I Can’t Deal With This Stupid Ringing Forever (2009, 56MB 2:29 min)
Donna Kuhn has joined the little pantheon (Sondheim’s another, as is Sam Renseiw)
of people whose work I’m just going
to post regularly because they are great.
No apology, no argument.
If you can’t see it, the problem is yours.
Great. Great. Great.
Scandal – trailer (1950, 7.7MB, 1:38 min)
The Idiot – trailer (1951, 6.3MB, 1:22 min)
Don’t know whether these are the original, or re-edited, trailers
but they’re wonderful, wonderful.
Watch and marvel.
I know neither of these films but I can’t wait to get my sweaty
palms on the DVDs from Eureka Cinema’s Masters of Cinema series.
Incident (2009, 44MB, 1:27 min)
DVblog’s Michael Szpakowski won the Jury Prize at the
Pocket Films Festival at the Forum des Images in Paris
last weekend for this short dream-documentary.
What Makes Me White? (2009, 9.4MB, 3:21)
New short film by award-winning director A.M. Sands
about race, privilege, memory, and experience.
What Makes Me White? official site.
The Split Mirror Syndrome (2008, 42MB, 6:22 min.)
“Murphy creates a polysemic experience in which visual and
temporal relationships progressively lapse, whereby the viewer is
challenged to willfully choose where to locate themself in relation
to the structure of the work.”
By Martin Murphy. Starring Theodore Bouloukos.
(more splendid acting work from Bouloukos, here)
Chapter 1 (2009, 27.3MB, 4:49 min)
Edward Picot has made an intelligent and generous contribution to
the creation of a serious critical tradition around web based literature,
(although his interests are wide and by no means limited to the written word).
A lot of people, me included, have cause to be grateful to him for his
acute, measured but sympathetic assessments of their work.
Apart from his invaluable critical writing he’s also a writer and maker
of work himself.
One of the engines driving his recent creative work has been his
relationship with his young daughter Rachel.
His fantasy story The Puzzle Box,written for Rachel, was one of last year’s
delights.
Here he turns his hand to video in a more active collaboration with Rachel.
This is work that has its roots in a particularly English form of lo-fi
moving image storytelling (I know the late Oliver Postgate is a figure Edward greatly admires.)
Does it work? – in truth, not 100% – I think we feel we are trespassing slightly
on a very personal world. ‘Slightly’, though, is the operative word – there’s
something here, no doubt, & old fashioned as it may be in some
respects there’s something about the kind of adult child collaboration rendered
possible by the digital which is unlike anything previously -a kind of levelling
of the playing field…
Anyway, we’ll post all three episodes over the next weeks and allow you to
make your own minds up.
“Senses and memories of motherhood evoked by visiting Birkenau
(Auschwitz II) in Poland July 2008.”
I wonder whether memorialising the Holocaust isn’t too important a job to be
left to artists.
Anders Weberg’s piece is as well made as one would expect from him
and I have no doubt it is a sincere response.
Does it tell us anything new, though?
Does it contribute to any understanding which will make
repetition less likely?
As we get further away in time isn’t it the facts we have
to insist upon & isn’t there a danger that art -especially well made
art -aestheticises and dilutes?
Read the Primo Levi book. It sets the bar very high.
Transformation (2009, 15.5MB, 1:18 min)
Representation of Memory (2006, 75.4MB, 2:22 min)
Clearly there is something in the water in Athens, Georgia giving us,
as it has, John Michael Boling & Javier Morales, John Crowe,
Dan Osborne, Brantley Jones and now Ash Sechler.
Hmm – The School of Athens, Georgia.
There’s no common style but there is a certain sensibility which,
curiously, pervades the quiet meditative stuff as well as the more
out-there and bizarre – it’s a species of wryness combined with an
eye for the casually arresting, odd and beautiful.
It’s exemplified here in both these rather good pieces, though I particularly
like Representation of Memory.
