bulwark against the pernicious, pandering childishness of Hollywood (early on, Cinema 16 was marketed as “a film society for the adult moviegoer”). In order to do so, however, Vogel stressed that the figure of the programmer must stand his ground against potential resistance. A truly productive experience of film-going, Vogel contends, must be dialectical, its revelations and joys produced through symbolic conflict and challenges to normalcy.<br />
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...In ‘Thirteen Confusions,’ Vogel argued that the New American Cinema had its own shortcomings:<br />
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The American film avant-garde suffers today, for the first time in its history, from an ominous new ailment: over-attention without understanding, over-acceptance without discrimination. Crime of crimes, it has become fashionable. Its gurus and artists are in danger of becoming the avant-garde establishment; its growing fame hides only imperfectly an inner weakness…To begin the process of an informed critique of the American avant-garde (and more specifically, the ideology and style of the New American Cinema tendency within it), is an act of the highest and most necessary loyalty to the movement. The time has come to rescue it from the blind rejection of commercial reviewers and the blind acceptance of its own apostles, both posing as critics and neither subjecting it to dispassionate, informed analysis.<br />
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...In Film as a Subversive Art, Vogel argues that the unique properties of cinematic exhibition allow film to function as a potential force for heightened political consciousness. “Subversion in cinema starts when the theatre darkens and the screen lights up,” Vogel writes. “For the cinema is a place of magic where psychological and environmental factors combine to create an openness to wonder and suggestion, and unlocking of the unconscious.”charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-67130912119762417222012-04-27T01:32:00.001-05:002012-04-27T01:32:58.225-05:00Carlos Reygadas - Cinema Scope<a href="http://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/carlos-reygadas/">Carlos Reygadas - Cinema Scope</a><br />
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<img src="http://www.ioncinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Post-Tenebras-Lux-3.jpg" /><br />
<h5>By Raya Martin</h5>There is much to be said about Carlos Reygadas—the way he shoots his lifeless sex scenes as class discourse, or the way he embraces his characters as milieus, and vice versa—but his greatest weapon is not his ability to achieve technical prowess with a relatively limited budget, nor his tributes to a transcendental cinema. His real weapon is ambition. Crowded by the Mexican triumvirate of Cuarón, Iñarritu, and del Toro, Reygadas prefers to make cinema as the commodified discourse it could be. Stories are being sold, and images are being peddled, and the result is a politically hedonistic mirroring of Mexican history.<br />
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<em>Revolución</em> (2010), an omnibus film by ten Mexican filmmakers commemorating the bicentenary of the Mexican Revolution, presents Reygadas’ best work to date. <em>Este es mi reino</em> (<em>This Is My Kingdom</em>) takes place in a simple setting—a Mexican country fiesta—where the guests exteriorize the whole class spectrum of his country. The rich warm up to their landed history before moving on to a framed painting of a map, on which kids tack up their achievements of subjugation. The middle class curse the land they step on, concerned with their own landscape of knowing and being known. They have to dress well for the game of survival; trends are lifted up to the television gods. There is also the search for drugs, and the fascistic/fashionistic fascination with their existence, only because we are never satisfied with the reality we are dealing with at any moment. And the working class? A minefield of descriptions, from embarrassed to embarrassment. There is the continuing detachment from technology (or is that just old age?). The revolutions in their heads and hearts that only the cameraman knows and can be asked about. These distances are all covered and continuously covering—much like in <em>Japón</em> (2002)—because seats have been assigned, then unassigned, for the portraiture ride.<br />
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Yet Reygadas, who appears in the background of the party’s opening, is unconcerned with the camera’s presence. He doesn’t really worry about staging the whole thing, here or in any of his films. He is concerned with our own biases, and how they become manifest in celluloid or video. We are reminded that the filmmaker as an artist is really only here to do one thing: ensure that the paying audience gets to see onscreen what they encounter as soon as they leave the cinema.charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-58166502805633930022012-04-12T03:38:00.001-05:002012-04-12T03:38:59.733-05:00Controversial French Ad Campaign for Photographers’ Rights<a href="http://www.petapixel.com/2012/04/09/controversial-french-ad-campaign-for-photographers-rights/">Controversial French Ad Campaign for Photographers’ Rights</a><br />
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<img src="http://files.petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2012/04/ad_mini.jpg" />charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-61946332683338838372011-08-15T21:29:00.000-05:002011-08-15T21:30:16.850-05:00Herzog on snails, editingHerzog: Woody Allen is like a snail. He makes a film a year. I make two or three films a year.
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<br />How do you do it?
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<br />WH: I make fast decisions. I know what I want to do. Projects are pushing me so hard that you can't even believe it. I have to wrangle them, like home invasion. How do you get the burglars out of your home how do you get them on screen? I edit digitally and you can edit almost as fast as you are thinking. Many of my colleagues lose themselves in the possibilities. They create 22 parallel versions and can't decide which one is the best. I just do one and do it straightaway with all the urgency of the material.
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<br />interview in the WSJ, 22 April 2011.charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-49055608639114363652011-06-04T20:07:00.000-05:002011-06-04T20:07:55.997-05:00Films - In Defense of Slow and Boring - NYTimes.com<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/movies/films-in-defense-of-slow-and-boring.html?_r=2&ref=movies">Films - In Defense of Slow and Boring - NYTimes.com</a><br /><br /><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/06/05/arts/CRITICS-4/CRITICS-4-articleLarge.jpg" /><br /><br />WHAT is boring?<br /><br />“The Hangover Part II,” which I find boring, raked in $137.4 million over the five-day Memorial Day weekend. It’s the kind of boring that makes money, partly because it’s the boring that many people like, want to like, insist on liking or are just used to, and partly because it’s the sort of aggressively packaged boring you can’t escape, having opened on an estimated 17 percent of American screens. Filled with gags and characters recycled from the first “Hangover,” the sequel is grindingly repetitive and features scene after similar scene of characters staring at one another stupidly, flailing about wildly and asking what happened. This is the boring that Andy Warhol, who liked boring, found, well, boring.<br /><br />“Of course, what I think is boring,” Warhol wrote in his memoir “Popism,” “must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different.”<br /><br />Warhol’s own films are almost always called boring, usually by people who have never seen or sampled one, including minimalist epics like “Empire,” eight hours of the Empire State Building that subverts the definition of what a film is (entertaining, for one). Long movies — among my favorites is Béla Tarr’s seven-hour “Sátántangó” — take time away even as they restore a sense of duration, of time and life passing, that most movies try to obscure through continuity editing. Faced with duration not distraction, your mind may wander, but there’s no need for panic: it will come back. In wandering there can be revelation as you meditate, trance out, bliss out, luxuriate in your thoughts, think.<br /><br />Thinking is boring, of course (all that silence), which is why so many industrially made movies work so hard to entertain you. If you’re entertained, or so the logic seems to be, you won’t have the time and head space to think about how crummy, inane and familiar the movie looks, and how badly written, shoddily directed and indifferently acted it is. And so the images keep zipping, the sounds keep clanging and the actors keep shouting as if to reassure you that, yes, the money you spent for your ticket was well worth all this clamor, a din that started months, years, earlier when the entertainment companies first fired up the public-relations machine and the entertainment media chimed in to sell the buzz until it rang in your ears.<br /><br />So, is boring bad? Is thinking? In Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” there is a scene in which the title character, a housewife who turns tricks in her fastidiously neat home, makes a meatloaf in real time. It’s a tedious task that as neither a fan of meatloaf or cooking, I find difficult to watch. Which is the point: During the film’s 201 minutes Ms. Akerman puts you in that tomb of a home with Jeanne, makes you hear the wet squish-squish of the meat between her fingers, makes you feel the tedium of a colorless existence that you can’t literally share but become intimate with (you endure, like Jeanne) until the film’s punctuating shock of violence. It makes you think. MANOHLA DARGIScharleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-56099999673396347382011-05-21T09:34:00.000-05:002011-05-21T09:34:30.819-05:00Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D!: Movies TV: GQ<a href="http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201105/werner-herzog-profile-cave-of-forgotten-dreams?printable=true">Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D!: Movies TV: GQ</a><br /><br /><img src="http://www.gq.com/images/entertainment/2011/05/werner-herzog/werner-herzog_628.jpg" /><br /><br />Explaining his own film, Herzog says, "I follow my own fascinations...." He also has a story about how he saw a book of cave paintings in a shop when he was a child and saved up for six months to buy it. But when I ask him to consider why he has always been fascinated by cave paintings, he looks at me as though I have just said something slightly distasteful. (Steady yourself. We are only seconds away from tumbling down a vortex and toward our first real-life glimpse of the world as seen by Werner Herzog.)<br />"Oh, I don't want introspection," he demurs. "I don't like to look at myself."<br />Why?<br />"I've always been suspicious. I don't even look into my face. I shaved this morning, and I look at my cheeks so that I don't cut myself, but I don't even want to know the color of my eyes. I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century. A major, major mistake. And it's only one of the mistakes of the twentieth century, which makes me think that the twentieth century in its entirety was a mistake."<br />What's the mistake with psychology and self-reflection?<br />"There's something profoundly wrong—as wrong as the Spanish Inquisition was. The Spanish Inquisition had one goal, to eradicate all traces of Muslim faith on the soil of Spain, and hence you had to confess and proclaim the innermost deepest nature of your faith to the commission. And almost as a parallel event, explaining and scrutinizing the human soul, into all its niches and crooks and abysses and dark corners, is not doing good to humans. We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore. And you cannot live with a person anymore—let's say in a marriage or a deep friendship—if everything is illuminated, explained, and put out on the table. There is something profoundly wrong. It's a mistake. It's a fundamentally wrong approach toward human beings."<br />And so if humans persist in this way...?<br />"They persist in stupidity, then."<br />And what will the consequence be?<br />"For example, for me, I could never ever be with a woman who is three times a week with a psychiatrist. It's like an iron curtain between us. Like venetian blinds rattling down."<br />I don't know if it's related, but you've previously mentioned an intense antipathy to yoga classes. Could you be with a woman who did yoga?<br />"Of course not. Of course not. I think there should be holy war against yoga classes. It detours us from real thinking. It's just this kind of...feeling and floating and meditation and whatever. It's as tourism in religions. People all of a sudden becoming Buddhist here in Los Angeles."<br />------<br />It is Herzog who brings up the moment captured on film in Burden of Dreams, the documentary made about the filming of Fitzcarraldo—"a moment which I still feel very strongly inside of me"—where he suggests, after a series of trials and mishaps and disasters, that he should no longer make movies anymore and that perhaps he would be better to go straight to an insane asylum. "Or I should do something more dignified," he reflects. "A grown-up man should do something more dignified. You never see a cattle rancher who is not dignified. You never see a farmer who grows wheat and is not dignified. No one is undignified for raising cattle, and filmmakers are."<br />You still think that?<br />"Yes."<br />And you feel yourself undignified, being a filmmaker?<br />"It's always borderline. You have to look at yourself, and you know there is something very, very strange about what you are doing."<br />When you look at other filmmakers, do you think they are engaged in something that—<br />He interrupts me. "Always, always the same. And you can straightaway, when you see films on filmmakers—they're always, always embarrassing. Including me. I cannot elude that embarrassment, either. I do not feel it as deeply as others should feel who have an ego problem and play the king on the hill, the genius behind the camera. That's an additional embarrassment. But when you look at movies made about filmmakers, they are without exception embarrassments."<br />I suppose the counterargument should be something about this glorious role as a grand storyteller, the spinner of illusions.<br />"There is nothing glorious about making a film. It is an endless sequence of banalities."<br />With a magical goal?<br />"Yes. But shooting a film itself is nothing but banalities. [Then, as though reluctantly, he continues.] However, there's very rare moments where I get the feeling sometimes I'm like the little girl in the fairy tale who steps out into the night, in the stars, and she holds her apron open, and the stars are raining into her apron. Those moments I have seen and I have had. But they are very rare."charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-72760892714203200572011-04-14T17:28:00.000-05:002011-04-14T17:28:03.502-05:00The Believer - Interview with Laurel Nakadate<a href="http://www.believermag.com/issues/200610/?read=interview_nakadate">The Believer - Interview with Laurel Nakadate</a>:<br /><br /><img src="http://www.believermag.com/issues/200610/img/interview_nakadate_4.jpg" /><br /> <br />"BLVR: In meeting these guys, has there ever been a negative experience, a line crossed?<br /><br />LN: No. I feel like the men who end up in my videos, their biggest crime is being lonely. They’re not violent, they’re not scary people, they’re just men who keep to themselves and have a hard time being social. I’m always out there by myself, I go into stranger’s houses. I did a project where I went and walked around a truck-stop parking lot and videotaped myself dancing with men in the cabs of their semis. I definitely am taking risks, but I think something really great can come out of putting yourself in an awkward situation. A lot of people think that the work is about mocking or making fun of things, but a lot of it is about discomfort and making myself as uncomfortable as the men feel, or putting myself in a situation where I’m revealing my loneliness as much as they’re revealing theirs."<br /><br />...LN: I got on Amtrak for thirty days last November. You can buy these rail passes where you can take Amtrak for thirty days in the U.S. and Canada. I took the train from New York down to New Orleans, Chicago, Memphis, Seattle. Mostly I ended up sitting in hotel rooms by myself and staring at myself and making videos about being lonely. I had made all this work about people I don’t belong with, and now I’m going to make some work about places I don’t belong. It’s just me. I took pictures of myself throwing my underwear off the side of a train and pictures of men I met on the train. I went up to the American Gothic house, the house that Grant Wood used as the setting for the painting, and I pole-danced in front of the house. It’s thirty days where I disappeared from the world and I think that the video and the show that came out if it was about travel, being in these Edward Hopper-esque hotel rooms by myself. It’s always a problem—you’ve got to figure out a place to put your body. You’ve got to wake up in the morning and deal with the fact that you have this body to lug around. It was thirty days where I didn’t have to worry about that. I was just cargo. The pictures were sad—in the best way. <br /><br />...When I was really little I remember driving by a sort of makeshift tent at the edge of these woods in northern Iowa, near where Buddy Holly’s plane crashed. I was on my way to summer camp. I had all my belongings packed up, and we drove by this makeshift tent. I asked my dad what was going on and he said, “That’s where hermits live.” And I was like, “What’s a hermit?” And he said, “It’s a man who lives by himself and doesn’t really have anyone.” And I remember looking at my little suitcase on my way to summer camp and his little tent in the woods and that we were kind of the same. I was going out on this adventure by myself with my pink Velcro sneakers, and he was out there in his little tent. It really affected me. I was about seven years old. Every time I saw an older single man by himself after that, all I could think of was that little sad tent in the woods.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.gallerynucleus.com/filenode/file/3226/Picture_2.png" /><br /><br />So that experience of seeing the hermit’s tent inspired me to become a hobo clown in fourth grade. I took clown lessons because my goal in life was to be a professional clown. I learned how to ride a unicycle, I learned how to juggle. I took on this alter ego. I became a hobo. The costume was a men’s suit jacket with a fake beard on my little fourth-grade face. I walked on stilts. I was obsessed with this idea of people who live by themselves and didn’t have to deal with anyone. So I guess this has been a theme in my work since about fourth grade [laughs]. Not to defend my intentions in going and hanging out with these men but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for them.charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-56601030379146426582011-04-13T15:13:00.001-05:002011-04-14T17:31:04.020-05:00Laurel Nakadate in a Show at MoMA P.S. 1 - NYTimes.com<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/arts/design/23nakadate.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2">Laurel Nakadate in a Show at MoMA P.S. 1 - NYTimes.com</a>: "Although she said she will continue making other kinds of work, Ms. Nakadate is clearly excited by the particular challenges and rewards of filmmaking.<br /><br /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiser6XWiFKFEI-qM1oyAjmUxxqJwpJ5X9S1uQFq6_TbSChsiFPuXT71WfY9IUiSbYoRWB51YGUAmDi0RJseDeI6wMTkFuOQFt3q1MOaUYF2x7WZWmsIRy0nEUnu2wK4e7Tj3Rd/s1600/04-LaurelNakadateTheWolfKnifeIMG_1333HR_130807730462.jpg_article_gallery_slideshow_v2.jpg" /><br /><br />“People who love movies love looking at the world,” she said. “Whether they love looking at the world through the processed lens of a director or whether they love looking at the world in the real world, I’m not really sure. But anybody who likes to look is someone I’m interested in spending time with.”"charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-62547359484874415152011-03-18T23:29:00.000-05:002011-03-18T23:30:25.670-05:00penny and jenhttp://www.incite-online.net/montgomery.html<br /><br />PL: No wonder she missed. I have to admit that I questioned the physical competence of your characters: hunting with a crossbow, or boating on rapids. It didn’t seem like any of you knew what you were doing. I wondered how much of my reading was just plain sexist, and how much “real” incompetence I was detecting.<br /><br />JM: I am happy that you asked me that question, because the question of competence is so interesting to me. I remember when I discovered Peggy Ahwesh’s films and totally fell in love and was inspired to become the kind of filmmaker [I became]. Someone had written that Peggy’s films were always on the edge of flying apart. That she was willing to take the risk of the charge of incompetence, the payoff being that you might get something utterly unique, and possibly far more real. The question of competence in relation to women and filmmaking is where my art lives. Every filmmaker should find a place of doubt that’s also transcendent. I don’t know what that is; it’s pretty much in the realm of poetics. But I know that when I was applying to Bard for my MFA, Peggy had to defend my films to a skeptical faculty, who thought the work looked incompetent. And, in defense of my films, she made up this term, the “fuck you” school of filmmaking: Super 8, hand-processed, 1-to-1 shooting ratio, a certain kind of unexplained intimacy, et cetera.charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-39603422663925181082011-02-12T10:04:00.000-06:002011-02-12T10:04:08.374-06:00An Interview with Ramin Bahrani | Reverse Shot<a href="http://www.reverseshot.com/article/interview_ramin_bahrani">An Interview with Ramin Bahrani | Reverse Shot</a><br /><br /><img src="http://www.reverseshot.com/files/images/issue23/Ramin%20Bahrani.jpg" /><br /><br />RS: I was looking at your top ten Criterion Collection list and noticed a disproportionate amount of films by Italian directors—Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini, Rossellini, Olmi, De Sica. What about Italian movies and specifically Italian neorealism are you drawn to?<br /><br />RB: I like those films because they deal with reality. I’ve always been interested in reality and I’ve always been terrified of escape. I don’t like escape in my personal life or in my art, and I prefer to try to understand how I should behave in this world based on what’s really around me. And I try to do that with my eyes open to the best of whatever knowledge I have, which is finite—I don’t know everything.<br /><br />I don’t like escape films. I don't like movies that don’t match the world I’m living in at all. Fellini’s films may be all over the place, but the emotional truths in them match what I see in my life. Same with Buñuel. Unfortunately—Jean Renoir talks about this, his idea of reality—in our day-to-day life we keep erasing reality and putting up barricades to it. Not just film, but in conversation, buying food, and art. Why do this? It just fools people. I don’t want to go to a film that people say is optimistic and hopeful when nothing in that movie resembles the world I’m living in. That doesn’t make me optimistic and hopeful, that makes me depressed.<br /><br />Solo is about a tough subject, but, for one thing, it’s very funny—so I can at least get the audience’s attention—it’s exciting, it’s dramatic. But there’s also something in there that, because Solo is not a famous person, because there’s no tricks in the film—Hollywood twists and turns that don’t make any sense, no music to highlight the emotions, no swooping camera all over the place to distract you, no quick editing—because people walk away thinking this is something real and could really happen, then it makes Solo’s giant act of love on that mountaintop something acceptable to us.<br /><br />...<br /><br />RS: Do you write your scripts first and then find actors to play the characters or do you find actors and then write scripts around them?<br /><br />RB: Unless you’re doing a space movie or something it makes no sense to sit alone in a room and write. You go to the real location—you write. You go the real location—you rewrite. You go to the real location—you reconceive. You meet the real people, you add them into your script, you change them a little for your fictional means. You cast, either from the real location or outside the real location, and based on those people you rewrite again.<br /><br />This is important as a concept, and more and more people are doing it, working in this style. As opposed to storyboarding—it makes no sense to storyboard for this kind of movie.<br /><br />RS: Your work contains multiple layers, but it also seems there are two main threads: one is that of metaphor, where someone like Solo is a figure who stands for perseverance and compassion, while the second is that of the particular social, familial, and economic forces that shape this specific character’s identity.<br /><br />That’s true. I’ve tried to make each film very specific to its characters—the way they talk, what they’re wearing, their props—and that specificity comes from the reality of the situation. I think there are metaphysical ideas here, grand meanings, but those meanings are created out of the specificity of the situation, by the research, the details. I’m a firm believer that those details add up to the meaning. Of course these details are all selections—to pick these characters in all three films and those situations, that’s a big part of the meaning. A Pakistani guy, a couple of Hispanic kids, a Senegalese guy, even William, who feels even more like an outsider in Winston-Salem than Solo—that’s a huge part of the meaning. These are three American films by an American director named, Ramin Bah-what? Starring who? Yeah, these are three American films starring three American people made by an American guy. And if you don’t believe it, look at the last election.charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-66400171448120085652011-01-19T13:51:00.000-06:002011-01-19T13:51:15.247-06:00Listening session with Ernst Karel – Documentary Film, Radio, Photography | Presentation Production | Williamsburg, Brooklyn<a href="http://www.uniondocs.org/location-recordings-an-evening-with-ernst-karel/">Listening session with Ernst Karel – Documentary Film, Radio, Photography | Presentation Production | Williamsburg, Brooklyn</a><br /><br /><img src="http://www.uniondocs.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/karel-main.jpg" /><br /><br />Discussion might take up the documentary use of nonlinguistic sound to produce ‘doubtful knowing’, in connection with ideas such as anthropologist of sound Steven Feld’s notion of ‘acoustemologies’, or sonic ways of knowing and being in the world, and the recognition (found, for example, in new books by sound theorists Salomé Voegelin and David Toop) that listening is an experience of a continuously fleeting, ungraspable present moment, and as such is “full of phemonemological doubt,” as Voegelin puts it (Listening to Noise and Silence, 2010:4): “The understanding gained is a knowing of the moment as a sensory event that involves the listener and the sound in a reciprocal inventive production.”charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-29379783321442174742010-12-24T20:24:00.001-06:002010-12-24T20:25:47.682-06:00Filmmaker Focus: Stephen Wetzel | Ann Arbor Film Festival<a href="http://aafilmfest.org/filmmaker-focus-stephen-wetzel">Filmmaker Focus: Stephen Wetzel | Ann Arbor Film Festival</a><br /><br /><img src="http://aafilmfest.org/sites/default/files/WETZEL_archives2.jpg" width=500 /><br /><br />"My specific interest in non-fiction is a little more complicated but, put simply, I tend to read a lot of non-fiction, almost exclusively, and I took many courses in anthropology that kind of blew my mind, so for whatever reason non-fiction -- which does not negate imagination, the fantastical, awe, etc. -- appeals to me. My first "serious" non-fiction work came really as a challenge. I was teaching a course on the subject, and I just decided that I should make what I was teaching.<br /><br />...<br /><br />Regionalism. I'm attracted to the Midwest and its weirdness and its pace. I guess like any location it's rife with contradiction and all its ensuing tension. The winters, long and gray, force one inside, on a chair in a room alone, maybe with a book, or just with one's thoughts, if of course one has time for such lounging -- or brooding.… <br /><br />I'm trapped in my editing room right now (really a small bedroom) with a space heater. Maybe this is it for me, or maybe I've embraced my own limits. Regions make people, and I accept what this place has made of me.<br /><br />...<br /><br /><br />SW: I always start by viewing all of the material, which defines the limits of the project. I rarely think in terms of what I might be able to add or shoot later that might augment the edit and instead proceed to "mine" the material, always treating it as if it is not my own.<br /><br />I simply watch every second of the material and take close notes, tons of notes, jotting down all of the language and general impressions I'm having about the footage. As ideas come to me I write them in the margins, so there's the literal transcript of the material (language, scene description), and my take on it, my interpretation, my "What's going on here?" commentary or inquiry.<br /><br />After my first viewing I tend to watch it all again (in the case of From the Archives I was dealing with 10 or 12 hours of footage) and I continue to make notes, after which I scour the notes and find common themes, circle them, make some more general notes, and then sketch out a timeline, a rough trajectory of the edit. Often times I know what the beginning and ending shots are AS I'm watching the material for the first time. I say, "That's it, that's my beginning, and there's my final shot, now how do I get from there to here?"<br /><br />The structure for this sort of editing, aside form the eureka moment in discovering the beginning and end, comes from a course I took on Research Methods in Anthropology by Professor Paul Brodwin at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.<br /><br />DD: Methods intended for enthographic films?<br /><br />SW: No. It was intended for ethnography: writing about people. In my case it involved collecting data on TV engineers in the sub-basement of the nursing building at UWM.<br /><br />...<br /><br />DD: How does he feel about your piece?<br /><br />SW: He doesn't seem interested. He's 84, and he just seems happy to have people taking him seriously. He gave Dan and I permission to do what we will, and in return we'll share any resources we gain. I gave him the award money from Ann Arbor Film Festival, and he was totally grateful.<br /><br />His handshake is like a vise. He practices age-regressive hypnosis and I believe in it after shaking his hand. You know the shot where he presses his finger to his temple and does some conjuring, that's what he does -- still does it. I may be under his command.<br /><br />...<br /><br />DD: but your portrait, however it is tethered to this particular individual, also opens the piece up to a larger depiction of a culture, with some notions of gender implied...<br /><br />SW: Yes. Yes. I start with details, specifics, a chunk of time, or an event, or an individual, and I scrutinize its small bits, always with the aim of finding threads that indicate something larger at work.<br /><br />I tell people I'm a social constructionist (not my term), and out of that identification comes a commitment (or inclination) to locating that which is taken for granted, natural, or context-independent and pointing at, hinting at, the various ways in which we have before us, in fact, a web.charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-90309243894043598872010-12-17T07:23:00.000-06:002010-12-17T07:23:41.168-06:00Let It Dough! - NYTimes.com<a href="http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/let-it-dough/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=ab1">Let It Dough! - NYTimes.com</a><br /><br /><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/niemann/posts/2010/12/01heavenQ.jpg" /><br /><br /><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/niemann/posts/2010/12/02sprinklesQ.jpg" /><br /><br /><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/niemann/posts/2010/12/03divideQ2.jpg" /><br /><br />...<br /><br /><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/niemann/posts/2010/12/05italyQ.jpg" /><br /><br /><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/niemann/posts/2010/12/08economyQ.jpg" /><br /><br /><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/niemann/posts/2010/12/21prideQ.jpg" />charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-77402139482575710152010-12-12T08:40:00.002-06:002010-12-19T06:16:58.096-06:00Utopia in Four Movements | The Film<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXw9M8phDCDg8Bf2V5D3G2qI5Bx8Qbqu7pXNUqHaduVpm2bckYNdM1KyRMsWMdL_y8ty47cAjc4fJiEdJ4ZtGxMrNN6XvVKmF_ADRm376pLNX_GKDsKFfZbft2b2Sne8zHGKQP/s1600/MG_8841.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 258px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXw9M8phDCDg8Bf2V5D3G2qI5Bx8Qbqu7pXNUqHaduVpm2bckYNdM1KyRMsWMdL_y8ty47cAjc4fJiEdJ4ZtGxMrNN6XvVKmF_ADRm376pLNX_GKDsKFfZbft2b2Sne8zHGKQP/s400/MG_8841.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5552365599080500274" /></a><br /><a href="http://utopiainfourmovements.com/about/">Utopia in Four Movements | The Film</a>: <br /><br /><br /><br />"The ‘live-ness’ seems especially fitting. At its heart, utopia is almost always about collectivity, about transcending the boundaries of our individual lives to connect with something larger. In this era, when there are so many forces pushing us into private and mediated experiences, the simple act of getting together with other people to talk, catch up, drink, and have a collective experience is a small utopian gesture.<br /><br />This kind of live event is also a response to the crisis facing cinema today. Most of my students rarely consider going to see a film in a theater. They can see a film more cheaply at home as a DVD or for free on YouTube. It seems as if filmmakers either have to embrace the notion of people watching their work furtively, in stolen moments, on laptops and iPods, or create something that cannot be reduced to a digital file"charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-67146567003295906282010-12-07T10:47:00.000-06:002010-12-07T10:47:09.583-06:00Susan Philipsz won the Turner Prize … but you can’t see why | News<a href="http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23904703-susan-philipsz-won-the-turner-prize-but-you-cant-see-why.do">Susan Philipsz won the Turner Prize … but you can’t see why | News</a><br /><br /><img src="http://i.thisislondon.co.uk/i/pix/2010/12/Susan-Philipsz_415.jpg" /><br /><br />Philipsz's sound installations, most of which feature her self-admittedly ordinary, folksy voice, are neutered when shown in the minimal, sterile confines of the art gallery.<br /><br />However, when they are in atmospheric locations such as under the Clyde bridges or in the City of London, where Philipsz's project Surround Me is running every weekend until January 2, then her work has a moving poetry and mystery.<br /><br />In the City, she is presenting mournful madrigals and canons from the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras in six locations.<br /><br />These laments haunt the locations, from the hotch-potch of brutalist buildings of Moorfields Highwalk near the Barbican, to the river walk under London Bridge and the courtyard of the 14th-century tower of All Hallows Staining church.<br /><br />And this is where she is an artist and not a musician — she asks us to respond not just with our ears, but to look around us, to think about the place in which we stand. In doing so, she reopened my eyes to the City's diverse architecture and rich history.<br /><br />Her work commands and occupies its locations with the authority of the best sculptures.charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-20840534398882792962010-12-07T10:27:00.002-06:002010-12-07T10:29:25.675-06:00Historical Photos from Torontotoronto's city photo archive now on flickr:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/torontohistory/4908446456/" title="Grannies' tug-of-war, Centre Island by Toronto History, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4123/4908446456_5cf4aaf516_z.jpg" width="640" height="501" alt="Grannies' tug-of-war, Centre Island" /></a>charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13483669.post-75529383416918015742010-06-16T22:06:00.001-05:002010-06-16T22:08:13.806-05:00termite art<img src="http://drnorth.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/manny-farber.jpg" /><br /><br />Unlike Klee, who stayed small and thus almost evaded affectation, Antonioni's aspiration is to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.<br /><br />. . . Kurosawa's Ikiru sums up much of what a termite art aims at: buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.<br /><br />- Manny Farber, White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art -charleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04571312696822519938noreply@blogger.com0