Investigations (2008, 40.1MB, 2:05 min)
Perfect piece of film making by Dan Osborne.
Interesting to compare it to the piece by him we posted
earlier this year.
There’s a lot in common, true, but what strikes me is both the
real elegance & the very precise focus of this new piece.
In contrast with the (admittedly very attractive) sprawl of
the earlier work there is not a second here that doesn’t feel
purposeful & controlled.
Interesting to see how this body of work develops.
Alphaville ( extract) (2008, 32.MB, 51 secs)
Rather fetching art-work-over of Godard’s
great film Alphaville, by Kurt Ralske.
Regular visitors will be aware of how little excuse we need
to post work from the formidable Alan Sondheim.
So…it’s Wednesday… – here’s one of his recent Second Life
pieces.
His accompanying text appears below.
Jennifer and Julu: Clean yourselves, you dirty boys!
Jennifer and Julu: Clean yourselves, you dirty girls!
Julu: Hello Nikuko, you are looking wonderful this very morning.
Nikuko: Hello Julu, why you are looking odd I do think!
Julu: And my leg too hanging by a thread! Nikuko, where are you?
Nikuko: Oh dear you are half-blind Julu!
Julu: And you are All-Blind-Nikuko!
Julu: Can you see anything here? Can you see anything at all?
Nikuko: I hear your voice!
Nikuko: You do not, Julu, you do not have anything!
Julu: Maud, you must move slightly to your left, thank you.
Julu: Maud, you are not looking properly or you would move!
Nikuko: I am looking just fine, thank you!
Nikuko: I am so, I’m trying as hard as you are!
Julu: Adjust yourself!
Julu: You are adjusting yourself in a very wrong way!
Julu: It is 10:30 and you have just lost your head!
Nikuko: Ha ha ha I have lost my head over you!
Julu: And hello Nikuko, and how are you?
Nikuko: Now we will Swirl and Change.
The Journey(2008, 30.8MB, 3:12 min)
Like a modern day Dante Robert Croma manages to squeeze
poetry even from a rush hour journey on the London Underground.
Beautiful. Beautiful & elegant & telling.
Recombinant Rain (2008, 7MB, 32 secs)
Source Video #1 (2008, 1.3MB, 10 secs silent)
Source Video #2 (2008, 2.2MB, 12 secs silent)
Source Video #3 (2008, 1.2MB, 14 secs silent)
Source Video #4 (2008, 2MB, 13 secs silent)
Millie Niss is one half of the daughter & mother team behind
the original & indispensable Sporkworld Microblog.
(And if you look at it for ten minutes & you don’t agree
it’s that, please check you have a pulse).
I’m not sure Millie felt that this piece was entirely successful.
(See her comments on the blog, linked above)
I’m posting it because even a borderline success from Millie
is something one can learn from. She has a formidable intellect
combined with a total & fierce independence & a complete
lack of bullshit.( Indeed I’m convinced that she wouldn’t
know how to bullshit, even if she wanted to.)
The last four pieces are tiny little studies of the rain
(delicate & lovely in their own right),
& the first is constructed from frames lifted from these
& worked over in various ways.
This piece (or actually the set of pieces, sources & first pass
at an end product alike) does it for me in a way that a lot of work doesn’t.
Simply, there’s a profound humanity to it.
Sure, it’s about the rain but it’s also about what it is
to be a human being in the world.
Lincoln (2008, 69MB, 7:36 min)
Typically exquisite bit of work from poet of the video
& occasional contributor here, Brian Gibson.
Interlords II (2008, 70MB, 5:09 min.)
Deft & compelling bit of After Effects powered You Tube
mashing from Daniel Swan, frighteningly, still a
student at Camberwell.
One to watch.
Konono No 1 Promotional Video (2005, 14MB, 4:20 min)
I was a bit wary of the rather glib “Congotronics” marketing
surrounding the absolutely fantastic music coming from Konono No 1
and other bands (including the Kasai All Stars) from Kinshasa,
Democratic Republic of the Congo*** – there’s so often a touch
(or more) of paternalism in these things as western rock luminaries
find some beautiful flower of music and well intentionedly but stupidly
trample and traduce it as they make it “palatable” for western consumers.
However I was completely won over by this article, which makes clear
producer Vincent Kenis’s deep knowledge of and devotion to the music
and its performers.
Furthermore it’s the kind of scholarly yet readable account of something
that one so often yearns to find on the net & so rarely does.
Watch the vid then read the article.
I bet you end up buying some of the music.
*** the much trumpeted comparison with avant-rock &c is marketing horseshit of the highest order of course – why the hell should two things that have developed in virtually completely separate social, political, economic & cultural circumstances be comparable in any meaningful sense simply because they share common surface features? Worse still, the comparison could be taken to imply that this music was somehow evolving towards the condition of western avant-rock..euurgh!
Fell in Love with a Dead Boy (2008, 66.7MB, 11:01 min)
I was a little chary ,at first, of posting this, not because I don’t
think it’s good (I do) but because Isidore Bethel had me a little
worried that it might be someone’s autobiography fuelling it &
I wasn’t entirely sure I should post it before that person had
thought about whether that was a good thing…a lot.
Silly me, because Isidore cheerfully assures me it’s all fictional.
He’s good.
Not to be OTT but there’s something that smacks
of Citizen Kane about this, in both a good and a bad sense.
Good, in that there is such energy & skill deployed here
(not just artistic, the guy can clearly organise too).
Furthermore, it packs a real punch, as witness my confusion.
On the debit side there’s sometimes a sense of everything including
the kitchen sink being dug out and after the initial rush (happens with
Kane for me too folks – little too much obvious desire to be epic) you
begin to see the thing as held together to some degree by sheer willpower,
even where the occasional hole is visible…
I look forward to see where Isidore Bethel will go next -we’ll hear a good
deal more of him, I’m sure.
Also: nice score from David Nyman (like its use in the piece too: non-obvious)
& a careful, intelligent performance of the script from Megan Popkin.
(not sure I’m making out the credits properly -did she share the writing credit? –
the script: that’s a piece of work too.)
Behold a Pale Horse (2007, 6MB, 2:26 min)
I love this piece, originally posted to the currently very lively & interesting
Rhizome front page, quite extravagantly, almost unreasonably.
Reader: Well! -what is it then?
Me: er..well it’s.. a very lo-fi mash up of film studio idents
Reader: and?
Me: ..well..um..that’s it.
Reader: Harrumph! (gets on bike to go)
but you would be so, so wrong, to go that way, dear reader.
I burbled something on Rhizome in a comment on this about the
transfiguration of the banal & it is precisely there
that it seems to me the magic lies. Bishop makes us examine
every pixel as if ( & of course he makes it so) it mattered.
In a kind of strange way the film is rendered archetypally
‘painterly’.
There’s more, though. In the way he estranges & hence makes us look
anew at the imagery of the idents, he recovers some of the mythic force
that was being tapped into by their makers before familiarity rendered
those images banal.
Tremendous work!
Saturdays Only (2008, 50MB, 1:18 min)
We’re quite keen here at DVblog on Giles Perkins & his quirky &
beautiful Super8 work.
He also maintains the excellent all-things-Super8 site onsuper8.org.
You might remember his beach huts piece
or his Burnley Panopticon mini-documentary.
Here he turns his poetic but clear eye to “Britain’s oddest train
– the once a week Stockport to Stalybridge.”
A great way to kick off our new season…
Kiki and Bubu and the Good Plan (2008, 74MB, 7:24 min)
Kiki and Bubu and the Shift (2008, 39MB, 4:11 min)
Well, almost.
Marred only by some fashionable end-of-the-working-class-in-the-West
(who collects your trash, checks out your groceries, teaches your kids?)
nonsense, this is on the whole the finest piece of glove puppet based
agit-prop I’ve ever seen & very funny to boot.
In particular the best of these pieces,Kiki and Bubu and the Good Plan,
is an absolutely clear & devastating reply to the marketeers…
See ’em all…
Utterly ravishing Lumière from the never predictable,
always interesting, Rupert Howe.
On that summery note, we’re going to take a rest in the sunshine.
We love doing DVblog, but the daily deadline definitely takes
its toll after a bit.
We’ll be getting ready to hit the ground running again around 16th Sept.
& we’ll still keeping our eyes peeled for the new, for the weird &
(best of all!) for the wonderful.
Have a great summer!
Brittany, Doron, Michael.
Pop Mantra Video Documentation #4 (2008, 51.7MB, 5:17 min)
Pop Mantra Video Documentation #7 (2008, 50.5MB, 5:41 min)
I like & admire Curt Cloninger for his steadfastness of belief in both his religion
& his artistic work.
He’s also one of the best writers about new media around at the moment.
In both theory & practice he’s curious, inventive, knowledgable, quirky and passionate.
Unlike many in this sphere he’s also not afraid to think aloud in public, to take risks.
Even, (quelle horreur!), to risk appearing uncool.
Recently he’s been making work away from the web, some of it performative
& very interestingly so.
Here (& I stress what you see here is the documentation, not the piece
itself -a fine, but important, distinction) he repeatedly sings & plays a
single phrase from a popular song, in this instance Radiohead’s Karma Police, for several hours.
For me there are number of interesting resonances – minimalism, shamanism,
the kinds of ‘test’ that occur in many religious belief systems, a losing, dissolving
of the self (In additon to the eponymous “mantra” ,there’s an echo too, I think, of Sufism);
but also there is the straightforward investigation*** of the mechanics of playing,
of performing (& there’s a fractal quality to the rather symmetric & crystalline
structure of popular song that makes this kind of extracting both possible & immediately
approachable -it’s a world familiar enough to welcome us in.)
The two extracts are from different ends of this marathon
( & selecting & typing that word just conjured another association –
the of the twenties & thirties).
I find this work fascinating.
Fascinating & affecting too.
*** It’s almost always a laughable misuse of the word to say ‘investigation’
in an art-speak context. Here it seems correct & natural.
Ludwig Poos Schwabe (2007, 36MB, 1:20 min)
1st Ping-Pong Lesson With Lucha Lib (2008, 31.2MB, 4:18 min)
Even 18 years after the wall came down there’s still a quite palpable
residue of the great absurdist tradition that flourished under Stalinism in work
being made in the former Eastern bloc.
(Of course it goes back further, to
Touch My Body (Oliver Laric version) (2008, 40.9MB, 4:18 min)
No Mariah (Caspar Stracke version) (2008, 52MB, 4:03 min)
OK, pay attention! This is complicated.
Ms Carey (or her corporate minders) release a video, which if she did have
a significant part to play in it shows such a staggering lack of self esteem
that a kind of dark despair begins to envelop me.
Artist Oliver Laric remixes it, removing all the backgrounds and replacing it with
green, for ease of a certain species of remixing.
There follows what is actually an interesting and nuanced exchange of views.
Then Caspar Stracke posts the second of our videos & MTAA make a
very funny joke.
Dust/Spring Evening (2005-7, 26.2MB, 1:57 min)
Dignity (2004, 40.4MB, 7:02 min)
Rain : Focus winter in the north (2004-9, 9.5MB, 1:12 min)
We showed a couple of rather restrained, pastoral pieces by Paul Kelly
in February of this year.
So, here’re three rather restrained, somewhat more urban pieces.
I admire the determinedly austere approach, to make much – or rather
to make us make much- of what is given to the camera (quite a lot, it has
to be said, in Dignity which is a touching portrait of man & dog), although
one does have visions of a kind of Yoda figure meditating in depth before every possible
editing decision to take the four years Focus apparently took to make.
I look forward to more.
Undisclosed Beauty (2008, 8.7MB, 3:13 min)
We’ve shown Anders Weberg’s work here on a number of occasions.
He’s clearly a serious artist & has made some very potent work,
I find myself a bit at a loss with this latest piece – it doesn’t work for me.
My assumption is that it’s me who is not looking right, but I find the
aestheticising of what looks like some quite violent and disturbing
imagery both trite and somewhat suspect.
(And the music over-eggs it for me too…)
The piece recently won a prize in Ljubljana so I could well be in a minority.
Of course it’s the mark of a rich & challenging body of work that the artist is ahead
of the commentators so I look forward perhaps to reconsidering in weeks, months or years…
patafilm #609 (2008, 18.2MB, 4:27 min)
No excuse offered or needed to show work by the Danish
magician, Sam Renseiw. (When I called him the ‘genius Dane’
here a little while ago, he wrote me, modestly demurring,
but he is, Dear Reader, he is. Both.)
He says “…still imbricated in the subtle magic of simple things
and situations…”, which is unusually accurate for an artist
self assessment.
Beautiful work.
Thibaut Is Singing On Oberstein Road (2008, 15.5MB, 2:36 min)
Rules of Engagement (2008, 18.1MB, 2:15 min)
Tremendous work from Robert Croma.
The Iraq piece is harrowing but you should watch it nonetheless.
The Thibaut piece is simply exhilarating.
I was trying to figure out what exactly makes this work so outstanding.
I don’t think it’s just the fact that it is technically so good (although it is).
It’s to do with Croma’s taste, judgement & instinct, or at least how he
deploys these to tell us something, or rather to intuit-to-us something
about being a human being.
You couldn’t make a rule of it, for that would render it inert & mechanical,
but, loosely, in these two pieces, it seems to me to lie in a going-beyond
-the-expected – a process with its heart in the little codas which open
out the pieces in a quite extraordinary way.
So the Iraq piece, though supremely well done, is initially not a
million miles away from much other remix type work, but it is the final
calling-to-attention, the framing, of the gait of one of the people
whom we have just seen obliterated that re-doubles its horror
but also creates the tiniest ground for hope in the inescapable
(thanks to Croma) clear recognition of our common humanity.
A similar process occurs in the Thibaut piece
– its potency initially seems to reside in the simplicity of the
camera exploring the still, the conjunction of the new and old
imaging technology and the simple & moving fact of evocation
of time passed.
It’s beautiful; and many would have been tempted to leave it there.
The final section is a risk – it could have have the opposite effect
to what it actually does; it could have closed off, made pat.
Here perhaps the technical fluency does play a defining role but the
effect is the exact opposite of closure -we’re left, once again, in a very
different way, filled with a sense of the mystery & complexity & possibility
(& the fragility) of being human.
Rather wonderful piece from Shawn Kornhauser & Brandon Joyce
who seem to exist in a strange crevice between real Philadelphia & well…some other one.
The layers of japes & spoofery multiply exponentially but something near the truth,
whatever that is, can be found here, here &
here.
I think.
3 of 7(2002, 74.7MB, 4:00 min)
Two (from a series of seven) heartbreakingly beautiful, lump-in-the-throat-evocative
lyric poems about being young, disguised as music video/documentaries.
Dan Canyon is a natural filmmaker. He so is.
What more to say, except nice to see Blackheef pronounced correctly?
Hansel and Gretel Chapter 1 (2007, 15.9MB, 4:11 min)
More from Diluvio Gallery, this time from Crist
Lucia (2007, 48.5MB, 4:01 min)
Exquisite stop motion work from Niles Atallah, Joaqu
Croque Quartet (2007, 29.5MB, 2:05 min)
I Didn’t Say That (2007, 45.8MB, 3:14 min)
Writer, musician, artist & general polymath Talan Memmott turns his attention
to film in this series of shorts made in collaboration with Sandy Florian.
They say
Nameless is a collaboration between Sandy Florian and Talan Memmott…
they make excessively short experimental narrative films, mostly in Paris…
Short they may be but Florian & Memmott’s works are assured, quirky,
evocative & entertaining.
You can see the whole series to date here .
Get Out and Play (2008, 36.9MB, 1:25 min)
Somebody called Donna sends us a mail ‘writing from a Nokia sponsored blog’.
Donna, kind soul that she is, thought
‘With your stop motion background we thought you might have a
different take on the video than the gamers and
tech bloggers who might normally watch the video’
Aw..bless her!
Nothing to do, then, with trying to use as us a part of an attempted
“virality” strategy ( don’t get us wrong, we’re impressed dvblog even
appears on these folks’ radar)
So..watch the movie..it’s good.
There’s stuff to be learned here, no doubt –
not least that the corporate vultures can clearly buy in time and talent;
but how much better a world it would be if the silly amounts of cash it
clearly cost to make this just went straight to fund new work by artists…
Art Model [AHP] (2008, 4MB, 56 secs, silent)
Burger King [BS] (2008, 22.4MB, 1:02 min, silent)
Meeting from Above [BS] (2008, 28.7MB, 59 secs, silent)
Pole [AHP] (2008, 4.39MB, 55 secs, silent)
Sour Candy [AHP] (2008, 3.58MB, 46 secs, silent)
Five Lumières, two by DVblog’s own Brittany Shoot and three by
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen with Brittany in the starring role.
They’re all great, but in particular I love the Meeting from Above piece
which is extraordinarily rich in color & incident in the kind of micro
observational way that the Lumières encapsulate.
In fact if Brakhage hadn’t got to it first, in a somewhat
grimmer context, The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes would make a
tremendous motto for the Lumière project…
Africalls Trailer (2008, 23.3MB, 1:57 min)
If this rather lovely trailer is anything to go by then Africalls
the movie proper, by director Pere Ortin Andres, will display a pretty high level of visual
sensitivity to its subject matter -art & artists from urban centers of Africa.
(And I can’t help feeling something visually so good is also going to be truthful &
meticulous in its account of the artists and their context. A hunch, but I bet I’m not wrong.)
Apparently it’s tied in with a book & exhibition too. Strikes me all three would be well worth
catching/booking.
Here’s the website.
Violin Power (clip, 1978, 2.1MB, 1:17 min)
The Vasulkas, husband & wife team Woody & Steina,
have devoted over thirty years to an intensive exploration
of the possibilities of electronic image making.
It
