down and out (2006, 15.3MB, 2:35 min.)
A silent comedy from undergroundfilm.
by Joseph Chomiak.
Category Archives: film
A Fluxus Re-enactment: A Walk Into the Sea
A Walk Into the Sea (2006, 21.3MB, 3:55 min.)
Re-enactment by Zach Layton of Ben Vautier’s 1963
performance a walk into the sea.
Great!
Tevye – glimpse of a lost world
Tevye – clip (1939, 32.1MB, 1:27 min)
Prior to WW2 there were between 10 & 13 million speakers
of Yiddish. Today there are probably less than 2 million.
Here is an image of a lost world, the flowering of Yiddish culture
in the years of the twentieth century before the Holocaust.
This is a clip from the 1939 film Tevye by Maurice Schwartz based on
the work of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem
The film has recently been restored and is available for .
A Panopticon in Burnley
A Panopticon in Burnley (2007, 20.9MB, 1:45 min)
Great short by Giles Perkins about a piece of public art by
Tonkin Liu situated on a hillside outside Burnley, UK.
I love Giles’s Super 8 work (folk might remember
his catalogue of British seaside bathing huts here last year, don’t
know whether we’ve re-posted it yet, but we will,
gentle viewer, we will) & there’s an added bonus in the sound
of those beautiful Lancashire vowels – ‘uor ouwses’ – on the soundtrack.
Delicious!
Guy Maddin – Brand Upon The Brain
Brand Upon The Brain (Trailer) (2007, 3.47MB, 1:34 min)
Brand Upon The Brain (Foley) (2007, 4.92MB, 3:20 min)
Brand Upon The Brain, a new feature film by Guy Maddin, tours the US this summer accompanied with a live orchestrations by Ensemble Sospeso.
Maddin’s fantastically extravagant Super 8 films are always enchanting and the additional elements of live music, sound effects and narration by quirky celebs is sure to delight cinephiles of all ages. I was lucky enough to catch it in NYC last week with Crispin Glover as a very charming narrator, but the three Foley artists nearly stole the show. You can see them hard at work in their lab coats in the rehearsal video. Looks like it will have further distribution later this year with recorded soundtrack and narration by Isabella Rossellini.
Film
Film (2005, 1.6MB, 17 sec loop)
“It’s Prelinger Archive footage of 1920s London.
Method:
(1) Make a virtual ‘film strip’, a long jpeg.
(2) Make a virtual ‘projector’ for this in Director.
(3) Export it all to QuickTime & Bob’s your uncle.”
syzygy
syzygy (2001, 18.6MB, 3:51 min)
This tiny film gem was made by my brother, artist and graphic designer,
Noah Scalin. It was made as part of a Super 8 challenge.
Watch to the end and see rules of this game.
And then, I dare you to try this at home.
By Mica Scalin.
Nick and Sheila Pye – The Paper Wall
Django and Grappelli
Hot Club of France Live (1938, 12MB, 3 min.)
A beautiful old film of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli
playing their signature Hot Club jazz.
Silas & Mange
Silas & Mange (1927, 14MB, 4 min.)
I have always had a thing for silent films.
Rob Sosin and Kevin Maher star in these twisted vignettes,
the restored (1999) films of long dead silent picture stars Silas and Mange.
from Thrillomedy.com
Helen Park – slow burn poetry
What Godard Said (2005, 29MB, 5:19 min.)
Two pieces, extraordinary in both ambition & affect,
from filmmaker Helen Park.
It takes a little while, ‘it did for me’ then not only
does the quiet ecstacy of the thing kick in, but your
mouth drops open at how boldly and confidently this
world grows & blossoms from very simple & at first
apparently unpromising material.
Helen Park also maintains a rather good vlog.
Belleville Rendez-Vous
Belleville Rendez-Vous (2003, 6.2MB, 2:08 min.)
A deliciously dark and twisted French comic animation film
in which a “Tour de France” cyclist is kidnapped by the Mafia.
Directed by Sylvain Chomet.
Lynch’s Inland Empire
Inland Empire UK trailer (2006, 13.6MB, 1:53 min)
OK, so there’re the famous rabbits.
It’s only just come out over here so I haven’t
seen it yet but it sounds great.
The New York Times certainly thought so.
UK site
US site
“Je suis Marxiste, tendence Groucho”
from ‘A Night at the Opera’ (1935, 1.6MB, 50 sec.)
from ‘A Night at the Opera’ (1935, 1.7MB, 1:19 min.)
From the excellent & mind-bogglingly comprehensive
‘Night at the Opera’ treasury, two clips from the Marx Brothers classic,
the first of which includes the best punchline ever, no argument, the best.
Trailers – Recuts – Twists and Turns
The Shining (2005, 9.5MB, 1:24 min.)
Stanley Kubrick classic horror as a romantic-comedy family flick.
A masterful trailer cut by Robert Ryang.
Sleepless In Seattle (2005, 19.4MB, 58 sec.)
This is what happens when the ultimate chick flick gets
the horror/thriller trailer treatment from – Demis Lyall-Wilson.
Untitled Iowa
Untitled Iowa (2007, 31MB, 5:57 min)
Gorgeous & deft chunk of Americana from Aaron Valdez
with all the Hoppery, Wyethy, Portery &c nods
but nonetheless standing nicely on its own feet
For my taste that high reverby modal piano(?)
tiptoes along the border of clich
For Sore Eyes – Anders Weberg
For Sore Eyes (2006, 23MB, 2:17 min)
I like this (though what I mean by that is sort of provisional; read on)
& also it, the piece, bothers me a lot.
I watched it once, context free, then I read a statement Anders Weberg supplied*
and quite honestly still felt pretty context free, and it’s that very elusiveness
which makes me say I like this and it’s that very elusiveness
which makes me say this bothers me, a lot.
Questions:
# Is the woman drowning, fighting for breath?
# If she is drowning & we find the film in some sense beautiful
are we then complicit in something terrible?
# Or is she frolicking in the water & does the slo-moness &
the sound mislead or, perhaps, just lead us.
# Is the footage appropriated or was it shot especially?
# If yes, was it slow in the original?
# Was the image treated in any way other than (possibly) being slowed down?
# Did either the music or the sound come with the original?
# Either way, is the provenance of music & sound different?
# It sounds like the sound really is the sound of something
(perhaps something terrible, I don’t like to think) happening underwater.
Is it?
# Is there a general lightening of tone just before the end?
# Does she free herself from the water?
# Is she now safe?
# We’re happy because she’s safe. Does this feeling
in us represent a cop out by either filmaker ( if there
are two, the original & the appropriator), a failure to follow
through,a failure of nerve?
# Or is she just leaping from her frolicking in the water,
shaking it from her hair in a kind of elemental ecstacy?
# Why is everything so dark?
# If everything is OK why is everything so dark?
*‘For Sore Eyes is another exploration of the ambivalence of the male
gaze and gendered (dis)order.
It is a suggestive reflection of life in the
pyrotechnic insanitarium of consumerism freedom.
But what really is freedom?’
High and Dry – Music from Tucson, Arizona
1Z0-803
High and Dry Trailer (2003, 8.6MB, 1:53 min.)
Trailer for what looks like a really neat film about the Tucson music scene.
Main attraction of this trailer for me is that it features the God-like genius of Howe Gelb.
but I’m sure it has other merits too.
8 halfmile – Fellini remixed
8 halfmile (2006, 6.9MB, 2:21 min.)
“Fellini’s classic film re-mixed Eminem-style…”
by – The AV Club, from Film Threat.
Lost Worlds
Wakefield Gala – clip (1920s?, 1.1MB, 23 sec.)
Munitions Factory – clip (1940s, 884KB, 21 sec.)
Berry Picking – clip (1950s ?, 891KB, 20 sec.)
Three clips from the Yorkshire Film Archive in the UK.
& a glimpse of some lost worlds.
It’s a crime more of these films are not digitised & available
for immediate view & that the online documentation is so poor.
Makes one doubly thankful for the wonderful Prelinger Archive…
Isaac Julien – DV and film work
Encore II (radioactive) (2004, 11.5MB, 3:31 min.)
Isaac Julien is one of Britain’s most innovative and provocative filmmakers.
He has been involved with forging a new language around black representation.
Although his works largely retain a conventional narrative approach, they are shot
through with strategies which then serve to disrupt the stability of this narrative.
Above – Encore II from tank.tv.
Vagabondia (clip, 2000, 6.6MB, 1:46 min.)
