One Man Show (1991, 7MB, 52 sec.)
Award winning video from 1991 by Antonio (Lobo) Pasolini,
video maker & journalist.
Author Archives: michael
March Madness at the DC Training Facility
Commerce meets art. Maybe.
Actually if you wear the shoes you can really do all that.
No..er..really.
From DC shoe.
Eddie Whelan #3
A Game of Petanque with Sam Renseiw
Patafilm 718 (2009, 30.9 MB, 2:40 min)
The Petanque Discussion (2009, 9.8 MB, 53 secs)
All his work is great but we can’t publish him every day
so we wait for the very finest.
Two Petanque themed beauties, the second
being a Lumière masterclass.
Robert Croma – Night Impromptu
Night Impromptu (2009, 50.9 MB, 5:19 min)
Despite being a very fine still photographer there’s something
paradoxically counter-photographic about Robert Croma’s
video work.
Of course, as one would expect from a photographer, he’s extremely
sensitive to finish and the care which is lavished on the working over
of each of his movies is humbling and astonishing but what struck me,
getting this post ready, is how difficult it is to extract a poster image from
these that really prepares us for the coming movie as movie.
(Believe me – mostly this is not so hard, so many people semaphore
from every frame)
Then it further struck me that this a mark of the most profound cinematic
thinking, that despite the pieces’ great visual beauties they are conceived
austerely, with the greatest economy & most of all holistically; that is, entirely
at the level of the final moving image.
Of course here, as so often with Croma, finally it’s also a very moving image.
Poems for Pictopia
Poems for Pictopia(2009, 83.5 MB, 8:00 min)
Deft & winsome documentary from Gabriel Shalom
(whose own very deft work DVblog regulars will
have come across before) and Patrizia Kommerell
featuring goings-on and personalities from this year’s
Pictoplasma in Berlin.
Sondheim/Carter/Foofwa
involuntaries #4 (2009, 68.4MB 7:35 min)
Love all Sondheim’s stuff but particularly the dance work.
Here he is with Azure Carter & the jaw-dropping Foofwa d’Imobilité.
Extremely odd & extremely wonderful.
There’s lots more of these on Foofwa’s site ,
all well worth checking out.
( Plus a Foofwa conducted interview with the late Merce Cunningham)
Olga Panedes Massenet – City of Fear
City of Fear (2008, 118MB 4:13 min)
Tad.. er.. earnest & a bit Burroughs lite at moments,
but gripping to watch, moves along nicely and clearly the work
of someone with serious skills, strong visual sense and something to say.
The green slime section must’ve been fun to do.
More here.
Florian Cramer – Floppy Films
nkdlunch (2009, 1:24MB 2:44 min)
coraria (2009, 1:35MB 2:09 min)
Ultimately, personally, I admire these more than I like them.
It’s clever/witty stuff, no doubt, squeezing sections of films,
or mash-ups thereof, down to the size of the old floppies
but you just feel it pretty much stops there. Is there much
to actually watch/engage with & if there is, how much of this
arises from the original material before the conceptual
shenanigans commence?
This is especially marked in ‘Coraria’, which feels entirely
parasitic upon John Cage and upon the tremendous performance &
photogenic qualities of Cora Schmeiser.
Hmm. You decide.
[There’s a more detailed ( & sympathetic!) account here
& you can buy the pieces on floppy, should you feel so moved, here]
South and mobile to the house of Mina
South and mobile to the house of Mina (2009, 31MB 3:18 min)
From DVblog’s own Doron Golan, this is simply stunning.
What I find so exciting is that Doron combines here
(and I haven’t spoken to him about this piece so I don’t know
whether he himself sees it this way) his fascinating & often intense
recent studies in image manipulation with something of the improvisatory
quality & narrative forward motion of earlier pieces.
In a world where so much work is predicatable and safe, what a delight
& what a tonic for the head and heart both, to see work that stretches out
like this and which so resolutely rejects the safe, the dull, the glib & the banal.