Here is a mixed media film by Los Angeles filmmaker Kelly Sears that tells an all too plausible documentary tale about secret government agencies listening in on telephone operators to learn all of our secrets. Found footage combines with animation to create a quiet disturbance. Sears' work has been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, LACMA, the Hammer Museum and many others.
Here's an interesting article with an interview about her work.
Thank you to Phil Solomon on Facebook.
A crimson kite caught in the branches of an ash tree catches the attention of two boys who may not know that the roots of an ash tree grow all the way down to Hell.
Playdead, a motion graphics and animation company in Glasgow made this arresting and mysterious film.
Here’s a 1944 Warner Bros. short film featuring famous jazz musicians doing a jam session with dancers. It was directed by Gjon Mili. The players are Lester Young, Red Callender, Harry Edison, Marlowe Morris, Sid Catlett, Barney Kessel, Jo Jones, John Simmons, Illinois Jacquet, Marie Bryant, Archie Savage and Garland Finney.
Using a supercomputer, scientists have built a 3-dimensional model of how the universe evolved after the big bang. Apparently, the model is so complex that a normal desktop computer would have required 2,000 years to do all the calculations.
It is a breathtakingly beautiful and detailed model, allowing viewers to find galaxies and dive into them. It shows the spreading of cosmic gasses, the distribution of both dark and ordinary matter, and the formation of galaxies. No such model has ever been built before. It’s the result of a collaboration known as the Illustris Project.
This is a brilliant animation from Janie Geiser who is a renowned theater and film artist specializing in the use of inanimate objects and toys to create unsettling and evocative films and performances. Her work has been screened worldwide, including at the Whitney, Guggenheim, Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The film investigates the origins of the word ‘algebra,’ which turn out to be somewhat interesting. Frankly, I had never once even considered the word before watching this film.
It’s a subtle film. A beautiful but difficult film. Let’s think about this experimental film, shall we? What do we see in this film? Holes. Lots of them. Holes for looking through. There’s a little plastic doll who looks very 1940s, some birds, numerals, trees, and lots of grass. Blades of grass. When I see a little plastic girl doll looking into holes I see a filmmaker looking into a camera to investigate the world, or rather the mind, or perhaps the unconscious. This doll approaches an odd stone bunker on a hill and she peers into a small opening into darkness. It looks a bit like an old Nazi gun bunker. Carl Jung would approve! All experimental films should dig into the unconscious mind, I think. People throw ‘dreamlike’ around quite often these days when talking about films. There are very few dreamlike films. What most people mean by dreamlike is simply blurry. Anyway, our plastic doll sees things in storybook fashion that suggest nature and Nazis. There’s warfare going on. The precision of battle maps. The doll’s vision puts conflicting images of tamed nature description together with extreme violence. Nothing is attached properly to anything. Ideas do not lead to logical conclusions. Instead, they lead to odd constructions, more like what is required by the creative mind.
Geiser’s ‘algebra’ theme seems to peek through at times in images of severed limbs or broken bones, teeth, spilled blood, and of course the various number machines that pop up. The word algebra apparently used to have a meaning related to restoration or reunion, sometimes applying to the setting of broken bones which was often done in medieval times by a dentist who also performed bloodlettings. Interesting. But this film is not really about mathematics. At least not the usual kind. It’s about piecing together a vision of the world. Immersion.
This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart.
In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.