More Landscaping Views (2010, 54MB, 3:47 min)
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’
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (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!
