Just Asking: A Cinegram

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

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

Why is this so interesting?

I-Witness Video Battles Police State Tactics

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

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

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

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

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

 
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

 
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

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

 
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

 
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

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)