When Sri Lanka banned goods from the north during a war with the Tamil Tigers, newspapers had to find the paper they needed for publishing. Kannan Arunasalam made this short documentary film about people who take their work in journalism very seriously.
Via Brain Pickings
This is a charming look at the world’s greatest bike race from 1962. I see that Louis Malle is credited as one of the directors. You can see the incredible efforts put in by racers in the mountains and how back in the early sixties they would eat fruit on their bikes and sometimes dart into village restaurants along way to snatch bottles of water, wine and ice cream! The film also mentions the issue of doping as it was practiced in 1962 which seems to have mainly been an effort to mask the pain. The one depressing thing about this film is that it shows the sport of bike racing in 1962 was as uniformly white as it is today. The complete lack of diversity in the Tour de France is a shame and an unforgivable embarrassment to the race itself and to the sport as a whole. The damn race is so white that it makes my teeth hurt to watch it. And I watch every stage of it every single year. So trust me, it’s an all-white event and the organizers and teams should be investigated for that issue which is actually far more important than the doping issue. Every single racer dopes. But quite obviously the dope is only given to white racers. The Tour de France is becoming a European NASCAR. Just go ask Lance.
Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin made this short in 2009 with Isabella Rossellini in the lead role of a woman who finds ecstasy in an electric chair. The film moves beautifully with its music and entertains with its silent film mystery and accelerated movement. However, I will say that Maddin’s films seem to me overly concerned with silent film technique. This tends to turn the films into curiosities rather than genuine works of art. That’s a tricky area because the films put so much virtuosity on display. But you can hide enormous failures behind that ‘old film look.’ I’m not sure that’s what Maddin is doing, but my suspicions are growing. Maddin might be interested at some point in working with less budget.
Thank you to filmmaker Fred. L’Epée.
Between 1988 and 1998 filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard made a film called ‘Histoire(s) du cinéma.’ Though it purports to be a sort of cinema history, reflecting on how cinema intersects with the 20th century, I think it is more likely a vision of how cinema works in the mind of one filmmaker. The images drift in and out, overlapping and complimenting one another just as they would in the mind. Don’t look for accuracy or understanding. Just watch the film. It’s very difficult to find pieces of this lengthy work online. But these are three good chunks and they certainly stand up as a taste.
More about the film at Mubi.
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.
Jamie Stone and Anders Jendenfors made this brilliant ‘washing powder’ animation about a kid named John who has lots of thoughts about Mars and man’s destiny in space. Beautiful and just hilarious.
One of the submitters to my Vimeo short films group, Robert Lyons, sent this short French stop-motion film in. He worked as the directory of photography on it. The director was Delphine Burros. It’s about a librarian who opens a magical and evil book.
Gulp is a stop-motion film created by animators at Aardman. It was shot entirely on a Nokia N8 camera and has the distinction of having used the largest set for a stop-motion film in the world. A beach!
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.
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.
This looks pretty good. There’s a new free browser game called ‘Star Trek – Infinite Space‘ coming this summer. You of course get to command either a Star Fleet or a Klingon ship. The explosions look impressive, as do the starships in this little preview.
A 1932 cartoon advertisement for Oldsmobile by the Fleischer studio. Via Hidden Los Angeles.
Below is a BBC news video of a man named Darcus Howe trying to explain what he has observed as being the cause of the violent rioting that is burning down parts of London and other cities across Great Britain. The news woman should probably be dismissed as quickly as possible because she is incompetent and obviously has a problem with the answers she’s getting.
Mr. Howe’s honest attempt to communicate his ideas about what has led to these riots should be listened to carefully. It is common knowledge that Great Britain has descended in the past ten years into the western world’s most closely observed police state. Everyone is watched on every street corner everywhere every day. Police routinely suppress free expression and demonstrations. According to Mr. Howe, they are also searching non-whites for no reason. Under such conditions, with the addition of worldwide financial panic and ‘austerity measures’ being put into place that strip services from the poor and middle classes, all it takes is a single flashpoint to ignite massive riots.
In case you had not gotten the picture yet, we are seeing a global explosion of rebellion, demonstration and riot. I firmly believe that all the rioting and revolt in the Middle East is directly connected to the rioting and revolt going on in Europe. People are finally seeing a broad general picture of a world and its governments, whether they be democratic or authoritarian, being controlled and dominated by a handful of powerful global corporations. Under such control, governments lean their decisions in favor of these corporate entities and the very wealthy people behind them.
The UK riots have broken out very shortly after the expanding news story of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporations committing crimes in partnership with the police as part of what they represent as ‘journalism.’ That is basically a tip of the iceberg example of corporate control of a nation.
To call the riots simple acts of vandalism by thugs is a gross simplification of the situation. All riots start from some cause which comes at the end of a long resentment and building desperation. When the riots actually break out they include all sorts of people, many of whom are simple thugs and criminals. But those thugs don’t normally break into riots that burn cities down. They are normally robbing convenience stores and shooting each other. Something much larger than them brings them out into open battle on the streets.
Widespread unemployment, idleness and the easy access to video information from all over the world builds anger and resentment toward governments that seem locked into corporate bonds. People begin to realize that it doesn’t matter who they elect. All the candidates are run by the corporations. The defining signal to the world, much to everyone’s surprise, was the election of Barack Obama. He won his office by seeming to promise something new – something independent and free. But as soon as he took office the world saw that he was just another corporate middle man. The ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are simply at the behest of the corporations that insist upon such a course which includes the very profitable activity of ‘nation building.’ That Obama signal – that horrific disappointment – has led directly to this global explosion of rage. Obama, by not being who he should have been, lit the fuse. The bomb is now going off.
Here’s a man explaining the riots to a journalist in London:
The ongoing worldwide explosion of violence is the beginning of a global war against corporate control of nations.
We are watching the beginnings of a worldwide effort to break government away from this corporate control. It mirrors the efforts of prior centuries to break away from the control of the Church.
It’s going to get worse and it’s going to spread virulently. The fact that London has exploded should indicate to everyone that it is leaping past all predictability.
Thank you to Dangerous Minds for the videos.
Here’s a 1969 British documentary on the development of the computer beginning with the code-breaking work by Alan Turing during World War II.
A group of at least six Fullerton, California police officers brutally beat an ill homeless man to death on July 5th, according to witnesses and news reports. The story is exploding across the national news media because of some video that shows witnesses at the scene of the beating talking about what they saw moments before. They describe a group of officers stomping and beating a helpless Kelly Thomas to death as he screamed for help. Here is an extremely graphic close up picture of what these police did to the head of their victim. This was an extremely brutal and extended crime in which a human being was beaten into a pulp by sociopathic murderers.
When a small police force in a small Southern California city can put six murderous cops on scene at one time you know you have a real statistical problem. In other words, you can bet your life that you have a police department that is a very clear and present threat to the lives of the citizens.
The FBI has now joined the investigation and will probably extend its inquiries deep inside the Fullerton department. What they will find there one can already guess at.
The story has reached the national news. I saw Brian Williams do a story on it tonight. In that story, the mayor of Fullerton says he thinks people should calm down because things are reaching almost ‘lynch mob’ proportions. Oh yuh think? Really? And how does the mayor of Fullerton think people should react to a group of brutal thug cops murdering a helpless man? Does he think they should allow a Fullerton court to handle the situation? Cops murder people and nothing happens. It’s common. Courts have serious problems handling cops who murder. They simply can’t deal with the problem.
In Syria, government forces – cops and soldiers – are shooting and beating people to death every day. We have no problem when the Syrian people pick up guns and shoot those cops. Why should we object to the citizens of Fullerton fighting back against an armed force of violent murderers? There’s absolutely no reason to trust a cop in Fullerton. The city is just a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles, right off an exit on the Five freeway. You certainly don’t want to get pulled over by these guys. I’d approach a Fullerton cop with extreme caution and preferably with a gun in my hand (I obviously mean that as a general attitude and not as an actual course of action!).
Shooting cops who are murdering someone is legal, by the way. Another cop can do it. A citizen can do it. It may be a very risky proposition and I would certainly not recommend it, but it is just as legal as shooting a regular citizen if one sees that a murder is imminent. Quite simply, it is always legal to prevent a murder through any means necessary. It would have been perfectly legal for someone to have walked up and done something to those Fullerton cops while they were committing murder. Remember that. It’s actually a prediction.
For now, we have citizens using the power of the cell phone camera to shoot cops who are committing crimes and atrocities. Those cameras in the hands of people everywhere need to roll every time someone sees a cop beating or killing someone. But beyond that, there is a serious argument to be made for armed confrontation against a police force that is fielding dangerous killers. After all, you cannot deny the numbers. If multiple squad cars in Fullerton pull up to a scene and the accumulated force of cops on hand decide to beat a man to death, then you can safely assume that those cops represent the fundamental picture of that police force. At that point, the Fullerton police force becomes an armed group occupying a city. They can and should be resisted by every means available, legal and physical. People will start killing killer cops. It’s inevitable in a world where a cop can shoot a bullet through the back of an unarmed man on a subway platform in Oakland and get off in court with a relatively minor conviction. Cops carry guns. They are dangerous people. Their training is suspect. Their histories are often suspect. They become cops for reasons other than wanting to protect people. They should not be viewed with the respect generally afforded to them. They should be viewed with suspicion. They should be treated as potential threats.
Cops who kill are actually pretty easy to identify and find. They are also easy to destroy financially. The cops on scene at the killing on July 5th should spend the rest of their lives in jail and should lose their homes, their finances and everything else they may hold dear. Pro bono legal services to such ends should be provided to the family of the dead man by major law firms. One way or another, killer cops must be destroyed.
So, pigs of Fullerton, squeal for the camera!