Photographic Apparatus

Herzog on snails, editing

2011-08-15T21:29:00.000-05:00

Herzog: Woody Allen is like a snail. He makes a film a year. I make two or three films a year.

How do you do it?

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.

interview in the WSJ, 22 April 2011.

Films - In Defense of Slow and Boring - NYTimes.com

2011-06-04T20:07:00.000-05:00

Films - In Defense of Slow and Boring - NYTimes.com

WHAT is boring?

“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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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 DARGIS

Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D!: Movies TV: GQ

2011-05-21T09:34:00.000-05:00

Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D!: Movies TV: GQ

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.)
"Oh, I don't want introspection," he demurs. "I don't like to look at myself."
Why?
"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."
What's the mistake with psychology and self-reflection?
"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."
And so if humans persist in this way...?
"They persist in stupidity, then."
And what will the consequence be?
"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."
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?
"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."
------
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."
You still think that?
"Yes."
And you feel yourself undignified, being a filmmaker?
"It's always borderline. You have to look at yourself, and you know there is something very, very strange about what you are doing."
When you look at other filmmakers, do you think they are engaged in something that—
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."
I suppose the counterargument should be something about this glorious role as a grand storyteller, the spinner of illusions.
"There is nothing glorious about making a film. It is an endless sequence of banalities."
With a magical goal?
"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."

The Believer - Interview with Laurel Nakadate

2011-04-14T17:28:00.000-05:00

The Believer - Interview with Laurel Nakadate:

"BLVR: In meeting these guys, has there ever been a negative experience, a line crossed?

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."

...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.

...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.

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.

Laurel Nakadate in a Show at MoMA P.S. 1 - NYTimes.com

2011-04-13T15:13:00.001-05:00

Laurel Nakadate in a Show at MoMA P.S. 1 - NYTimes.com: "Although she said she will continue making other kinds of work, Ms. Nakadate is clearly excited by the particular challenges and rewards of filmmaking.

“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.”"

penny and jen

2011-03-18T23:29:00.000-05:00

http://www.incite-online.net/montgomery.html

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.

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.

An Interview with Ramin Bahrani | Reverse Shot

2011-02-12T10:04:00.000-06:00

An Interview with Ramin Bahrani | Reverse Shot

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?

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.

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.

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.

...

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Listening session with Ernst Karel – Documentary Film, Radio, Photography | Presentation Production | Williamsburg, Brooklyn

2011-01-19T13:51:00.000-06:00

Listening session with Ernst Karel – Documentary Film, Radio, Photography | Presentation Production | Williamsburg, Brooklyn

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.”

Filmmaker Focus: Stephen Wetzel | Ann Arbor Film Festival

2010-12-24T20:24:00.001-06:00

Filmmaker Focus: Stephen Wetzel | Ann Arbor Film Festival

"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.

...

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.…

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.

...

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.

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.

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?"

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.

DD: Methods intended for enthographic films?

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.

...

DD: How does he feel about your piece?

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.

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.

...

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...

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.

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.

Let It Dough! - NYTimes.com

2010-12-17T07:23:00.000-06:00

Let It Dough! - NYTimes.com

...

Utopia in Four Movements | The Film

2010-12-12T08:40:00.002-06:00

Utopia in Four Movements | The Film:

"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.

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"

Susan Philipsz won the Turner Prize … but you can’t see why | News

2010-12-07T10:47:00.000-06:00

Susan Philipsz won the Turner Prize … but you can’t see why | News

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.

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.

In the City, she is presenting mournful madrigals and canons from the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras in six locations.

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.

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.

Her work commands and occupies its locations with the authority of the best sculptures.

Historical Photos from Toronto

2010-12-07T10:27:00.002-06:00

toronto's city photo archive now on flickr:

termite art

2010-06-16T22:06:00.001-05:00

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.

. . . 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.

- Manny Farber, White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art -

MUFF (a lovely review)

2010-05-16T12:21:00.002-05:00

"Indeed, many of the films are remarkable in showing just how much you can achieve in a short time and on the lowest of budgets. Charles Fairbanks’ Wrestling With My Father simply depicts Fairbanks’ dad in the audience of a wrestling match (apparently with the filmmaker as one of the wrestlers). Within this extraordinarily simple set-up are whole worlds of humour, pathos and intrigue."

communication

2010-05-10T07:45:00.001-05:00

The communication is not by any means so simple...

I realize that, with even so much involvement in explanations as this, I am liable seriously, and perhaps irretrievably, to obscure what would at best be hard enough to give its appropriate clarity and intensity; and what seems to me most important of all: namely, that these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings as those which are taking place over their heads; and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on,... revered, and loved, by other quite monstrously alien human beings, in the employment of still others still more alien; and that they are now being looked into by still others, who have picked up their living as casually as if it were a book, and who were actuated toward this reading by various possible reflexes of sympathy, curiosity, idleness, et cetera, and almost certainly in a lack of consciousness, and conscience, remotely appropriate to the enormity of what they are doing.

If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game.

A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.

As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it; and if I were you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly bear to live.

-James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Errol Morris: Interview

2010-04-28T06:05:00.000-05:00

Errol Morris: Interview

SS: What became of your research from your time in Plainfield?

EM: I wanted to publish the interviews. I actually think that the work that I was doing in my 20s was really smart, and that I'm now just a shadow of my former self. I recorded literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviews. In those days, I would transcribe everything. There were no computers. Everything was on cassette tape, but I would laboriously transcribe the material with a typewriter and Wite-Out. I really loved the whole transcription process. You sink into someone else's head in a strange kind of way. It also became a game - why I started doing this, I have no idea - but I started to ask fewer and fewer and fewer questions. I became interested in the stream-of-consciousness interview. It's the exact opposite of adversarial interviews, where you're supposed to pose the extremely difficult and embarrassing question and watch the interview subject squirm. I had this one interview that I was particularly proud of that was on a 120-minute cassette tape - I had piles of these tapes - and my voice wasn't on the tape. It was just the other person speaking. I would play this weird game. I'd wonder, How can I keep them talking without talking myself? That's long before I started making movies.

Diary of A Teenage Girl at 3LD � Culturebot

2010-04-05T00:24:00.000-05:00

Diary of A Teenage Girl at 3LD � Culturebot

a great review of the theatrical adaptation of The Diary of a Teenage Girl by my friend Phoebe.

‘Ash Wednesday, New Orleans’ - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

2010-04-05T00:09:00.000-05:00

‘Ash Wednesday, New Orleans’ - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

a video diary by a great poet: photographer alec soth.

catch congolese

2010-04-05T00:02:00.001-05:00

some great photos of wrestling in the congo

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2010-04-03T08:47:00.001-05:00

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The Garage

2010-02-04T14:54:00.000-06:00

The Garage

The first rule of "The Garage" is you do not talk about the Garage. Indeed, the Zagreb Youth Theatre's ferociously violent phantasmagoria, adapted from Zdenko Mesaric's Croatian novel, could probably teach the tough guys from the film "Fight Club" a few things. Not so much a play as a simulated societal meltdown, "The Garage" courageously follows its dark thematic material to a shockingly bleak conclusion.

Magnum’s Photo Archives Make Move to University of Texas - NYTimes.com

2010-02-04T13:49:00.000-06:00

Magnum’s Photo Archives Make Move to University of Texas - NYTimes.com

The Magnum archive joins a parade of other collections of vintage photographic prints, including those of The New York Times and the National Geographic Society, that have changed hands in the past few years, as publications and photo agencies, moving aggressively to digitization, have realized they are sitting on valuable historical property.

Like other photo agencies, Magnum has seen its fortunes decline in recent years, along with those of the magazines and newspapers that once published the work of its photographers more regularly. The best known of these pictures went on to have long financial afterlives, thanks to licensing agreements that placed them everywhere from television to books and Web sites. But in a world of camera-phone images, bloggers and inexpensive photojournalism flooding the Internet, the cooperative’s finances have suffered.

“You could see the handwriting on the wall,” said Mr. Lubell, who took over as director six years ago, “and the handwriting was shrinking and shrinking.” With the proceeds from the sale the agency — which represents the work of 13 estates and 51 current members, including well-known photographers like Bruce Davidson, Eve Arnold, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr and Alec Soth — will try to recreate itself as a media entity on the Web, relying less on publications and more on its ability to tell its own stories of world events and trends.

More Churches Promote Martial Arts to Reach Young Men - NYTimes.com

2010-02-04T13:43:00.000-06:00

More Churches Promote Martial Arts to Reach Young Men - NYTimes.com

Recruitment efforts at the churches, which are predominantly white, involve fight night television viewing parties and lecture series that use ultimate fighting to explain how Christ fought for what he believed in. Other ministers go further, hosting or participating in live events.

The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”

Over the past year and a half, a subculture has evolved, with Christian mixed martial arts clothing brands like Jesus Didn’t Tap (in the sport, “tap” means to give up) and Christian social networking Web sites like Anointedfighter.com.

Men ages 18 to 34 are absent from churches, some pastors said, because churches have become more amenable to women and children. “We grew up in a church that had pastel pews,” said Tom Skiles, 37, the pastor of Spirit of St. Louis Church in Arnold, Mo. “The men fell asleep.”

In focusing on the toughness of Christ, evangelical leaders are harking back to a similar movement in the early 1900s, historians say, when women began entering the work force. Proponents of this so-called muscular Christianity advocated weight lifting as a way for Christians to express their masculinity.

Carlos Reygadas - Biography

2010-02-03T14:55:00.001-06:00

I just saw and loved "Silent Light" by this director...

Carlos Reygadas - Biography:

"'After I make a film I psychoanalyze myself retroactively so that I can give explanations to journalists and film people. But I don't believe in those explanations myself.'

'In philosophy there are two qualities. The act of being, and the act of being what they are. I wish my actors would just Be, first of all. And secondly, that they would be a chauffeur with an internal conflict. But the act of being is the one I really want to state.'

'Hope is the most important feeling we can have.'"

Eclipse Series 11:Larisa Shepitko - From the Current

2010-01-25T15:15:00.000-06:00

Eclipse Series 11:Larisa Shepitko - From the Current

Larisa Shepitko (and her masterwork The Ascent) stole my heart last night.

After having her son, Anton, at age thirty-five, under extreme risk of death due to a serious spine injury, Shepitko began to plan her darkest, grandest vision. “At that time, I was facing death for the first time, and like anyone in such a situation, I was looking for my own formula of immortality,” she would later say. Her cinematic response was 1977’s The Ascent.

At once a visceral, earthy evocation of life on the ground during World War II and a momentous, spiritual Christian allegory, The Ascent, adapted from a novella by prominent Russian writer Vasili Bykov, drags the viewer alongside two peasant Byelorussian soldiers, Sotnikov and Rybak, as they attempt to evade, and finally are captured by, marauding Nazis. From the film’s opening images of telephone poles haphazardly jutting out of snowdrifts like bent crosses, Shepitko, with cinematographer Vladimir Chukhnov, plunges us into a nightmarishly blinding whiteness, a physical and moral winter that envelops everything in its path—except, ultimately, the victimized and beatific Sotnikov, whose slow journey toward death brings a strange enlightenment. Such redemption eludes Rybak, whose ruthless desire for survival puts him at odds with the Christlike martyr Sotnikov, and Shepitko charts their twinned passages to darkness and light with a stunning arsenal of aural
and visual experimentation.

"Ecstatic Truth: Documenting Herzog 'Documenting'" - Herzog, et al. - Slought Foundation

2010-01-17T11:17:00.000-06:00

"Ecstatic Truth: Documenting Herzog 'Documenting'" - Herzog, et al. - Slought Foundation

this deserves repeating.

regarding 'Herzog's continued explorations of "ecstatic truth" and the boundary between fiction and documentary practice' -

"In my 'documentaries' I have constantly explored the intensified truths of the situations that I have found myself in and of the characters I have met, whether it be abused people who lose their speech in Lessons of Darkness or the chain-smoking African chimp of Echoes from a Sombre Empire. [...] The real Fitzcarraldo moved a far lighter boat from one river system to the next, but he disassembled the boat into little pieces and got some engineers to reassemble it later on. But for what we did there was no precedent in technical history, and no book of instructions we could refer to. And you know, probably no one will ever need to do again what we did. I am a Conquistador of the Useless." -- Werner Herzog, -Herzog on Herzog, 241/179 (2002)

“Minnesota Declaration” / Truth and fact in documentary cinema

Werner Herzog
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 30, 1999

LESSONS OF DARKNESS

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law; the bad guys should go to jail.”

Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures of ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can’t legislate stupidity.”

9. The gauntlet is herby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Nisimazine | Itw/Portrait: Martens, Renzo

2010-01-16T15:39:00.001-06:00

Nisimazine | Itw/Portrait: Martens, Renzo

To what extent is the Renzo in the film a character?

I am a character, but I’m acting myself. I tried to be the most realistic and sincere ambassador of us. This means I’m a little interested in them, but not too much. I think they are slightly stupid, otherwise they wouldn’t have been poor and would have colonised us instead. If Bono and Madonna sing songs to help Africa, I can do the same thing. I’m willing to help them, but not if this would mean that the prices of our products will increase - then I prefer them to be a bit poorer. In order to make it realistic, a full exposure of the human being Renzo Martens was necessary. So yes, I’m also very much myself.

GreenCine Daily: PODCAST: Werner Herzog

2009-11-27T11:33:00.000-06:00

GreenCine Daily: PODCAST: Werner Herzog

an interesting interview full of Herzogian wisdom.

"It's always liberating to show some self-irony. It always does good for a grown-up man to make fun of himself."

‘Ghost Town’ and Guerilla Filmmaking From China - NYTimes.com

2009-11-15T10:23:00.000-06:00

‘Ghost Town’ and Guerilla Filmmaking From China - NYTimes.com: "An underground filmmaking subculture emerged in China in the late 1980s, but it began to flourish only about a decade ago with the advent of inexpensive digital cameras and postproduction computer programs that helped put filmmaking further out of reach of the government authorities.

Many of this latest generation of Chinese filmmakers have no formal film training and shoot on minimal budgets, often with small crews, or alone. Ying Liang, whose films have won numerous prizes on the international circuit, shot his widely celebrated debut film, “Taking Father Home,” using a borrowed camera. Relatives and friends were his cast and crew.

“Unlike in previous generations, the stars of this generation are not only Beijing Film Academy graduates,” said Karin Chien, a film producer in New York and president of dGenerate Films, a company she founded last year to distribute this new crop of independent Chinese films outside China. “They’re journalists, they work at television stations, they’re painters, they’re people who just picked up a camera and made a film for $1,000.”"

About 20 filmmakers have been banned from making films for two to five years, according to Zhang Xianmin, an independent film producer and a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. Others have received intimidating phone calls, had tapes confiscated or been detained and interrogated.

But according to several filmmakers and film scholars both here and abroad, the government recently appears to have adopted a somewhat hands-off, though highly watchful, posture toward this film vanguard, leaving it to operate in an undefined gray area.

It seems that as long as certain incendiary topics are not broached — among them the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibet, the Cultural Revolution, the outlawed religious group Falun Gong — then independent filmmakers are allowed to work.

Yet no one is absolutely sure where the boundaries are, or whether the government will start to clamp down more fiercely.

“You don’t know where that limit is,” said Zhang Yaxuan, a critic and documentary filmmaker who is organizing an independent film archive for the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. “You have to try to touch it. In the process of trying, you know.”

Huang Wenhai, a documentary filmmaker in Beijing, said that the process of filmmaking here “is the process of conquering your fear.”

Despite this pressure and uncertainty, there are now at least four major independent film festivals around the country and at least two theaters, both small, dedicated to showing Chinese independent films.

“I feel very frustrated,” Mr. Zhao said. “I’m a Chinese filmmaker, and of course my audience should be the Chinese people, especially since my films are about ordinary working Chinese people.” He added, “That would be more valuable than winning an international film festival.”

Mr. Zhao began his career in the fine arts. He studied oil painting at an art academy before dropping out and working as a professional artist and advertising director in Beijing and Guangzhou. He eventually founded his own advertising firm as well as a journal for contemporary arts, and he opened a gallery in Shanghai.

His first documentary was “Street Life,” a portrait of recyclers on the streets of Shanghai, which had its premiere at the Viennale in Austria in 2006. “Ghost Town,” his second film, is a series of vignettes and scenes that explore the economic struggles, religious beliefs and relationships of the residents of Zhiziluo, which had once been a local county seat for the Communist Party but was largely abandoned by the government.

Mr. Peña said he had heard about the film for some time but finally viewed it in the 11th hour of the festival’s film-selection process. “It’s one of those films that, when we saw it, there was little question in our minds that it should be included,” he said. “Ghost Town” is the first documentary from China’s new generation of digital independent filmmakers to be included in the New York festival.

Mr. Zhao, who continues to support himself by shooting television advertisements, said he had no illusions that his films would ever make him much money.

“For me, making films is a way of life, not the means to it,” he said. “And I really enjoy this life.”

/ HAMMER TO NAIL � Blog Archive � A Conversation with Zhao Dayong

2009-11-15T10:16:00.000-06:00

/ HAMMER TO NAIL � Blog Archive � A Conversation with Zhao Dayong

H2N: Do you have any optimism that things [in China] may improve?

ZD: I really don’t have the time to think about it, because it’s outside of my control. The only thing I can do is persist in making my films. That is something I have control over. For Chinese independent filmmakers, it’s important for us to be persistent, to insist on making good quality films, and that will hopefully change the environment in the future.

H2N: You were a painter, and you worked in advertising. How did that lead to becoming a documentary filmmaker?

ZD: When I was a professional painter, the overall goal was the same, to find the best method to create art. As you mentioned, I was working for an advertising agency making commercials, but I don’t see that as creating art—that is just a way to pay the bills. Going back to this idea of finding different ways to make things—during that process, I did installations, performance art, voice, painting of course; I used different media to express my creative energy. I think it was a process of exploration, of finding what would be the best medium for me. Right now, film is something with which I can capture the essence of the subject matter I want to depict. The time is right for me to use film.

Jamilo Pitts � Blog Archive � Aged�Beef

2009-09-28T06:30:00.000-05:00

Jamilo Pitts � Blog Archive � Aged�Beef

i kind of love this font style

Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School

2009-09-21T20:54:00.000-05:00

Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School

The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible. It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature.

Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; they may be shown and discussed as well. Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?

Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list: if possible, read Virgil's "Georgics", read "Hemingway's "The short happy life of Francis Macomber", The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular the Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo "True History of the Conquest of New Spain".

Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.

The Times We Live In – An Interview with Marc Isaacs in Resources on DFGDocs – The British Documentary Website

2009-09-21T18:19:00.000-05:00

The Times We Live In – An Interview with Marc Isaacs in Resources on DFGDocs – The British Documentary Website

an interesting interview with a filmmaker whose work i really want to see. second run just came out with a dvd... hope to find one soon.

"You need a setting, you need a story and you need characters. If you have those three things you have everything you need to make a good film. But you need some formal binding device in which to present the story. It’s about our relationship to stories: we expect ‘once upon a time there was a town called Calais’, so once you’ve got that clear, that contains everything. Once you’ve established what the film is apparently about, you can go off on tangents, as long as they seem to be a variation on a theme, or a progression of a theme."

‘I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door’ - And the Pursuit of Happiness Blog - NYTimes.com

2009-08-29T11:46:00.000-05:00

‘I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door’ - And the Pursuit of Happiness Blog - NYTimes.com

Iranian Cinema and Democracy

2009-06-20T14:30:00.002-05:00

Film - Iranian Directors Like Abbas Kiarostami Foreshadowed Current Tension - NYTimes.com:

I watched Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry last night -- fantastic -- and today noticed this in the Times...

"No national cinema is easily summarized, and movies are always an imperfect window on the world. But to watch, say, “The Apple” (1998), Ms. Makhmalbaf’s first film; “The Circle” (2000), “Crimson Gold” (2003) and “Offside” (2006) by Mr. Panahi; the more tenderly sentimental films of Majid Majidi (including “The Color of Paradise” and “Baran”); and Bahman Ghobadi’s tough, poetic films about Kurdistan — and this is a very partial list — is to encounter images and stories that add depth and meaning to the raw videos and tweets of recent weeks. You see class divisions, the cruelty of the state, the oppression of women and their ways of resisting it, traditions of generosity and hospitality, and above all a passion for argument.

A typical Iranian film can feel like one long series of family quarrels — a clatter of competing opinions and interests that is at once contentious and courteous, violent and fraternal, but that never seems to end. Democracy can feel that way, too, and in that respect the Iranian cinema of recent years offers a foreshadowing of what is happening now, beyond the screen."

Pedro Costa -- on process

2009-06-12T15:12:00.001-05:00

“At one point I just left the script behind, because I thought that if I’m going to try and shoot this girl in this new place that’s foreign and dangerous, then I have to shoot it from her point of view. So when I would meet with people on the way up to the volcano, I tried to learn more of the language, the history, or the music. There was a lot of improvisation each day, and then I hoped that the next day maybe a miracle would happen, and of course I had this open structure already: this girl didn’t know what she was going to find, so she could find everything.”

“In the beginning when I started making Vanda it was pure documentary —it was the worst documentary ever made. I was there trying to catch things with my camera, and then slowly I realized I was there to lose moments, not to catch them. [...] not to try and catch reality, but to try and lose reality in a way.”

Steve McQueen (not the one you're thinking of)

2009-06-12T15:01:00.002-05:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/venice-biennale/5394613/Venice-Biennale-Steve-McQueen-interview.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_McQueen_(artist)

McQueen’s films are frequently about the body, about replicating the intensity of physical sensation; they are also predominantly silent, more visceral than verbal. “There are so many people who sit in a cinema or look at art, and they’re numb to it,” McQueen says. “We are very sophisticated viewers. In a way, I’m trying to break that barrier. I’m interested in pushing language and physicality to their extremes. It’s not a gimmick. I’m not trying to fool people. I’m trying to engage them.”

One of his most refined works is also one of his most famous. In 2003, the Imperial War Museum appointed McQueen as official war artist to Iraq. The result was Queen and Country, which was bought for the nation by the Art Fund and is touring Britain. It consists of wooden cabinets filled with sheets of facsimile stamps bearing photographic portraits of 155 dead British soldiers chosen by their families. McQueen considers the work unfinished until the stamps are officially issued by Royal Mail.

“The second-in-command of the Ministry of Defence said to me, 'We’re not against the stamps, but why can’t you do landscapes?’ And I said, 'Are you ashamed of these people?’ The whole idea is to give them visibility. They need to be present, not just a number. This isn’t a pro-war or an anti-war project. It’s not about Left or Right, or right and wrong. It’s about allowing this situation to reach the general public, not through the sensationalism of the media, but entering the everyday, entering people’s lives when they bend down and pick up their mail.”

richness (amidst the crisis)

2009-06-12T14:55:00.000-05:00

“I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.”

2 poems from, and 2 photos by (and of), my friend Arnold

2009-06-03T11:38:00.002-05:00

Black and White
(This is a poem about male bonding)
He—the subject—is black and white.
Even his clothes are like telephones.
Sometimes I think he’s suspiciously “clear”
in the Scientology sense.
Other times that he has no way to defend himself.
I think he thinks me cheap; a vegetable; perverse;
out to get him where it hurts;
and sometimes I think he’s a
seagull—in an oil slick.

Black leather and white, white hothouse flowers.
Gardenias, camellias, and the things
that come out of his mouth and
words, whether printed or written in letters
or spoken, are all black and white;
even he’s a word, that loves itself, that loves other
words because they are as colorless; therefore he and
I love the same things, all words, and himself, and
that which is black and white:
footprints in the snow—piano keys—busing—
Sometimes I think he’s entirely a fool.
Sometimes I think he just wants to be adored.
Sometimes I think his waist—a thin, blue, imaginary
membrane—the only thing that belongs to him
that all the rest is mine.

And because he wants the same thing I do
Vatic shimmer like a nest of bijoux
I forgive him all his flaws
and I call him a cloud—picked out by jackdaws.

— Kevin Killian

The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air – The edge
cuts without cutting

meets – nothing – renews
itself in metal or porcelain –

whither? It ends –

But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry –

Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica –
the broken plate
glazed with a rose

Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses –

The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end – of roses

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness – fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching

What

The place between the petal's
edge and the

From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact – lifting
from it – neither hanging
nor pushing –

The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space

-- William Carlos Williams

((see worksarnoldjkemp.com ))

Epic theatre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2009-05-17T13:26:00.000-05:00

Epic theatre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "While the French playwright Jean Genet articulates a very different world view in his dramas to that found in Brecht's, in a letter to the director Roger Blin on the most appropriate approach to staging his The Screens in 1966, he advises an epic approach to its production:

“Each scene, and each section within a scene, must be perfected and played as rigorously and with as much discipline as if it were a short play, complete in itself. Without any smudges. And without there being the slightest suggestion that another scene, or section within a scene, is to follow those that have gone before.[3]”

Brecht, too, advised treating each element of a play independently, like a music hall turn that is able to stand on its own."

Actors frequently address the audience directly out of character ("breaking the fourth wall") and play multiple roles.

Mise en abyme - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2009-05-17T13:14:00.000-05:00

Mise en abyme - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mise en abyme (also mise en abîme) has several meanings in the realm of the creative arts and literary theory. The term is originally from the French and means, "placing into infinity" or "placing into the abyss". The commonplace usage of this phrase is describing the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, seeing an infinite reproduction of one's image.

Mise-en-abîme occurs within a text when there is a reduplication of images or concepts referring to the textual whole. Mise-en-abîme is a play of signifiers within a text, of sub-texts mirroring each other. This mirroring can get to the point where meaning can be rendered unstable and in this respect can be seen as part of the process of deconstruction. The film-within-a-film is an example of mise-en-abîme. The film being made within the film refers through its mise-en-scène to the ‘real’ film being made. The spectator sees film equipment, stars getting ready for the take, crew sorting out the various directorial needs. The narrative of the film within the film may directly reflect the one in the ‘real’ film.[1]2

In Western art "mise en abyme" is a formal technique in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself, the sequence appearing to recur infinitely. The term originated in heraldry, describing a coat of arms that appears as a smaller shield in the center of a larger one. See Droste effect.

In film, the meaning of "mise en abyme" is similar to the artistic definition, but also includes the idea of a "dream within a dream". For example, a character awakens from a dream and later discovers that he or she is still dreaming. Activities similar to dreaming, such as unconsciousness and virtual reality, are also described as "mise en abyme". This is seen in the film eXistenZ where the two protagonists never truly know whether or not they are out of the game.

--> see also my website digital luddite

Parr on seeing

2009-04-21T00:44:00.000-05:00

Secret Britain travel guide part one: Photographer Martin Parr on the beauty of everyday objects | Travel | The Guardian

I would urge everyone to start looking at the world in a different way. Spend some time looking at everyday objects, at their design, their shape, their individual characteristics. Think ahead and imagine their significance. Many are interesting and aesthetically pleasing in their own right, if you just give them some attention. And of course, the discipline of taking out a camera and documenting the things around you on film is a great way to start to open your eyes wider.
--Martin Parr

vibrations

2009-04-18T21:08:00.000-05:00

all week i've been at the school of sound, london:

http://www.schoolofsound.co.uk/

met, saw, and listened to wonderful people, including Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki.

SoS is the most organized, beautiful, and poetic conference i've experienced. a poetic conference you say -- oxymoronic? i thought so too, but boy was i wrong.

(((sending out the vibrations absorbed in diane's closing sound, to silence)))

Riley and his story.

2009-04-18T20:53:00.000-05:00

Minneapolis News - Monica Haller - page 1

a project by my dear friend monica, and her friend riley. i'm so proud.

Georges Braque used the metaphor of "two mountain climbers roped together" to describe his collaboration with Picasso in the early years of the last century as the two ventured into the uncharted territory of analytic cubism. I like this image of brute, self-effacing interdependence, of going places together that can't be reached alone. It's an apt image to describe the collaboration Twin Cites artist Monica Haller initiated with war veteran Riley Sharbanno and graphic designer Matthew Rezac. "Roped together," they embarked on an elaborate book project designed as a model for, and an invitation to, action in response to war. Nearly three years ago when Haller's college friend Riley gave her over a thousand digital pictures he'd shot while on tour as a nurse at Abu Ghraib prison, he didn't know that he'd started an artistic odyssey that would carry his images and words into the arena of contemporary art and far beyond.

http://www.rileyandhisstory.com/

International Center of Photography - School

2009-04-12T22:53:00.000-05:00

International Center of Photography - School

a refreshing sense of documentary pedagogy:

This class explores the ways that artists and documentarians engage with the public to produce collaborative and participatory works. Existing works are viewed and discussed. Students produce new works based on public interaction that uses photography, video, found and archival material, and the web in various ways. Students are allowed to self-determine some of the form and content of the class.

Little Brown Mushroom

2009-04-06T10:53:00.000-05:00

Little Brown Mushroom

"During these last days of the administration, what is the point of protest, satire or any other sort of rabble-rousing? In assembling this collection of pictures I’ve made over the last eight years, I’m not really trying to accomplish much at all. But as President Bush once said, 'One of the great things about books is, sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.'" - Alec Soth

more Sean McAllister

2009-02-24T02:05:00.000-06:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/sean-mcallister.shtml

BBC Four: What was it about Samir that you felt was worth your attention?
SM: It takes a long time to make my films and I don't really want to do them with people I don't want to be with. So first and foremost I enjoyed his company. Secondly, he spoke very good English, which was important, especially as I don't speak Arabic. But ultimately there was a story. It seemed an interesting premise that at the point of Iraqi liberation here was a man who was anti-Saddam and said quite up front, "My country is finished now. I'm leaving". As soon as I met his daughter Sahar and realised that she was pro-Saddam then I knew that this was a great area of conflict which brought in the whole political sphere, but through the family rather than in any contrived way

...BBC Four: A lot of documentaries have come out of Iraq. How do see yourself as a documentary filmmaker within the context of all the media covering Iraq?
SM: I don't know. In a way it would be interesting for others to judge. You always think that you're not really making a film when you're hanging out with someone for so long. A lot of what I shot with Samir is the same mundane sort of stuff I would do making a film in Britain with somebody. But that's what I think is important because it ends up being a human story within a political context rather than a political film. In a funny kind of way it didn't do well at certain festivals because it wasn't hammering America like Fahrenheit 9/11. But Sundance has taken it - they enjoy that more subtle kind of approach.

BBC Four: What is Samir's current situation?
SM: He's in Amman with his son and daughter. I was on the phone to him yesterday. He was having difficulty getting a visa to come to the premiere at Sundance. But he was also crying because his neighbour, who I knew, had been killed. He was driving through an area where the resistance had tried to attack the Americans. The Americans just spray around everybody. He got a bullet in his head and a bullet in his petrol tank. Thirty years old with three kids. He burnt away in his car.

The Voice Was Lying. The Face May Have Told the Truth. - NYTimes.com

2009-02-16T05:55:00.000-06:00

The Voice Was Lying. The Face May Have Told the Truth. - NYTimes.com

another rehashing of physiognomic techniques, in the stream of contemporary culture...

On the Fox network's new show "Lie to Me," a deception expert sees, not just hears, a cascade of fibbing via the liars' minute gestures and expressions. The show was inspired by the work of Dr. Paul Ekman, a psychologist who has long studied what such expressions mean.

Last week, the sports world was abuzz after Alex Rodriguez, the costly Yankee infielder, admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs. Dr. Ekman, not a sports fan, nonetheless felt compelled to watch a 2007 interview of Mr. Rodriguez by Katie Couric in which he flatly denied using drugs. He was looking for signals that revealed the player's lies.

He reviewed the Couric video twice last week and found plenty of evidence...

I Have Cancer on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

2009-02-16T03:00:00.001-06:00

I Have Cancer on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

this is the photo blog of a friend of a friend, started with his diagnosis of lymphoma cancer. wow.

culiblog � Episode 1, emergency food distribution and the role of the cameras

2009-02-13T04:09:00.000-06:00

culiblog � Episode 1, emergency food distribution and the role of the cameras

In an open market destroyed no more than thirty minutes ago by Russian Federation soldiers with tanks and heavy artillery, a woman recounts how she and the other market women formed a human shield to halt the execution of a group of Chechen boys. Speaking to the camera, in an oddly well-rehearsed role of who stands where and who says what to the camera, the woman is still shaking from the experience. The scene ends with Martens staring shamefaced at the ground, unable to gather enough gumption to ask her what she thinks of him.

At a food distribution centre, Martens addresses a group of women lined up to receive rations of oil and flour. ‘I just want to ask you what you think of me!’ and this time there is an answer. The grim situation of lining up to receive basic foodstuffs, fades in the face of humanising laughter and warm sparkling eyes, women just being women. For a moment the food queue has all but disappeared. ‘Boy, I think you’re handsome, with your blue eyes!’ ‘What’s your theme?’ ‘Are you a journalist?’ ‘No, he’s an artist.’ ‘I think he’s a journalist.’

Ultimately Martens ‘act’ of showing up with his camera and popping the question brings humanity to every situation that he creates. When he meets a young woman in a refugee camp (who bears an uncanny resemblance to his true love back in Belgium), his question changes, ‘How should a man let a woman know that he loves her?’ the woman’s answer, delivered with beaming smile and sparkling eyes, dissolves the miserable tent landscape and suddenly it’s just two people (and their translators) talking about love and life.

Of course Martens created this film for an art context, and the film articulately addresses contemporary art issues. Quite possibly Martens would be appalled that I consider his film to be ‘useful’, not just for artists and an art public, but as a tool to talk about the causes of war, hunger and the politics of emergency food distribution. And the question that Martens dares to ask amidst flying bullets, UN press conferences, annoyed Russian soldiers, women in food queues and refugees living in tent camps, the initial struggle that it initiates in the interviewee and in me, the audience, as I am simultaneously embarrassed by this question, but know that it is a question that can air-lift all of us actors out of the immediate and into a larger, more important discussion. Complexity is not complicated. Episode 1 brings us to the next tier, where a complex situation can be discussed with the nuance it deserves.

I LEGO N.Y. - Abstract City Blog - NYTimes.com

2009-02-05T03:38:00.000-06:00

I LEGO N.Y. - Abstract City Blog - NYTimes.com

World Cinema, Harutyun Khachatryan, One of the foremost filmmakers Armenia

2009-02-02T07:27:00.000-06:00

World Cinema, Harutyun Khachatryan, One of the foremost filmmakers Armenia

I saw Khachatryan's film Border at Rotterdam last week... and it was one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. No dialogue. Supposedly it's a meditation on Armenian history, transposed into the life of a family and a water buffalo over the course of a year.

sempre em marcha: Pedro Costa Entretien effectu�le 13/03/2001, ARTE

2009-01-13T07:15:00.000-06:00

sempre em marcha: Pedro Costa Entretien effectu�le 13/03/2001, ARTE

3. Le passage d'"Ossos" à "Dans la chambre de Wanda"

La différence, c'est grandir, je crois. Mais grandir, je pense à ce livre qui est pas mal, "Age d'homme", c'est qu'"Ossos", il y avait un monde choisi, parce qu'il s'accordait bien à mes désirs, à mes choses lointaines d'enfance, qui venaient plus des peurs, plus sombres, d'angoisses de petit garçon. Là, je voyais bien que ça venait de là. Ou bien de films qui m'ont marqué pour ça. Certains films d'horreur ou tous les films allemands, quand je dis horreur, je pense à Tourneur, qui étaient des invitations à entrer dans ce monde. Je prends l'exemple de Tourneur, des mondes où les gens ne savaient pas être au monde, donc il y avait quelque chose dans ce quartier qui était aussi ça, des gens qui savent pas, qui n'ont pas la place, qui n'ont pas les mots, qui sont tellement trompés et exploités et opprimés qu'ils ont dû parler d'une autre façon, parler avec une espèce de langage tellement métissé pour se protéger, parce qu'ils étaient tellement trompés et exploités… Le passage des deux films c'est ça, au début il y avait un regard de détresse cinéphile, quelque chose d'enfantin, qui aime ce qu'il voit mais qui a peur, qui veut se réveiller tout le temps. Il y avait plus de cinéma dans "Ossos" dans ce sens-là et aussi moins de cinéma dans le sens où je commence -j'ai toujours compris le cinéma comme ça mais - où il faut faire des pas, peut-être qu'un film explique l'autre.

La vie qui circule dans les sons

Moi, j'aime beaucoup beaucoup travailler le son, mais le travailler vraiment, passer des mois et des mois, et dépenser beaucoup d'argent évidemment parce que c'est cher, à refaire le son à envoyer des gens faire des ambiances. Moi, je crois que c'est une bonne chose quand tu as un copain qui fait le son, qui est déjà engagé dans cette espèce de film avec des gens, tu n'es même pas une petite équipe. Et tu dis : "Va écouter un peu ce monde. Prends un week-end, complètement tout seul, tu verras c'est bien." Et puis, tu vois ce qu'ils disent, dans les films : "Après, on fait une ambiance raccord ou je vais faire un petit son là-haut dans la montagne", c'est pas absolument vrai. C'est toujours entre le moment où la voiture de production va partir, il fait le son avec déjà le coin de l'œil sur la dernière voiture sur le point de partir et il dit "Hé, là, je fais encore un son". Mais ce n'est pas exactement vrai, faire un son, c'est pas ça. C'est parler avec des gens, rentrer dans les maisons, c'est dîner, c'est tout ça. Et ça, j'aime beaucoup, faire beaucoup d'ambiance, ou essayer moi-même, c'est une autre façon de filmer, j'en ai fait moi-même beaucoup pour Wanda. Mais c'est être là avec un micro et une caméra. Essayer de faire parler les gens parfois, dans Wanda, il y a plein de choses comme ça. Dans l'autre aussi. J'étais avec mon DAT, et j'ai fait parler des gens, ils parlaient de tout et de rien, dans Ossos il y a ça, des moments de conversations, de dîner d'une famille, derrière. Après tout ce travail de son, de montage, c'est quelque chose que je trouve nourrit les films d'une façon pas pour faire comme si c'était du direct, parce qu'on voit bien dans ces deux films qu'il y a un travail sonore qui dépasse le son direct, qui serait là, présent, brutal, mais aussi un côté recomposé. Le son installe une espèce de confiance dans la vie, il donne un peu de vie, simplement.

OUTSIDE IN TOKYO / Pedro Costa “Colossal Youth” Interview

2008-12-29T04:26:00.000-06:00

OUTSIDE IN TOKYO / Pedro Costa “Colossal Youth” Interview

In Vanda's Room was a project that was almost done alone. The shooting, the production and sometimes I had a friend helping me with the sound. Sometimes I had a friend helping me with small things which we call production, which just involves a car. And with this one, we actually got a little more money, here and there, in Switzerland and Germany. So before we started Colossal Youth, we had this small budget and were allowed to have a small crew. We were four, so I managed to put one year, with almost 2 years of shooting with four guys and plus, we could pay the actors for all the shooting, and that changed a lot because it creates a normal film crew schedule and routine, so we tried to keep a very disciplined schedule, from Monday to Saturday. And Sunday we didn't shoot. This went on for a year and a half, so it's very different. But I wanted to try and see if we could do it. Because when you do a film, it's generally five, six or seven weeks at the most. We had the ambition to do it for a year and a half, and that changes a lot of things and we were not in the same state of mind. You don't see the end so near. What you talk about, what you live during this long period is not the same as when you're doing a shoot in five weeks. In five weeks, you talk about everything except the film. You talk about girls, cars and money (laugh) like in every shooting and you just hope it's over soon. When you spend a year and half with the film, you are just there and life is much more together. You have lots of other things. You have people who are born, people who die (laugh) and seasons change. So the film becomes, really, almost organic. You don't really think about the film. Or you think about the film and life at the same time. So it's good. It's because it brings down the importance of cinema (suspiciously). The balance is more correct, I think. In what you live, that a film should not be the main thing in your life. Perhaps it's one of the things. It's your work. It's like the guy in the office, or the guy who makes food, or the guy who makes shoes. They do it everyday, from 9-7. It should be the same thing. Photography too. This idea that you're making film, that you?fre making art, is a special moment or aspect, or a thing for the special kind of people, was never for me. It's like the idea of trying to make it all your life, because I like it, it's what I chose, and make it day to day, everyday. Just very simple, very simple, but very tough and very boring sometimes. (laugh) Sometimes it takes a lot of work. Taking a photograph can be very boring and making a film is not always wonderful. If you think there's always a wonderful moment and you meet beautiful people, no it's not. It's not! (laugh) It could be tough, a tough job. But, it's also a privilege to do it, because, it's something that I chose. I wanted to do it, and I can do it well. And with this small budget crew and in this place where people are very generous. We can do it on a very daily basis. We're not doing art. Even if the actor, the film you see is something mystic or beautiful or good.

Pedro Costa: "I Have to Risk Each Shot" | GreenCine

2008-12-26T16:43:00.002-06:00

Pedro Costa: "I Have to Risk Each Shot" | GreenCine

I did film school and just after that I had four or five years of [working] as an assistant to the producer/director. I did a lot of things from just getting sandwiches for the actors to picking [them] up [and driving them to location]. Those five years just before this film, that was the period where I saw a lot of things that I didn't like. I chose film or cinema; but then I had this experience of the hard reality of making films. What I saw was very bad. I did a lot of films - maybe 20 or 30 - as an assistant and each one of them were mirrors of the worst parts of society, from power relations to all the worst part of our organization as human beings. I was a bit afraid that this work could become the rest of my life because I saw a lot of directors collapsing, failing, afraid, usually in very bad situation[s]. It was all about money or about lacking time. As I was assistant director, my job was to say, "Calm down. Everything's all right"; but I saw that everything was collapsing. That's what an assistant director does more or less, is to calm down the paralytics. It's a phony job actually, at least in Europe.

Then I had this moment in my film where I tried to avoid a lot of things. I think we succeeded. We had a very good crew. We did this film in five weeks. It was very quick and hectic with a lot of lighting. We had no time to rehearse with the young boys. There were a lot of locations. Because I was a little bit experienced with this kind of organization, we managed through it, but it was more a sensing or feeling [of] what the secret of making a good film could be - not the film itself - but the way you make it; the way you live it. It took me many films and many experiences to get to that point, to get things more or less right, as I feel I have now. Now, the film and the way we live the film during the making has begun to balance. I feel I have achieved a certain balance between being behind and in front of the camera. Here [in O Sangue], though there were not a lot of production problems, there is still a lot of me in front of the camera. The balance is not right, correct. It's more [that] everything was a means to an end.

...There's not that much money that comes in and less and less every year. You can feel it. Also, there are less possibilities of showing my films. But they're dangerous in the sense that I have to risk each shot of my film. There's a French writer, Céline, who I like a lot. He wrote Journey to the End of the Night, a classic novel. He used to frequently say that the writer should "put his skin on the table"; that was his expression. I feel the same way. If you don't risk yourself and the people with whom you're working in almost every shot you make, it's not good, it's useless, it's just another film. For me, this danger takes a lot of forms. I'm shooting with video, which - perhaps - some people think is easier and has more freedom, is cheaper. It is cheaper - you can do it yourself - but at the same time, if you want to do something ambitious, it's difficult for this small-medium machine to accommodate so much ambition. Can it produce a bigger form? A bigger picture? Sometimes, I think, not always. It's a very limited machine, a limited medium, and you can easily make false moves.

It's risky to try to use video as I'm trying to use it, almost like a 35mm camera. It's no different for me. I used to work with a crew and big cameras. I have the feeling it was safer for me when I had this crew, these assistants, this large machinery. It was protection. I was surrounded by people that were there for me, sometimes a bit naïvely, sometimes very sincerely, but that's a kind of work that no longer interests me. I don't know. There's a danger to the kind of engagement video affords, letting yourself be in reality, aware of certain aspects of reality. When I did films in 35mm with a crew, every day the thing that I wanted to shoot, to film, was happening either to the left or the right or behind the set-up - it could be some bit of the actors; it could be just a bit of light on leaves; it could be something happening just to the side - and with a big crew and cameras, lights and everything, you never had time to turn the camera and just shoot this small spot of sunlight on a rock. You never have the time. If you do that, it will kill your production schedule. So you never do it. The producers don't allow it. The machinery does not allow it. It's too complicated.

Again, this freedom or lightness in the way I work now doesn't mean that it's completely improvisational or that it's a vacation with a video camera. Not at all. I try to impose, almost, the same discipline and the same consciousness as working with a 35mm camera; but I feel that everything is really more risky. Technically, because we have to be as good as with a 35mm camera, which is nearly impossible. I'm adjusting my camera to conditions and always trying not to make false moves because video is not good for certain things.

One of the things I especially respect about your work is that you grant agency to your audiences. You're not just spoon-feeding us. The films pull us into their gravitational orbit and require an accommodating physicality, an attention, exploration, engagement, endurance.

It's not only me or the style or the way the film is structured; it's more the rhythm of the people inside the films. They also put themselves in danger because they are naked. These are naked people; they have been all their lives really, not only sentimentally, but socially, economically. They have little and they're giving a lot in the films. Giving a lot almost like actors though, for me, better than actors. They're more sincere. They want to share, they're trying to express some things, and - in that sense - they also are very much in danger. They reveal a lot. I think they expect that the viewers and the audiences can be as naked or as responsible or as conscious. Responsible is a good word because it's about memory, it's about rhythms, it's about different timelines and timeframes, all these people, and you have to accept that or walk out.

Can you talk a bit about your compositional eye?

No.

No?

No. To be very frank, people are always comparing and referring to filmmakers of the past. I forget to mention that there is a tradition that moves me a lot. Here, in France, in Portugal, in Spain, there were people all over the world at the beginning of the 20th century who were photographers. One of them even called himself a "citizen." They were more or less amateurs - you could say documentary photographers - because photography was so young from the turn of the century until the 30s when it became something else. But photography is still something that touches me and I always forget to say this because it replaces for me a lot of things that I miss in film today and in filmed documentaries. I don't like to talk about framing or the composition because I don't know how to talk about that. I really don't. I know that in Fontainhas it comes from the material space. You have to think about the space.

My friend Jean-Marie Straub says something obvious, "When you see a film by Stroheim, you are afraid for people when they cross the street." It's that material. It's two things. One, he was saying cars are bad. Second, the very powerful effect that just crossing a street at a street corner could really materialize fear on the screen; it's just incredible. Fritz Lang, the way he organizes space - I'm saying Fritz Lang but it could be 30 different filmmakers - all of them, even the not very good ones, are fantastic. Today, you don't see doors or windows. You never see a door. If you see a door, it closes in perfect silence. "Stuck in a perfect silence," that's what Jacques Tati used to say. Now a door closes and it's a different conception of space. I don't know if it's a conception that people accept today. I don't know how to answer your question.

...There was film criticism that I really hate completely, that almost killed people that I like, like Straub, all this semiology, and I hated that and I still do. It's pathetic if you read it today. I think everything communicates. They say nothing communicates. Perhaps people have difficulty communicating but things communicate. They organized space to communicate. That's what was the cause of one of my fascinations.

...The scene in the museum brings a little bit of the art into the film and, of course, says also that we say hello to these artists but without being too reverent. I don't like films that try to be paintings or try to imitate paintings or try to be close to certain paintings, as I don't like films that are too close to films, to cinema. A lot of vanity and fetishism is involved in that and I'm trying to get rid of that. So this museum scene is for me a nice way to come together with people that we liked in the past who did the same work we did. Very tough, very hard. Reubens worked like that with enormous canvases that he spent months and months trying to find something; it was not about some secret or strange mystique; it was just work, and our's too, so we meet and we do this moment where it's not only an homage to Holbeins and all the paintings but it's an homage to Ventura's work also.

Well, there's work and there's work. I've been taught that within indigenous cultures there's a belief that soulfulness is embodied and corporeal and that it comes through the body to register as creative expression. In other words, it comes from within and literally emerges through the whorls of the fingertips into the creative object. Fine craftsmanship is thus recognized as soulful. When I first read about Ventura's visit to the Museum, I considered that he was in essence admiring the soul he put into those walls.

...The best answer for your question is something I shot in my film on Jean-Michel Straub - Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? - the film about the editing. They say something that is not a mystery but that everybody tends to forget a little bit. All the critics and people that write about cinema, they tend to forget what is evidence for me and for Straub. He says it and I could say the same thing: there is not so much psychological investment when we are working. We're not trying to compose a dream or compose with dreams; but of course psychology comes into the film and - for me and for Straub and for a lot of filmmakers, especially the most classical ones, the ones that depend on at least some kind of narrative; it can be modern but they have this minimum narration they have to achieve - psychology comes into the film when you edit the film.

When you edit the film, you are composing, you are analyzing, you are choosing more deeply than when you are shooting. Of course you are choosing certain things when you are shooting a film - you are choosing a space and not another; you are choosing an action and not another; you are choosing a smile against something else - but when you're editing, you're choosing and you're going deeper and that can affect the psychology of a character, of the film. It depends on how you cut your film. It depends on how you put your shots together. It can say things and there it launches a lot of possibilities. That's when a lot of psychology is coming into the work. It's like that; you cannot refuse it. It's like Straub says in the film, you cannot refuse it because - if you cut close to a smile; if you cut close to someone that cries; then you have your next shot and it's larger and the reaction or response of someone to this laughter or this cry - this is psychology. This will tell things in another way, in a psychological way. I cannot refuse it. I'm just saying that when we are shooting, we are trying to concentrate on something that is very dry, actually, very dry. We're trying to get to what's rough. It's not a sketch. We start with the sketch of a thing and then we try to improve and improve and improve, but in movement, in rhythm.

It's more like a musician perhaps than theater work. There is not much psychology; feelings are absent; we tend to expel them to find them again at this editing stage. That's also very fascinating because you can change a lot of things and create a lot of affinities, which are psychological, even more than psychological. Editing is almost a psychoanalytic process, as you can see in the film about the Straubs.

I think the exact term would be "psychoid" rather than psychological, in the sense that you're not trying to create a meaning or generate equations saying this means that or this is the consequence of that. To be in a psychoid state is to say you are seeing with the psyche, imagining with the psyche. The affinities an audience might catch might emanate from a psychoid state and might not be your psychological intentions at all. You may not have put an affinity there; but, a spectator can look at a well-crafted, well-edited image and feel an affinity.

Sure. Then there is the interpretation the audience chooses or makes; but, that's another thing. Yeah, when you are structuring or constructing your film, in the editing especially, you're creating enemies, affinities, certain things begin to become enemies of other things, some things connect very closely, just because you cut one or two or three frames. It's fragile and magical. It's unexplainable. You cut a little bit and images become closer in every sense. You cut large and they clash.

I can't even fathom that work: shaping 340 hours of footage down to three hours. I can't imagine the process or the commitment of time. You took a year to edit Colossal Youth?

Yeah, it takes a long time. But it's great because it forces you to be patient. It's a discipline that, I think, lacks in a lot of cinema today in general. It's a lesson - well, this is very pretentious and reactionary - but, it's a good lesson for young people. I think young people today are used to things that are so easy; the films are so easy to see and easily made. That kind of work is everywhere so they don't imagine hard work. Probably they don't want to do hard work. I tend to say that it's not a mountain of suffering that comes for you; it's just work you should do like everybody else does in all aspects of society, like the simple guy that has a shop and opens the shop at 9 and closes at 6 or 7 every day for years and years. Cinema should be like that and not just special and incredible with funny and strange moments in six weeks of the life of someone. It should be everyday. It should be patient. That's the only way to learn a little bit. You should give film time. You should give cinema more time today. That's what I think it lacks a lot.

When I see a movie, I always see that they had no time to think. It's like Jean Renoir. Renoir said something that is not very true; but he said his American films, the films he made in Hollywood, were all bad because he had no time. He couldn't get used to the four, five, six week production schedule, shooting very fast, so he said his films were not good and that - after the films in Hollywood - he had to go to India to do something where he could really discover and work properly. He did The River.

Speaking of that temporal quality to film, you've used the term "material" to describe your films, and suddenly materiality in film seems better than metaphors in film! Letting something just be what it is and apprehending it that way, appropriately. The Maya of Central America had a concept called the ilbal. An ilbal could be any number of things - a rock crystal, a folded book, an inscribed monument, in your case a cinema lens - basically, an ilbal is a seeing instrument that furthers perception. Your films allow me to see. I don't always understand what it is I'm seeing but, then, I think you like my not always understanding. I think as a filmmaker you want me to question what I'm seeing?

Of course.

And it ramifies. Now, I will accept that your films are not metaphorical and I will accept that they are not necessarily symbolic or even representational, but - because of the temporality and the materiality in your films - I would have to argue that there is a mythic quality to them. Yours are stories that slow down and dilate perception, shifting them into mythic territory. Let me offer two examples from Colossal Youth, which I'd like to run by you to see if I'm projecting or not.

Returning to the doors, I know you have talked about leaving the door closed, that it's a philosophy about access or lack of access, but for me such a philosophy implies a necessary transgression on the part of the audience, in the old style of fairy tales, let's say, where a character is told, "Do not open that door. Do not open that box. Don't do that!" And yet it's absolutely imperative for the character to open that door, open that box, and to do what they're not supposed to in order for the story to move forward and for the wisdom to be gained. Are you doing that?

[Costa smiles ear to ear and chuckles.] Yeah. It's so obvious for the films that I've been making at Fontainhas and Casal Bobol that we are dealing also with space and fear. Everything comes together because it's about space, it's about being in space, creating your own space. It's all about rooms and it comes from a very faraway place also, from childhood, from being a teenager.

For instance, In Vanda's Room is a film that I thought was about all the rooms, all our teenage rooms, where we close doors and decide not to talk or to talk, to play a guitar or read a book or imagine. It's a film about creating your space or how space is created for you to be in. It's about the problem of space today because the space today is paid for and it has to be almost fought for. This space is a way in and out also. Even the light comes in through some holes and so I'm very used to this being my center for making a film. I have to find the center of a room, the center of a neighborhood, so that then I can begin to have an almost 360° view of things. I start opening some doors and closing some other doors, letting some people in or not, and sometimes I decide to close some doors because it's better for the audience perhaps or for the story or for the film. While other doors are just open, mostly windows I think, lots of seen or unseen windows, sources of light, there are spaces. You can see that the light comes in through some indirect window or hole or aperture. That's very interesting for me.

Another mythic element I've foisted on Colossal Youth that I'd like to run by you: in Sumerian-Babylonian mythology the original descent myth is that of the descent of the goddess Inanna. Do you know that story at all?

No.

Innana has a sister named Ereshkigal who is the Queen of the Underworld and, one could say, she doesn't really like her job. She's pretty miserable. It's not so much that Ereshkigal is a bad person; she's just a dark person and it weighs heavily on her. There are many elements in the myth of Inanna but the bit that I'm interested in that I think is relevant to Colossal Youth involves Ereshkigal. She has two attendants. They're like imps or spirits that live in the thresholds of the doors. They're threshold spirits and I see them as the original psychoanalysts, the original therapists, because what they do is they repeat back to Ereshkigal all her complaints. She'll say, "Oh, I have all these aches and pains. My arms hurt" and they'll whisper back, "Oh, your arms hurt." She'll say, "Oh, my back hurts," and they'll whisper back, "Oh, your back hurts." That's all they do. They repeat her complaints and it comforts her. I felt this with Ventura, that he was a liminal spirit moving through all these doors and rooms, listening to everybody, but never offering advice, just listening and sometimes repeating what people have said.

That's nice. I like this comment you're making. It's important because he never really gives advice. He's not a doctor or a psychoanalyst. He's not even a father. It's a bit like myself when I make a film with these people. The thing is I cannot rob them, but at the same time, I cannot give them anything. It's very sad sometimes. It's very ambiguous, but I don't think cinema can give that much to these people, but anyway, cinema is not there to rob them or dispossess them of something.

You've honored them.

I think so. It's done with some dignity. But we're equals. I'm not quite sure who is gaining in a profit sense and neither of us lose also.

Recently, I read Alexander Nemerov's Icons of Grief, which is about the films of Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton. I'm looking forward to seeing Casa de Lava, which I understand is somewhat a remake, or a reworking, more a riff, of I Walked with a Zombie, which is one of my favorite films. Nemerov's thesis - and I can apply it to your films - is that, like John Ford, like yourself, the extra, the character actor, the minor role, the marginalized role, is almost the true story. The lead actors are primarily there to drive the narrative forward, but it's the brief appearance of minor character actors that carry the weight of unspoken grief and tragedy. Nemerov describes them as iconic. Especially in his collaborations with Tourneur, Lewton would film these minor actors standing very still, almost pictorial, invested with presence.

In many of the reviews of Colossal Youth, Ventura is described as iconic and mythic. He embodies, as you are saying, the grief of ages, the ongoing tragedy of a displaced, enslaved people. In Colossal Youth I noticed this iconicity was achieved through your camera placement, which is very low, looking up at him. Was that conscious? Why did you do that?

For me it was more about the daily work. Before starting every day's work, for me it was more about, How can I meet this man? This very big man that I had met and with whom I had talked and who had accepted my proposal to make a film? Then came the moment in the first weeks of the shoot where I had to find how I could be as - the words are not enough - how can I put myself at his height really with my camera? The camera came down and down and down because I could not be at his height. I had to be lower. It was not instinctive, but for the first weeks of shooting, I adopted this height, this position, this respect perhaps - but it came like that and stayed like that. It seemed good for me. It seemed good for him, especially for the image, and it seemed good for him in the space. He was the one who was more or less the designer of the space. He crosses some things that make you aware.

It's my feeling that when you see him at some doors or in some places like the museum, Ventura is a man for a museum also when everyone says no. There are some people that are not for the museum. This is also a metaphor. Of course he fits very well in this Louis XV chair called the "Canopy of Confidence." Ventura is more or less the designer or the architect and it is because he designed the neighborhood. All these men, these pioneers, they made this medina, this place.

So it's because he crosses the shots or he enters and gets out or just being in the shot, being there, made me be at this height of camera position. If there's not a living human being in a shot, the shot does not exist today. It's very strange. Even more with Ventura or with people with this mythical quality, I tend to be respectful. My camera wondered and was a little bit afraid of him. A little bit. It's not fear; it's...

Awe?

Yes. So that was my feeling every day when I came to the place, when I arrived and saw Ventura, how can I do it again? How can I do it today? How can I go on? Because he seemed much more than what I imagined. And that was good because we both worked with imagination, especially the other's imagination, which is much more rich, confronting this other person and you have to begin the work with him, this challenge between him and you. This is what's going to be the film, the imagination and the void of the film, the ideas. The whole film is about me and him and it's also about space. The way we are everyday. Ventura is a very polite, elegant man that does not seem a man of today, you know? I have the feeling that some people are not of today. It's rare but sometimes you see someone who seems from the past, who has the force of the past, like our grandfathers, and Ventura is this kind of man. It makes you wonder.

... read it!

Archive Fever

2008-12-22T11:31:00.000-06:00

“Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art - Art - Review - New York Times

a lovely bit on the work of an exceptional human i had the pleasure to meet once, fazal sheikh.

"And in the show’s most startling example of archival accumulation, the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann has filled a room with the framed front pages of 100 international newspapers — from Paris, Dubai, Sydney, Seoul, New York and elsewhere — printed on Sept. 12, 2001. Questions flood in: Why were certain pictures of the devastated Twin Towers used in certain places? Why does Osama bin Laden’s face appear on some pages and not on others? And how is the story reported in languages we cannot read; Arabic, say, or Persian? And what could readers who didn’t read English know of our reports? To enter this archive is to relive recent history. I was reluctant to go in, but then I couldn’t leave.

Mr. Feldmann’s work, made for this exhibition, is monumental. Fazal Sheikh’s “Victor Weeps: Afghanistan” series (1997) is, in almost every way, not. Each of the four pictures in the show is of a hand holding a passport-size photographic male portrait. Statements by the family members who hold the photos tell us that they are portraits of Afghan mujahedeen fighters who had died or disappeared during battles with occupying Russian forces in the 1980s.

Although the portraits are in each case held loosely, even tenderly, the words they evoke are passionate. These little pictures — routine, unexceptional, of a kind turned out in countless numbers — may be the only visual link between the dead and their survivors. Here the archival is profoundly personal.

But do Mr. Sheikh’s beautiful pictures, or the photographs within them, represent some special, easily approached corner of the great archive that surrounds, shapes and even overwhelms us? Do they convey , for once, some comprehendible truth? No, just the ordinary one: When it comes to full disclosure, art never, ever speaks for itself, as Mr. Enwezor’s eloquent exhibition tells us in many ways."

Joe Sola: Atlanta College of Art Gallery | ArtForum | Find Articles at BNET

2008-12-20T03:27:00.001-06:00

Joe Sola: Atlanta College of Art Gallery | ArtForum | Find Articles at BNET

In interacting with these and other icons of hypermasculinity, Sola always marks his own masculinity as different from theirs. In a monitor-based video Riding with Adult Video Performers, 2002, the artist rides a roller coaster with a group of male porn stars, but it is obvious even in this context that he is a breed apart. His physique does not resemble the performers' and his ebullient enjoyment contrasts with their more restrained reactions. For the other monitor-based video in the show, Saint Henry Composition, 2001, Sola allowed himself to be used as a tackling dummy by a high school football team and was inevitably knocked over by the uniformed players. By presenting himself as either more emotionally expressive or physically passive than the more "masculine" men with whom he interacts, Sola becomes their feminized Other.

He takes a more active role in the projected video Studio Visit, 2005, the most engaging work here. This documents a series of visits by art-world professionals, including Artforum contributor Jan Tumlir and LA Louver gallery's Peter Goulds and Chris Pate, to Sola's Los Angeles studio. Each time, after showing his guests around and asking them if they would like to see a new performance, the artist suddenly takes a flying leap out of a closed window, crashing through the (breakaway) glass and leaving those present bemused. Here, Sola emulates that archetypal movie scene in which the desperate protagonist seizes a slim chance to escape a threatening situation. Particularly likable is the moment just before each leap when Sola feigns interest in the conversation while visibly planning his dive to freedom. (Perhaps this video provides the backstory to Yves Klein's Leap Into the Void, 1960. Is it possible that a curator was responsible for driving Klein out the window?)

see also: site and catalog!

girish: Pedro Costa One-Stop

2008-12-20T02:33:00.000-06:00

girish: Pedro Costa One-Stop

reblogged from a handy compilation:

I'm in the middle of a Pedro Costa retrospective at Cinematheque Ontario. To make it a little more convenient for people searching for writings on his films on the Internet now and in the future, I thought I'd collect those links here in a one-stop post.

-- The most detailed Costa overview I've seen so far is by James Quandt in the Sept 2006 issue of Artforum. Unfortunately, it's not online but a reduced and revised version serves as the introductory essay for the retrospective.

-- At Rouge: A lengthy, thoughtful, amazing lecture that Costa gave to film students in Japan called "A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing"; and an essay on him by the Japanese film critic Shigehiko Hasumi.

-- A collection of Costa posts at Andy Rector's blog, Kinoslang.

-- Tag Gallagher's "Straub Anti-Straub" in the current issue of Senses of Cinema.

-- A collection of writings, many of them on blogs, in no particular order: Mark Peranson's Cannes '06 report in Cinema Scope; Dave McDougall at Chained to the Cinémathèque; Darren Hughes at Long Pauses; Acquarello at Strictly Film School; Michael Sicinski's TIFF '06 report at Greencine; Doug Cummings at Film Journey; Daniel Kasman at d+kaz; Jason Anderson in Toronto's Eye Weekly; Dave Kehr on Casa De Lava; Tom Charity's Vancouver '06 report at Greencine; Ruy Gardnier at A_Film_By; and my own post on Costa from last summer.

-- UPDATE: See Michael Guillen's Pedro Costa Next Stop post from several months later.

-- In addition to these online pieces, let me strongly recommend: Mark Peranson's interview with Costa in the summer '06 issue of Cinema Scope (issue #27); and Thom Andersen's essay in the Mar/Apr '07 issue Film Comment.

A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing

2008-12-20T02:28:00.000-06:00

A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing

This whole essay is brilliant, but I'm just including a little bit (relatively) of it here.

I knew the Japan of films, above all of the three directors most well known in Europe – namely, Mizoguchi, Ozu and Naruse. I knew Japan through them, these who are dead, who are of another time, but I loved it already, at a distance – and that also is very important in the cinema, to love at a distance. There were things in Japan that I'd never seen in the films of Ozu or Mizoguchi or Naruse, and that I continue not to see in Japan. Here, I launch into a rather complicated subject, for there are things that these directors, or the other great directors I don't know, hid from me, aspects of Japan that they didn't show me. Today I'm in Japan and I still don't see them. That is to say, sometimes in the cinema, it's just as important not to see, to hide, as it is to show. The cinema is perhaps more a question of concentrating our gaze, our vision of things. That's what great directors, like these three Japanese, are doing. They are not showing Japan – they're condensing something. Instead of scattering your mind, your heart and your senses, they're concentrating your vision. That's what I'm always saying: the cinema is made for concentrating our vision. To concentrate means also to hide. It's a cliché to say that Japan is like the films of Ozu, and the history of Japan is the same as in the historical films of Mizoguchi. Now I understand and I sense Japan better (it's the same thing: to understand is to feel and to feel is to understand). For example (and you must not laugh now), I have the impression that I don't see pregnant women on the streets in Japan, and I understand that after having seen the films of Ozu. I know what it means not to see a pregnant woman on the streets of Tokyo. In Ozu's films, he gives us cues to understand that it's hidden. That is to say, Ozu prepared me to see this absence of pregnant women. So, sometimes a director who is very much a realist, working almost in a documentary mode like Ozu, sometimes he makes films also to hide something. There's a secret somewhere in his films, and to assert certain things he must hide others. Maybe it's necessary to step a bit outside of Japan, because what I'm about to say could make you uncomfortable, I don't know ... but for me, the true Japanese documentaries are by Ozu. All the people I know in Japan, all my Japanese friends, I knew before, through the films of Ozu. What I've just said, Ozu has written in his journal. He says: ‘I've never made up a character. In my films, I make copies of my friends.’

All of that is to begin to tell you what I think the cinema really does well, what it has as its ultimate function, and in the first place that isn't artistic or aesthetic. For me, the primary function of cinema is to make us feel that something isn't right. There is no difference between documentary and fiction here. The cinema, the first time it was seen and filmed, was for showing something that wasn't right. The first film showed a factory, the people who were leaving the factory. It's similar to photography, which is also something quite close to our world. It's like when we take a photo in order to have proof of something that we see, which is not in our mind, something in front of us, of reality. The first photograph shown to the world in newspapers was of the corpses of the Paris Commune, it showed the bodies of the Communards. (2) So, you begin to see that in the first film ever shown we see people leaving a prison, and the first photo published in a newspaper showed dead people who tried to change the world. When we speak of cinema starting from there – or of photography, documentary, or fiction – we're speaking of its very realist basis. It's sort of a basic historical given that the first film and the first photograph are somewhat terrible things. They're not love stories, they're anxieties. Somebody took a machine in order to reflect, to think and to question. For me, there is in this gesture, this desire – be it the gesture to make a film or a photograph, or today to make a video – there is in this gesture something very strong, something which says to you: ‘Don't forget.’ Of course, the first gesture, the first film, the first photograph, the first love, is always the strongest, always the one that we don't forget.

The problem comes afterwards, because after the first film, after Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895, La Sortie des Usines Lumière) by the Lumières, there is a second film, again workers leaving a factory made by the same Brothers Lumière. It is here that things deteriorate, go awry, become complicated, because the Lumières were not very happy with the appearance of the workers coming out of their factory (it was their own factory), they said to the workers: ‘Try to be a bit more natural.’ They managed the workers. So the first gesture was lost, this first act of love – it's an act of love but also of criticism – is very powerful, like a first gaze is very powerful. So they managed the workers, they said: ‘You, go left, don't go to the right ... you, you can smile a bit, and you too ... you, go with your wife over there ...’ And so there was mise en scène. Thus, fiction was born, because the boss gave orders to an employee, to a worker. It's obvious that the first film script – a script is always a book of law, of rules – the first book of rules for cinema was a production script. In comedy scripts, it was noted how much it costs for an actress to play a young girl, how much it costs for an actor to play a lover, and for an actor to play the father who just hit the head of his son, i.e. that costs such and such amount of money. That was it, the first script.

At the same time, or a bit afterwards, films were also made without scripts, and strangely these films still exist today in the museums of cinema. I'm talking about erotic films. It's as if the first fiction films (as we understand a fiction film) with a script, a love story, and characters which speak, were romantic comedies. We could also say that the first films without a script, thus documentary, are vaguely amateur films, vaguely secret, pornographic. At the beginning of the century, in 1900, there were thus on the one hand, the first directors who wrote fiction and the script was how much things cost, so it was really an economic story, this love story, a romantic comedy, a melodrama. While on the other hand, there were directors who filmed without a script, who also filmed love stories, that is to say, the gestures of love, in an erotic or pornographic film, but without a script. So, there were already people who showed things, fiction, they showed a love story, a girl, a father, a mother, a happy ending, and on the other hand, there were people who also showed things, a gesture of love, somebody fucking somebody else. What's interesting here is that documentary and fiction in the cinema are born at the same time, with the same idea of love. Except that on one side, it started with a sort of economy, which afterwards began to be an industry, and from the industry, a market, and thus a need for people who want to buy a certain product. It became the law of the market. Even if that's just one aspect of cinema at the beginning of Hollywood, it continues even today. On the other side, there were films without a script, without an apparent market, without an industry, amateur films that were made at home, and which were above all also films of love, because they were erotic films, family films, but they continued to be only the gesture to make a film for film's sake. It was thus necessary to have people who could bridge these two things. At the beginning of the century, there were people who succeeded in putting a bit of fiction into documentary and a bit of documentary into fiction, and thus a bit of money into the private sphere, and a bit of the private sphere into money. We could say that the first directors were those who synthesised the documentary and fiction film, that is to say, created a synthesis of the almost private, documentary film, made in its own corner, in a village, at home, and the film made in public where one showed everything. This synthesis between the public and the private happened with Griffith who made a war film that was also a pornographic film, and succeeded in putting sex and terror into the same shot. This happens in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). These films convey a very strong feeling that the passions and terrors of men can make two things: love and war.

...

International Jean Rouch Symposium

2008-12-19T05:34:00.000-06:00

International Jean Rouch Symposium

[Jean Rouch] kept repeating that he was neither an ethnologist nor a film director, but combined both functions. Extraordinarily diverse, surprisingly unusual, the decent man par excellence, crossing through the looking glass, a pale fox straight out of Dogon mythology, the hunted-hunter of an impossible doppelganger that he finally came to face on that last night in Niger, on February 18, 2004, elusive and yet present, yesterday or tomorrow, forever...

Between surrealism and knowledge of Africa, Jean Rouch found the magic lantern of cinema. It reveals the self in the other, and the other in ourselves, between which the anthropologist attempted to initiate dialogue. He wrote that "cinema, the art of the double, is already a transition from the real world to the imaginary world, while ethnography, the science of others' systems of thought, is a permanent crossing from one conceptual universe into another, a form of gymnastics where going out of one's depth is the least of the risks involved."

...

- Direct cinema and construction of the real: Chronique d'un été
Across all his manners of "acting" as both an ethnologist and director Jean Rouch brings into play a true philosophy of action. This unrepentant trickster, this smiling magician, this intriguing charmer, this dream hunter, this smuggler of genres, never stopped inventing Africa -- has he not invented anthropology as well, in making his films?
One response to this question appears clearly through his collaboration with Edgar Morin for the film Chronique d'un été. Not only is the film a token of the advent of direct cinema in France, it is also a real action film showing real situations and relations b/t characters that are more or less artificially brought together. Rouch and Morin's cleverness lies in allowing the spectator to follow the meanderings of the actors' and directors' involvement with each other, thus offereing a dynamic anthropological study about the formation of a group, the emergence of a society. The director is no longer a demiurge or a learned portrayer of shadows, but a mediator who is implicated in the effects of his work. The meaning of the film belongs to the spectator in the end, and thus renews itself from viewing to viewing.

- A new anthropology, an anthropology of the living
"Rouchian" anthropology teaches us a double lesson: proximity and continuity allow us not only to see, but also to explore the meaning of difference, to exchange points of view, and as such to possibly change and most of all decenter the analysis. Shared anthropology puts into perspective the anthroplogist whose method is included in the questioning. The interviewer and his subject are both incorporated in a situation that eludes them as they define it.
From his very first films, Rouch presented his images to the people that they were showing. ...
Anthropological investigation becomes a concrete situation: it is the meeting of people who openly question their belonging, their desires, their pleasures and their obligations. The description that is the foundation of anthropology is thus narration, avoiding the risks of hasty explanations that Marcel Mauss proscribed by enjoining anthropologists to first observe without drawing any conclusions. The Rouchian lesson follows in the same direction as that of Dziga Vertov, the "armed gaze", that of the director and to an even greater extent, that of the ethnologist: it is important to overcome the prior organization of seeing which leads only to cursory examination, if not reducing it to a mere resemblance of itself.
Rouch suggests increasing the number of observation paths and locations. He directs his anthropological questioning toward putting the approach itself into perspective. Perceptive attention must rediscover its capacity for surprise, astonishment, and thus intimate questioning, which questions itself before questioning the legitimacy the other.
On the paths covered by Jean Rouch, the urgent lesson that he leaves behind is to always find new paths to endlessly question accepted truths and "continue the fight!" In Jean Rouch et Germaine Dieterlen "l'Avenir du Souvenir," a film directed by Philippe Constantini, Jean Rouch bids an emotional farewell to a young Dogon and says to him: "I am going to tell you a beautiful French phrase: what is the future of memory?"
Constantly renewing our questions, intriguing our imaginations, escaping our rules and our classifications, impertinent, always ahead of us despite all the delays, Jean Rouch is simply present!

Nina Davenport: "I've Never Encountered Anyone Quite Like Him Before" | GreenCine

2008-12-19T04:50:00.000-06:00

Nina Davenport: "I've Never Encountered Anyone Quite Like Him Before" | GreenCine

Whatever the merits of the American documentaries about the Iraq War made so far, all of them are clearly made by filmmakers convinced they're on the side of the angels. Not so for Nina Davenport's Operation Filmmaker, the first American film whose director implicates herself in the condescension and cultural misunderstandings of the occupation. Her soul searching, spurred by a complex relationship with her subject, gives liberal guilt a good name.

The film's also compellingly structured, as it depicts Iraqi film student Muthana Mohmed using an internship on the Prague shoot of Liev Schreiber's Everything Is Illuminated as a chance to navigate his way out of Iraq permanently. Muthana's life goes through twists and turns that would please the most hardened screenwriter, but Davenport follows his story while highlighting her own increasing role, including lending him money at desperate times, in it.

Was it hard to make a documentary about someone you obviously dislike?

I did like him at the beginning. I wanted the best for him and to steer him in the right direction. It was a very long, slow and painful process of disillusionment, which I think the film captures.

How does Operation Filmmaker connect with your other films, particularly Parallel Lines, which is about 9/11?

I think the connection is that they all have some sort of personal element. To a greater or lesser extent, I become a character within the films. I wasn't planning on doing that with Operation Filmmaker, but I got sucked in and realized, partly because of my previous experience, that it would be a lot more interesting if I became a part of it. Another filmmaker would never even have considered that, and it would have been a completely different film.

In Mexico, Beyond Gay and Straight - The New York Times > Week in Review > Slide Show > Slide 5 of 15

2008-12-19T04:41:00.000-06:00

In Mexico, Beyond Gay and Straight - The New York Times > Week in Review > Slide Show > Slide 5 of 15

Alex with her mother, Rosa Taledo Vicente, and her father, Victor Martinez Jimenez. Mr. Martinez is a construction worker who speaks Zapotec but little Spanish. He and Alex have a loving relationship, and when asked about having a muxe son he replies: “It was God who sent him and why would I reject him? He helps his mother very much. Why would I get mad? God sent him for both of us. Why would I get mad?”

erratum - noise.art.poetry

2008-12-19T04:16:00.000-06:00

erratum - noise.art.poetry

Henri Chopin, explorer of the body’s voices.
For the last forty years, with his sound poetry revue OU (1964-1974), then through his participation in various international sound poetry festivals, through his personal experience in the experimental studios of radio stations in Köln, Paris, Australia, Canada or Sweden and in his concert/performances throughout Europe, Henri Chopin has consistently and unceasingly opened the ways to unexplored spaces beyond all known languages. Thanks to the systematic use of microphones, amplifiers, tape recorders, editing and mixing consoles, he has given a voice to realms beyond modern or experimental music, beyond any note system and headed for spaces without norms, categories, definitions or limits: spaces of permanent metamorphosis. But despite misleading appearances, Henri Chopin is not merely doing a new kind of music; he is not just a consequence of Pierre Schaeffer’s concrete music principles and Pierre Henry’s experiments in the fifties. Henri Chopin is an individual (in Stirner’s sense: the ego and its own) who has always resisted absurd attempts to reduce him to part of a movement, a school, an academism; what one perceives are Henry Chopin’s bio-psychical vibrations, that he himself constructed by electronically recording, then modifying, amplifying and transforming the energies of his own body. This language is beyond institutionalised language or indeed beyond any language, it precedes all idioms (sound signs, playful energy signs like those of whales and dolphins), it is a breath language, a soul language (the language of anima), the unfettered respiration of the cosmic energies we are, who belong neither to factions nor clans. The energy of live beings, whose individuality is irreducible, and impossible to break down. Solitary and strange cosmic creatures, mysterious yet showing solidarity, resonating with all those who dared breach shackles and rules, escape vile obedience, submission and compromise, reject complacency and blind allegiance to traditional or experimental academism. With Henri Chopin let go and bid farewell to all that: here’s a plunge into the unknown, an exploration of the inside of voice, of the other side of voice, a sort of submarine navigation, of potholing into the unmapped tunnels and grottoes of the glottis, oesophagus, stomach and lungs, the places where pneuma (breath) is formed. Henri Chopin uses electronic devices to explore the pneumatic body relentlessly, but never gives way to the temptation of artificially fiddling with noises. He remains a-live, energetic vibration of the pulsating, cosmic soul.

Tate Britain | Turner Prize History | Artists: Steve McQueen

2008-12-19T04:15:00.000-06:00

Tate Britain | Turner Prize History | Artists: Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen
Shortlisted: 1999

The use of extreme and unexpected camera angles has become a trademark of Steve McQueen's films. 'The idea of putting the camera in an unfamiliar position is simply to do with film language . Cinema is a narrative form and by putting the camera at a different angle . we are questioning that narrative as well as the way we are looking at things. It is also a very physical thing. It makes you aware of your own presence.'

Susan Meiselas with Phong Bui - The Brooklyn Rail

2008-12-16T10:48:00.000-06:00

Susan Meiselas with Phong Bui - The Brooklyn Rail:

"Consequently, my concern is not the concern of the concerned, but just to not pull back from that act. I think part of the impact of postmodernist inquiry or criticism, in some ways, inhibited that action. And that’s very costly. I want to put things into question but not paralyze people in that process. For example, what happened in Nicaragua, I wanted to register the voices of the subjects that are embedded, I hope, as objects in my photographs. By knowing and recognizing its limits, the voice of the protagonist within the picture, challenges the image as a fixed moment in time, all of which constitute another way to reevaluate, reconsider this act of photography. At the same time, I’m aware of the differences of how memory registers those images, when we saw them, if we did, and later they get transferred to our mind, and remembered when we read a book, differently than seeing them now in an exhibition."

Rail: And it’s a far cry from Carnival Strippers to Nicaragua!

Meiselas: That’s because I had no idea how to work in the field, nor did I have any kind of framework before going to Nicaragua. At least in Carnival Strippers, there was an immediate structure of the girl’s show that was visible to me and I could peel the layers, to go from the front of the fairgrounds, which was a public viewing to the private zone, through the dressing room, to the back of the tent. But when you land in a place you don’t know, and it’s just everyday life, so to find a narrative structure, what you are seeing, what’s happening, how to find the differences between one place and another, how to relate to people, and so on, is nearly impossible. I would say that it wasn’t until the drama of the insurrection took place that I began to see a process unfolding, evolving, whether it was the graffiti on the walls, which was always a signature, indicators, or different kinds of demonstrations that would follow. That was when I really felt this sense of an evolutionary process that drives the Nicaraguan book forward.

Rail: Having watched both films, which came with the two books, it made me realize that your process is equally and integrally invested in both taking the pictures and talking to people. You seem quite natural at it, especially the latter.

Meiselas: Well, I think people always know their own lives better than you can possibly imagine them. One of the things I’m quite pleased about in this exhibit is that we were able to include the open soundtrack...

Rail: You once said, “We take pictures away and we don’t bring them back.” Is that what compelled you to go back [to Nicaragua] in 2004, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution? At which time you took mural-sized prints of some of your memorable images and mounted them in the locations where they had originally been taken. And this was revealed in the film Pictures from a Revolution. What were the reactions among the people, especially those that you talked to?

Meiselas: I had no idea if the pictures would resonate from history in present day memory. The question was and is, “How do young people, who weren’t present at that time, relate to it?” I think this is the essence, to continually question what you do. This, again, goes back to the “Concerned Photographer” that we spoke about earlier. In other words, the “Concerned Photographer” can’t start off with a concern and not continue to be concerned. There you go. It’s sort of the play of language but not really. I think what was unfair and sad about Johnson’s review was his simplistic notion of opportunism. It’s as if when I went to any one of these places I knew what was going to unfold.

...In fact, when I brought the Spanish version of the book, that’s just been reprinted, to Nicaragua, they asked me to bring the murals back to the 30th anniversary, which is in eight months. I don’t know if that’s what I’ll do, but I’ll try and figure out how to respond. In other words, is there a dialogue with the community that can be meaningful? Likewise with Kurdistan. I’ve been really searching for what would make sense there. People are trying to transform their lives. It may not be relevant to look at their past right now because it may not be useful. It wouldn’t make sense to just go and decorate the landscape with my photographs. So I just think of this as an ongoing project of interrogation. Frankly, I don’t know the answers.

...
Rail: That’s how I feel too. One more question: Why haven’t you been able to spend time in Bosnia and Somalia?

Meiselas: Since everyone else went there I didn’t feel I needed to be there. I stayed in Kurdistan instead. Now with so many people taking photographs, whether it be with cell phones or digital cameras, professional or amateur, the question is what do you do that contributes to the thinking about photography? I think those experiences tend to come from encountering real issues in the field. Not just having ideas, sitting away from the reality.

Rail: How do you mediate between spending a great deal of your time in places subjected to serious turmoil, which is your real passion and work, and New York City, where you live and rest in between?

Meiselas: Well, you know, there was a time I lived in New York and going back and forth to El Salvador I thought it was more dangerous to live in New York than there in El Salvador, which was hard for most people to understand. It’s not only the violence in the literal sense, but it’s the violence of being ruptured with the familiar, going to the unknown, and having to travel places where you have no idea what might evolve. So it’s a psychological violence that you put yourself through, to disrupt yourself, to uproot, throwing yourself into places where you don’t belong and you try and find a reason to be there that makes that act coherent and justified and that’s what I mean. It’s not just about pictures; it’s about the whole role.

Rail: That doesn’t sound that romantic anymore.

Meiselas: I don’t think it’s romantic. But it’s realistic.

Critic's Choice - New DVDs - ‘Douglas Fairbanks - A Modern Musketeer’ - Review - NYTimes.com

2008-12-02T23:54:00.000-06:00

notes on my most famous (supposed) relative...

Critic's Choice - New DVDs - ‘Douglas Fairbanks - A Modern Musketeer’ - Review - NYTimes.com

It’s no coincidence that MoMA chose to begin its version of film history with these two figures: if Griffith was the first modern filmmaker, then Fairbanks was a plausible candidate as the first modern movie star. With his boundless energy and incandescent smile, Fairbanks counts among the earliest major performers to emerge, not from the one- and two-reel films that had been the norm in the nickelodeon days, but from the feature-length film as it began to develop around 1912.
...
This is the performer whose development is traced in “Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer,” an extraordinary, well-produced set of 10 features and one short film that arrives on Tuesday from Flicker Alley. These aren’t the more familiar costume epics from Fairbanks’s later career — several of which have been issued in fine editions by Kino International — but rather the modern-day comedies that first established his screen personality.
...
For Fairbanks, a dedicated amateur gymnast, such moments of physical exuberance came naturally. On “His Picture” he was teamed for the first time with the director John Emerson and the screenwriter Anita Loos (the future author of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”), and their collaboration extended through eight more films, three of which are included here: “The Mystery of the Leaping Fish,” a bizarre short with Fairbanks as a drug-addled detective named Coke Ennyday; the western comedy “Wild and Woolly”; and the Ruritanian adventure “Reaching for the Moon.”

Working with Emerson and Loos, Fairbanks (who contributed substantially to his own scripts, often under the pseudonym Elton Thomas) elaborated the character audiences came to call “Doug”: an energetic striver, of middle- or upper-middle-class origins, whose romantic notions and passionate enthusiasms (for the cowboy life in “Wild and Woolly,” or a fantasy of royal origins in “Reaching”) are first presented as comic but ultimately allow him to save the day.
...
With “Zorro,” Fairbanks inverted his successful formula. No longer was he an ordinary individual who dreamed of being a hero, but a hero (Zorro, the masked scourge of corrupt officials in Colonial California) who disguised himself as an average guy (Don Diego, the foppish son of a landowner). The reversal, of course, only made the fantasy seem more potent: “Zorro” began a line of superheroes with secret identities that remains very much (perhaps too much) with us today.

Sean McAllister - Japan: A Story of Love and Hate

2008-11-29T13:04:00.002-06:00

I haven't seen this film yet, but I met Sean Mccalister last week, sat in on a lecture, and saw his film "The Minders" which I found surprisingly tender, sincere, heartwarming and funny (all at the SHADOW film festival). Having seen him talk, I expected the humor but not the tenderness. Very impressed.

Sean McAllister - Japan: A Story of Love and Hate

How to make a film using Sean McAllister’s tried and perfected method:

1. Head to a hostile environment to report on an important political issue
2. Brutally collide camera lens with your topic head on
3. Realise your subject is a victim sprawled open for examination, like a bug in a petri dish, divorced from the context of its being and devoid of individual detail
4. Become depressed and think you’re losing your way with no human narrative to grasp onto, as you drink and talk your frustrations through at night with a bar fixture
5. Leave, and almost give up on the facade of making a film, until you understand the one who propped you up with their near-immunity to the surrounding scenario is the one you must return to
6. Stake down your claim on this surviving social misfit whose eyes dance above a slouching spine, and attach yourself fast for the next 6 months
7. Question the basics until they laugh and reveal their seams
8. Spot the potential drama of their destiny, and divine it

Again, Sean McAllister has cast the most charismatic of characters, in another free-spirited hero, at odds with his society and expected role. Welcome to Naoki and the class of working poor in Japan.

On His 100th Birthday, the Anthropologist L�vi-Strauss Captivates Paris - NYTimes.com

2008-11-29T09:43:00.000-06:00

On His 100th Birthday, the Anthropologist L�vi-Strauss Captivates Paris - NYTimes.com

Mr. Lévi-Strauss shot to prominence early, but with his 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere in the 1930s, he became a national treasure of a specially French kind. The jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques” had it been fiction.

... Mr. Lévi-Strauss “is very important to me,” Mr. Clément said, adding: “He represents an extremely subversive vision with his interest in populations that were disdained. He paid careful attention, not touristically but profoundly, to the human beings on the earth who think differently from us. It’s a respect for others, which is very strong and very moving. He knew that cultural diversity is necessary for cultural creativity, for the future.”

You Say Synecdoche: Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York | GreenCine

2008-11-11T06:27:00.000-06:00

You Say Synecdoche: Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York | GreenCine

[I have.] With the writing process featured heavily as an element in Adaptation and SNY, what is your particular process? [You suspect he doesn't but ask anyway.] Do you use notecards...

I don't. I have an idea of where it's starting and I have an idea of things I'm interested in exploring. By "things" I mean "themes" or "life issues" or a particular character trait and then I write. By "writing" I mean that I take notes and I think about the script for a very long time but, by the time I'm writing the script, I'm writing it without an outline. I try to let it become expansive. In the process of writing, I am open to the process of discovery. If I'm thinking about death and I come up with a concept on page 30 that intrigues me, I want the movie to be open to going there. I don't want to say, "Well, I have an outline and it has to go here." I'll let it be what it wants to be and then I'll go back to the beginning and put in what needs to be put in to allow what happens on page 30 to exist properly in this continuum. In that sense, it takes me quite a while to write but it also makes it about something for me. It's about an exploration. I wouldn't want to go in writing anything knowing what it was going to end up being. What I know at the beginning of a process is very different from what I know at the end of a process.

Specifically, I find the act of writing or creating another world intriguing and I try to analyze why. To a certain extent, it's part of the process of being alive in the world. We do that constantly. It's not just for writers or filmmakers or theater directors. We constantly take this information and organize it. We constantly tell stories about ourselves. We put our lives in the context of a story, which it really isn't. It's really a subjective, human thing to do - to tell stories about the people that we meet and how we fit in with them. To me, it's a larger thing than a thing about writing or about directing or about the artistic process. It's more about what the interior process of being a human being is, for me.

... I'm really interested in chaos. You're often told by writing teachers that you should write from a distance. You're told that you should write about something that happened ten years ago because that's the only way that you can really understand it.

To give it perspective.

But I think that "perspective" is storytelling. It's a lie! The reality, when you're in it, is a very interesting moment. That moment involves confusion. I try to be in the moment when I'm writing rather than at a distance. I think that's the truth. It's life. It always where we are. The other stuff is never where we are. When I'm going through something really serious - some sort of depression or some kind of serious problem - there's always a pre-verbal kind of reaction that I have to it. The way that I know that it's over is when I can start talking about it. I want to be in that moment as a writer. As a film writer, it's especially important. Obviously there is a talking element to movies but there are other elements as well. Things that you can explore that don't involve dialogue - lighting and sets and movement and all of that stuff that can enter into that realm of the non-verbal.

... Now, at this point, I'm trying to start on a new project because I'm done with this. It was my only job for the last five years and I need to have a job! I need to pay my mortgage and the economy is falling apart! What's the world going to be like in two years when I'm done with my next script? Is anyone going to want it? Is anyone going to buy it? Do I even want to put it out there because people have been so mean? A million stupid things are paralyzing me from writing. But it's what I like to do! I like to put something in the world that I feel is honest from my vantage point. That's the kind of decent thing to do in the world. To give people what you think is honest because, otherwise, you might as well be selling soap. In fact, you are selling soap! I don't want to do that. I'm not in that business. I've got to just jump into something and make it about what I'm interested in again. But there's pause. There's always pause at this point.

...I use voice-over a lot and, in this movie, I decided that I wasn't going to use it from the character's perspective. I decided to take his internal existence and put it outside, which is why the movie moves the way it does. It's why there is kind of a dream-like quality to it. How do you do an interior story in a movie without voice-over? I feel like the voice-over in this movie, because it's coming externally - and, in some cases, it's almost pretending to be his voice-over but it isn't - I find that really fascinating. I like that contradiction. It's a different way of using voice-over. I felt like I wasn't going back to the well!

Facebook | Salamishah Tillet's Notes

2008-11-11T05:49:00.000-06:00

Facebook | Salamishah Tillet's Notes

It's not just that SNL does not give a back story to the Obamas or that a non-African-American actor plays Barack Obama; it is that these skits miss the complexities, contradictions and the interior features of African-Americans lives. On SNL and other mainstream political comedy shows like "Real Time" and to a lesser extent "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," the cast and writing staffs lack diversity, and it shows in the racial parochialism of the humor itself.

Perhaps Bill Maher was right when he said that Barack Obama leads to bad comedy because he is "too perfect" as a presidential candidate and that "liberals" and "comedians" (both of whom in Maher's calculations all appear to be white) are "afraid of laughing at anything with a black person in it." But, I think it goes deeper than that.

For such comics to consider Barack or Michelle funny, one of two things now has to happen: Either the Obamas must begin to feed into prevailing racial stereotypes (and therefore be seen as unfit for the presidency), or mainstream satirists will have to learn the cultural nuances of black America.

This would include not simply making fun of how white CNN pundits developed a media crush on Obama, but lampooning, as one YouTube skit shows, how Obama preps his swagger before each debate. SNL focuses on Obama's intellect and verbal pauses but does not satirize his performance of the "cool" black man. Understanding both his swagger and cool requires an understanding of black bourgeois respectability, not just in opposition to caricatures of working-class blacks but as a source of potential contradictions and comedy.

There is a great debate about whether CNN's "D.L. Hughley Breaks the News" and David Allen Grier's variety show "Chocolate News" on Comedy Central are funny or offensive. The verdict is still out. I can't help but wonder what kind of cathartic laughter Dave Chappelle would have been able to provide for us this year.

Imagine what he would have done with Jeremiah Wright or Barack's unannounced visits to the home of white undecided voters in Ohio. It's not that Barack and Michelle aren't funny; it's just that those who have been able to thrive in a predominantly white comedic universe will now have to hire more writers and actors (and hopefully producers and directors) who know how to work with the material that Barack and Michelle will serve up. If they are going to stay on top of their games over the next four years, white comedians and comic writers will have to acknowledge black interior lives and class and ethnic diversity. Then we'll all have something to laugh about.

Rīgas Mākslas Telpa

2008-11-11T05:40:00.000-06:00

Rīgas Mākslas Telpa

Disobedience is an archive and a video station about the relationship between artistic practice and civil and social disobedience. Founded in 2005, the project curated by Marco Scotini is a guide to geography of recent protest, from the social struggles in Italy in 1977 to anti-globalisation actions before and after Seattle. In particular, Disobedience is an investigation into the practices of art activism emerging from the fall of the Soviet block and the events of the 9/11 that today are developing on a global scale. A new and different kind of political and artistic collaboration characterises the current phase of post-Fordism. With regard to the relationship between art and politics, a radical shift away from modernism is evident; the forms of art activism are determined by a common recognition that traditional democratic politics is largely bankrupt. Contemporary dissent manifests itself less as theoretical criticism or protest than as defection, exodus and exit. Abandonment rather than confrontation, the search for new participatory spaces, constituent practices, micro-actions on a local scale, forms of self-organization and empowerment are the main strategies of the new movements. In the end Disobedience is an atlas of the plurality of resistance tactics such as direct action, counter information, parallel planning process, self-managed architecture, media activism and other tactical strategies.

The goal of the archive is to create a common space for artistic output and for political action, understanding that society itself is changing and with it the language it produces as a political subject and as a media object. Disobedience is designed as a long-term work-in-progress and is presented as non-comprehensive and provisional, intended to expand over time. The archive contains ten sections of which six are presented here – Reclaim the Streets, Protesting Capitalist Globalization, Disobedience and Society of Control, Disobedience East and Argentina Social Factory. There is also a section dedicated to the Italian 1977 "workerist" movement (operaismo) as a form of introduction to the configuration of contemporary Multitude.

Since 2005 the archive has been exhibited in Berlin, Mexico D. F., St. Petersburg, Eindhoven, Karlsruhe, Nottingham and Zagreb.

Art Films From Cellphones and Web Cams - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

2008-11-10T15:25:00.000-06:00

Art Films From Cellphones and Web Cams - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

Last year, Carlton M. Evans and Eric Slatkin solicited films made with Flip cams, Web cams, cellphone cameras and still cameras.

The result was the Disposable Film Fest, a selection of short videos first shown in San Francisco in January, which will be shown at the Anthology Film Archives on Thursday, Nov 6. (The shorts can also be seen on Vimeo.)

Paired with those selections is a movie, “Buttons” by Red Bucket Films, a collection of docu-vignettes, which the producers say is the first feature-length film shot using casual digital video.

...The exercise started just as practice for larger projects by Red Buckets, like “The Pleasure of Being Robbed,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. The original perspective on the vignettes was that it “could be our kind of sketchbook for filmmaking.”

Apple - Final Cut Studio 2 - In Action - MediaStorm

2008-11-10T15:06:00.000-06:00

Apple - Final Cut Studio 2 - In Action - MediaStorm

“We look at every single picture the photographer shot,” says Storm. “For most projects, we’re looking at 5,000 to 10,000 images. We bring all those images into Aperture for organization and editing. We’re looking for cinematic sequences of photographs, and Aperture allows us to organize them in a way that’s cohesive with the final project.”

Cinematic sequences of still pictures need to have a consistent look and feel. To get it, producers use Aperture’s Lift and Stamp tool. “Because we’re doing these big sequences, we can use the Lift and Stamp tool to enhance one image of a sequence perfectly, and we’ll replicate that across a sequence of stills,” says Storm. “It really cuts production time.”

...
Producers start by cutting audio, creating a “radio edit” of the story. Then they work with the journalist to craft a working narrative. A cohesive story emerges, and then it’s time to pair the images with the audio. For that, they use Final Cut Studio.

...
A MediaStorm story can be like a flipbook, a series of stills strung together in sequence that animate an idea. But some are also sprinkled with storytelling video. “We work hard to make the seamless transition between the power of a still image and the immediacy of video,” says Storm. “Final Cut is a great tool for those transitions. It allows us to do a lot of experimentation. And with ProRes, it can handle all the different video formats we get from photographers.”

It’s a formula that works extremely well. “Winning an Emmy for the ‘Kingsley’s Crossing’ piece was pretty important for us,” says Storm. “Essentially, the broadcast industry validated the power of still photography, and acknowledged that our technique can be a moving approach to storytelling.”

Ballast

2008-11-10T14:39:00.001-06:00

Apple - Final Cut Studio 2 - In Action - Ballast

In Production

Working against the grain of typical studio production methods, Hammer shot his movie with handheld 35mm cameras on location in the Mississippi Delta, with non-actors playing every part. “I’ve always responded to real human beings more than to movie stars, who bring the baggage of every other role they’ve played. I know it’s a difficult idea to sell in the United States, but I respond to non-actors more profoundly than anything else.”

To enhance the authenticity of the film, Hammer showed his cast only a page of the script at a time, talking them through the scenarios on location for several months of rehearsal as they worked up to the shoot. He then gave them the freedom to react as naturally as possible within the parameters of the scene.

“I was interested in obtaining the language of each individual, their idiom, their choice of words. So if the scenario wasn’t ringing true to somebody, they were free to say ‘I’d do something more like this.’ During rehearsal, scenes would just transform from the ones I wrote. I would record all of this with a video camera and keep it in Final Cut Pro. Each night after rehearsals I’d look at all the different options we’d explored. And I would choose one or two that we would then photograph in the next week, basically rewriting in real-time. It was actually all stored on my MacBook Pro.”

Sergey Dvortsevoy: "Film Is Closer to Music Than Literature" | GreenCine

2008-10-19T15:24:00.000-05:00

Sergey Dvortsevoy: "Film Is Closer to Music Than Literature" | GreenCine

Why did you make a fiction film?

Sergey Dvortsevoy: I like documentaries, but I want to go deeper into relationships between people. And I feel a very strong ethical barrier, because the deeper you want to go, you're using someone's life, and this is a private life. You make a choice - to go there, which means you can destroy somebody's life, and for me the problem is that I destroy myself also, because I feel that I can do everything, I feel that I can do anything I want with people.

Documentary for me is like some kind of absurdity. The worse for people it is, the better for the director. At the same time, the most interesting films you see are on the borderlines. Documentary is only on the borderlines for me. This is why I've decided to stop making them for now, because maybe I'll continue. The most important problem for me is the ethical problem.

Also, there is the problem that more and more television people are running foundations that give money to documentaries. So it is more and more difficult to convince them to give money. When I asked for money for my previous film, In the Dark, there was a young woman directing a foundation, and she asked me, "Why do you need so much time to make this film?" I told her, "When you see my films, you'll understand. It's very difficult to shoot like this. You need time for this. It's not possible to shoot it during one week." She said, "Our commission says you don't need this time."

You have to prove all the time that you are not a camel. The problem is that people funding films are more and more people who do not understand this. They deal with video mostly, and they think that everything is possible, very quickly.

...

They want documentaries to fit into a commercial business model.

I understand that, but at the same time, I don't want to make films only for TV. It's different for a director. It's a different dramaturgical composition, a different picture, different sound. Of course, I do make films for television as well. But these are the two main problems for me - the ethical problem and technology. In Moscow, now there are more and more television programs. I can't call them films. They are more and more reportage. I was on the jury at a festival in St. Petersburg, and saw many films, different international films, all of them one half hour. And they are the same. You understand that people don't care about dramaturgical composition. You don't feel energy. You don't feel what you feel on film. They make them like bricks, and you don't feel who made this brick - no author, nothing - information, that's all. It must be interesting for some audience, but this is not for me. I don't want to make simple TV programs.

...
You have sheep giving birth in this film. How many pregnant sheep did you have to choose from?

We had a herd of a thousand sheep - and I knew we could not shoot this scene without having our own herd, and having our own shepherd. When sheep are about to give birth, they run away from people. It's very hard to follow them, and especially if you want to shoot this kind of scene, when they give birth.

We spent the first two weeks with the crew, because the camera people were ready to shoot immediately. Sometimes it's very important not to shoot, and to stop people, just because they want to shoot immediately. This was a Polish crew and they said, "Come on, Sergey - you see this donkey, you see this sheep, you see how it's good. Let's shoot this sheep giving birth immediately."

I have a lot of experience in documentaries with animals. I know that if you will wait, if you analyze a situation, if you try to understand how to shoot, and you plan how to shoot this, you'll shoot it much better. We spent the first two weeks just following sheep with a small camera, with a video camera, and then with a big camera, because I told them that. I told them that it must be one shot, one take, no cuts inside. And also because of language in telling the story. That was very hard.

We had a special system. Our shepherd had a radio. He was all the time with the sheep, with this herd, and the whole time I also had a radio and was listening to him. He'd say, "Sergey, there is a sheep and she is ready to give birth." We had a car, an old-fashioned car outfitted for emergencies. If the shepherd said, "Okay," we would move - we would put the springs behind the actor's [Ashkat Kuchincherikov's] ears, because unfortunately he had very small ears. It was very hard to do this, because it took one and a half hours to place these springs.

...
Will you ever make another documentary?

I'm not sure. I have to have a strong motivation to make a film. I don't have motivation now. It can only be a film about me or about some people close to me. I'm not ready now, but we'll see. I like documentaries, but this contradiction with documentaries for me now is too strong.

When you create every piece of something, you see that it's a parallel life. Of course, you understand that it's made of nothing. Actors have played for you, but it's what you have thought up in the kitchen, in fact, with friends or just by yourself, but you see that in this life there is something very serious. You catch something, you can tell something very serious, sometimes stronger than in documentary.

Errol Morris: "The Photographs Actually Hide Things From Us" | GreenCine

2008-10-19T15:05:00.001-05:00

Errol Morris: "The Photographs Actually Hide Things From Us" | GreenCine

What I think is so amazing about that is that, through the course of the film, you deconstruct the photos. You interview all these people, you uncover all this evidence from these witnesses, yet the only crimes that were prosecuted were those that were photographed, the ones that had the visual evidence, the ones that were seen by the public.

EM: But it gets even worse than that. I have this essay coming out in the New York Times this week on Sabrina's smile, the photograph of her with her thumb up, the smile and the body of [Manadel] al-Jamadi. Now I remember seeing this photograph for the first time and thinking, "God Lord, what is this? It's monstrous."

She didn't kill him. A CIA interrogator either killed him or was complicit in his death. The brass of the prison was involved in a cover-up. In the log, he's described as Bernie, from Weekend at Bernie's, the body which people have to get rid of. It's an inconvenience because they don't want to be, in any way, implicated in his death. He's the hot potato being shuffled about.

Sabrina takes these photographs as an act of civil disobedience, to provide evidence of a crime. In her letter to Kelly, immediately following this whole deal, she says, "The military is nothing but lies. I took these pictures to show what the military's really, really like." And here's the weirdness of it all. The people responsible for al-Jamadi's death, the people responsible for covering up a murder, skate. Sabrina spends a year in jail.

I think this is the heretical thing. It's not just that the photographs direct us in a certain way, but they actually hide things from us. They make us think that we know a story when in fact we don't know the story at all, or we know the wrong story. It's endlessly fascinating to me and I would like to set the record straight. That represents to me an incredible miscarriage of justice. Taking a picture of a body to expose the military and to expose a crime, to me, is not a crime. Murder is a crime.

...

EM: I kept thinking about baking a cake. I have all my ingredients in front of me. I have the photographs, the digital photographs. I have the digital files from Abu Ghraib so, anachronistically, I put a light border on them. There shouldn't be a light border on them but I wanted somehow to say visually to the audience: These are uncropped, these are the photographs, bam! There they are. They're all squarish, more or less, squares with light borders, you see them floating around and so on. And of course the letters. Sabrina's letters are other pieces of evidence from the Fall of 2003. And I had Sabrina read each of the letters. Then I have the interviews, everyone shot with the same background, lit differently. And then the illustrations or reenactments, taken from the things that people say.

So when Diaz says to me, "A drop of al-Jamadi's blood fell on my uniform," I had this one moment shot in ultra-slo-mo with a thousand-frame-per-second camera, the Phantom V9. It's not reenacting anything, it's bringing you into that moment in his interview. For what it's worth, I remember when it was said, I heard it for the first time, I'm listening to Diaz and he's really trying to explain his own feelings at that moment, his feelings of complicity: I am involved but I'm not involved but I am involved. And I started to identify with him. I think, don't we all feel exactly like that? I'm not involved in this but I am involved in this. And the drop of blood becomes a way of bringing you in, of hearing that line and thinking about it.

Lance Hammer: "Achieving Truth" | GreenCine

2008-10-08T21:51:00.000-05:00

Lance Hammer: "Achieving Truth" | GreenCine

What I ultimately decided to do is make a film about very universal and fundamental existential concerns like grief, sorrow, hope. I designed a process that would recruit people that live in these places that we were gonna shoot, that would bring the specifics, either in more subtle ways like their physical comportment and choices of words - I think that's a more direct way, the actual things that are said - and hopefully the very complicated subtleties of place that deal with race, deal with the brutal history of this place would be communicated through people who have the authority to communicate that. That's not me. But I think, obviously when you do turn a camera on there you have to tackle the subject. And I'm white and the characters are black, so a lot of thought has to be given to how you pursue a process like that. Accuracy was very important to me. I relied upon the collaborative process with the actors and the people from the region to bring their own experience to the film as much as possible. ...

The actors never saw the script, so we would rehearse everything. Talk about it verbally, create the language, re-create the scene, if necessary, and then go and shoot it. So we were always rehearsing in advance of what we were shooting, and then the next day we'd shoot it, and then be rehearsing something else. The actors never knew what was gonna happen next. That was very important, that they had no idea where it was going. They had some forward vision; they would see what was gonna happen tomorrow, because they'd rehearsed it already today. But they really had no idea what was gonna happen, and that was very important, because that's the way life is, right? You don't know. It was important to keep the actors in that state. It'd be hard to do with professionals, because they'd have to read the script first to sign on to it, they'd have to know what their character was going to do because maybe they wouldn't want to put themselves in that position... Another argument for non-professionals.

...A lot of stuff doesn't work. Usually, when the actors try to act, that's because what I've written is not true, and so they have to try and do something that's artificial and not familiar to them. And those scenes didn't work, and they've been cut from the movie. ...

  How do you prevent a film like Ballast to avoid presenting a touristic view on poverty or hardship?

  I think the suffering part of it is about death, and it's a very simple primal thing and it's shared by everybody. A fear of death, and sympathy for those who experience death. I feel a very direct connection to that. It's not tourism; this is me, and the writing came from me, and I'm not touring. The site-specific conditions, in this case poverty - that comes from a desire to achieve accuracy of a place. I'm not interested in touring that either. I'm interested in, again, in a documentarian's approach to a place. This detachment that we have, and objectivity, and emotional impartiality, never using the camera as the point of view of one of the characters. I'm interested in being as emotionally removed from the subject as possible, which is a paradox because I'm supremely interested in the emotion of the characters. But in order to achieve that I have to have impartiality. The locations were found. What you see is not constructed. They're real - that's a way to protect yourself from being a tourist. So in a lot of ways this is a documentary in a sense. You travel through a place, you record. The photography of what's there is the truth. And you don't comment on it. It's just a context. That was my attempt. That's how I approached it.  

Vogue’s Fashion Photos Spark Debate in India - NYTimes.com

2008-09-01T15:09:00.000-05:00

Vogue’s Fashion Photos Spark Debate in India - NYTimes.com

A family of three squeezes onto a motorbike for their daily commute, the mother riding without a helmet and sidesaddle in the traditional Indian way — except that she has a Hermès Birkin bag (usually more than $10,000, if you can find one) prominently displayed on her wrist.

Elsewhere, a toothless barefoot man holds a Burberry umbrella (about $200).

Welcome to the new India — at least as Vogue sees it.

Vogue India’s August issue presented a 16-page vision of supple handbags, bejeweled clutches and status-symbol umbrellas, modeled not by runway stars or the wealthiest fraction of Indian society who can actually afford these accessories, but by average Indian people.

... The juxtaposition between poverty and growing wealth presents an unsavory dilemma for luxury goods makers jumping into India: How does one sell something like a $1,000 handbag in a country where most people will never amass that sum of money in their lives, and many are starving?

... For now, the Indian middle and upper class — and the companies that aim to cater to it — are just getting used to having new money, said V. Sunil, creative director for advertising agency Weiden & Kennedy in India, which opened its first office here last September. “No one thinks they need to do something deeper for the public,” like address India’s social ills, he said.

Still, the in-your-face poverty of India, where beggars sometimes sit outside five-star hotels, does present challenges that companies do not face in other markets. In China, most of the very poor live in rural areas, said Mr. Debnam. “Most of the luxury companies don’t consider these people,” when they’re thinking of selling products, he said, “and even the consumer product companies don’t look at them.”

Not taking a close enough look at the “real people” is drawing criticism for Vogue, too. “The magazine does not even bother to identify the subjects” of the photos, said Ms. Gahlaut, the columnist. Instead, Vogue names the brands of the accessories in the captions, and says they are worn by a lady or a man.

Democracy Now! | NYPD Officer Caught on Tape Body-Slamming Cyclist During Critical Mass Ride

2008-08-07T17:25:00.000-05:00

Democracy Now! | NYPD Officer Caught on Tape Body-Slamming Cyclist During Critical Mass Ride

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And initially, the biker was arrested and charged, is that correct?

EILEEN CLANCY: He was arrested and charged with assaulting the police officer, which is a very serious charge. So he had two misdemeanor charges, I think, and a lower charge. And the police officer made a statement that he’d been basically run into, deliberately run into, by the bicyclist. And I think you can see from the video that the bicyclist is veering away from the police officer, who’s pursuing this fellow.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And the officer claimed initially that the biker was veering in and out of traffic and aimed for him, is that what he said?

EILEEN CLANCY: That’s what the police affidavit says, so that’s what was sworn to by the police officer under a penalty of perjury, which in this case would be a felony.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And in fact, there’s no cars in the video.

...
EILEEN CLANCY: And that’s what we used the [2004] Republican convention for in New York. We were able to find out that the police were using agents provacateurs. We were able to find out—we were very surprised—that the district attorney’s office was faking video evidence, police video evidence. And we were able to show that the police officers lied in many instances. So, we don’t know what’s going to happen in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul, but, you know, we’re going be there to cover it, and we’ll be hoping that people share their videotapes with us. And if you would like to help us, please send a contribution in through the website.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And what do you mean, faking video evidence?

EILEEN CLANCY: Well, what happened in the 2004 demonstrations is, in one instance, I discovered that there were two different copies of the same police videotape, and the district attorney had given a defense attorney a copy of a police tape for use at a trial and said, “This is our evidence against you. This is our video evidence against you.” And I found a copy of the police tape with a lot more video, and it then was handed over as evidence. And it turned out that the Manhattan district attorney’s office had removed two sections—and that would have to be deliberate; you can’t do this by mistake—two entire sections of several minutes, the sections that showed that the man who had these charges, Alexander Dunlop, was innocent of the charges. And it was extraordinary. And when that was discovered, the district attorney immediately dropped all the charges.

Jesse Lerner's Aesthetic and Cultural Hybrids | GreenCine

2008-08-05T09:15:00.000-05:00

Jesse Lerner's Aesthetic and Cultural Hybrids | GreenCine

...
I think the collage aesthetic, with the rough edges still showing, encourages us as viewers to engage critically with the material we're watching, rather than simply letting the visual or narrative pleasures wash us away. It's a bit like what Brecht called the "alienation effect."

But when you're dealing with information that's culturally specific, or that is common knowledge in one context and much less so in another, how do you make sure everyone else is following along, regardless of their background? That's something I'm always struggling with. If I can provide the background information to those who need it, and use the opportunity to provide the other part of the audience with a laugh, then that's the best the solution.

Do the various accents of your speakers in The American Egypt reflect the home region of the person who actually said those words? Interesting touch.

Yes, that was what I was trying for. The Yucatecan Spanish is very distinctive. I don't know how to describe it, but I can imitate it (though perhaps not very convincingly). It's an accent that's disappearing slowly, mostly because of the mass media. So the Yucatecan voices I recorded there with people who spoke that way. And the same thing with the English-language parts, though of course it's highly speculative, as these are for the most part people who left no recordings of their voices.

...
For Mexican intellectuals in the aftermath of the Revolution, the Indian was the central problem. For centuries they had looked down on the Indian, but the Revolution had changed everything, and cast the Indian in the role of protagonists, as active agents of historical change. After the Revolution, the question remained: if Mexico was going to become a modern country, what role would the Indian play? The existing models of modernity were all Western nations. Could one imagine a country that was both Indian and modern? How might that be different from the modernity of Western Europe or the US?

...
I don't especially like the idea of your films being called "fake" documentaries, as all docs are fake in some ways. Yours get at the truth via a different route, that's all. Or maybe this "fake" thing bothers me more than it bothers you.

Well, I explore this sub-genre in much greater depth in my book (with Alexandra Juhasz) F is for Phony. While we argue that most "fake docs" are fiction films (with a script, actors, etc.) that present themselves as if they were documentaries, Ruins functions differently. On one hand, it's a documentary about fakes, so it's a fake documentary in the way that a baseball documentary is a documentary about baseball. And while most of the archival footage that I incorporated into the film is in fact that - archival - there were moments when I couldn't find the archival material I needed to make a certain point, and I ended up shooting certain sequences myself, hand-processing the footage to get a certain distressed look, and incorporating this original material disguised as archival images alongside real historical footage. It's a lot like the practice of the forger of archaeological artifacts, who has to add a patina of antiquity to the objects in order to pass them off as authentic. Again, with the sound, I ran certain original audio elements through filters in ProTools in order to get the hiss of an old optical track. It's at that point that I started to identify with Brigido Lara, the forger at the center of my film, and began to explore the parallels between forging and documentary filmmaking.

U B U W E B - Film & Video: Guy Ben-Ner - Berkeley's Island

2008-08-04T18:40:00.000-05:00

U B U W E B - Film & Video: Guy Ben-Ner - Berkeley's Island

wow. fantasy island, dick tricks, and pathos.

The Transom Review: Errol Morris's Topic

2008-08-04T16:02:00.001-05:00

The Transom Review: Errol Morris's Topic

"My belief that believing is seeing and not the other way around. If there's enough pressure, if there's enough reason to believe something, then people will believe it, no matter what the underlying truth might be, no matter what the evidence against their believing it might be."
--Errol Morris

"THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A STRAIGHT INTERVIEW. (Although I would admit there are good and bad interviews.)

Interviews are human relationships in a "laboratory" setting. They allow us to scrutinize the nature of how one person relates to another and vice versa... As such, all the things that are common features of the "ordinary" relationships appear in the interviews - deceit, coyness, misdirection, sincerity, honesty, dishonesty, confusion, etc.

In some instances - I dare say - there is the powerful impulse to protect a subject from himself or to show him in the best possible light. I have a lot of these kinds of impulses. I actually like people to look good, and I attempt - even if I don't succeed - to capture their complexity in the interview and in the film I eventually produce.

But let me provide a couple of definitions of a good interview.

A GOOD INTERVIEW CAPTURES THE COMPLEXITY OF THE SUBJECT.

and

A GOOD INTERVIEW CAPTURES THE COMPLEXITY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE INTERVIEWER AND THE SUBJECT.

Sometimes it is a matter of "discretion," sometimes it is "let the best man win..." But, it's usually a lot more complex than that."

Beginnings... Unbidden Radio, by Jim Metzner

2008-08-01T12:05:00.001-05:00

Beginnings... Unbidden Radio, by Jim Metzner

Although I've cringed when I listen back to the stiffness of the narration of my early programs, they were how I learned the craft of radio -- by the seat of my pants. I made lots of mistakes.

Like what? Well, like recording the reenactment of the battle of Lexington and Concord with my tape recorder's limiter on, reducing all that beautiful echoey musket fire into a series of pallid hand-claps. Like not using a good enough windscreen, and running out of batteries, and not bringing the proper cable, and on and on.

In the beginning, I had no models to emulate or imitate; it was all new. I had two minutes to do more or less what I wanted to, assuming it had something to do with greater Boston. I learned the power of a compelling question. I learned that sounds can take you to places where words can't go. I learned that a tape recorder and microphone were magic keys that could open doors and memories. That an "interview" could be something more than just a gathering of information. That the well of sounds is bottomless, and you can return to drink from it at any time and there would be something new. I learned to respect the recordings, the sounds, the words -- and regard them as gifts, gifts that needed to be honored and shared.

Perhaps the best advice I could give you about beginning is that the first impulse and exultation of it will only take you so far, so choose your path and your subject matter accordingly. If you've found something that you love to do, that love will likely sustain you through the periods of drought and resistance.

The next best advice would be to find your own voice, your own way of listening, your own particular way of telling a story. The rest is practice, perseverence, and being free enough to learn from what may seem like a mistake.

5B4: A Shimmer of Possibility by Paul Graham

2008-07-31T12:53:00.000-05:00

5B4: A Shimmer of Possibility by Paul Graham

It was the ‘less is more’ approach that Chekhov mastered and this is the lesson Graham has learned and applied to his craft. Graham conveys so much about his subjects in so few images. He sets us within the flow of their life for small amounts of time and paves the way for a chance at revelation if we are open to it. Mind you, these are revelations that are not defined by a neat and tidy beginning middle and an end. These are open ended moments where we pause to notice and experience these subjects, and as they move on in their own direction and continuum, we move on our way too. Ships passing in America.

BOMB Magazine: Tod Papageorge by Richard B. Woodward

2008-07-31T12:46:00.000-05:00

BOMB Magazine: Tod Papageorge by Richard B. Woodward

RW Are the mistakes that your students are prone to now the same mistakes that students were prone to when you were teaching back in the late ‘60s?

TP No. I think now that, in general—and this includes a lot of what I see in Chelsea even more than what I see from students at Yale—there’s a failure to understand how much richer in surprise and creative possibility the world is for photographers in comparison to their imagination. This is an understanding that an earlier generation of students, and photographers, accepted as a first principle. Now ideas are paramount, and the computer and Photoshop are seen as the engines to stage and digitally coax those ideas into a physical form—typically a very large form. This process is synthetic, and the results, for me, are often emotionally synthetic too. Sure, things have to change, but photography-as-illustration, even sublime illustration, seems to me an uninteresting direction for the medium to be tracking now, particularly at such a difficult time in the general American culture. All in all, I think that there’s as much real discovery and excitement in the digital videos that my students at Yale are making as there is in the still photography I see either there or in New York, perhaps because the video camera, like the 35 mm camera 30 years ago, can be carried everywhere, and locks onto the shifting contradictions and beauties of the world more directly and unselfconsciously than many photographers now seem to feel still photography can, or should, do.

...

RW Well, the other book you have coming out next year, the sports pictures from 1970, published by Aperture, are even more about crowds and spectators. But what struck me as I was looking at them on disk last night is that all the people look as if they’re on the margins. Even if you’re photographing the star quarterback or pitcher, the wide-angle lens spreads and compresses everything: it’s such an equalizer. No one person really can be more important than any other. It’s a very democratic way of photographing.

TP I’m glad you brought that up because the project was to a certain degree an aesthetic experiment. Virtually all of it was done with a 28 mm lens, a very wide-angle lens. So as much as the pictures are almost desperately about something—the violently disturbed American spirit at the time of Vietnam—they were also about trying to “fill a cup up to the brim / and even above the brim,” as Frost put it. I think the project works both as a strong set of pictures and as the description of an intense experience: I wouldn’t want you to believe that it’s simply a kind of visual aftereffect of being out in the world using a particular lens. But a good part of what I was playing with was metaphorically throwing this very small wide-angle lens at a world in breakdown to see if, picture after picture after picture, I could make something that was dense and coherent at the same time. So you could say that the work was the result of a calculation—not a calculation that assumed there would be successful results, but one that assumed, in fact, that there probably wouldn’t be.

RW That’s the thing about a 28. Even if you’re photographing one person—

TP Well, I almost never did.

RW But even if you were! If you were photographing the starting quarterback, the 28 spreads out space so he would not appear to be this grand, heroic figure. Everyone is shrunken and the same, sort of mushed down. I love those pictures, and I love that kind of aesthetic, because everyone’s a player.

TP Right. Like you and me.

...

RW You said the goal with Garry always was process. Not exhibition, gallery shows, or sale of prints. Did you absorb that mentality pretty much?

TP This may go way back to your first question: why no book until now? I don’t photograph for exhibition, but to engage in this process of understanding photography itself. I started to photograph because poetry was impossible for me, not realizing that photography was at least as difficult, and also not anticipating how, as with poetry, that difficulty can, in itself, create an addiction in those people who see this kind of creative test as something monumentally attractive. We all have to deal with our strengths and weaknesses, and while I guess my strength is my willingness to engage repeatedly with this deeply difficult problem of making coherent pictures, my weakness is an equally strong tendency to want everything in my pictures to be part of a perfect web—not a very healthy or often-satisfied ambition when trying to clarify such complex chunks of the visual world. But that’s my problem, and maybe something I can’t escape.

Tod Papageorge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2008-07-29T21:12:00.000-05:00

Tod Papageorge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "“ This ridiculous-seeming activity of walking along the street and lifting up a little camera is so powerful, so complicated, and so resistant to being mastered. If I had the choice between doing that and sitting in an office somewhere … Are you kidding?[2]"

Op-Ed Contributor - Silly Chimps on TV Make People Think the Apes Aren’t Endangered - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

2008-07-22T08:37:00.001-05:00

Op-Ed Contributor - Silly Chimps on TV Make People Think the Apes Aren’t Endangered - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

"this picture, harmless as it might appear, is giving the public the mistaken and even dangerous impression that chimpanzees have a safe and comfortable existence — and nothing could be further from the truth."

Che Guevara (photo) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2008-07-20T15:45:00.001-05:00

Che Guevara (photo) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As a life-long communist and supporter of the Cuban revolution, Alberto Korda claimed no payment for his picture. A modified version of the portrait through the decades was also reproduced on a range of different media, though Korda never asked for royalties. Korda reasoned that Che's image represented his revolutionary ideals, and thus the more his picture spread the greater the chance Che's ideals would spread as well. However, Korda did not want commercialization of the image in relation to products he believed Guevara would not support, especially alcohol.

This belief was displayed for the first time in 2000, when in response to Smirnoff using Che's picture in a vodka commercial, Korda sued advertising agency Lowe Lintas and Rex Features, the company that supplied the photograph. Lintas and Rex claimed that the image was "obviously in the public domain." The final result was an out of court settlement for (US) 50,000 to Korda, which he donated to the Cuban healthcare system.[12]

However, he was not against its propagation altogether, telling reporters:
“

As a supporter of the ideals for which Che Guevara died, I am not averse to its reproduction by those who wish to propagate his memory and the cause of social justice throughout the world, but I am categorically against the exploitation of Che's image for the promotion of products such as alcohol, or for any purpose that denigrates the reputation of Che. [13]

Peter Hutton | REDCAT

2008-07-19T14:37:00.000-05:00

Peter Hutton | REDCAT

Curator’s notes

“Hutton’s exquisite images, precise, observational style, and use of long takes and silence encourage the mind to roam. These ships come to seem like inspiriting physical measures of mankind’s outsized capacity for hard work and boundless imagination, by which we overcome the isolation of the human condition.” – Film Comment

“A breath of fresh air... For thirty years now, Peter Hutton has been building a radical and singular body of work. A sort of primitive documentary, silent, which celebrates the beauty of the world without forgetting to observe people, the conditions they live and work under. At Sea, his latest 16mm film shot silent and in color, deals with the giant cargo ships on which he spent a large part of his youth traveling the world’s oceans. It’s hard to find other words to describe its beauty than poetic documentary, or documentary poetry. A sensitive approach comes before anything, with meaning taking a back seat to the vibrancy of forms and colors. Hutton starts the film with a handful of shots of the construction of a boat at a Korean shipyard, before embarking on a voyage made up of some of the most gorgeous sea views ever committed to celluloid: shades of grey on both sides of the horizon, pleats of waves and rounded shapes of clouds. The film ends on a beach in Bangladesh, a cemetery for cargo ships where children and teenagers in rags strip these pollution plants with their bare hands. Not a sound is heard, not a word is spoken, just two dozen hypnotic shots in which Hutton brings together heaven and hell, in a striking portrait of globalization and ecological disaster. With his lion’s mane and tanned seafarer’s skin, the director looks proud and speaks eloquently and generously.” – Cahiers du cinéma

MoMA.org | Film Exhibitions | 2008 | Peter Hutton

2008-07-19T14:22:00.004-05:00

MoMA.org | Film Exhibitions | 2008 | Peter Hutton

Canyon Cinema: The Films of Peter Hutton

excellent descriptions of films in Peter Hutton's oeuvre.

Peter Hutton at MoMA | Tisch Film Review

2008-07-19T14:02:00.000-05:00

Peter Hutton at MoMA | Tisch Film Review

Budapest Portrait: Peter Hutton’s thirty-minute collection of images that makes 1980s Hungary seem like a slide-show of glimpses. An enormous swimming pool filled with languid bodies, a set of framed photographs of anonymous faces, a woman preparing food inside an apartment; Hutton’s images reveal a curiosity about a variety spaces, an interest in separating, organizing, dividing them into discrete visual experiences (a black screen periodically indexes what we see throughout the film, acting as a brief flashes for rumination or recollection).

Here, coupled with another of Hutton’s city portraits, Lodz Symphony (created between 1991 and 1993), buildings facades become cinematic Harry Callahan photographs; other images, less insistent in their symmetry, cite Eugène Atget or Eva Besnyö. Comparisons to the city symphony films of Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttman are incompatible, for Hutton is less interested in the capacity of the city to produce the shocks and pleasures of modern experience than his predecessors. These cities are too muted, too stable, too unassuming to permit the kind of spectatorial grandeur of Vertov and Ruttman. They function, instead, as portraits of places no longer capable of alerting the senses, of shaking things up. In this way, they continue from where Vertov left off.

Peter Hutton at Museum of Modern Art, New York - Artipedia - Arts News

2008-07-19T14:00:00.000-05:00

Peter Hutton at Museum of Modern Art, New York - Artipedia - Arts News

“Like the haiku of Bashô, these seemingly simple films offer lessons in the art of seeing and fashioning images that make you wonder how anyone could produce something simultaneously so humble and so astounding.”—Tom Gunning, Spiral

“Hutton’s Budapest Portrait (1984 - 86) suggests the photographs alternately of Eugène Atget and Bernd and Hilla Becher, if not a lushly entropic gloss on Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera…. Human presence is often suggested merely by indexical signs—photographs, shadows, or bullet holes. This relative absence of the figure, together with the harsh chiaroscuro of the winter light, induces a poignant sense of loneliness and isolation. Voluptuously gray, worn, and lived in, the city is like a stage set for an invisible drama.”—J. Hoberman, Artforum

The Believer - Errol Morris talks with Werner Herzog

2008-07-18T11:42:00.000-05:00

The Believer - Errol Morris talks with Werner Herzog

Photo-Op - Believing Is Seeing - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

2008-07-18T11:37:00.000-05:00

Photo-Op - Believing Is Seeing - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

BIDOUN -- Issue 13

2008-02-16T17:06:00.000-06:00

BIDOUN -- Issue 13: "WJ: My work never develops in an efficient, linear fashion. The writer of a narrative film must know how a movie ends at an early stage of its script; to do anything else is to court disaster. I consistently make disasters, not knowing where the research or the writing will lead. In this respect, I have a lot in common with more conventional documentary filmmakers. Where my practice differs is in entertaining the kinds of digressions that most other filmmakers would cut out. For me the digressions are the body of the film.
...
BH: Part of your pursuit is biographical, and we both have come up against people who will not speak about what they know; people who will tell tales but only anonymously; subjects who are struck with the convenience of amnesia. Have you learned any tricks to woo revelation from the reluctant? And, if not, how do these silences and gaps become structural, paradoxically productive, in terms of changing your thinking as well as, potentially, a film's form?

WJ: I once worked at the offices of National Geographic, and I read their manual dictating how to make a film. The production of a program always began with images shot at great expense in various far-flung locales. Writers then composed narration to accompany the footage; their job was to tell the audience what it was seeing. With few resources at my disposal, I begin a film with words and collect images to accompany them. The distinction...explaining what is seen vs hearing or writing, then imagining, something to see...is crucial.

In the US images are routinely censored and controlled, but words circulate much more freely. It is very difficult to suppress completely any text with some claim on literary merit. This disparity favors films that may deal with sex but avoid sexually explicit images. The situation abroad is different. Australian censors refused to sanction a screening of my video The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography, simply because the title mentioned what they were supposed to be guarding against. This episode was a pointed reminder of the power of a single word.

The dictionary definition of aporia...a passage in speech or writing incorporating or presenting a difficulty or doubt...also describes a generating principle of my work. Sometimes the difficulties come from without; at other times I impose them on myself. This method strikes the conventional as perverse. For Is It Really So Strange? (2004), I couldn't afford to license a constant stream of songs, and spectators expecting the kind of music documentary that merely advertises the recording industry were disappointed. In some quarters, I'm known as the person who takes the sex out of pornography. I prefer to concentrate on other, clandestine (though paradoxically, more chaste) desires co-present with the obvious ones.

I may be obliged to complete my current project without the use of footage from Fred Halsted's films. I will have to rely upon interviews with his friends and colleagues, an exceedingly small bunch of survivors, some of whom are reluctant to speak to me. The only promise I can make my subjects (and one that never works on young people) is that anything they offer me has some claim on posterity."

Democracy Now! | Headlines for January 10, 2008

2008-01-11T05:46:00.000-06:00

Democracy Now! | Headlines for January 10, 2008

Bush Warns Iran on Naval Dispute

Meanwhile President Bush also continued to criticize Iran for a naval confrontation between Iranian and U.S. boats this week.

President Bush: “Our ships were moving along very peacefully off the Iranian border, in territorial waters–international waters, and Iranian boats came out and were very provocative. And it was a dangerous gesture on their part. We have made it clear, publicly, and they know our position–and that is there will be serious consequences if they attack our ships, pure and simple."

Iran has accused the U.S. of faking video footage showing Iranian speedboats approaching the U.S. warships.

Ex-CIA Official Demands Immunity for Videotape Testimony

The former CIA official who ordered the destruction of videotapes documenting prisoner interrogations has reportedly said he won’t testify before Congress without a grant of immunity. Jose Rodriguez was head of the CIA’s clandestine service when he ordered the tapes’ destruction in November 2005. He was subpoenaed last month.

NSA: “No Attack Happened” in Gulf of Tonkin

Newly declassified documents have provided more evidence the Johnson administration faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident to escalate the Vietnam War. The alleged 1964 attack on U.S. warships by North Vietnamese was used as a pretext to increase bombing and troop deployments in Vietnam. But a report from the National Security Agency concludes: “no attack happened that night.”

Democracy Now! | Shooting Back: The Israeli Human Rights Group B'Tselem Gives Palestinians Video Cameras to Document Life Under Occupation.

2008-01-01T23:27:00.000-06:00

Democracy Now! | Shooting Back: The Israeli Human Rights Group B'Tselem Gives Palestinians Video Cameras to Document Life Under Occupation.

rthe whole article is important -- read it -- but this section is interesting here because it's a positive (rather than disparaging) example of Susan Sontag's equation of the camera with a gun.

" AMY GOODMAN: And the title of this project, why did you choose “Shooting Back”?

OREN YAKOBOVICH: Because it’s shooting back. It’s, first of all, kind of a weapon that a Palestinian has against human rights violation. Of course, I would prefer that people will have cameras and not guns. So it’s—and then they are shooting back.

AMY GOODMAN: And what, ultimately, do you hope to achieve?

OREN YAKOBOVICH: First of all, I have to say that we’re spreading more and more cameras all over the West Bank. In every place when there is a tension and [inaudible], we give them cameras. This is very important. And I know that it’s protecting the Palestinians. There are places that we know, when the Palestinian is taking out the camera, the settlers will run away, will escape, happening a lot in south of the West Bank.

It’s giving power. You know, this word is called “empowerment.” I don’t like this word so much, but I will use it. It’s the children and the kids are filming. It’s helping to mobilize communities. In Hebron, where the community was destroyed, suddenly they’re filming and they have some kind of an interest in seeing the videos, talking about it. And what I hope to achieve, that everything is going to be filmed, at least in the—there’s going to be a feeling that everything is being filmed, nothing is being done in the dark. And this what B’Tselem was basically established for, to bring light to places that are in the dark so violation will not occur."

Hombres of Steel - New York Times

2007-11-12T10:50:00.000-06:00

Hombres of Steel - New York Times

A few years ago, Ms. Pinzón, a former organizer for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, started asking the city’s anonymous day laborers from Puebla if they would pose for her in their work settings — dressed as superheroes.

“They’re so quiet and hard-working and invisible,” she said. “I wanted to pay a tribute to them.”

Of her score of subjects, Mr. Reyes was her favorite. “He’s been in New York 10 years and has put his siblings in Mexico through university with his earnings,” she said. “But he’d never so much as visited the Empire State Building, he’s been working so hard.”

She added: “He’s so fragile and small with his bicycle. I said to him, ‘You’re going to be my Superman.’ ”

Zundelsite ZGram - October 6, 1999

2007-09-15T12:12:00.000-05:00

Zundelsite ZGram - October 6, 1999

an account by a Holocaust-denying revisionist historian on his interactions with Errol Morris -- particularly how he was impressed by Morris's genuine interest in his perspective, and how he thought Morris could help him "get past the censors with part of the story intact - in other words, get past his fellow Jews who have a vice grip on the electronic and film media in America".