Driving (2006, 6MB, 4:39 min.)
Loop (2006, 11.8MB, 7:49 min.)
Two 2006 movies from Christian Marc Schmidt’s adaptive landscapes
sequence of work.
Check out the link above for Schmidt’s background notes on the pieces.
I’ll just observe that they are not alone in recent work featured here
in belonging to a category of work that could be called gorgeous formalism.
Still Life (2006, 16.9MB, 3:36 min)
Spout (2006, 8.26MB, 2:14 min)
Two short movies from Canadian artist Adamo Macri in 2007.
Grass Barbed (2008, 13.8MB, 41 secs, silent)
Grass In Wind (2008, 20.4, 48 secs, silent)
Utter loveliness from Irish artist Kevin Flanagan in 2008.
Utter loveliness never something to be disdained in my view, but here it’s also allied to a
steadfastness of purpose & well, just simple old fashioned
courage of conviction.
DRIFT SLICYCLE POPPED! (2007, 11MB, 1:59)
LOQUACIOUS EYESICLE WILD-BITES (2007, 14.9MB, 2:34)
PSST gets designers, animators, and directors together for
collaborative film projects every year. Their main concern
is process, which they explain comes from a fusion of the
Dadaist game Exquisite Corpse and the sometimes childhood
game, Telephone.
Whatever their theory, their annual collections are stellar.
Margarida Paiva – Untitled Stories (2007, 15.6MB, 2:49)
Excerpt from Margarida Paiva’s 11 minute Untitled Stories,
a video from 2007 about everyday stories, told through a broken
female monologue about memories.
Expertly layered and totally gorgeous.
Cell Portraits (2005-7, 28.7MB, 4:18 min)
Beautifully assured piece of documentary film making from Richard Jochum in 2007,
a portrait of the scientist Jan Schmoranzer preparing microscopic images
of cells (& and eating lunch, drinking coffee &c.)
I particularly like the lighness of touch shown here, the gentle wit.
Jochum’s openness to the humanity, the quirkiness and individuality of the
participants ( the..um..dance), raises the level of the piece from
an interesting educational short to something much richer.
To be slightly controversial, it’s dully predictable someone left
a comment on Jochum’s site along the lines of ‘I’d like to get some of those
images for my wall’ The final slide images, laden with scientific interest as I’m
sure they are, are in my view the bit of the piece with the least artistic
interest (or at least such interest as they have derives from their place
in the process and the film’s account of it rather than their pretty-pattern-ness).
Tim and Puma Mimi: High Five Low Five (2012, 283MB, 4:22 min)
Slightly self-consciously kooky but, it must be said, splendidly
entertaining bit of both music and moving image, from -ahem –
Tim and Puma Mimi.
Curiously we were lobbied for this by a publicist type fellow.
We’re quite flattered here at DVblog that we’re thought of as having
any clout.
I should say we turned down the first couple of things he suggested
and he obviously then did his homework because this one we like, a lot.
Béla Halmos – Legyenes (2010, 19MB, 4:10 min)
I just love this and I can’t completely rationalise it. Everything about it –
the fantastic playing of Béla Halmos and companion, the earnest intensity
of the dancers, the crowd’s glorious vocal participation (especially that very
Eastern European tight-throated high pitched rhythmic women’s singing) just makes me
weak at the knees with delight.
It was recorded at the 29th National Dance House festival in Budapest in 2010.
June Pak – double (2002, 892 KB, 0:30)
June Pak’s work is innovative and breathtaking.
In double, one character disrupts the other’s stability
by changing the television channel but is nevertheless
oblivious to this effect. Pak says, “This exchange
between the two suggests the disjunction within
oneself caused by technology and boredom.”
Finger Bolts (2005, 1.9MB, 1:13 min.)
Shannon Noble, an extremely technically accomplished
artist, made this elegant short video in 2005 from the simple, well-timed,
juxtaposition of moving images and sounds.
He’s still making stuff – he’s quite strangely
secretive about his work and quite often as soon
as it’s posted somewhere it disappears again.
A shame – he’s consistently great.