Combine Harvester (2010, 68MB, 2:23 min)
A eclogue of sorts from Edward Picot; somewhat noisy, somewhat dusty
but evocative of the real British countryside and a little bit thrilling too.
Category Archives: poetry
Robert Croma – La Descente
La Descente (2010, 96MB, 8:21 min)
It’s always great to have a new piece from Robert Croma –
recently this has been an all too rare event.
Great to report that his first in a year is as good as it is.
I know that the people-going-down-steps/up-or-down-escalators/though-doors movies
have come to constitute almost a micro-genre, but this is an exceptionally
meticulous and rich example.
In particular what makes it for me is the decision (wherever – camera, edit – in the workflow
it happened) to leave in the faces who gaze boldly back at the camera.
A lot of Croma’s work employs subtly deployed but thorough post-production
to heighten and poeticize further his material. Here it’s rather his visual acuity
and the years of experience accumulated both in still and moving image which leads
to this simple but devastating handling of his original footage.
Similarly his use of sound is unobtrusive but exceedingly well judged.
I hope it’s not a year to the next one.
Eryk Salvaggio Unfinished Mpeg Haiku
First Line (2002, 165kb, 7 secs)
Second Line (2002, 224kb, 10 secs)
If I remember rightly Eryk Salvaggio posted a link to this tiny piece
on the Rhizome list in 2002, at a time when the Rhizome Artbase was
still rejecting some embryonic video or video like works as ‘not net-idiomatic’.
The post was something of an epiphany for me and I suspect
when the history of online video comes to be written this work,
together with the Manovich Little Movies, will loom large
(As beginning to find a way towards precisely a ‘net-idiomatic’
video practice).
Also: I thought then (and I still think now) it is wonderful work.
Here’s what Salvaggio said about it at the time:
Mpeg Haikus
these are short films which work in their original digital formats
as 30 to 60 second mpeg files. The idea was to stay “egoless”
as in the nature of a haiku, and so there is no design – the films
and the files are presented by whatever defaults your browser
uses. The first, “Unfinished Mpeg Haiku,” is a short 30 seconds
of an airplane’s vapor trails across the sky, the second, a 30
second loop of a bird hopping on industrial machinery.
The third line is not represented, but is intended to be the
viewer’s response, ie. dismissal, understanding, happiness,
sadness- whatever meaning the viewer makes.
Millie Niss – Skyway
Skyway (2009, 39 MB, 1:53 min)
A couple of months before her untimely death last year Millie Niss
sent me this video –
‘I have been working for a long time on and off (mostly off) these
days on a video showing industrial ruins on the outskirts of Buffalo,
shot from an elevated highway which is scheduled to be torn down…’
I remember thinking how beautiful and evocative it was and I assumed
Millie would publish it on the Sporkworld Blog in due course.
Sadly this never happened.
The other day I came across it & asked Millie’s mother and collaborator,
Martha Deed, for permission to post it here, which she gave,
so it’s a pleasure tinged with sadness to do so.
We’re going to take a summer break now.
We’ll be back on September 20th but in the meantime we’ll leave you
with this memorial to a fine artist & a fine human being.
Direct Language
Diect Language 5.0 (2010, 74 MB, 6:26 min)
Steven Ball has re-started his Direct Language project & this was the first piece
of the new sequence.
I think it is quite breathtaking.
It strikes me as very much in a relatively recent British experimental film tradition
where a quite austere formalism can engender the most extraordinary beauty.
There’s always the danger of a failure of nerve, the pill being quite needlessly sugared
and nothing such happens here.
Not only is it haunting & lovely, there’s food for thought here too,
the lack of glibness & the refusal to cuddle up to the viewer meaning
it sustains repeated viewing.
Donna Kuhn – Please Don’t Look Like A Pear
Please Don’t Look Like A Pear (2010, 10 MB, 3:22 min)
I love Donna Kuhn’s work.
I’ve rhapsodised about it here before, so I’ll just note, first,
that she continues to develop in the most thoughtful & interesting of ways
& second that this video is very funny, poetic
& scarier than most horror movies.
( Donna: ‘people don’t believe that these are completely unembellished
craigslist personals ads’)
To do all three – a coup!
More soon please Donna!
Brantley Jones Again
Mountains – “Interlude” (2010, 105 MB, 2:11 min)
Wistful, quirky & -well, just quite lovely – bit of filmmaking from
Brantley Jones who squeezes real magic – what feels in part like a summoning up of a child’s
eye view of the world (in the best possible sense) – from minimal resources.
Don’t be fooled though – there’s both eye and technique at work here.
We’ve shown his work here before & on the evidence of this will certainly
do so again.
More Robert Todd
Robert Todd – Ground Play
Ground Play (extract) (2009, 64 MB, 5:15 min)
I stumbled across Robert Todd’s work by accident & I’m glad that I did.
Judging by the extracts on his site, one of which we’re posting here, he will bear
a good deal of further investigation.
Here I love the use of oblique angles, cropping &c. to create a world both highly abstracted
yet naggingly familiar (and very beautiful).
There’s also an interesting dynamic going on between the probing camerwork & the
thoughtful and restrained editing.
There’s an interview with Todd here and you can buy DVDs of his work .
John Berryman – Dream Song #14
Dream Song #14 (1967, 8MB, 1:43 min)
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatedly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
Another Dream Song.
For details see original post