Short Experimental Western: The Magical Dead Sunstroke Valley

A film combining the mythology of the Hollywood/Spaghetti western, Tarot, magic, occult, Jungian psychology, and mysticism with flamboyant, multi-layered, supersaturated imagery.

Multiple narratives conflict and adhere. Meanings emerge and contradict. Music and dialog tell another layered story, sometimes agreeing with the images, sometimes trying to subvert them.

A film should be a container for the psychic unconscious energy of its creator. That is what this is.

There is also a commercial.

Dream Work: A Film by Peter Tscherkassky

Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky works with found footage to create layered films that disturb our casual acceptance of those seemingly everyday tasks performed in cinematic stories. The simple act of walking into a room and drawing the shades can become a hallucinatory experience containing dread. The few films of his that I have seen create suspense from the ordinary. Sounds are repeated and magnified. Shots jitter and jump, repeating in a staccato nervousness that suggests confusion, hysteria, horror.

Dream Work makes the connection between filmmaking and the unconscious obvious. It explodes scenes from a Hollywood movie to reveal the hidden dream forces contained by cinema itself. The rush of fluidly changing points of view reaches a crescendo and breaks down into sprocketed film strips and hands editing celluloid to make palpable the dream content of all films. Working with the material of dreams is what Tscherkassky seems to be doing.

Visit the filmmaker's web site.

The Birth of the Robot: 1936 Experimental Advertising Film by Len Lye for Shell Oil Company

In 1936, experimental filmmaker Len Lye made this short surreal animation to advertise the benefits of Shell oil for lubricating things. The film is a hyper-saturated stop-motion extravaganza that involves a mechanical world turning on some sort of hand crank. There's an adventurer driving around the sands of Egypt. His car winds down and konks out leaving the man dead in the desert. The angel of oil rains drops of lubricating crude down on the Egyptian landscape bringing the parched skeleton to life as the Shell Oil robot. Fascinating. It's got that awkward, shiny, naive beauty that could only be achieved in the 30s. Parts of this thing look like they might be influenced by Salvador Dali's work. Something about that dead skeleton and the desert looks like it could fit right into the Surrealist master's paintings.

Lye was from New Zealand and worked not only as an experimental filmmaker but also in newsreels and advertising. He was a kinetic sculptor, poet, painter and a writer of essays on artistic theory and philosphy. He made a 1935 short film called 'A Colour Box' which was the first generally exhibited film made by painting directly on the film emulsion. It's a brilliant experimental animation posing as an advertisement for cheaper parcel post. I'm sure the great direct paint filmmaker Stan Brakhage must have been familiar with Lye's work.

Here's a gallery site with information and examples of his artwork.

Detective City Angel: A Film by Alessandro Cima

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

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

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.

Demo Images From New Film by Alessandro Cima

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

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.

Fire in My Belly by David Wojnarowicz

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.