Sam Renseiw –Two Recent Movies

sam_r
More Landscaping Views (2010, 54MB, 3:47 min)

sam_r
Art and Traffic (2010, 14MB, 1:00 min, silent)

We haven’t had anything from the indispensable Sam Renseiw
for a little while so, just to make Monday more tolerable for us all,
here are two recent pieces, both small gems.
I particularly like the Lumière, ‘Art and Traffic’

Konx-om-Pax –Twin Portal

shanno
Twin Portal (2010, 11MB, 2:00 min)

Biog:

Konx-om-Pax is 25 year old Glasgow based Director/Animator/Sound Designer
Tom Scholefield. In recent years worked with Warp Records, DFA Records,
No-Fun Productions, Universal Everything and Optimo Espacio.

Normally I find it an effort to care much for digitally constructed worlds
with a kind of sci-fi undercurrent; it all seems a bit easy (no matter, of course,
that it probably isn’t) and usually more than a bit banal.
However this guy does it with considerable style and I found myself
drawn in. It’s the level of detail, the care with which its put
together and the sheer verve and -yes- beauty of it.
The audio is great too & I like the bipartite stucture of the piece.

Martha Deed – War and Peace

War and Peace
War and Peace (2006, 35.4MB, 2:34 min.)

Some delicate & tough poetry of the everyday &
the often overlooked (& thence of all we are & of
our place in the natural world too) from Martha Deed in 2006.

Shannon Noble – Newt

newt
Newt (2010?, 47MB, 1:48 min)

We haven’t had anything from Shannon Noble for a long time.
He’s quite elusive. His blog springs up, then disappears, then appears
again under a different name. Currently most of his stuff just seems to
be sitting, unlinked, in a folder on his site.
His work is always interesting (in the strong sense that one can
always learn from it) and hardly ever showy. Maybe his lack of need to show off
or jump up and down saying look at me, even when he’d be justified in so doing
is tied in with his apparent reluctance to promote his work.
Don’t get me wrong -I approve of the former -it makes the viewer do some work and there
are rewards to be had here for doing that work.
Here’s the first of two pieces, a bit like Robert Croma’s piece earlier this week,
not at all in mood or content but simply in being by someone who clearly knows
exactly what they are doing.
The use of sound is both deeply eccentric and wonderful.
More next week.

Edward Picot – Combine Harvester

la descente
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.

Robert Croma – La Descente

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.

Christophe Gendre – Travelling

Christophe Gendre: Travelling
Travelling (2004, 185 MB, 11:33 min)

Carefully made & delicious to watch travelogue
(although I think it conflates a number of different trips,
so in one sense it’s about travel itself as much as place)
from French artist Christophe Gendre.
More soon.

Millie Niss – Skyway

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

pink tall bike
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.

Pink Tall Bike

pink tall bike
Pink Tall Bike (2010, 50 MB, 2:16 min)

One of those does-what-it-says-on-the-can movies.
Made by Mike Stoddard & Ryan Lynch who say:

”This is our latest creation made from free bikes and parts,
comprised of three womens’ frames, bed frame iron (front fork),
and an old ATV shock.
Filmed on the Woonsocket River Bikeway in Rhode Island. ‘

…not much to add except to say it’s very diverting &
WANT ONE!

Scanner et al. – Night Jam

NightJam
NightJam (2006, 26MB, 11:28 min.)

An Artangel commissioned project from 2006 involving
sound artist Scanner working with clients of London’s
New Horizons Youth Centre, devoted to work with homeless youth.
The musical collaborators are MC Utta, MC Marcel,
MC Quick Latino, MC Magic and MC Sweetie.

Undoubtedly evocative, if a tad derivative, especially
considering the resources at play here.
The multilingual MCing is great though!

One Minute, Volume 4

Dinosaur
Martin Pickles – Dinosaur  (2010, 130 MB, 1:01 min)

1961 Revisited.
Nicki Rolls – 1961 Revisited  (2010, 114 MB, 58 secs)

Two pieces from a touring screening of one minute films,
the fourth such from British filmmaker Kerry Baldry.

It’s a really well put together and gripping hour
(transparency dictates I confess I have a piece in it
but I won’t foist that on you here), with a strike rate well above
most of this kind of compilatation.

Here are two of my favourite pieces; both, in different
ways, little gems of cinematic poetry.
Although Martin Pickle’s piece is amusing there’s
something enchanting about the changing seasonal
landscape & light of West London and how it manifests on screen,
which raises the work from anecdote to something more complicated
and lasting.

The Nicki Rolls piece had me in the palm of its hand within about a second.
(I’m a total sucker for near stillness and for the movement of light)
Then I started to think about what exactly I was watching.
You might like to give it some thought too.
Again, the twist breaks the confines of the one minute form
to resonate long after.

I haven’t see the other three compilations but I hope we could maybe
feature a couple of pieces from each in the not too distant future.

Next week we’ll have a piece by Kerry herself.

Brian Gibson – On A Roof

on a roof
On A Roof (2010, 20 MB, 2:52 min)

Sheer ravishing loveliness from DVblog’s own Brian Gibson
( I posted his last piece too, I know, but he’s not making that much these days
& what he does make is just so great, I can’t resist.)
More please!

Takashi Ito – Spacy

Private Charges
Spacy ( 1981, 14MB, 2:27)

The other day,on a whim, I bought Takashi Ito’s collected works on DVD
from the BFI shop. I’d never heard of him before.
I’m so glad I did. It is utterly compelling and remarkable work.
Spacy is an early piece and the clip here is neither complete
not particularly good quality but it does give you a taste of Ito’s early
– almost formalist – style.
There’s such delight in seeing how this broadens into the flexible,
confidently handled and singular idiom of the later pieces, where a quite
musical rigor in the formal structuring is never absent but which
also underpins a beautifully ambiguous and rich expressivity.
The whole set was one of those all too rare tingle-down-the-spine
revelations which I gulped down in a couple of sittings.
This is outstanding & important work – I urge people to become acquainted with it.

Sam Renseiw – Fragmented Occurences

Fragmented Occurences
Fragmented Occurences (2010, 67MB, 4:33 min.)

It’s a little while since we featured anything from the splendid Sam
Renseiw
, so here’s a recent piece.
In contrast to many of his films, which have an incredibly strong
sense of a particular place, this was apparently composed
from odds and ends of footage from various locations during the last
few months.
I think it works beautifully; it’s instructive to see Sam intervening,
perhaps a little more than usual, at the editing level.
(His camera work is always very distinctive – there’s often a sense
-true or not- that many pieces are largely composed in the shooting.)

Whatever the case, this is, as always, a wonderful and utterly distinctive voice.

PS This is our 1000th post of the new series. Many thanks to all who have sent words of encouragement & appreciation. It makes the time spent working on DVblog feel doubly worthwhile.

Two from Kate Dickinson

19th
19th ( 2010, 1MB, 1:00 min, silent)

are you ready
Are You Ready? ( 2008, 20MB, 52 secs)

Two contrasting short movies from Leeds, UK, artist Kate Dickinson.
The second should provoke a smile (did for me) but it’s
the first, in which not a great deal happens & in a deliberately
confined area of the screen to boot, that I particularly liked.
There’s a melancholy about its view of an overcast
Leeds landscape which is amplified by cropping a good deal of it out.
The resulting minimalism marshalls the viewer’s attention in a quite hypnotic way.

Liz Sterry – Borders

Borders
Borders (2010, 201 MB, 3:59 min, silent)

Worth every second of the download for this extraordinary
piece from young UK artist Liz Sterry, a digital arts student at the design school
in Writtle, Essex, UK*.
It’s an astonishingly assured bit of conceptual gorgeousness.
I’m particularly taken with..what’s the word.. the ..um..rightness of judgement
with which it was shot and assembled – on the surface thrown together
but everything combining so easily & elegantly to create something of
logic, power and great beauty.

*Transparency – where I currently teach.

More Steven Ball

ex Local Authority
ex Local Authority (2005, 156 MB, 6:59 min)

Over the Borough Island
Over the Borough Island (2009, 63 MB, 1:51 min)

Two longer pieces from Steven Ball some of whose
Direct Language pieces we posted here last week.
Both pieces are great but I have particular soft spot for
ex Local Authority which, although I’m sure it
has all sorts of potent intellectual justifications for being is also,
quite simply, austerely & melancholically gorgeous.

Jason Miller – Fall Was Kind

fall was kind
Fall Was Kind (2009, 40 MB, 2:57 min)

Well, we’re a season out, but it somehow feels altogether
appropriate to feature this bit of tranquil & melancholy loveliness
on a holiday day like today.

(Made, BTW, by yet another School of Athens alumnus, Jason Miller)

We’re going to take a short break ourselves now, but we’ll be back,
batteries fully re-charged, on January 4th.

We wish everone a happy & peaceful holiday season.

Annette Hollywood – Stuttgarter Filmwinter Trailer

filmwinter trailer
Stuttgarter Filmwinter – Trailer (2009, 6 MB, 58 secs)

Adding with distinction one feels to the, perhaps hitherto
somewhat sparsely populated, genre of German-Art-Country & Western
is this quite splendid trailer from Annette Hollywood for the annual
Stuttgarter Filmwinter festival.
The subtitles are in Schwabian, the local dialect, and we
reproduce both Engilsh and Schwabian lyrics below.
Photography is by Anna Go, all else by Ms Hollywood.
Fab.

for a shooting cowboygirl like me
in the cold desert of artscenery
filmwinter is like a warm campfire
and makes filmworld much higher

they bombard you with prices of honour
like this arty wolperdonger

Ed Day – Hats

Hats
Hats (2009, 123 MB, 10:54 min)

A first film from young UK actor Ed Day this made me laugh quite inordinately.
It was “was filmed over a few weeks in Jersey and Guernsey with the cast from
Oddsocks Theatre Company’s 2009 summer tour of Richard III”.

Apart from the humour what strikes home is the sheer technical ability,
wit and

Sebastian Hernandez – DIY or Die #3 – A Month of Sundays

A Month of Sundays
A Month of Sundays (2009, 65 MB, 4:54 min)

Last &, in my view, the best of Sebastian Hernandez’ DIY or Die
series of documentaries, which we’ve been delighted to
be able to feature here in the past few weeks.
I found them all well made, engaging and informative.
This one I also found profoundly moving.
We look forward to featuring more of Sebastian’s work
in the not too distant future.

42 New Briggate – a film & a call for work

Untitled 1, 2 and 3 (Bullet Series)
Untitled 1, 2 and 3 (Bullet Series) (2007, 4 MB, 40 secs)

Rather splendid film by Steven Allbutt shown as part of a film showcase
in 2007 at the 42 New Briggate Gallery in Leeds, UK.
Apart from the piece’s intrinsic merits I had said to curator Yvonne Carmichael
we’d post her call for short films to be projected in the gallery window
Dec 2009 -Feb 2010 if she sent me a nice QuickTime we could also post here.
She did & so here it is – please consider submitting something!

Two from Rick Silva

Colorado
Colorado (2008, 93 MB, 8:41 min)

Massif
Massif (2009, 142 MB, 110:13 min)

Continuing a line of thought, of work, which seemed to begin with
his 2007 piece A Rough Mix Rick Silva creates two new pieces
in the wholly original style he has forged over the past few years.
(Contemplate those last words – it’s a rare claim to be able to make)
The two big themes seem to be landscape/environment & various
remixing practices ( of which Silva, of course, under various pseudonyms,
is a we-are-not-worthy master).
Thre’s a lot of greatly well-intentioned and almost equally dull “environmental” art
around, it being so zeitgeisty and all, but if this is how is could be
I want more.
Big downloads but, even if you’re on a slowish connection, well worth the wait.
(The movies here are obviously compressed & reduced in size -I would love to see them
full on in a gallery context!)

Brian Gibson – to the young, youth

torc
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.

Regina C

videocat
Video Cat (2009, 11 MB, 1:34 min)

videocat
Aguas De Maio (2009, 9 MB, 1:19 min)

Two videos from earlier this year by Regina C