Brantley Jones – Dead Plants

Dead Plants
Dead Plants (2009, 36 MB, 1:24 min)

Another from the seemingly inexhaustible (but always pleasantly individual)
film seam at the School of Athens.
This is a lovely understated little study of ..er..dead plants, which fuses quirk,
a certain menace and a strange found beauty into something very satisfying.
Brantley Jones seems to live a double life – his website contains much more
“well made” stuff.
It will be interesting to see where he heads, eventually.

PS Also, how can you not warm to someone who lists the late great
David Foster Wallace as inspiration?

A Sad Loss

voting
Voting (2008, 37.2MB, 13:37)

We’re deeply sad to have to report the untimely death on Sunday of
Millie Niss, at the age of 36.
Anyone fortunate enough to have met her, either online or in person,
will have been struck by the combination of razor sharp intelligence,
a glorious sense of humour and personal kindness with a sense of utter
puzzlement at pomposity, bullshitting or self-agrandisement.
She just didn’t get the latter three.

In recent years, working in close collaboration with her mother, Martha Deed
she brought us the wonderful Sporkworld Microblog,
something that always felt to me that rarity, the invention
of a new form (or at least an unprecedentedly deep and
thorough realisation of the possibilities of a new medium,
effectively the same thing.)
It’s uncool to the deepest degree, being about domesticity,
illness, food, birds and animals glimpsed from a car or house window,
the life of a small blue-collar town -its problems and its festivals- and so much more,
but then cool -being a facade- was a concept lost on Millie and that’s why I
treasure all the more this beautiful work and I mourn her loss
as an artist, as a friend and as a marvellous human being.

We send our deepest condolences to Millie’s family but in particular to Martha.

As a small tribute we post once again their short collaborative film about Millie’s
attempt to deal with the absentee ballot form in last year’s presidential election.