Memory Loss (2008, 61.4MB, 2:13 min)
No Exit (2008, 38.2MB, 2:19 min)
Two pieces from Lee Sarter.
Memory Loss is an unequivocal success in my view,
evocative, very nicely constructed & haunting.
(Even manages to temporarily subdue my deeply felt &
longstanding antipathy to ambient sounding piano
soundtracks)
I don’t think No Exit works quite so well but it’s clear
in both that there’s a thinking & creative filmic intelligence at work here.
I look forward to more.
Forgot (2008, 98.3MB, 12:06 min, silent theatrical act)
This is simply wonderful.
Doron’s work is strange – it doesn’t lend itself to blow by blow verbal description:
er..‘Some actors perform in a silent movie based on Waiting for Godot‘
Then you actually look at it (or if you haven’t you should, you really should).
The grammar of his editing is completely unique & mysterious (a feature of all his longer pieces).
‘Why did he do that?’ – ‘Dunno – but it made my spine tingle’
Work like this often slips under the radar because it has no easy marketing line,
it can’t be glibly summed up, reduced to an easily digestible one-liner.
Work like this is food you have to chew a little…but what flavour & what nourishment!
Also, the acting ( and the director/actor collaboration) is outstanding.
Smart, funny, puzzling, touching by turns…and generous also…
With Theodore Bouloukos, Joanne Douglas, Brian Gibson and Stephanie Noritz
Bathtime in Clerkenwell (2002, 15.3MB, 3:14 min)
Alex Budovsky aka Aleksey Budovskiy created this great animation
based on Stephen Coates ( aka (The Real) Tuesday Weld‘s) song of the same title.
This film is about The Great Revolution of the British Cuckoos,
who bravely took over London, forcing all the people to move
inside the cuckoo clocks.
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.
Fashion Victim no. 92 (2005, 19.8 MB, 6:10 min.)
Commissioned by Amy Prior and extracted from her short story
of the same title. From Tyler Coburn.
By Mica Scalin.
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 .
Lenin (2006, 21.3MB, 3:50 min.)
‘Once while walking, Leo Tolstoy spotted in the distance the figure of a
man squatting and gesturing strangely; a madman, he thought, but on
drawing nearer he was satisfied that the man was attending to necessary
work, sharpening a knife on a stone. Lenin was fond of citing this example.’
Ygael Gluckstein (Tony Cliff ) – Lenin Vol 1
with Meir Pichhadze. music by Yehuda Poliker. movie by Doron Golan.
from Howl part 2 (1997, 7.5MB, 4:07 min)
The mighty Allen Ginsberg, buffoon, trickster, personality, conscience, catalyst
above all genuine, genuine poet; our Whitman, sometimes bad but never boring,
who in so many ways shaped ‘the best minds of his generation’,
reads from part two of ‘Howl’ shortly before his death in 1997.
From the excellent allenginsberg.org