Meet 'Bonecrusher Hemingway,' a slight man with heavyweight dreams of arm-wrestling glory. Watch his final day of preparation as he must shed unwanted pounds before the big event which will pit him against female opponents who are bent on interrupting his Herculean assault on the Olympian heights of athletic achievement.
This is a first documentary by photographer Eric Reichbaum and it made me laugh… a lot. Sometimes people do something they want to do and you just have to watch them do it.
This is a 1960 trailer for Jean-Luc Godard's exploding hand-grenade of a film, Breathless. It's a brilliant trailer that casually itemizes the best features of the movie. I am betting that Godard made the trailer himself. In other words, this would be an actual Godard film. That's him doing the male voice-over work. This is the same director who recently made a film trailer that compressed an entire film into four minutes of fast-forward.
Filmmaker Lawrence Jordan calls this 'a long opium dream of the old Mariner' that marries the engravings of Gustave Dore to the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Jordan adds many of his own cutout elements to the animation, creating something totally unique. Orson Welles' performance of the poem is unforgettable, simultaneously delicate and powerful as he fully embodies the role of the old Mariner with a story to tell. There is enough mystery and otherworldliness from Jordan's hands to pair magnificently with one of the saddest and most beautiful poems ever written in English.
The film is dedicated to the great assemblage artist and filmmaker Wallace Berman who was a close friend of Jordan.
This is a Dutch documentary about dangerously anti-establishment Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was brutally murdered in 1975 under extremely suspicious and unexplained circumstances. The Italian justice system – if such a phrase doesn't make you bust a hernia with too much laughing – dismissed his death as the act of a single young man upset about the filmmaker's sexual advances. This film points out that Pasolini was utterly smashed, his body broken and shattered everywhere. He'd been beaten and run over with a car. The evidence does suggest that he was slain by a group. Director Philo Bregstein attempts to draw a connection between the outrage caused by Pasolini's leftist, harshly critical works and his death. It's a tough connection to fit together because there is really very little good police work done by the Italians to provide any reliable information. I remember going to Italy as a boy and upon seeing an Italian policeman saying to my father, “But that's not a real policeman!” That was one year before Pasolini was killed.
There's just something always ridiculous about an Italian who either thinks they are a cop or a soldier. The country is absurd. It elects Berlusconi, a man who is actually a monkey, as if the entire nation just wants to make a big joke and cause the world to laugh at its expense.
My main reaction to this documentary is nostalgia for a time when the work and thinking of filmmakers and poets was taken seriously enough to warrant a documentary that immerses one in the mind of an artist. We don't see that anymore. We get jokey pop nonsense about what people are up to, but nothing approaching an understanding of a director's viewpoint. We are spoon-fed pablum about the moronic Martin Scorsese's eternal and cuddly love of cinema. The guy is a chipper little dolt who cannot function without De Niro's slightly winded masculinity nearby. A documentary about such a clown would not be worth making. I imagine him with a collection of old popcorn makers in his living room. Pasolini was engaged, angry, excited, subtle, harsh, contradictory, confused, dangerous, and beautifully unlikable. We don't allow those people to work now. What we get through an endless comment feedback loop are feeble protests about Tarantino's massive ego as he thinks he can be white and make a film about slavery. Tarantino's Django Unchained is actually the closest thing to Pasolini that this country may have ever produced. The present day outrage and the joy of expressing it is like a bomb going off throughout the length of that film which I consider a masterpiece.
A documentary like this makes me feel as if the world needs these people like Pasolini to show us how beautiful is a lack of common sense. How insightful contradiction can be. How anger and violence are really the material of poetry.
By the way, the story told by Bernardo Bertolucci about how he first met Pasolini is worth the entire film. That moment of doubt, of thinking that someone is a thief, a suspicious person, is at the heart of what an artist is. Listen to that part carefully and then think about how most artists now want to do something good for you. Take those artists out in the alley and shoot them. Leave only the bad guys alive.
Drift was made by Tim Sessler with a Canon 7D DSLR camera shooting through an airplane window on a cross-country flight.
Lawrence Jordan began his filmmaking career by learning from and working with the great artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell. This is a 1972 film that is a mysterious trip through a subconscious world of imagery that suggests hidden communications and magic behind observable reality. His technique is mainly focused on using cutout illustration collages. I like his work because it leaves things unsaid, unexplained and it does not work too hard at being funny.
You can watch a lot of Jordan’s films at Mubi and read more about his life and work.
What a funny artist he was.
This is a Chinese propaganda film from 1966 about the communist country’s first nuclear weapons tests starting in 1964. The film shows the preparation of the testing area and the participation of the scientists and workers organized for the event which shocked the world. The soundtrack features a complete English translation of the narration which is delivered in a rather deadpan fashion, contrasting with the obvious enthusiasm of the original Chinese narrator.
Most interesting to me in nuclear testing documentaries, both from the communist and democratic worlds of the mid-twentieth century, is the willingness of researchers to subject both animals and people to the effects of nuclear fallout. One would think that some of those U.S. and Chinese soldiers placed out in the desert to weather a nuclear blast with sunglasses would have decided to pick up some machine guns and slaughter a few commanding officers rather than risk the deadly radiation. That’s the problem with being a soldier. You have to follow some idiot’s orders and those orders can easily place you right up against a threat to your life and health that may be totally unnecessary. The twentieth century was filled with masses of people who willingly subjected themselves to the instructions of leaders and dropped themselves right into the meat-grinder of war, sacrificing themselves to some vague idea of glory which was actually just the glory of the guys at the bank. We’re doing it a little differently now in the U.S., making war with drones and ‘volunteer’ armies. But the fact is that people are still sacrificing themselves for some idea that’s never been properly explained to them. So they tell themselves that the idea they fight for is ‘freedom.’ We’ve somehow used the events of 9/11 to convince many people to volunteer for a fight they don’t understand. 9/11 was a criminal act by a criminal organization, not a true act of war. The inability to understand that has led to decades of hatred and an all-encompassing worldwide war of vagueness that infiltrates every daily activity, even those as simple as taking a photograph in a subway or near an airport. The terror organizations we fight all over the world could only ever hope to kill as many people in a single year as the drug cartels do. So why aren’t we flying drones over Mexico, killing anyone who looks like a cartel member?
So enjoy the film. What it’s really about is how people turn themselves into horses.
In 1965 Pavel Klushantsev made this Soviet film about how a voyage to the moon might happen. I’ve seen and posted other footage from this great science fiction director, but this is interesting because its color has been restored to saturated magnificence. Don’t worry that you can’t understand the Russian language. Just watch and enjoy the 60s communist enthusiasm! You will be treated to astronauts cavorting on the lunar surface while wearing space suits that look to me like nearly perfect adaptations from popular speculative illustrations of the time. The technical detail of this film is really quite amazing. NASA might want to refer to it while trying to re-acquire its lost Apollo knowledge.
It is apparent that Kubrick had his eye on this director’s work as he prepared to make 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you know that film, you will catch the shots I’m talking about.
Vivian Maier worked as a nanny but kept up an amazing life as a prolific photographer of life on the streets of Chicago. The enormous trove of her negatives has recently led to major exhibitions around the world. A historian named John Maloof set off this furor when he purchased a box of thirty thousand prints and negatives being auctioned away by a storage facility. Little did he know that he had stumbled upon an incredible record of mid-century life in the big city.
