Camouflage Lenses: independent, experimental, avant-garde films and cinegrams

Cuadecuc, Vampir: 1970 Spanish Underground Dracula Film Shot as Attack on General Franco

2011-11-12T16:05:00.000-08:00

Here's an extremely rare underground Halloween treat for anyone who loves film. Ah, but only the very fewest of you will actually watch this all the way through! Give it a try. Not only is this film underground... it's underhanded. Pere Portabella made 'Cuadecuc, Vampir' in 1970 by filming on the set of a Christopher Lee film called 'Count Dracula' that was being directed by Jesus Franco. Portabella's underground classic is on its surface a silent horror film. But it's also a documentary about the making of the Dracula film. It tells its story by stealing scenes from the feature being shot around it, almost as if the film were a mashup of existing footage! The high-contrast black and white photography evokes such cinema greats as Carl Theodor Dreyer's 'Vampyr' and F.W. Murnau's 'Nosferatu.' We see typical horror scenes like a stagecoach racing through the wilderness, or a dusty crypt, interrupted by the arm of a prop person using a fan to blow fake spiderwebs or a cameraman shooting from behind furniture. These slippages from horror into documentary actually produce a weird terror when you realize that the film was being shot under the watchful eyes of Spain's dictator, General Francisco Franco. What the film really is underneath all the fantastic and disturbing imagery is a vicious attack on Franco and the false media manipulation that keeps all dictators in power. The portrait it paints of Franco himself is one of a sad, disturbed and largely ineffective vampire who lives inside a mental construction based on the past. The other characters in the film seem to be wandering through this psychotic realm, trying to find a way out.

The soundtrack incorporates jet engines, muzak, electronic music, opera singing, jackhammers, stuck records and various other electronic sounds. Don't let this throw you because the soundtrack is one of the most eerie and unsettling that you will ever hear.

And I'm thinking that Criterion needs to jump on this and make a nice blu-ray release out of it.

Pere Portabella has a web site.

Now, just for kicks, here is a scene from the actual color film of Dracula being shot while Pere Portabella stole his own film right under Christopher Lee's nose! You decide which film seems scarier.

The Dystopian Trilogy: A Film by James Schneider

2011-11-12T16:02:00.000-08:00

James Schneider made 'The Dystopian Trilogy' in 1993, mainly through the use of found footage. Its three parts, 'Faerie-Monition,' 'Oasis,' and 'Median Strip,' convey modern Americans' infatuation with closing off entire communities from the rest of the world for some theoretical benefit. The first part deals with the corporatization and homogenization of imagination through eerie footage of Euro-Disney. The second part focuses on a gated community near Las Vegas. The third contrasts and connects the freedom of the modern highway to the growth of our prison system and the fast-growing outrage of private prisons run for profit. This last part, when seen in light of today's use of immigration law to fill corporate-owned prisons with people who are turned into a slave workforce, is particularly frightening.

One Day Occupy L.A.: A Film by Alessandro Cima

2011-10-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

I went down to the demonstration to make a film. I liked the people there. They were very focused and happy. They were talking, explaining, arguing, educating, dancing, singing, playing, making signs, painting, photographing. Some of them made speeches at the microphone. Some read poems. There were lots of cameras.

The music and words in this film are by Tom Morello (http://nightwatchmanmusic.com), former Rage Against the Machine guitarist. He sings his own 'Maximum Firepower' and Woody Guthrie's 'This Land is Your Land.'

The mood at City Hall was high energy and cheerful. The underlying anger and frustration of the movement seemed to be moving through a positive channel. It was exciting but also comfortable there because of the people and their open attitudes.

The Los Angeles police headquarters is directly across the street from the protest grounds. That's where I began shooting my film - right into the windows of police headquarters. Several squad cars drove up First Street, but there was not a single cop anywhere near the protest area. The crowd is organized and respectful, but also very serious about its messages which are various and multifaceted.

The city has taken a protective stance over its protesters. I'm very proud of Los Angeles for this.

Occupy Los Angeles is one of the spreading protests coming out of the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York. Hopefully, the incredible momentum of the movement will continue and be heard very clearly across the country and the world.

The simple messages that I get from the protests are that government cannot function while it is under the control and influence of corporations. The economy cannot function properly while corporations and their extremely wealthy owners are allowed to operate without oversight and control. The country cannot pave its roads or build its schools or house its people while corporations and the wealthy play with money that is nearly tax-free, removing it entirely from the real world economy. The country cannot function as a democracy while its politicians and Supreme Court justices are working for corporations. The country cannot be free while racism and bigotry are increasingly seen as legitimate reactions to change. The country cannot be secure while corporations are given the power to run wars and people's basic privacy rights are removed.

That's what I see in the Occupy movement.

If every city in the U.S. could have as fine an Occupy movement as Los Angeles, they would be very lucky indeed.

Detective City Angel: A Film by Alessandro Cima

2011-09-29T11:51:00.000-07:00

Here's the YouTube version of the film for those who might not want to load the full HD version.

Detective City Angel: A Film by Alessandro Cima

2011-09-27T09:37:00.000-07:00

Want to follow a secret identity artist through a dangerous Los Angeles as he escapes and hits like a criminal? Hang on and watch carefully. You may need to watch it 14 times to catch the drift. But you've probably got that kind of time anyway.

This is a Los Angeles crime film. But it's as if several films on celluloid fused together and what you end up with is an art film that gets overwhelmed by urban documentary and then collapses into a narrative thriller. It's filled with hints, clues, evidence and misdirection. Images, ideas and sounds bounce off each other, mirror each other. There are secrets in this film. You have to watch carefully, through layers to catch things. I've tried to make a film that moves like disjointed thoughts toward the preordained ending.

During part of the shooting we found ourselves quite amusingly right smack in the middle of what was obviously a criminal lair. We had to leave quickly. But we returned with a very rapid coordinated sneak attack to film at the place several hours later. You'll never guess which scene in the film I'm talking about.

Underneath everything is the city of Los Angeles and its power over the imagination. The grimy and false facade of the city distracts observers and its inhabitants from the deep power of its mythology. If there is any American city where the ancient gods play, it is Los Angeles.

In my film, the increasing association of the artist with criminality is central. The artist as a secret identity is a perfect and unexplored area for film noir. This is probably the overriding concern of the film. The artist constantly under threat but using that threat to drive the creative impulse, even in the face of death.

The dark, gritty elements of film noir, especially that of the Los Angeles brand, inform everything in this piece. Various personas or aspects of the personality fight for identification even while running for cover. One part of the mind kills off or suppresses another, wants to be dominant and unknown at the same time. Unconscious forces create images that reflect one another, contradict, and foreshadow.

Secrecy, identity, escape, art as crime, artist as troublemaker, the anonymous creator who controls events, the protection of the delicate and easily destroyed creative impulse, the conflict between experimental and narrative film, the inescapable instinct toward narrative, the mask worn as both expression and protection. These are some of the themes I am at least touching upon.

It's a sort of psychotic noir film. The noir of dreams.

With a couple of brief exceptions, everything in color was shot in Los Angeles over the past 11 months. The music is by Kevin MacLeod who offers his incredible compositions through http://incompetech.com. The actors in the narrative portion are Joshua Fardon, Renato Biribin, and Laral Cima.

This is a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) production.

Filmed in Los Angeles December 2010 - September 2011
Canon DSLR and HDV cameras
Produced by Candlelight Stories, Inc.

Music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com
Music is licensed as Creative Commons non-commercial - no derivs - attribution

Digital B&W archival footage from the Prelinger Archives at the Internet Archive - archive.org/?details/?prelinger and from the public domain feature collection at archive.org. However, some B&W footage was projected from 16mm directly into certain scenes as they were filmed.

The Hyrcynium Wood: Short Film by Ben Rivers

2011-08-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

The 'Hyrcynium Wood' is a 2005 experimental film by British filmmaker Ben Rivers who tends to work with old film cameras and 16mm. I like the layered misty anxiety of this short film. Rivers has a couple of films showing at this year's New York Film Festival.

Mater Suspiria Vision - Mania

2011-08-20T10:03:00.000-07:00

Here's a video by Cosmotropia de Xam for Mater Suspiria Vision's 'Mania.' It's a celebration of elegant murder and destruction of the body made by remixing a horror film by an Italian/Egyptian director of adventure and horror films, Riccardo Freda.

Beauty and Love Are Another Song - Song About the Youth Uprising in England

2011-08-16T20:55:00.000-07:00

Michel Montecrossa's latest video examines the desperation behind the rioting in Great Britain. His direct and heartfelt approach works to cut through all the recent bullshit about the rioters being simple thugs with nothing more on their minds than robbery and destruction. Riots are open wounds that erupt after enormous damage has already been done to a population. The seething pressure is always there for a long time before exploding in everyone's faces. By definition, riots involve damage and robbery. What else would there be to do at a riot? Riots are anger and desperate hopelessness that cannot be controlled. Yes, of course one must punish people who burn down buildings. But one must also have the intellect and social responsibility to seriously look at why children and adults would feel so awful that the only thing they can think of doing is burning down a city. That is serious rebellion and it is going to spread. The world is under incredible economic pressure and the people who suffer understand that governments tied to extreme wealth and corporate interests are responsible. Populations are going off like bombs. The uprisings in the Middle East are directly connected to the uprisings London because both groups of people have become aware that the same corporations control what happens in both places. The dictators and authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are kept there because they provide certain corporations with efficiency in the region. Assad is exterminating people in Syria because it is convenient for Western companies and politicians that he do so. The Western governments have wanted globalization and now they've got it. Globalization of uprisings and riots. One must remember that the riots in Great Britain were started by a policeman who killed a young man. A policeman who chose, just like the policemen in Syria, to point his gun and fire a bullet into the body of a human being. A violent reaction to such an act should be expected in most cases.

Michelmontecross.com

RETINABALL! : A Bang Wash Film

2011-08-16T14:59:00.001-07:00

Have you seen any of the films from Bang Wash Productions? I hadn't until today. Fantastic. I'm always utterly confused by underground things and how they operate but I enjoy them nevertheless. This film is from its two stars, Becky Lawn-Darte and Dang Steele. They also made the music. The film is an intensely fluorescent trip through sensory experimentation. The video is the message. The color hurts when experience is focused. The lo-fi approach is beautiful, concerning itself only with the creation of absolute image. In other words, it is not possible to work as a painter if you are worried about your camera. It starts off like a caper movie and then gets into secret device territory where it veers off into a volcano movie and then brings us into an analog 3D viewing glasses world of portable television, puppet shows and well-spoken pop music.

Seizure: A Magnificent Cry for Art by David Vaipan

2011-08-16T11:52:00.000-07:00

At the start, I'll say that this is one of the most magnificent films I have seen in years. David Vaipan has made this relentless and fully-committed scream of artistic intent, desire, confusion, effort and love. This is a film about being an artist. It is a film about fear and confidence. About effort, will and failure. Vaipan simply takes the entire history of art and all that it has given him and dumps it out on his desk and turns it all into his own material. All of art, music, film, literature and poetry become Vaipan's crayons and he uses them to tell his own personal story.

The film bombards with imagery. Just gaze in wonder at the crayon animated memoir that's presented like a little puppet theater show. It moves from birth to boarding schools to Wall Street and beyond with effortless skill. The drawings are amazing and funny. Just when you think you've seen plenty Vaipan moves into a stick figure run through the history of art and it just keeps coming at you. He cuts and chops and mixes and slides and just keeps streaming the grandeur of art at us like a force of nature. He's completely lost inside the world of inspiration. He sees the fear of getting lost in the pile - the fear of being ignored - and he literally revels in the fear itself. He makes the fear seem like something to seek. This is a grand and important statement from someone who I think is a young artist. The tools of his trade are digital and he uses them freely with a wild eagerness to explore that is extremely difficult to maintain. The unabashed use of video effects and computer equipment as if they are the oil paints and charcoals inside a painter's box is one of the hallmarks of the emerging American video art movement.

I can see the influence of Ryan Trecartin's work in this. There's a familiarity with digital layers that is of primary significance in this recent art. There's a hard-edged willingness to allow the digital processes to show through. It's sort of a freedom with the computer and video that means one doesn't have to make anything necessarily look the right way or look like something it isn't.

You have to really watch this film very closely and try to catch the pieces of the roaring mass of art thrown at you. Even the ending credits are a complete statement in themselves with the director drunkenly singing the Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy For the Devil' in the background.

So many people are part of this film. Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Jean Luc Godard, Maya Deren, Luis Bunuel, Stanley Kubrick, David Foster Wallace, Michael Snow, Agnes Varda, to name but a few.

I know that the intertitles and other things flash by too quickly to grasp and maybe that intimates something about the info-age and attention spans, it's why your lord Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, invented the pause button and that's also why the real Creator (one D. Vaipan) put this on the internet rather than wherever, because you have control.

See? That's one of the little treasure waiting for you in the end credits of this gigantic and raving epileptic fit of a film that should ultimately bring you close to tears and make you want to explode in all directions and actually truly and finally... make something!

Here is the artist's web site.

Short Film: Subcollision (59 Seconds to Death)

2011-08-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

The filmmaker prints the following quote alongside the film: 'Somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom.' - Luis Buñuel

Interesting. I post this because it is a perfect example of how modern cinema and its major movements and aesthetics are being investigated and decided not in theaters or film festivals. It's being done on the web. The artistry and overall aesthetic in web cinema is vastly superior to what is made by the studio system, whether it be major studios or smaller independents. There is no comparison anymore. It's very unusual to walk into a movie theater anymore and see anything relevant to modern cinema. You cannot find anything that builds upon the major achievements of the past. All you can find is someone who has improved the hydraulics of a Steadicam system. Ask yourself this question about the modern cinema: if you are filming with a hand-held camera and running, why would you want to smooth that out?

The smoother you are, the stupider you are.

Works like these by a filmmaker on Vimeo called Origins examine cinema's past and try to build upon language developed during various movements like the French New Wave of Godard. When else in the cinema's history have we had such a well-educated population of filmmakers making their work available to all for free?

'The Auteur is dead. The future is cut-and-paste movie mashups.' - Jean-Luc Godard

Here's another Origin film called 'Contempt at 16mm.'

The Incredible Remix Films of Cosmotropia de Xam

2011-08-01T19:09:00.000-07:00

When I look for films on the web I always hate it when I find well-produced films on sites like Vimeo that are made by filmmakers who treat their films as business cards leading to bigger things. When I make a film I make it for that little box on the white web page. I work like madman on those films and play them on the web because that is why they are made. This filmmaker submitted work this week to my Vimeo short films group and I was stunned by it.

The filmmaker, Cosmotropia de Xam, makes these beautiful haunting films for a European band called Mater Suspiria Vision. The films have a deep involvement with cinema and exist for themselves. They include transformed shots from 70s horror and exploitation films, but they are reborn in a totally unique and individual art form that stands on its own. Gorgeous. Captivating. This filmmaker is well aware of the great underground work in film going back fifty years. These films have depth and illusion. They seek the magic and the demons. Really fine work.

Many more films by Cosmotropia de Xam can be seen on Vimeo.

Voices: Documentary on Jean-Luc Godard Filming 'One Plus One' with the Rolling Stones

2011-08-01T18:49:00.000-07:00

Here's a film begun by director John Stember and finished by cameraman Richard Mordaunt. It shows Jean-Luc Godard working on scenes from his film, 'One Plus One,' that featured the Rolling Stones as they recorded 'Sympathy For the Devil' in 1968. Godard always has something nearly unintelligible to say but which ends up making perfect sense later on. You might also note that Godard seems to have very little in the way of a plan as he shoots his scenes. He appears to discover his scenes as he goes. That is the only kind of intelligence in filmmaking that I can truly respect. A director with a storyboard is usually a jackass.

Thanks to Paul Gallagher at Dangerous Minds.

Short Film: Attackazoids!

2011-08-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a wild underground science fiction short produced by a company called Robot Hand. This fun and narratively loose assault on the alien invasion/mechanical overlord genre was directed by Brian Lonano and uses old-style lo-fi analog techniques for its special effects. The apparently concerned and helpful robots seem intent on wiping out every last vestige of life on the planet. Maybe they come from Wall Street!

Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film has posted more about the filmmakers and festivals showing their work.

Jim Jarmusch Short Film: INT. Trailer. Night

2011-08-01T18:47:00.000-07:00

This is Jim Jarmusch's short film contribution to a 2002 double feature film compilation project called 'Ten Minutes Older.'

Pier Paolo Pasolini - The Form of the City

2011-08-01T18:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a 1973 film with Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini talking about the need to protect the basic form of a city because it is an expression of anonymous popular history. Pasolini believed that modern consumerism was destroying Italy in the early seventies more successfully than fascism.

Short Film: Plot Device

2011-08-01T18:45:00.000-07:00

Seth Worley made this very fun and amusing tour through plot and genre as a sort of advertisement for Red Giant which provides filters used in video editing. A struggling video maker happens upon a 'plot device' and all sorts of trouble begins. Each segment has its own unique and appropriate look achieved through the use of Magic Bullet filters.

Wall - Ethos: A Film by Alessandro Cima

2011-05-06T09:25:00.000-07:00

Brazilian artist Claudio Ethos works on his first Los Angeles art piece. I happened upon him down on Main Street and thought he was a worker about to paint over a painting of a face. I started shooting and after several minutes realized that he was the artist.

One Dead Angel (Part 1) - A Film by Alessandro Cima

2011-02-27T16:32:00.000-08:00

I have removed the video because the full film is nearing completion. The title has been changed to 'Detective City Angel.' I will be posted here in a month or so.

This is part 1 of my next film. It stands alone as of now however.

With one brief exception, everything in color was shot in Los Angeles over the past several months. The music is by Kevin MacLeod who offers his incredible compositions through http://www.incompetech.com.

The dark, gritty elements of film noir, especially that of the Los Angeles brand, inform everything in this piece. Various personas or aspects of the personality fight for identification even while running for cover. One part of the mind kills off or suppresses another, wants to be dominant and unknown at the same time. Unconscious forces create images that reflect one another, contradict, and foreshadow.

Secrecy, identity, escape, art as crime, art as trouble, the anonymous creator who controls events, the protection of the delicate and easily destroyed creative impulse, the conflict between experimental and narrative film, the inescapable instinct toward narrative. These are some of the layered themes I am at least touching upon.

It's a sort of psychotic noir film. The noir of dreams.

I like to work with a basic overwhelming drive toward an atmosphere or elusive set of central images and an undefined goal. I then submerge and produce images driven by immediate instinct. I also search for existing images by using a very fast, reflexive search method that only allows certain specific things to flare into view, selected purely by instinctive means. I trust that these impulsive decisions will be guided and informed by an unconscious will which is totally submerged in the film's atmosphere or world. I treat the images that I have filmed and the images that I find elsewhere in exactly the same way. They are all part of the archival pile that must be sifted. It's simply an act of recognition at this point. A filmmaker can scan a 90 minute film in super fast forward for 2 minutes and land on specific images that will have direct application to a project. I think it is this super-fast scanning of lengthy archival material that is a new development in filmmaking. It can only be achieved through digital means. No one was ever able to work this way in an analog medium.

There is an element of the William S. Burroughs cutup method at work here. But it actually goes further because it forces the artist to do the cutup with his or her mind, not any mechanical or arbitrary means. The cutup method becomes an act of will that is very close to unconscious. I find that incredible and unforeseen connections can only be made unconsciously. They do not happen with advance planning or scripting. In some respects, one must be an actor in one's own creation. One must be both creator and subject.

Filmed in Los Angeles December 2010 - February 2011
Canon 60D DSLR camera

Digital B&W archival footage from the Prelinger Archives at the Internet Archive - http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger and from the public domain feature collection at http://www.archive.org. However, some B&W footage is projected from 16mm directly into certain scenes.

Music by Kevin MacLeod at http://www.incompetech.com

Demo Images From New Film by Alessandro Cima

2011-02-16T15:08:00.000-08:00

These are low res screen captures from the rough cut of my new film.

The new film's initial demo version will have a title like 'One Dead Angel,' or 'Little Dead Angelino,' or 'One Last Angel,' or 'Black Angel Hood,' or 'Hidden Black Angel.' Or none of those. Don't know yet. Each image I slip into the film reshuffles the whole damn deck.

Secrets, identity, noir, Hollywood, vanishing, murder, beauty, romance, fear, chase, thriller, who done it (whodunit), LA, crime, forensics, art.

Those are pieces of my film demo 1.

Culture Shock, Level One – A Film by Bill Mousoulis

2011-02-16T11:58:00.000-08:00

Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film posted a film by Bill Mousoulis called The Experimenting Angel. I liked it. So I've posted another of Mousoulis' films. It features Jennifer Levy who returns from a long absence to Australia and feels dislocated while visiting a city. She wonders why the people seem so 'deflated' as they wander through various public/corporate spaces like malls. The film captures something increasingly common worldwide which is that quiet, blank, but seemingly normal behavior encouraged by any structure designed and erected with a corporate idea behind it. We all know how we are expected to behave when we walk past a row of Gaps, Starbucks, Banana Republics and Wetzle's Pretzels. We obey. We perform the routine and go about our business making sure that we are perceived as correctly normal. We are guests in someone else's house, even in our public spaces. We behave like new guests, ingratiating ourselves to the dome camera in the ceiling. The cell phone is the absolute symbol of complete obeisance to the corporate superstructure looming above us. We are told to engage in meaningless chatter while we walk, drive, breathe, eat, date, watch movies, run, bike, and work. We are told to do this until it seems like normal and seems to make perfect sense. It is as logical as being told to drop a penny on the ground every third step for every day of your life. Steve Jobs tells you to leave him a penny on the ground every third step of every day of your life... and you damn well do it. You know how many times Steve Jobs uses a cell phone during an average day? None. Why? Because he's much smarter than you are.

Nightlife in a Puddle - A Film by Fabio Scacchioli

2011-02-07T14:45:00.000-08:00

Fabio Scacchioli is an Italian filmmaker who turns ordinary shots on Super 8 film and video into magical and mystical pieces about memory and all that it does for us. I am always impressed by his work and how he finds the perfect moments to let glimmer through the haze to catch us unaware. I maintain that as we move further into the 21st century, we are developing a new cinema completely removed from the theatrical aspects of the last century's cinema. It is filmmakers who do not try to make films that look like American features who will make the new cinema. Filmmakers making films that look like American features are looking at forms as outmoded as 19th century theatrical works were during the age of the early silents. The new cinema is as natural and immediate a form of expression as writing or painting.

I know that Scacchioli is currently working on something new and I'm looking forward to seeing it. I've posted on CandlelightStories.com about Scacchioli's work before.

Glass Boulevard

2010-12-28T17:19:00.000-08:00

Filmed in the dullest imaginable environment of shops along a major Los Angeles street at night when the shops were closed.

My Christmas film.

The music is a public domain recording of Artie Shaw and his orchestra playing 'There's Something in the Air' in 1936. The singer is Peg LaCentra. I found it at the Internet Archive.

Fire in My Belly by David Wojnarowicz

2010-12-08T11:21:00.000-08:00

This is the film by David Wojnarowicz that the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery decided to remove from a recent exhibition because of some politically motivated protest focused on its brief images of a crucifix covered with ants.

Now other museums with slightly more educated staffs are showing the film.

An activist who hung an iPad round his neck to show the film while he walked around the Portrait Gallery has been banned from the gallery for life.

There's nothing wrong with making images that insult religion. There's nothing wrong with an artist or anyone else using a religious icon for purposes other than worship.

And there's nothing wrong with walking around the National Portrait Gallery with an iPad around your neck.

The Smithsonian is filled with idiots who have no strength - no courage - no conviction. No art.

Horror Short: Helping Hand

2010-10-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

This is a graphic horror film. It's not intended for young children. If you are under 13, do not watch this before discussing it with your parents! Seriously. Also, you should probably not watch it if you are at risk from sudden fear, anxiety or shock.

A woman answers the phone late at night and does not recognize the voice on the other end.

This is my own contribution to the specific horror genre exemplified by the series of Saw movies. It also has some of the qualities of the moral warning fairy tales in which awful things happen to innocents because of relatively minor errors in judgment.

It's really fun to make a hardcore scary little movie for Halloween! I've wanted to make a horror film for quite a while and just never had the perfect opportunity. It's a very simple film but it can really give some people a bad scare.

I set out to make a horror short the way I might have done it as a twelve year old. In fact, the film pretty well sums up my thoughts on what horror films really are, how they build suspense and anticipation through a series of ordinary events and actions viewed as slightly askew.

Of course, horror should always have some kind of payoff.

This was filmed entirely without digital effects. It's all analog like the old days! Lots of fun. I love horror shorts and will try to make another one soon.

Enjoy and have a Happy Halloween!

Film: Prénom Ernesto

2010-10-14T20:24:00.000-07:00

Marvelous movie! Prénom Ernesto was made by Gabriel Dib and it stars Ernesto Salles as Ernesto and Debora Gaspar as Anna K. It's in Portuguese and I don't understand more than several words of it but I don't have to. It's a wonderful film that is inspired and heavily influenced by the work of Jean-Luc Godard. The filming of traffic at the beginning of the film is a Godard signature, the gunshots on the soundtrack, the sudden on-screen titles and the quote from Godard that goes, 'All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.' That's essentially what this film is about. It's shot with that casual sense of people interacting with objects that Godard perfected in the early sixties. Dib has made a very careful and productive study of Godard's technique and uses it in a way that shows how fresh and modern it still is.

Bike Parked in Fake Snow

2010-10-13T11:07:00.001-07:00

Looks just like a real bike parked in real snow. But it's a trick. A horrible trick.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.3

Samuel Beckett's Play, 'Krapp's Last Tape', Starring Harold Pinter

2010-10-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

The late British playwright, Harold Pinter, stars in the Royal Court Theatre production of Samuel Beckett's play, Krapp's Last Tape. It's about a man listening to himself.

Charles Bukowski Documentary From 1973

2010-10-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

In 1973, future An Officer and a Gentleman director Taylor Hackford made this public television documentary about foul-mouthed poet of drinkers and streets, Charles Bukowski.

The crater-faced legend of a brawler poet is interesting for about five minutes and then begins to look to me exactly like a poseur. He would have knocked me down and stepped on my head for saying so. But it doesn't make a bit of difference. The guy had lots of marvelous talent, but he was a bullshitter. Anyone who mentions bullfighting and Ernest Hemingway in the same breath on camera is bullshitting somebody in a big way.

Drinking, bars, dumb women, fights and horse races are a tiresome brew and this man lived at the bottom of the bowl. Sometimes you just have to be willing to admit in the final analysis that F. Scott Fitzgerald was the real man all along. Hemingway was the poof. It's always the guy wearing the boxing gloves that you need to put the lipstick on.

Bukowski the bullshit artist. Enjoy.

Thinking About Underground Film - Part 1

2010-09-30T20:16:00.000-07:00

If you live in Los Angeles you've probably seen it many times: the caravan of white trucks parked along the block and around the corner, diesel generators roaring, cables strung along the gutters, piles of lights, rolls of cables, racks of costumes, makeup trailers, bored extras, bored crew members, bored motorcycle police, and fascinated passersby.

That's all you need to see to know that something mainstream - feature film, TV show, or commercial - is being made.

But what's an underground film?

Bad Lit, my favorite site devoted to underground film, has an article about the problem of defining something as slippery as 'underground film' in which several definitions are offered by different people. Mike Everleth, the site's editor, defines underground film this way:

"Essentially, I believe it is a film that is a personal statement by one person and a film that dissents radically in form, or in technique, or in content, or perhaps in all three. However, that dissension can take on any number of forms."

I agree with that, but would add the requirement of hostility. There should be an element of combativeness which attempts to counter a much larger established force. There must be some rebellion in the work. It can be very subtle - nearly imperceptible - but it's usually there somewhere. In fact, I think the hostility should even tend to include the general culture surrounding the filmmaker/s. Dissent, by itself, can be rather subdued, soft-spoken and shy. I think underground film requires a willingness not only to dissent but to kick apart.

While thinking about all this mainstream versus underground stuff, I went searching around on YouTube for something that might fit the discussion. I found this peculiar British documentary film about filmmaker Donald Cammell who co-directed, along with Nicolas Roeg, the 1968 film Performance. The film is one of those odd mixtures of underground and mainstream. It features Mick Jagger and involves a lot of mind-bending drugs, sex and criminal underworld shenanigans. It's actually impossible to forget once you have seen it.

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

The documentary, Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance, describes a time when a group of intensely creative artists from various disciplines could operate on the fringes of the mainstream to create an essentially underground film with something resembling support from a mainstream production company. It's a scenario that does not exist today. If you watch all 7 parts of the film, you will be immersed in that strange hybrid world of the 'popular underground' that defines much of what was happening in the 1960s and 70s. Today, if it cannot be jammed into a mall and sold with Sour Patch Kids, it won't get any money. That holds as true for 'independent' films as it does for summer blockbusters.

Watching this documentary makes me wonder why so many filmmakers seem to have such trouble making the films they really want to make. After all, one can purchase a cheap camera and make exactly what one wants regardless of what one's career and money-earning responsibilities might be. Tormented filmmakers who are battling studois for creative freedom should simply make films with video cameras during their spare time. This would not only foster a healthy underground, but it would quite possibly prevent a few tragic endings.

Film: Velocity

2010-09-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

Official selection at CINEME, 2003 Chicago International Animation Film Festival.

This is a short film that I started back in 2001. 9/11 happened and I put the film on hold for almost 2 years. When I returned to it I was able to finish it in several months of hard effort. I was working with Flash and my process was kind of awkward. The drawing is actually very crude. But the film came out decently. It got into a Chicago film festival in 2003 and it has remained in its Flash form on CandlelightStories.com ever since. It was recently shown by NewGrounds.com as part of their 'Treasure Hunt' festival of animation.

But getting the film out of the Flash ghetto and into video proved to be more work than I thought. So I've made a few little updates and improved some of the film effects a little. So now the film is actually closer to the film I was imagining back in 2001.

Yellow Plastic Raygun Wins Best Experimental Film Award at Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles

2010-09-13T23:02:00.001-07:00

Well I'm just very pleased about this. The Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles has given my film, Yellow Plastic Raygun, the award for Best Experimental Film. I was having quite a nice week attending various parties and screenings at the festival. Its use of multiple locations in the heart of downtown Los Angeles gives one a real sense of taking part in the life of the city and being involved with something that's helping to foster the exploding art and film scene in downtown. Most of the short films were screened in the new Civic Center Theater at the intersection of First and Main Streets, in the shadow of the famous City Hall tower that has appeared in so many crime shows and film noir classics. I attended the screening of my own film this past Saturday evening and was amazed at seeing it large since I had put so much work into it on small monitors. What's great about the Downtown Film Festival is that it shows a wide range of filmmaking styles, crew sizes and budgets. They show films made with lots of production resources right alongside films made by individual artists working with inexpensive HD cameras and even cell phone cameras. I am very proud to have won this and I look forward to more great festivals in downtown Los Angeles from the people who put this together.

It Shines and Shakes and Laughs by Matthew Wade

2010-08-31T18:02:00.000-07:00

Here's a film that was an official selection at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2009, Zero Film Festival L.A. and True West Cinema Festival in 2008. It Shines and Shakes and Laughs was made by Matthew Wade. He shot this on Super 8 mm color reversal stock. There's an easy unhinged nightmare quality to the film which ultimately turns into an expression of fear of domesticity, I think. That engagement ring against the clouds is my favorite shot.

Le Labyrinthe by Sabrina Ratté

2010-08-31T11:00:00.000-07:00

The Sound of Eye experimental film/music blog recently linked over to Camouflage and that made me happy because I'm always a little stunned when someone takes my work seriously. It makes me feel like I have to suddenly get more productive and work harder. Filmmaker Sabrina Ratté was also recommended recently by The Sound of Eye. This particular film, Le Labyrinthe has a mysterious walk into a jungle landscape and a doubling of the explorer. I do like seeing two of her, I must say. I could watch many of her walking around the jungle for quite a while in fact.

She goes into the leaves and we can hear her footsteps crunching softly on the ground. This anchors her in reality. But her observations blend and shift, mixing with the landscape. She is being absorbed.

Film: Yellow Plastic Raygun

2010-04-15T22:10:00.000-07:00

Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

You can watch in resolutions of 360p, 480p, 720p HD, and 1080p HD. I think the best compromise for quality and loading speed is the 480p resolution. You can also watch it in HD on Vimeo.

I may do a part two of this film. For now, this is the film in full.

The film is science fiction because it concerns the use of memory images for time travel. The powerful imagery of the singular event - the horrific event - is etched forever in the mind, yet it becomes fluid and its influences cannot be entirely trusted. What led up to the singular powerful event? What course was set following it? In what way would the entire world be different if the event had been avoided or not seen? Not recorded? If, as scientists say, the fundamental particles of existence change location or cease to exist when observed or not observed, then what about events in memory? Or events simply residing in the past?

If one asks, 'Why are we here?' Well, I think the answer is obvious. We are here to remember things. We are memory.

It's difficult to see a star clearly if one looks straight at it. Looking just off to the side can clarify the star in one's perception. Going back in time to recover something lost is very much the same. One is sometimes forbidden to look directly at the object sought. One must keep one's gazed shifted slightly or risk losing the memory entirely. This principal has been understood for a long time.

So putting one's eye on something like a yellow plastic raygun, or a car, for example, might in fact sharpen one's vision and allow an accidental recovery or a transfer to take place.

Odd thoughts? Yes, well maybe so. Very much like the thoughts that run through one's mind before sleep completely obliterates consciousness.

The film uses a mash-up of archival footage, drawings, digital painting, new video and video I shot many years ago. The imagery is very layered and attempts to duplicate the way images move through my mind as I circle around my ultimate objective which is sometimes nearly unknown. There are a multitude of connections and meanings to be drawn from the sequence of images. Some meanings might be very obvious, others would be almost impossible to predict.

Yellow Plastic Raygun: Film Images Part Two

2010-04-15T19:19:00.001-07:00

Images exported from my upcoming Yellow Plastic Raygun. Sometimes the picture isn't in the main frame; it's in between.

The first set of images is here.

Alpha City Double
Dream Road
Crosswalker
The Way Back Home
Tap That
Love Lights
Going Deep
Bang the Thing
Any Kind of Spaceship
Incoming

Yellow Plastic Raygun: Film Images

2010-03-10T22:18:00.000-08:00

For Only Your Eyes. These images are from my upcoming Yellow Plastic Raygun. Distilling single frame images is almost as much fun as making the film. What kind of a film does it seem like?

Second set of images is here.

Traffic Flow
Wave Rider
Planetary Intersection
War Drive
Hairpin
Whatever You Do, Don't Look Back
Telefog
Gun Sight
Vision Rays
Mourning Sun

Videos From Haiti During and After Earthquake

2010-01-14T16:03:00.000-08:00

This video shows shocking scenes of the carnage and death just after the earthquake in Haiti on Tuesday, January 12. It is extremely graphic. It shows dead and severely injured people. This is terrible and tragic news from a desperately poor nation that has no medical infrastructure to deal with the injured.

YouTube's CitizenTube Channel is maintaining an updating playlist of videos taken on the ground in Haiti just after the earthquake and during rescue attempts.

You can donate to the Red Cross International Response Fund. Also, giving blood is always one of the very best things you can do because it fills the blood banks and can be used almost anywhere.

You can also donate to Doctors Without Borders, which is putting medical personnel on the ground in Haiti to assist in saving lives.

One extra and disgusting note: on his Christian Broadcasting Network today, televangelist Pat Robertson told viewers:

And you know, Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it, they were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon the third and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil, they said, we will serve you, if you get us free from the Prince, true story. And so the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.' And they kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free, and ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. . . the Island of Hispaniola is one island cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is, is, prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty, same Islands, uh, they need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God. And out of this tragedy, I'm optimistic something good may come, but right now we're helping the suffering people, and the suffering is unimaginable.

I'm going to be very clear about something. What this awful man is saying is truly disgusting and belongs back in the Middle Ages. This is deeply primitive and racist thinking which is an embarrassment to our nation. If you are watching this creep on television, please seriously reconsider what you are doing.

Jean-Luc Godard's Film Impression of the Twentieth Century

2010-01-05T21:32:00.000-08:00

L'Origine du XXI Siècle (Origin of the 21st Century) - Part 1

L'Origine du XXI Siècle (Origin of the 21st Century) - Part 2

Jean-Luc Godard made this film as a short opener for the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. The film can be perfectly well understood without subtitles. It is a work of incredible beauty and horror. Looking back over the twentieth century, I believe Godard is simply showing us what runs through his head when he thinks of the twentieth century. Naked dead people. Dirt. Guns. Uniforms. Mobs. Armies. Sex. Cinema.

Watch the film closely and you will see various sex acts interspersed with images of grotesque horror and cruelty. Godard shows us a closeup, near the beginning, of a woman gently touching her body. There are several impressions of languid sexual behavior in the midst of all the chaos and desperate movement. I think these shots are a denial of the death march surrounding them. An attempt to adhere to the human - to life. It requires a mental effort to move from the feelings of sexual desire and love, regardless of how base they might be, into the world of frightened refugees who hardly even understand what they are running from. Pleasure requires a certain serenity, a place of repose. You must remove yourself somewhat from your surroundings in order to enjoy the humanity of sex and love. How does a person, stripped of their burning clothes, running through mud, escaping the bombs, being raped and tortured, watching their friends die, ever love again or even come to think of a quiet moment in a neat room where they can touch another person?

Godard sees the twentieth century as mechanized death. Everywhere. We think of the twentieth century as the moon landing and modernity. Progress. Machines. Beautiful cars. Computers. But the century really stands out, not for its progress, but for its vast unrelenting murder. It was the century beyond all others for the wiping out of human beings. Our progress is an illusion. Most of the world has not even seen a telephone. The twentieth century was built on a pile of burning bones and rotting flesh. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the introduction to our brand new twenty-first century. We ain't seen nothin' yet.

New Film: Rain On My Flower

2009-12-19T11:22:00.000-08:00

My new film is a silent one about wet, foggy colors. It was raining in December and the roses looked droopy under the weight of the water droplets. Then the camera started going in and out of focus and I thought it made a good color show so I started to learn how to make it happen more and how to make the focus flutter. So I think that what is out of focus in the film is more important than what's in focus.

New Film: Revisit November North Five

2009-12-02T22:50:00.000-08:00

Here’s a new film for the film fans who happen to stumble by. It’s a film about memory shifts, searching, losing something, trying to find the old image, trying to regain an old feeling or impression, capturing a season of life or the mind. As if one were thinking, “I can almost remember how it was and what we did that day so long ago. Where were we again? North somewhere? It was dark? No, the sun was out… wait, it was cold… I think.

New Film: View From a Corporation Window

2009-10-13T07:57:00.000-07:00

My latest is a landscape really. This one is a very straightforward abstraction. It's a view sort of seen in miniature - as if through a small aperture. The way you move by the same view over and over again without ever really seeing much. Blind on blind.

New Film: Lunch With Bardot

2009-06-10T20:08:00.000-07:00

My latest little film. It's actually a cinegram. The subject is trains. Time. Memory. The present doesn't exist. You can't find it with measurement. You can't even define it. The future is not there yet. You cannot see it. The only thing that really exists is the past. I say that because we can all see the past - some more clearly than others. But we can most certainly see it.

Here's the poem from inside the movie:

Lunch With Bardot

Trains run on time
With passengers asleep
Temporarily forgotten
Between observation points
Colliding lines
Of fictional transport

Philips Carousel Commercial is a Freeze-Frame Police Shootout

2009-04-23T09:01:00.000-07:00

Philips has a new super-widescreen television coming out that is in true cinema proportions. This 'freeze-frame' film is their advertisement for it. It's a beautifully produced police shootout with a gang of clowns at a hospital. It's got obvious Joker overtones and is just so damn creepy and weird. Adam Berg is the filmmaker. As I watch it I wonder how they did it. You can go over to an interactive version and move through the film slowly. The techniques used become more clear that way. It's really one giant stitched-together image with some CG inserts. It really works.

'Kingdom of Moderate Sunshine' on No fat clips!!!

2009-03-29T15:04:00.000-07:00

DeK at No fat clips!!! has posted my latest film, Kingdom of Moderate Sunshine! I'm very proud of that because I think DeK runs the best cinema site on the internet. DeK finds films, understands them, finds excellent quotes to go along with them, and posts them in all sorts of formats for viewers to enjoy.

I go to No fat clips!!! all the time to see what filmmakers are up to around the world. This is the first time I've been included in the list of films there. Thank you to DeK at No fat clips!!!

New Film: Kingdom of Moderate Sunshine

2009-03-14T20:50:00.001-07:00

You should make sure to press the 'HD' button to get the best image in the player if your connection can support the large file size.

I wanted to make the kind of film that might play on Winston Smith's telescreen in his Oceana home from George Orwell's novel, 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' This thought was not in my mind at the start of making my film, but as I worked on it I began rereading the Orwell novel and realized that my instincts were following right along the lines of his thinking. The concepts of 'doublethink' and 'newspeak' came naturally to me as I began to assemble my film. I'm interested in the techniques and mind-control efforts of fascism. The use of expressions that are at once meaningless and obvious fascinates me. Orwell uses phrases like 'Ignorance is Strength' for his language of the Party. Once you start thinking along fascist lines and trying to create according to fascist mythology and will to power, it's pretty easy to come up with strange phrases like, 'True History Refurbishment.' That's one of mine from the film. The combining of this kind of language with images that play against each other in the same way creates an almost frighteningly fascist work.

Here's something interesting: a Daily Mail article about the rise of fascism in Austria and Europe today. Look at the images in the article and compare with images from my film. Amazing huh?

I had originally set out to make a film that criticized the use of fascist art techniques for political purposes in the U.S. The primary example of this currently is the famous picture of Barack Obama by artist Shepard Fairey. The poster is powerful but strikes me as bizarrely fascist in its technique and focus on the hero personality gazing upward toward some grand future above all our heads. Pretty damned terrifying if you ask me. But I'm obsessed with the whole idea of it and what drives people to start using this kind of imagery. So I had wanted to make a short film that objected to this kind of thing. But as I worked, I realized that I had made a weak choice. Far better to make an actual fascist film from some mythological totalitarian state that had mastered all the methods of population and mind-control through sound and image. So that's what I did.

The dense layering of images that I used to create new compositions and emotions incorporates many different elements. I used original HD footage that I shot recently, artwork I created in Photoshop, computer-generated voices, machinima footage that I shot directly off of a plasma television screen while manipulating the game characters with an Xbox 360 controller, public domain government films, documentary footage, corporate films, images of graffiti, training films, porno films and old western films. I found that the wealth of footage freely available from Archive.org was my most valuable asset. It required many hours of searching and scanning for just the right shots for the impressions and meanings that I was interested in for my film.

So, yes, I have created a truly despicable bit of fascist totalitarian social training that tries very hard to convince the viewer to be a good working member of the 'Collective.' But the great thing about working this way is that the humor and unwitting self-criticism leaks out through every shot of the film. It's almost as if the repressive state trying so hard to convince everyone of its strength and noble cause, just can't help but make fun of itself without knowing it.

Since the film uses text so closely related to the images I've classified this as both a film and a cinegram.

Sita Sings the Blues: Nina Paley's Feature Online

2009-03-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

Above is part 1 of the film. Go to the YouTube playlist for the other nine parts.

Sita Sings the Blues is a feature animation by Nina Paley. It is based in part on the ancient Indian Ramayana, but combines this with stories from the animator's life. The film incorporates some 80-year old jazz music by Annette Hanshaw. Those recordings are public domain but the compositions are not and the owners will not allow Ms. Paley to sell the movie containing the copyrighted compositions. So public television, which operates under unique rules concerning copyright, broadcast the movie and offered it in full on their web site. Now, the animator has offered the film for free with a Creative Commons license in many formats, including HD.

It's a wonderful film that is bursting with color, enthusiasm and sheer raving talent. Enjoy it.

Jean-Luc Godard: Still Making Things

2009-02-09T21:43:00.000-08:00

In film, we ignore our great thinkers and practitioners at great peril to ourselves. For my entire life, I rejected any consideration of Jean-Luc Godard. I dismissed him as a pretentious, dull intellectual who threw text around on the screen to hide bad filmmaking. I had seen 'Breathless' and had a memory of two people in vivid and somehow ultra-modern black & white climbing on top of each other and walking on a bed in a tiny apartment room. But I dismissed the director as a one-film-wonder and refused to see anything more by him.

Until one year ago.

I have been reading a good book about Jean-Luc Godard and watching as many of his films as I can find on DVD. He's still working. He's still there. I'm glad I managed to find him while he's still working.

I enter a room in mid-afternoon knowing that my camera is only a few feet away. The light comes through the kitchen window and makes shadows of potted plants on the white porcelain tile. The trees outside sway and it seems like rain is coming. I know that there are scenes I could film here. They are all around me in this room with its strange light. I could grab my camera and with the proper attitude make an incredible film. Right now. Immediately. But it's hard to do. It's a battle to persuade one's self to attempt it. I begin to feel foolish. I struggle with myself and laugh at myself for imagining that out of the great universal pile of YouTube videos a single film taken in my kitchen could possibly amount to anything at all in the mind of a single viewer. Nietzsche, in 'Thus Spake Zarathustra,' writes about how one's self is one's greatest enemy and will begin to doubt and mock one's own thoughts and noble efforts.

I view Godard as someone who has spent a lifetime leaping fully into this battle and winning it. He would look around my kitchen, pull out his video camera, turn a gas burner on and film it without a pot to heat. He might talk about holding his palm to the fire and then pressing it against his lover's cheek to burn her. He might briefly show a scalded and blistering hand, a palm print on a cheek, a car bomb exploding next to a busy marketplace. And he would have a film. I think he has fought consistently to make film a nearly mental act. As much a mental act as writing a novel or a poem. I think he is perhaps closer to this achievement than anyone else in the history of cinema. He appears to be willing to put himself into his work the way a writer might. Not a screenwriter. A real writer. I don't think Godard gives one tiny bit of a damn about screenplays. He uses a camera to write. Like Brakhage scratching celluloid with his fingernails.

Last night I watched 'Contempt.' I've read that Godard was unhappy during this shoot and couldn't stand working with Brigitte Bardot. But it's one of the greatest films about marriage that I've ever seen. She is magnificent in it. Mysterious and irrational and like a curse to all foolish and driven men. Once again, I come from a Godard film with a vivid memory of a man and a woman stalking each other in an apartment. Climbing over one another and scrambling across a bed. Almost like a prizefight. The film is forty-six years old and looks like it was shot just last week. Godard is the most modern of artists. I look at his work and I suddenly know what the word 'modern' means. It has nothing to do with being recent. I think it might be something to do with light and the way people behave in it and react to it. How they gaze at or through windows and engage with structures and how they move into or out of the light. Modern. Microsoft didn't name its operating system 'Windows' for nothing.

Here's a short film called 'Une catastrophe' that Godard made for the 2008 Viennale film festival.

Here's is a piece of his enormous 10-hour 'Histoir(s) du cinema.'

Well I certainly want to see all the rest of that. It's spellbinding. I like the way he talks about how Italy was the only country that could resist the domination by American film in the 1940s. How he says the language of Dante made its way into the image and made Italian cinema great. I believe him because the images make me believe him. I want DVDs of this history of cinema. I want them badly.

I got into a big fight in a movie theater this past Saturday night after seeing a Swedish film called 'Let the Right One In.' At the end, a friend of mine said, 'Boy! The pace of that was just unbearable.' I snapped, 'Forget every stupid thing you've ever heard about Hollywood films. It's a disease I recognize. The disease of timing. Timing. You think films need to blast along on a railroad track, gaining speed until the big crash at the end... don't you?'

I'm just that kind of asshole. Three of use made our way up Fairfax Avenue yelling at each other like several idiots. But I meant it and I'd say it again.

But see, Godard doesn't even think the railroad tracks exist. There's no train and there's no end.

So Godard now works in his studio with video equipment. I wonder if secretly, under some indecipherable username, Jean-Luc Godard might be uploading work everyday onto YouTube. Would he do that? Wouldn't it make sense? Perhaps he's shooting video in his kitchen everyday and making something magnificent for us to see. I want the link if it exists!

Thomas Wolfe Said...

2009-02-07T19:14:00.000-08:00

Are we mistaken in assuming that the whole vocabulary of abuse which is exhausted every week in the journals of our red and pink-complexioned comrades - the sneers against a man's talent, the bitter denials that his work has any substance, sincerity, truth, or reality whatever - is really what it seems to be? No doubt we are mistaken. It would be more charitable to believe that these pure spirits of the present day are what they say they are - collective, selfless, consecrated - and that the words they use do not mean what they seem to mean, and do not betray the romantic and deluded passions that seem to animate them, but are really words used coldly, without passion, for the purposes of collective propaganda - in operations completely surgical, whereby the language of the present day, with all its overtones of superstition, prejudice, and false knowledge, is employed clinically, scientifically, simply to further the Idea of the Future State!

No more, no more! Of what avail to crush these vermin beneath our heavy boot? The locusts have no king, and the lice will multiply forever. The poet must be born, and live, and sweat, and suffer, and change, and grow, yet somehow maintain the changeless selfhood of his soul's integrity among all the crawling fashions of this world of lice. The poet lives, and dies, and is immortal; but the eternal trifler of all complexions never dies. The eternal trifler comes and goes, sucks blood of living men, is filled and emptied with the surfeit of each changing fashion. He gorges and disgorges, and is never fed. There is no nurture in him, and he draws no nurture from the food he feeds on. There is no heart, no soul, no blood, no living faith in him: the eternal trifler simply swallows and remains.

And we? Made of our father's earth, blood of his blood, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh - born like our father here to live and strive, here to win through or be defeated - here, like all the other men who went before us, not too nice or dainty for the uses of this earth - here to live, to suffer, and to die - O brothers, like our fathers in their time, we are burning, burning, burning in the night.

Thomas Wolfe
('You Can't Go Home Again' published in 1934)

Brilliance Exploding Out of Echo Park Film Center

2009-02-06T17:52:00.000-08:00

Look at this. It's ragingly brilliant. It's a film called 'La Vida Nueva' by Kaymen Barber at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles.

I love the shots going down the streets while shooting out of a car. Just wonderful. This film grabs attention and does not let go. It keeps hitting you with people who want to tell their stories to the filmmaker. You know, it's not easy to get people to want to tell you their story. Not easy at all. This Kaymen Barber has some serious talent and better not stop making movies because he's going to waltz himself straight into a professional filmmaking career and blow a few directors I know clear out of the pond.

It looks like the film is shot with a silent camera and then sound is recorded later. Frankly, I think the technique is totally captivating and it is something I never would have thought of. It's so good in fact that I want to steal it. That's how good it is.

Here's another film. It's called 'Thick Strings and Shredded Cheese,' by Carla Orendorff.

This is a young filmmaker learning fearlessly. She's good. This film is moving in a very simple and direct way. I love the shots of the photos and the spools of thread. The way the filmmaker animates them on the table. I've never seen that before. It's something new. To do that in the middle of a documentary with a voice telling a story is a very unique and wonderful approach.

Here's yet another. It's called 'Spray Cans and Stencils.' It's by John Tavares. It's about artists and what they do.

I think what you have here are three artists showing their respect for each other. The two spray can and stencil artists are doing their thing for the film artist and the sense of mutual understanding that comes through this film is very subtle but unmistakable. I love the quick shot of the painter taking a digital photo of his work on the wall. He is serious and proud. As he should be. This is a fascinating documentary that I wish lasted at least an hour because I want to see more.

I once had a big conversation with friends about how best to find real intelligence in kids aside from IQ tests and things like that. I said that if you want to find intelligence you go and hand cameras to kids and see what they make. That's one way you can find someone's mind. But I never had the will to prove it. It looks to me like someone down at the Echo Park Film Center is doing this and it's paying off. I haven't been down there yet, but I think it's a great place anyway. I can tell from the films.

Echo Park Film Center also has a YouTube Channel.

United Kingdom Ready to Jail Anyone Who Photographs a Cop

2009-02-03T20:14:00.001-08:00

If you like photographs, stay the hell out of the United Kingdom. The straggling Western nation appears to have not noticed that the unconstitutional Bush junta is no longer in power in the United States and persists with its little-partner notion of a totalitarian security apparatus defending itself against... well... defending itself against civilization. The thug nation has decided to give police the authority to stop people who are photographing police in public. They are already doing this to an alarming degree, but now it will be an offense punishable by 10 years in jail.

The logic is that someone might be trying to elicit information about a police officer that is likely to be useful in an act of terrorism.

It would be useful to have a photograph of a police officer's shiny round face because then we would know exactly how to shoot something directly into the officer's mouth. Is that what the new law protects against?

I would not under even the remotest of possible circumstances ever travel to the UK. It has become utterly barbaric and is a total surveillance police state. Also a helpful British gent in a hurry once dropped an entire ice cream cone onto my ex-wife's blouse in the West End. But if I did go there, would it be acceptable to pull out my camera and imagine inside my private little mind that my Nikon was an AK 47? Nikon. AK 47. If I aimed it at a fat Brit cop and imagined pulling the trigger and sending a hot lead bullet through his unsuspecting head, would I be committing a thought crime that might lead to an act of terrorism? If I imagined his undersized head exploding in a spray of scarlet and dull gray puffballs of brain against the 'No Littering' sign, would I be committing an imagination offense? If I thought of my shoes all sticky and dripping with his blown off face as I tried to scrape it onto the curb, would I be offending and likely to commit an act of terrorism? What if I took a picture and then Photoshopped the cop into a smashed and broken body on a London sidewalk and hung it in a fancy gallery? What if I used thick red paint to write giant letters across my photograph that said, 'Clean Up Your Dead Cops Or Else.'

Perhaps I will enter Great Britain on a sly low-flying radar-proof night flight and disembark all in black with a knapsack full of James Bond terror and make my way to the GPS point of my imaginary crime. I will pull my Nikon AK 47 and pull press the button trigger and fire take a shot at of an imaginary police officer with a tin pot on his head that will pop off into the air and clatter to the ground as his cranium swells into a horizontal mushroom and bursts shards of bone in a perfect exit circle to stipple the display window before his body curls to the sidewalk in a lazy gelatinous slump.

How about that, Great Britain? Are you listening, home of Shakespeare? Wistfully remembering when you were a civilized nation? Are you reading my mind? Are you angry? Frightened? Suspicious? Taking all this seriously? Analyzing? Storing? Registering? Confident you've got me figured out?

Hey, what if I shot Shakespeare and blew his brains all over the Prime Minister? Words. Words. Words. All over his shirt. Red words. Black words. White words. Spraying out like a water cannon shooting gasoline.

Remember, poets don't teach. They destroy.

Read the poem, k*nt It was written specifically for the poor fallen UK. It totally pissed off the moderators at BoingBoing.net really bad because I slapped it into their comments area and when they censored it I told them they were a bunch of hypocrites pretending to defend freedom of expression. But I play nice with them and read their posts, but still they're pasty super-duper white cream goofballs. I mean, if you can't print 'k*nt' in your blog, what's the fucking point?

Away: Cell Phone Camera Film from NFB Online Catalog

2009-01-25T18:15:00.000-08:00

Filmmaker Peter Mettler shot 'Away' on his cell phone camera in Costa Rica. His subject matter is how disconnecting from technology or the modern world can sometimes lead to a better use of technology. In this case, he lets technology lead him toward artistic expression. This fellow is a real camouflage lens. The film is beautiful and it has ended up in the catalog of the National Film Board of Canada.

There is Only One Sun: Sci-Fi by Wong Kar Wai

2009-01-25T15:50:00.000-08:00

I'm very happy and also very ornery about what I'm about to say. Firstly, Wong Kar Wai is one of my favorite directors. He's the Hong Kong filmmaker who's made Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love, and 2046, among others. His films are fantastic swirls of color and he totally loves to film womens' feet. I don't know if it's the feet or the shoes he's in love with, but I think whatever he chooses to photograph ends up looking like he went shopping on another planet and came back with an entire film. He's incredible and he is a light-artist.

Well, he's gone off and made what might turn out to be my favorite science fiction film of the past five years. It's a ten-minute short called There is Only One Sun. But he shot it as a commercial for Phillips televisions. That's really too damned bad. A fucking commercial. I guess he took the money and was fascinated with the television company's fixation on bright vivid colors and crystalline picture quality. Whatever. Phillips can go take a dump. Pioneer makes much better television screens anyway. Wong Kar Wai wins the exchange and leaves us another masterpiece. I'm sure he ripped Phillips off in some clever way. I would. A gigantic multinational corporation asks me to make them a big juicy commercial. Well, I'm damn sure going to bamboozle them right on down the road and slip a little artistic time-bomb right under their nose. That's what this film is.

Look at these beautiful images from the film then go watch it here on NoFatClips. By the way, I found this film via an excellent short film blog called Short of the Week.

The Spider: Animated Short

2009-01-25T15:09:00.000-08:00

Director Juan Delcan of Nola Pictures made this short animation of a poem by Gabor Barabas. Apparently, the spider animations are inspired by the work of sculptor Louise Bourgeois. I like the ever-flowing background and the way the lines transform so smoothly from one shape to another. I like the poem also.

The Spider from Juan Delcan on Vimeo.

'9': A CGI Film by Shane Acker

2009-01-24T11:31:00.000-08:00

'9' is a short computer animated film by Shane Acker, produced while he was an animation student. It is being made into a feature film by producer Tim Burton. The original short sets a fascinating apocalyptic mood and builds to its climax with expert precision. The little burlap sack character holds my attention as he or she deals with spare parts from old machines and fights off a life-sucking metal insect creature. The character appears to be fighting to preserve something - perhaps the life force itself.

Here's the original short film:

And here is the feature film trailer:

I look forward to seeing this one.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' Speech

2009-01-19T12:10:00.000-08:00

This is the speech that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered on the Washington, D.C. Mall in 1963. It is quite possibly the greatest speech delivered in the United States since Abraham Lincoln's 'Gettysburg Address' and 'Second Inaugural Adress.'

It is possible that the past eight years of terror and bigotry from an American presidential administration can be overcome. That's my dream.

New Film: 'Christmas Black'

2009-01-11T17:03:00.000-08:00

The sun is low and cold when Christmas time comes. The lights flicker and dark boxes are slowly opened. Trees spin round faster and faster until the light explodes.

The film uses two movements from Respighi's 'Pines of Rome.' The music and film start slowly, quietly, as if conserving or gathering their resources. Then the music builds to a martial crescendo and the film images begin to fragment.

This film took me the better part of two months to make. It uses footage taken during December and some older footage that fit the subject matter. Last night when the moon was full and apparently showing at its largest for the year, I went out and took some video of it and decided that the shots were the missing element that I had been puzzling over for the past several days while editing my film. The editing took me about a week to complete. There are many connections to draw between the images that appear. Some of them are very quick, but the overall impression should be a little bit on the mystical side.

I've been very impressed lately by the work of Kenneth Anger. His underlying mystical concerns and his total lack of fear in his image-making are extremely important. He makes me think that it is the intent behind an image that determines whether it will become a part of memory or not. If you see a cup in a coffee commercial, you don't remember it five years later. If you see one in a Kenneth Anger film, you remember it forever. The intent behind an image functions a bit like magic.

I don't necessarily completely like everything Anger has made, but I admire his willingness to film beauty that frightens people. There are many very tough and hardcore underground filmmakers, but I think there are very few who are unafraid of actual, shocking, terrifying beauty.

Marcel Duchamp In His Own Words

2009-01-09T20:57:00.000-08:00

I found a film about Duchamp. I've always liked his playfulness that never overpowers his keen eye for beautiful forms. He created art objects that he called 'ready-mades.' Films are sort of 'ready-mades,' aren't they? Watching people like Duchamp gets the brain working in a different way. Suddenly the lamp on your desk becomes more interested and full of unique possibilities. What if I lit the lamp and balanced a leg on top of it? Or a pair of eyeglasses glued onto a gun as a sighting mechanism?

That's the kind of thing Duchamp does to me. He plays with notions of art. But he plays seriously.

I am ready to post my new film. It's called 'Christmas Black.' Then, after that, I think I'm going to make a very nasty, blunt film that will combine real world photography with some video game footage. Like machinima, a technique I've used before. The story will be simple: an off-duty police officer stands in his apartment. He leaves. He walks several blocks and approaches a passerby from behind. He shoots the passerby dead and is suddenly standing in his apartment again. He leaves. Walks. Shoots another person. And so on and on... It will be two things - an interesting point of view on what video games do best and a loaded cinematic gun aimed directly at the cop who killed the subway rider on January 1, 2009. It's my little way of helping to metaphorically get rid of him. Art is anger, baby. Put it in someone's face and pull the trigger. Then just hope for the best.

Here's the Duchamp film. Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Oakland Erupts in Violent Protest Over Filmed Police Killing

2009-01-08T07:57:00.000-08:00

This is what you get when a police officer is filmed shooting a helpless individual in the back:

Oakland protests turned violent last night over the killing of an unarmed man who was lying face-down on a subway platform by a uniformed BART officer. The killing was performed in front of onlookers with cameras rolling.

And still we must all ask: Why has the cop not been arrested on suspicion of murder?

The photos above say plenty. But here is an iReport from CNN with Oakland youths explaining why they are so angry. One of them calls the killing 'a modern day lynching.'

BART Police Officer in Oakland Filmed While Killing Helpless Man

2009-01-07T17:32:00.000-08:00

Subway riders in Oakland, California shot videos on their cellphone cameras of a group of police officers handcuffing several young men on a subway platform. A couple of the officers throw a man face-first onto the ground, sit on him with their knees and then one shoots him to death.

There's lots of video of this horrific killing.

Here's one angle on the homicide. The killing happens at the 1 minute 15 second point in the video. Watch the officer in the back pull his gun, aim it and fire it into the man's back.

Here's another angle from which you can clearly see the officer drawing his weapon and aiming it down at the victim:

This alleged police officer shoots a totally helpless man in front of dozens of onlookers while being filmed!

The alleged officer's name has been released. He is apparently Johannes Mehserle of the BART Police Department in Oakland, California. So, there are news reports that this man is being moved from place to place in order to protect him from harm because he has received death threats.

People with cameras filmed this police action starting well before the seeming execution. Why would they do that? Possibly because they knew there was something suspect in the police activity. Watch the video of the moments just after the killing. Look at the other police officers. They're just standing there. A man has been shot in the back and these other jackasses are standing around as if someone's received a parking ticket. Do these officers have Nazi regalia in their homes? Are they skinheads? Are they Ku Klux Klan?

Cities burn for stuff like this. Rodney King. Remember? The cops only beat that guy with sticks and Los Angeles went up in riots and flames. This man was shot to death in public in Oakland. Looks like murder.

Protests are forming.

BART officials have made statements urging calm until the facts are known. BART can put the facts up its ass. The facts are on video.

Questions:

Why wasn't the killing officer arrested immediately on suspicion of murder?
Why do the other cops stand around looking bored after the killing?
Why are the bystanders already filming from so many angles well before the killing?

2008 Holiday Animation

2008-12-24T11:27:00.001-08:00

Here's a holiday animation I did for CandlelightStories.com. All the backgrounds and scenic elements were painted in a cheap software package called 'ArtRage.' The character and animation were done in Flash CS3.

You can watch a high-definition version on the home page at CandlelightStories.com.

Have a very happy holiday and an excellent 2009!

Hero Journalist Throws Shoes at Bush

2008-12-14T15:08:00.000-08:00

This is the first person in nearly eight years to react rationally and intelligently to the presence of George W. Bush in the same room. During a surprise visit today in Iraq by Bush, an Arab journalist took off his shoes and threw them directly at the supreme asshole of the Western World. I cannot think of a better thing to do than to throw shoes at this son-of-a-bitch. In the Arab world, showing someone the sole of your shoe is a terrible insult. To actually throw your shoe at a person is to call that person filth.

In the history of the United States there has not been a president who has conducted such a brutally violent assault on freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, freedom from illegal detainment, freedom from torture, freedom from illegal wiretapping, and freedom from fear itself. This prick and his friends have been torturing and killing thousands upon thousands of people. They have prevented journalists from even taking the photographs that they should be taking during a war. They have lied in order to conduct the invasion of a sovereign nation. Journalists in the U.S. are too frightened to even write critically of this creep or to adequately investigate his acts. Much less to throw their shoes at him. Several weeks ago, as Bush ascended a podium holding many of the world's leaders at the G20 Summit, they all refused to shake his hand. It was the first behavior from world leaders toward Bush that seemed suited to him.

I suspect that the Iraqis will go easy on this man because they all secretly agree with what he did. It was not any kind of life-threatening act. I think anyone who understands what this awful man has been up to for the past decade would agree with throwing shoes at him. I have not seen a more beautiful expression of the world's hatred for this man than this magnificent shoe-throwing display.

Once the worst president in U.S. history has left office, those who are too afraid to speak out about what he has been doing will begin to talk and then this shoe throwing episode will be remembered for what it really is: a great big 'Fuck You' from the journalists of the world. This Arab shoe-throwing journalist is a true camouflage lens.

Perhaps with all the stress associated with being so hated and reviled by all the world's leaders, Bush will get cancer. Then he will wither. And finally go to hell.

The shoes. The lovely shoes.

Bad Lit: Digging Underground Film

2008-12-09T19:46:00.000-08:00

Bad Lit - The Journal of Underground Film (Badlit.com) is a good film blog. There are a lot of crappy ones around, but Bad Lit just keeps putting real stuff up there and I keep finding things I want to read about. For instance, a couple weeks ago I came across this post about filmmaker Kenneth Anger and I got curious about this artist who knew the Rolling Stones and a Manson killer. So I read the article written by Bad Lit's founder and owner, Mike Everleth. I watched Anger films called 'Lucifer Rising' and 'Invocation of My Demon Brother.'

I thought this was some total rocking scary good stuff that was trying to turn my insides out. My point is that what Everleth writes about gets me interested and gets me searching for more. His site posts film clips, reviews, underground film news and events, biographical information about filmmakers, a listing of films called The Underground Film Guide, and film festival news.

It's a good film site because the guy writes like he loves underground film. He doesn't sound like he's trying to get a part time job at Columbia University. I'm amazed at how little I know about underground or avant-garde film. I'm trying to make some of my own while learning about the great filmmakers at the same time. So I go out browsing around for web sites and blogs about film and I end up ready to shoot myself in the head. It's almost impossible to find a site that simply discusses films and actually posts things you can watch. YouTube is just a giant hard drive. It doesn't count unless you're talking about their Screening Room which works well, though they tend to focus on middle of the road short film stuff that you'd expect to see at your local Academy Awards ceremony. I don't know if most of these bloggers are students or what but I gotta say 99 of 100 film sites just bore the living shit out of me. Then there's a site like Bad Lit and I just start searching around in there and find all sorts of treasures. Here's a very recent post about some guys who have made a short horror movie promo that's modeled on 70s slashers. That's cool. It's some people with a camera and some initiative going out and making something. Very nice. That's why video cameras exist. Here's another post about a filmmaker in New York who walks around with a video camera and makes documentaries that get put out on DVD. Fantastic. Perfect. Everleth writes about the guy's films with obvious enthusiasm for both the films, their technique, and for the city itself.

I browse around on Bad Lit a little bit more and I find this filmmaker:

Very well done that little piece there. So I wish there were more good film sites. There are not. But Bad Lit is one.

New Cinegram: Venture Forth Wicked Beauty

2008-12-02T10:27:00.000-08:00

My new cinegram is about a woman and a rose, ashes, projections, a bottle, a walk through the night. I won't be much clearer than that. A cinegram should not announce its intentions. It should bury them and allow them to drift up through the ground.

It took more time to make this one because it uses a more layered soundtrack than my other pieces. Also, the rose and flame scenes were very difficult to film because I wanted the light of the projections to flicker across the scene properly. Moving the camera in such close up conditions made everything an effort.

I am really enjoying YouTube's new high quality video settings. They've gone to widescreen format with normal and high-quality settings. Though their high-quality video isn't as high-definition as other sites like Vimeo, the motion is much smoother than either Vimeo or BlipTV. I find the inability of those sites to encode hi-def video without frame stutter to be inexcusable. YouTube has figured out the problem and maintains the smooth motion as it was originally shot. The image quality is good enough. So YouTube wins. Smooth motion is much more important than sharpness of image.

Argine: An Animation With Creativity On Its Mind

2008-11-14T15:39:00.000-08:00

Julia Simeon has made a film called 'Argine.' It is a series of still images rendered in a 3D program and edited together. It's simple and beautiful. But what is it about? Watch first.

It is a film about the origins of creativity. It shows how originality is not the prime mover behind creative endeavor. Imitation is. The innocent drive to imitate that which inspires and excites is the primary force behind all art. That does not mean that one never does anything original. But the impulse to 'do something just like that!' should always be there throughout the creative life. To this day, I open a book or magazine, see a picture and think, 'Oh man! I want to take pictures just like those. Then I will change them to make something new!' I firmly believe in what this little film has to say. It is dead on the mark. Its creator has seen, admired, copied and created something of her own. That is the entire scope of all learning and education. It is honorable theft. The code of thieves and artists. Steal and learn.

I found this on No fat clips!!!

London: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

2008-11-13T23:14:00.000-08:00

Here's a stop motion film made byDavid Hubert who is a Dreamworks animator. It was made by taking several thousand still images around the city of London and then editing them together with Adobe Premier and After Effects into a film. I like it's timing and the rush of action combined with the slow camera pans. I think it's more difficult to do than it would seem. However, if you take away the still images and replace them with a video camera shooting normal speed, what do you have? Why does the rush of activity and motion-streaked car lights make the film more interesting? Is it animation? No, probably not. I think to animate one must make something inanimate move. In fact, this is the opposite of animation. The motion of the objects has been reduced to a minimum.

The Basement Horror: A Very Short Film

2008-11-12T11:06:00.000-08:00

How about some horror? I always love a good horror film. That's why every Halloween I have my friends over for Horrorfest. We argue for days about what films will constitute our pile of DVDs. Then we stay up very late eating pizza and watching one horror film after another. This year, I made my own little horror film to run as a loop in my DVD player while everyone was just eating and talking. It's a very silly little horror film. I heartily recommend that everyone make their own little horror film. It's more fun than just about anything. And - get this - I think that the horror genre is the last great unexplored genre for serious artistic expression. I mean it. Watch carefully.

A Video for Barack Obama

2008-10-29T23:32:00.000-07:00

My new cinegram is for Barack Obama. I am disgusted by the McCain/Palin campaign of race-baiting stupidity. Obama stands for unity, intelligent politics, and compassion for people who don't earn millions of dollars. He is an extraordinary candidate who has already achieved something historic. I sincerely hope that this country experiences an election blowout that leaves a whole hell of a lot of dumb Bush/McCain/Palin supporters in the woods without a map, right where they belong.

The big message here is that everyone who want to get this guy into the White House needs to get up on November 4th and go do it. Do it. Don't stop for anyone. Don't listen to someone who says there might be a little problem with casting your vote. Just go do the thing. Vote. Vote. Vote.

Here's my first political advertisement.

Here's a group called Video the Vote that signs people up all over the country as video volunteers to go out and film problems at polling stations. There are lots of places in this country where Republican operatives try to scare poor voters away from the polls. There are tricks they play with mailing addresses to try to challenge voters' right to vote. Video the Vote wants to compile a video library of trouble spots at voting locations all over the nation. Check it out and if you have a camera maybe you'll want to lend a hand.

Just Asking: A Cinegram

2008-09-30T21:31:00.000-07:00

This is my latest 'cinegram.' It's about the kind of communication one sometimes wants to read too much into. We live with email and we type our thoughts quickly and sometimes, accidentally, we make something with meaning. Sometimes, by not putting things too specifically or too carefully, we say a little more than might have been intended. That's what this little film is about. There's no sound. Just the image.

Just Asking from Alessandro Cima on Vimeo.

This one was hard for me to get right. I felt that I was being too subtle and that there was a danger of the piece simply being a series of boring office shots. But I think I caught the feeling pretty well in the end. It's a mixture of attraction, anticipation, nervousness, doubt about the validity of one's own feelings, worries about offending someone, and an overriding need to write messages that are acceptable in an office environment. The modern American office is quite demonstrably a place where people work exceedingly hard at pretending love does not exist.

This cinegram is also about how difficult it is to speak plainly. It can also be interpreted as an entirely different kind of communication than I have described.

Lull: An Animated Short That's Too Short

2008-09-17T21:03:00.001-07:00

I'm normally extremely wary of posting about a film or filmmaker associated with a school or university. In my humble opinion, if you're in film school, you are quite possibly wasting your time and someone's money. I think filmmakers should hide those associations if they exist. But if they're going to boast about them, I'm going to jump all over it. Don't worry, I'll get to the animated short in a minute. The next Jean Luc Godard will not come from a school, he or she will come from YouTube. Not kidding. Buy a video camera, microphone, computer, drawing tablet, digital editor, Adobe Flash, and perhaps 5 books. That's all you need to learn filmmaking. Approximate cost: $4,000. New York University film school: over $35,000 a year just for tuition. Figure it out. Schools of art mainly exist for social networking purposes. They do not actually teach anything resembling the production of art. Go look at the theater scene. Everything is being 'workshopped.' This is something people learn in a school somewhere. As if you can 'workshop' a play and come out with something worth an ounce of spit. And these people are charging $15 - $25 dollars for you to sit and watch them rehearse. I wonder what all these writers and actors and directors are trying to figure out. It's a mystery. If you don't like what I'm saying here, man, you really don't want to hear what I have to say about film festivals. It all starts with two sinister words: Submission Fee. More about that some other time when I'm feeling really mean. But honestly, if you really need to meet people, go to a bar. It's cheaper.

Anyone can write a poem. Anyone can make a film.

That being said, here's a short animation that is adapted from a longer work by Lisa Barcy who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Film. Hmmm... well, ok... but her film is pretty cool. I love the roughly drawn cutout puppet technique. This kind of animation can be much more emotional than carefully drawn, well-timed animation. Very rarely does the Disney style of animation convey anything close to a human emotion. This kind of animation does. I have an affinity for work like this. It makes me want to draw and I start thinking about how to convey things with a simple stroke of a pen.

The film is very lonely. There's a guy walking around on a pier with a bucket of lobsters. There's a squid that seems to attract him. He floats around and generally rejects the society of men. Sort of an oceanic recluse, I suppose.

I just wish that the full version of Ms. Barcy's film was available. Here's more of what I'm talking about with schools. Go check the filmmaker's page at the School of the blah blah at Chicago. See what I mean. Every link to her work gives a 404 not found error. You can't run a school of film and 'new media' and pull crap like that. And how much for tuition again? What a nifty scam.

I found this little gem via a site called 'BadLit.' I'll work up a little post with more on that film site later. But the short of it is that you can find lots of cool stuff there and the guy writes as if he really enjoys writing. That's unusual for some reason.

6J6L6G

2008-09-09T21:17:00.000-07:00

Why is this so interesting?

I-Witness Video Battles Police State Tactics

2008-09-01T10:11:00.001-07:00

I am falling in love with this group. I-Witness Video uses video to protect civil liberties. They probe police actions at First Amendment events like peaceful protests by videotaping what the police are up to at these events. They build a library of these videos, some of which are submitted by amateur videographers, in order to use them as evidence at trials to overturn bogus charges. Often it would seem that these charges are a blatant attempt by police to eliminate protests at events like political conventions.

Their work has largely involved the New York City Police Department which would seem to be making every possible effort to become an exceedingly dangerous fascist organization bent on squashing any form of dissent in New York City. I used to live there and I know there were some serious problems with abuses by the police. But over the past ten years, boy it has just become a sad joke of a department. It's shocking. It makes Los Angeles look like a bastion of free expression.

I-Witness Video has had huge success in turning its video against the police in order to get hundreds of charges dropped. It has exposed conspiracies within the NYPD to lie and make false charges. The group appears to have been involved in the shocking and illegal police raids in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area aimed at squashing any peaceful protests around the Republican National Convention. It is obvious that the St. Paul police do not want these people getting evidence that can be used aganst the department. These people at I-Witness are simply using video like nobody's business. They've got it right and their work is hugely important.

Here is something I found printed in one of the entries on their blog:

The rights of photographers under the Constitution are expressed in sparklingly clear language in a legal memorandum on the "Rights of Journalists on Public Streets" which is available on the website of the National Press Photographers Association. I will now quote liberally from this very helpful document.
In general, the right to take photographs on the street is the same for members of the public as it is for journalists. So, if you're a member of the public, rather than a journalist, most of this applies to you too.
Although not unlimited, the media [and the public] enjoys a broad right of access under the First Amendment to photograph in public places such as streets and sidewalks. These rights are rooted in the First Amendment's strong protection of speech within "public forums." A "public forum" refers to a public place historically associated with free expression. The most commonly recognized examples include streets, sidewalks and parks. Within these areas, the government's ability to limit the public's speech is extremely limited.

This is very useful information for anyone with a camera. Go I-Witness Video! You people kick serious ass.

Jonas Mekas: A Filmer & Poet

2008-08-27T22:01:00.000-07:00

Let's record the dying century and the birth of another man… Let's surround the earth with our cameras, hand in hand, lovingly; our camera is our third eye that will lead us out and through … Nothing should be left unshown or unseen, dirty or clean: Let us see and go further, out of the swamps and into the sun.
Jonas Mekas

Since the 1950s, Jonas Mekas has been preserving and showing avant-garde films, writing about films, and making films. He was one of the founders of the Anthology Film Archives in 1969 which preserves and displays many types of independent film. He also wrote film reviews in the Village Voice starting in 1958.

His own films were first shot on a 16mm Bolex camera. Then, in the 1990s, he began to shoot on video. He films his daily life as a sort of diary. Sometimes he puts shots together to make a longer piece. In 2007 he even decided to make 365 films - one film per day - and post them all on his web site, www.jonasmekas.com.

Here are a few of those 365 films:

I think they qualify as cinegrams.

Mekas is sometimes called 'the godfather of American avant-garde cinema.' I'm not sure what that means, but he is certainly a man who loves what he does and this unusual quality shows through in every single frame of footage that I have seen so far. Here's a guy who sees how one can hold a small camera up to the world and press a little button and voila - something beautiful is made! Some of the French New Wave directors in the 50s and 60s thought that cinema would become a real art when the camera became as easy to acquire and handle as an ink pen. Mr. Mekas is using video, film and the internet the way any young filmmaker should instinctively want to use these things. The most dreary sight in the world is a pair of young writers sitting in a Starbucks with a laptop trying to be the next hot screenwriting duo. The most exciting sight is someone running around with a camera making cinema.

Here is a poem by Jonas Mekas:

Old is rain gushing down shrubstems

Old is rain gushing down shrubstems,
cockgrouse drumming in the red summer dawn.
Old is our talk of this.

And of the fields, yellowing barley and oats,
the cowherd fires wetblown in lonesome autumn.
Of the potato digs,
the heavy summer heat,
white winter glare and sleigh-din down unending roads.
Of heavy timber hauls, stony fallows,
the red brick ovens and outlying limerock.
Then – by the evening lamps, in autumn, while fields turn gray –
of wagonloads ready for tomorrow's market,
the roads, in October, washed out and swamped,
the potato digs drenched.

Old is our life here, long generations
pacing the fields off, wearing down plowland,
each foot of earth able to speak, still breathing of fathers.
Out of these cool stone wells
they drew water for their returning herds,
and when the flooring in the place wore down,
or the housewall quietly started to crumble, they dug their
yellow clay form the same pits,
their sand gold-fresh from the same fields.
And even with us gone
there will be others, sitting out on blue fieldstones,
mowing the overgrown meadows, plowing these plains,
and when they come in at the end of their day and sit down to the tables,
each table, each clay jug,
each beam in the wall will speak,
they'll have the sprawling yellow sandbanks to remember,
and ryefields swaying in the wind,
the sad songs of our women from the far side of a flax field,
and one smell, on first entering a new parlor,
the scent of fresh moss!

Oh, old is the flowering clover,
horses snorting in the summer night,
rollers, harrows and plows scouring tillage,
the heavy millstones rumbling,
and women weeding the rows, their kerchiefs glimmering white.
Old is rain gushing down shrubstems,
cockgrouse drumming in the red summer dawn.
Old is our talk of all this.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Andrei Tarkovsky Film Interviews

2008-08-17T12:18:00.000-07:00

Andrei Tarkovsky was the great Russian filmmaker who made Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Stalker, The Mirror, and The Sacrifice, among others. His images are some of the greatest ever recorded on film. Though his films are not easy, they never leave your mind once you've seen them.

He felt that cinema served a spiritual purpose rather than an intellectual one.

Here are three clips from film interviews with the director:

Tarkovsky had a theory which held that when you make a film you are actually 'sculpting in time.' You are fixing and conserving a moment in time for future people to experience. This is beautiful thinking, but I do actually think he's wrong. I am more inclined to think that one cannot conserve or fix anything. What you record from a particular angle is never experienced the same way twice by anyone. The moment that you capture changes in its interpretation as time passes and changes physically as it is played on different pieces of equipment in different physical situations. You never see the same film twice. This holds even for digital mediums. The film Tarkovsky shot in 1965 is not the same film that I see now. When you make a film you are simply decorating someone's wall or screen with colors and suggestions that change over time, just like real chipped paint. A novel is a much more accurate method for fixing moments in time than a film is. That is, until the language itself begins to change and leaves the novel far behind. This is why a film should be extremely dense with meanings that are both obvious and hidden. That way, the film can gain unexpected life as time passes and changes the film. As the film decays over a long period of time, it will slowly release its hidden meanings and suggestions the way decaying matter in the earth slowly creates a rich soil.

But don't get me wrong, you cannot find a greater thinker on film than Andrei Tarkovsky.

Gilbert & George: British Artist(s) Featured in Documentary

2008-08-13T23:02:00.000-07:00

I believe it was Kandinsky who wrote in his book 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art,' that true artists come along rarely, but when they do they lift civilization by a few inches. British artists Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore) lift civilization. I admire people who can be ever so polite and full of charm while telling everyone to get fucked. These two men are vivid personalities even while operating as a single artist. If you watch this wonderful BBC documentary about them, you will notice them walking in lockstep through a gallery exhibit of their work.

I have been trolling through the UBUweb.com site which just happens to be one of the greatest sites in the world. Today I found this documentary and sat fascinated by the creative power of these (or this) artist(s). They make photos of almost everything they can find, file them for later use and produce huge shocking colorful works of art. In 2007 they became the first British artist(s) to be shown at the Tate Modern.

Some of their work uses imagery derived from bodily fluids and excrement. Make no mistake, these are magnificently beautiful images. But Gilbert & George make an interesting comment about how their work could never possibly be shown in the United States outside of a totally private gallery. That is truly a shame and is a vivid reminder of just how idiotically conservative and uptight we can still be as a nation. Seriously. Watch the documentary.

Film Poem: Another French New Wave

2008-08-12T06:53:00.000-07:00

In order to help you avoid the Olympics and war with Russia, here's my latest film poem.

Another French New Wave from Alessandro Cima on Vimeo.

Century 21: Abstract Movie or Digital Painting or Something

2008-06-24T21:07:00.000-07:00

For several days I'd been wondering what happened to avant-garde film making in the United States after the nineteen-eighties. And then today I stumbled upon an abstract movie called 'Century 21' by Jeremy Blake, an artist who apparently commited suicide about a year ago. It was made in 2004 and combines many layers of imagery from photos, 8 mm film, digital painting, movie star pictures, cartoons and even what appears to be cloth. The soundtrack is full of subtle wind, footsteps, squeals, and gunshots.

I think this video is probably one of the best short movies I have ever seen. I can think of no avant-garde film that is better. I haven't seen a huge number, but I have seen enough to recognize this thing for what it is. It is gorgeous, mysterious, evocative, surreal, frightening and just simply from another world. This guy was some kind of fantastic genius and this piece of work is absolutely masterful.

Century 21 is the third part of something the artist called The Winchester Trilogy. I have not seen the first two parts because I don't think they are available on the web. I think the movies are meant to be shown as continuous loops. The link to the video that I provide is to a long version of the work that appears to be looped several times. I mean holy dumbfounding shit, what a find!

Go watch Century 21

A Film Critic's Book About Film Critics

2008-06-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

So it sounds like an interesting book. Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood. It's by former Village Voice film critic, Michael Atkinson. Here's the article about the book. Mr. Atkinson apparently writes about the decline of the status of film critics who work in print. Many of them are losing their positions with newspapers and magazines. Many of them are going online to write for blogs. So the book is about the slowly disappearing art of film criticism and how important the critical dialog really is to the art of film. I completely agree with this point of view. There have been film critics like the young Francois Truffaut writing for Cahiers du Cinema who could tell you things about movies that you would never ever have thought of. Good critics make you want to leap out of your chair and make a movie yourself. They imbue film with a sense of magic and history that excites minds and draws new talent into the art. Without these people and their writing you are left with fat-assed Jack Nicholson watching Lakers games and making stupid movies about being old. Good critics exist partly to tell short fat men to for god's sake get the hell off the fucking basketball court!

We need good critics. But we don't need theaters and candy concessions. Film is not a communal experience. Never has been. If it were, you would see Johnny Depp standing up near the front row dressed as a pirate to act out his part and you would clap every time he took a bow. And this would be called 'theatre.' Film is a solitary art form best enjoyed with a very sharp widescreen television or projected from a 16mm projector. Theaters show films on expensive dirty torn smudged screens. They project with dim bulbs in order to save money. They earn most of their profits by selling candy and hot dogs out in the lobby. Movie theaters as an industry don't really exist. They are candy stores that happen to show films in order to keep your ass in there instead of going home to read a book. Look this up if you don't believe me. Theaters do not make profits on the films. They make it on the candy. This should tell you something. It should tell you not to go to the theater. Stay home and watch movies on a well-calibrated widescreen television. This is the best way ever invented to see a movie. Nothing else comes close.

Once you do this, you will then be able to run wild through the great library of films available on DVD. You will be able to enjoy films without the presence of 2,000 nitwits eating their candy, farting, and checking their email. Don't believe any critic or filmmaker who tells you that you should experience a movie in the presence of an audience. That person is trying to sell you some candy and thinks that we all need to be told when to laugh.

By the way, one of my favorite critics online is a guy named Walter Chaw from Film Freak Central. He gets it and he says it and he's absolutely merciless. Look here at his review of Iron man. And here's his review of the well-trained university theatre actor Edward Norton doing his turn as The Incredible Hulk. And here is his rave for There Will be Blood.

So I'm not so sure I'd do a hell of a lot of worrying about print media critics dying off. I think the online writing's better. Frankly, when I read the critics in the Los Angeles Times newspaper I immediately get an image of them all slithering around in an orgy at Jack's house. They're such film lovers!

Film Poem: Lunch Glasses

2008-06-22T08:19:00.000-07:00

This is a little poetry form that requires you to make a short film. It should probably be an everyday sort of subject, shot simply, without effects. You can edit the film, add titles, and manipulate the sound track. But it should remain simple on the surface. Its complexities should exist beneath the surface in its meaning or its potential.

This film poem was shot on Saturday, June 21, 2008 in Los Angeles.

Poem: Unanticipated Natural Array

2008-06-08T18:55:00.000-07:00

Buried amphora
Hairline cracks
Black and shiny in patches
Dulled in others
Dirt gently brushed away
Diagrams revealing
The rage of Achilles
Drunk in love on the beach
Stomping away
To sit
To brood
He’s the hero aggrieved
Let the motherfuckers die
I don’t give a shit
He hisses
Sitting in his tent
Staring at the sand
Digging with his heel
His bloody selfish useless jealous murderous hideous rage
Is all we need remember
Picking at it
Scraping through it
Burnishing
Polishing
Take your vase and clean it
Put it on a stand of wood
Simple
Centered
Black lacquer
Lacy coppery embellishments
Remember the wall
Of pitted tiles
Enamels wearing thin
Showing through their colors
Your empty heroic vase hollowed with
Ancient air breathed in a tomb
Now pick some flowers
A wild bursting bunch of untamed color
Leafy stalked and bent
Gather them
With an eye toward an arrangement
Shifting them and tugging them
Into a shape that pleases
Cut off the stems
Thrust them into the vase
So they spread out
In an unanticipated natural array
And turn the vase
Slightly
Then look at your colors
And your history
And think of this
Thuggish brawling clansman
And how he would
Have driven his foot
Through your vase
Exploding flowers
Against the wall
To drop
And whither on the sand
And would have kicked
Shards of clay aside
Like corpses
Into a ditch

cimail (June 7, 2008)

Poem: Alongside Too Soon

2008-05-29T21:07:00.000-07:00

On a highway
At seventy-five miles per hour
I see a truck
On the right
Its side is fabric
Beating and waving
In the wind
I want to film it
As I pass it
But I cannot
Reach my camera
In time and I’m alongside too soon
The dark shiny waves
Ripple and slap
While my air-conditioning
Quietly cools me
And I kick myself
All the way downtown

cimail (May 29, 2008)

Poem: k*nt

2008-05-26T18:52:00.000-07:00

Missing u in a perfectly
Good kunt
What’s happened when u
Can’t get a kunt in edgewise?
What kind of hole are we in
That we can’t say kunt?

Cardboard ridges
Make my red marker bump
Words come out
Crooked
Summon the leadership
The call of the cult
Will of the crowd
Can’t hold it closer
For photos
To post
Like you meant it
Flat on my chest
Like a badge
Or a stiff
Unwashed
Shirt
Unsheathe
Your jostling baton
Ask me again
To put this away

The artists
Are bedding with troops
Shooting
Through camouflage lenses
Taking fire from roofs
That bullet’s a bunkerbuster
Coming in fast
Bend way over backward
So the orders cum down
Boots hit the ground
There’s safety in numbers
Bombs in the road
Kick a door down
Shoot up a house
And go with it live

Security apparatus inuratus upuratus
Pushing probes
Swivel heads
Fingertip scanners
Retinal mapping and
A busted up head
Show your receipt jerk
Or you cannot leave
We are authorities
And we work for the safety
And convenience
Of all

And by the way
When did the howling stop?

Since I don’t owe rent
And school’s out today
I can stand in a crowd
Like a forum today
Mildly retarding
Your reclining submission

Like a cock-jerking
Butt-thumbing priest
Asking you at least
To think about God
As you go on your way

The Queen’s a ceremonial kunt
Jagger her leashed bitch
Dylan’s a carnival show
As rebellious as a busboy
Because you can’t
You can’t
You can’t
You can’t
You can’t say kunt

cimail (May 24, 2008)