I found this 1966 Bruce Baillie film on the Echo Park Film Center‘s Facebook page. It’s just a simple fence and I imagine an ocean behind it every time I watch. The fence is like a track.
Author Archives: Cimaxion
The Living Dead – Adam Curtis Documentary About Cold War Mind Control
Adam Curtis makes fascinating documentary films for the British Broadcasting Corporation. This one is about the manipulation of memory, or the attempt to manipulate it, by governments during the Cold War era. It features several scientists and psychology experts who worked for either the U.S. or Soviet governments trying to figure out how to control minds.
I post the work of Curtis because his filmmaking is actually quite a lot like my own in several ways. This film bears a relationship to my latest film, Yellow Plastic Raygun, which is also about memory and how it influences the future. Curtis dwells in the domain of documentary, a form that I have serious misgivings about, while I dwell in the domain of art – or direct mind control if you will! I like Curtis’ use of corporate, military, instructional, and entertainment films as his raw visual material. He mixes it up with what is actually a rather simplistic script relating information that is not especially insightful. The film seems to suggest something more under the surface because of its imagery which often bears no relationship whatsoever to the information being related by the voice-over. This is a tricky area for documentary that brings it perilously close to the realm of art. You don’t quite know what it is that you are actually watching. I like that but I also distrust it. But Curtis appears to me to be making a documentary about his own feelings and artistic interpretations of the factual material. He is not trying to teach or inform at all. He is simply trying to create an impression. The words of the documentary could be replaced with gibberish. In fact, it would probably be a slightly better film if they were!
The Living Dead – Part 1 (watch the next 5 parts after the jump)
Memory is perhaps the single most important quality of existence. We are simply memory machines walking around and recording. All of our activities point toward an ever-increasing ability to record and remember. We are building memory. The idea, pursued in the first half of this documentary, of wiping out unpleasant memories that are assumed to be destroying the health of an individual, seems to me to be misguided and foolish. I have always viewed it as the job of every human to be able to stare straight into the most horrific scene, remember it, and not allow it to take control. Very simple. You must be able to look at anything… and continue to eat your ice cream.
A Prayer for Cool – Super 8 Biker Film by Marc Bencivenga
It’s not the bikes that I like so much. It’s the super 8! A perfect little piece of humorous filmmaking that really does somehow capture a kind of coolness and easy rebellion that I thought was long gone. There’s some absolutely gorgeous photography going on here. And who ever sees someone lighting up a cigarette with so much perfection as in this film! You just don’t see that anywhere anymore ever.
Marc Bencivenga made this and he apparently did it with a fifty-year-old super 8 camera.
R. Crumb and the Corporate Mono-Culture
Cartoonist Robert Crumb gets interviewed by a Los Angeles Times writer and talks about his living in France and his hatred for the pervasive corporate mono-culture that Americans seem unaware of. He can’t stand it and chooses to live outside of it.
Really good perspective.
In a culture where you’ve got a Supreme Court actually giving corporate entities the rights of individual human beings, you’ve got total corporate control of every single living man, woman and child. You can see this complete robotic control on very prominent and horrific display in the current president of the United States. He a corporate hologram who moves only when commanded to by his boardroom overseers. The entire country is oriented around cop/lawyer shows on television which are specifically designed to make you feel close and personal with the state/corporate stooges who work for police departments and gleefully lay disadvantaged people out on their faces on subway platforms and slaughter them with bullets fired straight into their backs from six inches away. ‘The Mentalist’ is probably the supreme example of this attempt to make the corporate/police control mechanism seem odd and quirky and just a little cutely but intelligently eccentric. ‘Medium’ is another. The individual with oddball abilities or perceptions is entirely consumed and controlled by the state apparatus. All cop shows are meant to make as many viewers as possible feel completely comfortable being visited by and talking to the police. That is the entire truth of American television. It’s message is simply this: when we come knocking, open the door.
That is the true subtext of every single show ever produced by American broadcasting companies.
R. Crumb is totally right.
Banksy Exposed!
Gotcha, Banksy! I’ve been wondering about enigmatic urban street artist Banksy for some time now. I’ve found out his secret. Urban Outfitters. Look at the stealth photo I snapped in a mall location. The book raised high above all others on a pedestal… Banksy. Apparently, he’s an Urban Outfitters fave. Yes. Indeed. Uh huh. Rebel artist. Street prankster. Humorist. Urban Outfitter. Dude, listen. If your art is seriously dug by super-corp teenage dupe specialists like Urban Overchargers, its time to fill a vodka bottle with gasoline and fire bomb your own wall paintings. For sure. You know something’s off when you start reading about an artist’s ‘humor.’ Now run off to your nearest Urban Outfitters to experience the rebellious humor of legendary street artist Banksy!
The Petting Zoo by Jim Carroll
Oh boy have I found a great book! Poet Jim Carroll was finishing this thing up when he passed away in 2009. I have only read 73 pages so far but I recognize this as one of the greatest novels I have ever read. A New York painter reacts strongly to some paintings by Velazquez, stumbles into Central Park and winds up in the looney bin where he finds some time to think straight. Simple and magnificent. What a damn great writer! I think this will actually be the first novel I write a review of. Now back to reading.