Author Archives: michael

‘Un Chien Andalou’ – Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí

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Un_chien_andalou
Un chien andalou (1929, 156MB, 15:40 min.)

This is just the source.
Can you imagine Cocteau, Deren, later Hitchcock & Cronenberg
without this?
Oh..more:- the whole of cinema would have a great gaping bloody gap
in it & what was left would be dull dull dull & Black Francis wouldn’t have been
able to write ‘Debaser’.
It simply prised open the language.
Afterwards, Bunuel went on to make some of the sharpest, most provocative
& disturbing films of the 20th century & Dali went on to
…well… be Dali.

Rick Silva – recap

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Recap -trailer
Recap (trailer) (2006, 7.18MB, 1:12 min)

Says Rick Silva:
‘Recap is a remix of the cult classic graffiti movie
Wild Style (1982) where every piece of graffiti in
the original film has been digitally crossed out and tagged over
with the Recap tag.’

The full piece is available on DVD as an 82 minute video loop.

I find this piece intriguing. I’m pretty friendly to formalism –
it’s amazing what beauty & interest a good algorithm
(in the broadest sense) can deliver.
But here Rick Silva seems to have taken steps to eliminate
…perhaps too strong…rather…to render difficult…
the emergence (partly because the original looks so great,
haven’t seen it, so even the trailer is, for me, quite irritating,
because by definition it covers up [and maybe this
is the point – I think the setting & hence the mode of viewing
probably make a huge difference – I could see this working
brilliantly in a gallery where one takes in some of it & moves
on, digesting, but I think I would rather have extensive dental
work than sit & watch it as movie] what
I long to see.) of casual beauty.

Good though!
I don’t mean to be negative!
Better than bland of course, anytime!

Josh Weinstein – “Cross Examination”

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Cross Examination
Cross Examination (2005, 11.4MB, 5:40 min)

Made in 2005, this is a really extraordinary piece for lots of reasons:

(1) It’s so carefully made ( & must have taken no little work)
(2) The chutzpah quotient is almost 100%
(3) There is more here than meets the eye
(4) The use of music (in its second appearance very reminiscent
of the school of Rifle/Hartley but spot on nonetheless)
(5) The warmth, genuine warmth; the real insight into people

As you see here Josh Weinstein, Brooklyn based film maker
does a lot of work for corporate clients. Hmmm.
Really, all you can think is, on the basis of this, they get way,
way more & better than they could possibly deserve.

Iban M. Selles – De Noche

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de_noche.jpg
De Noche (2010, 71MB, 3:09 min)

I like the boldness of this, constructed by Iban M. Selles entirely
(and deftly) from stills taken on the set of , as I understand it,
a different film on which Iban Selles was working.
The sound, collaged from a number of movie soundtracks, is tremendous.
The piece as a whole has a slightly provisional feel to it -a study rather
than something definitive -but dull it’s not and I look forward to seeing
more work by Selles.