Two films by the late Dieter Roth.
Category Archives: poetry
Interior Footage with Canine
Interior Footage with Canine (2009, 13 MB, 57 secs)
Exquisite Lumière from the ever reliable, ever astonishing, Sam Renseiw
at spacetwo : patalab.
Brian Gibson – to the young, youth
to the young, youth (195?/2008, 13 MB, 2:04 min)
Poignant & beautiful work from DVblog contributor Brian Gibson
gently & quirkily re-configuring footage shot by his late grandfather
on a European visit in the 50s.
Brian’s work is always striking, always affecting, but the secret extra
ingredient is the luminous intelligence underlying everything he does.
The Commoners – by Jessica Bardsley & Penny Lane
The Commoners (Excerpt, 2009, 37 MB, 1:25 min)
“In 1890, one man had the idea to collect every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare
and release them into Central Park. The only bird to survive in the New World was the European
Starling, now one of the commonest birds in America. Its introduction is now widely considered
a major environmental disaster.
The Commoners is a moving image essay about starlings, poetry, and the purist rhetoric used
to describe “invasive species.” It is also about the paths people forge through history, intentionally
or not, as they attempt to change the natural world.”
Written & directed by Jessica Bardsley & Penny Lane.
From video_dumbo 2009.
A Game of Petanque with Sam Renseiw
Patafilm 718 (2009, 30.9 MB, 2:40 min)
The Petanque Discussion (2009, 9.8 MB, 53 secs)
All his work is great but we can’t publish him every day
so we wait for the very finest.
Two Petanque themed beauties, the second
being a Lumière masterclass.
Robert Croma – Night Impromptu
Night Impromptu (2009, 50.9 MB, 5:19 min)
Despite being a very fine still photographer there’s something
paradoxically counter-photographic about Robert Croma’s
video work.
Of course, as one would expect from a photographer, he’s extremely
sensitive to finish and the care which is lavished on the working over
of each of his movies is humbling and astonishing but what struck me,
getting this post ready, is how difficult it is to extract a poster image from
these that really prepares us for the coming movie as movie.
(Believe me – mostly this is not so hard, so many people semaphore
from every frame)
Then it further struck me that this a mark of the most profound cinematic
thinking, that despite the pieces’ great visual beauties they are conceived
austerely, with the greatest economy & most of all holistically; that is, entirely
at the level of the final moving image.
Of course here, as so often with Croma, finally it’s also a very moving image.
Owen O’Toole – Super8 films
Frames (1985, 31 MB, 6:25 min)
Early experimental Super8 films by Owen O’Toole.
Short interview with him here.
South and mobile to the house of Mina
South and mobile to the house of Mina (2009, 31MB 3:18 min)
From DVblog’s own Doron Golan, this is simply stunning.
What I find so exciting is that Doron combines here
(and I haven’t spoken to him about this piece so I don’t know
whether he himself sees it this way) his fascinating & often intense
recent studies in image manipulation with something of the improvisatory
quality & narrative forward motion of earlier pieces.
In a world where so much work is predicatable and safe, what a delight
& what a tonic for the head and heart both, to see work that stretches out
like this and which so resolutely rejects the safe, the dull, the glib & the banal.
I Can’t Deal With This Stupid Ringing Forever – Donna Kuhn
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.
Marianne Moore – The Fish
The Fish (date unknown, 754KB, 1:12 min)
The Fish
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices