Volcano (2006, 7.6MB, 54 sec.)
Two beautiful & expressive poems in sign language.
The first is in British sign language
& comes from the deaf arts forum in Edinburgh,
Scotland. There are subtitles for the hearing.
The second is in American Sign Language & is written &
performed by Ellie, a sixth grader at the Metro deaf school in St Paul.
No translation for this one, so non signers should bear
the title in mind & enjoy the volcanic performance.
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema -Trailer (2007, 8.97MB, 1:06 min.)
Slavoj Žižek, philosophy’s PT Barnum, struts his stuff
con shed-loads of brio in this Sophie Fiennes directed opus.
Doesn’t seem to be much genuinely new (the terrible fate of
the celebrity academic being to be lionised for what we already
know they’re going to do/say) but still vastly entertaining.
Readings from ‘Health Proxy’ (2007, 32.7MB, 8:19 min.)
So..declaration of interest..Robert Roth is a friend of mine & I get mentioned in the book.
Nonetheless, if he was my worst enemy, I’d still say watch this, then .
Health Proxy is pretty much sui generis..the only comparisons I can think of being those fragmentary, diaristic things in the Japanese tradition:The Pillow Book or Essays in Idleness.
Of course Kenko & Sei Shonagon never wrote about baseball or AIDS,
nor were they animated by the massively warm oppositional & radical spirit we find here.
The video is a nice job too – not only is it elegantly made, but Langager and Smolarski
pass the documentary acid test of honouring their subject matter whilst still creating
something with a palpable sense of their authorship.
Antinormalizer (2007, 83.9MB, 9:58 min)
This has quite a complex history, which is explained
better in the video than I could do here.
My nose twitched when I saw it posted on the
Rhizome list by Brett Stalbaum.
Anything associated with him is worth checking out
as witness the various excellent things he’s made with
a hiking theme ( & hiking theme so fails to do justice to the peculiarity
& wonder of them).
Anyway this one is a big team thing, students and staff from
two courses at Unviersity of California San Diego &
it’s entertaining & thought provoking & it feels like
a 2007, modern tech twist on 1968’s
‘Sous les pavés, la plage!’.
‘This is a cartoon representation of the process
used to link amino acids to make a protein.’
Flavoprotein (2006, 1.3MB, 4 sec loop)
‘This is a model of one of the proteins used
in the electron transport chain. Basically, where
we get most of our energy to survive as living organisms.’
Bilayer (2006, 3.3MB, 3 sec loop)
‘This is the general structure of our cell membranes.’
Beautiful animations -teaching materials- of chemical
processes & structures by Professor James K. Hardy
of the University of Akron. Thanks to Professor Hardy for
the accompanying explanations of what each animation
actually represents.
The whole series is a delight.
Return to Auschwitz – clip (1982, 1.95MB, 18 secs)
A tiny fragment today, but oh what a fragment.
An extract from an Italian television documentary
about a visit to the site of the Auschwitz extermination camp,
where he had previously been incarcerated for a year,
by the great Italian writer Primo Levi, who died 20 years ago this last April.
Levi wrote the indispensable memoir of the Holocaust,
‘If This is a Man’ ( in the US called ‘Survival in Auschwitz’).
Apparently this documentary used to be available on the net in its entirety.
If anyone can point us to a copy we’ll post the whole thing.
This tiny clip is nonetheless a key one. NEVER AGAIN!
Rudy Adler piece on the excellent gaaagle.com,
protesting Google’s spineless policy of assisting
Chinese government censorship.
Check out this site, there’s some great stuff there.
Even better, make a short & relevant movie & send it in.
Now.
Tevye – clip (1939, 32.1MB, 1:27 min)
Prior to WW2 there were between 10 & 13 million speakers
of Yiddish. Today there are probably less than 2 million.
Here is an image of a lost world, the flowering of Yiddish culture
in the years of the twentieth century before the Holocaust.
This is a clip from the 1939 film Tevye by Maurice Schwartz based on
the work of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem
The film has recently been restored and is available for .
VlogHistory1 (2007, 15.5MB, 4:07 min.)
from the excellent Richard Show.
