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!
