When Clouds Clear (2008, 15.3MB, 2:26)
Directed by Anne Slick and Danielle Bernstein,
When Clouds Clear is a remarkably intimate portrait
of a tiny Ecuadorian village’s struggle against
mining companies that seek to take over (and destroy)
the land they have long cultivated as their home.
Shot on a lovely mix of Super 8, 16mm, and video
to show the complexities of different viewpoints, the
film is one of the most beautiful I have had the
privilege of viewing this year.
Smith and Foulkes – This Way Up (2008, 3.4MB, 0:54)
Trailer for the Academy Award nominated short
from duo Smith and Foulkes.
Official film site here.
Via Nexus Productions.
Must Read After My Death – Morgan Dews (2007, 23.9MB, 1:47)
When a Hartford couple turns to psychiatry for help
with their marriage in 1960, things quickly spiral out
of control. Couples counseling, individual and group
therapy and 24-hour marathon sessions ensue. Their
four children suffer and are given their own psychiatrists.
Pills are prescribed, people are institutionalized, shock-therapy
is administered. This is an intimate story in the family
West of the Great Altar of Zeus (Doron, 2009, 27MB, 1:51 min)
9 Third Avenue Haiku (Michael, 2008, 52.7MB, 4:32 min)
We normally avoid posting our own work but this
time we’re going to make an exception.
Doron & I have a joint show at HTTP gallery & we’d like to
invite any DVblog readers in the area to come
along to the private view, this Friday, 16th January.
(Details on the HTTP site linked above)
I’ve posted a piece by each of us (which should
give you a feel for whether you’d love or hate us) but the HTTP
show is going to be a little different from our usual work
so please come along, have a drink, take a look & say hello…
A Portrait of Arthur Russell (trailer) (2008, 7MB, 2:11 min.)
“Wild Combination is Matt Wolf’s acclaimed documentary on seminal
avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist, and disco producer
Arthur Russell. Before his death in 1992, Arthur created music that
spanned both pop and the transcendent possibilities of abstract art.
The film incorporates rare archival footage and commentary from
Arthur’s family, friends, collaborators and admirers, including
Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, Jens Lekman, and many more.”
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.
The Listening Project (2008, 31.5MB, 2:43)
It feels a bit cliched, but I’ll give this one the
benefit of the doubt, of doing relevant and
important work about the current state of
global relations.
The Listening Project is a documentary feature film
that puts a human face to world opinion of the U.S.
Filmed in 14 countries, it explores many facets of
America
Kill the Artist Trailer (2008, 17MB, 2:37 min)
Kill the Artist (excerpt) (2008, 12.7MB, 1:09 min)
Documentary from Andreas Troeger about ‘artists who got into trouble with the law
because of their art-works’.
Personally I don’t share what I understand to be the film’s implicit
libertarianism – I’m all in favour of shutting down, for example,
Holocaust deniers, or race hate merchants generally.
Niether did I see any work in the extracts sent that I gave a damn about artistically
but of course the point is that censorship operates salami style
& often by picking the most problematic, hard to defend, cases first,
so the discussion here matters.
Nonetheless when the definitive history of political censorship of/attacks upon art in the early
twenty first century is written I can’t help feeling the Steve Kurtz case
will figure more largely than the stuff on display here.
Interested what others think.
Jeff Nichols – Shotgun Stories (2008, 10.3MB, 1:50)
Shotgun Stories tells the tale of two families with the
same father. One, in which the children are named
Kid, Boy, and Son, came before dad sobered up and
found Jesus. The second, his marriage to a beautiful
woman who had four more boys, was his do-over.
After his death, an explosive feud breaks out between
the grown half-siblings.
It opened to rave reviews, and from the chilling
trailer alone, I can see why.
