Author Archives: Cimaxion

Trauma: A Video Poem Triptych by Swoon

by Cimaxion

Swoon is a Belgian poet filmmaker who makes films that try to blur the boundary between written poem and moving image. He mixes his own footage with found footage and sometimes mixes his own words with others. I like the quiet easy tone of his work. I like his manipulation of imagery. His work is a very difficult kind of work because it tries to make something new from two different things. Poetry is a perfect form all by itself. But film is never satisfied. It’s always looking for something to include within it. So it’s natural for film to go looking for poetry and try to bring it in. But poetry resists all alliances. Poetry seems content and willing to wait for centuries. It requires nothing. It doesn’t care what film wants. It will sit on a dry page in some crowded shelf somewhere waiting six hundred years for just a single pair of eyes to come along in boredom, open to the page, glance in, read half-way down and then slap the book shut for another six hundred years until someone decides to finish reading the goddamn thing. That’s patience. Film doesn’t have that. Film must be seen now or it withers. It begins to rot. Even if it’s digital. Digital films become confused and get lost in the forest of other digits. They may never find their way out again. So working with the two things and trying to get them together is very difficult but may actually make perfect sense.

This is a film poem triptych that is Swoon’s first work to include his own words. There’s a site for the film with more information.

Pereval: 1988 Soviet Science Fiction Animation by Vladimir Tarasov

by Cimaxion | 2 Comments


Humans have crash-landed on an alien planet. Sixteen years later, they send a small search party consisting of their children – born at the time of the crash – back toward the broken ship. The young members of the party make their way through a hostile and surreal landscape that holds surprises for them. Finding the ship well-preserved gives one of the young people an important connection to his past and to his origin.

This film was directed by Vladimir Tarasov and was adapted from a novel by Kir Bulychev.

Les Mystères du Château de Dé: 1929 Film by Man Ray

by Cimaxion

Surrealist art great, Man Ray, made this film in 1929. It follows a pair of indecisive travelers who base all their action on chance. They head out to a fabulous chateau in the hills and wander around inside and out. They run into four odd persons who enjoy swimming and running about as if the place is their private gym. But what is Man Ray doing here? Why all these shots of windows, lamps, sculptures? He is finding the abnormal in the normal. Wherever he happens to be with a camera he can make the surreal. He’s functioning as an artist, looking for odd angles, shadows, contrasts. He is also diving into the great current of his culture. The house is a castle filled with fine objects and great art. Man Ray is expressing his enthusiasm. This is an extremely childish film. I mean that as a compliment, though I really see nothing exceptional in works for children. But for an artist to function as a child for a certain amount of time is extraordinary and beneficial I think. But that kind of thinking must end and lead to its own destruction. In other words, I do not think any children’s author or illustrator should ever continue to work in that way for more than a few years. Then it is time to think about serious things and to make things that upset people. Perhaps that is my main criticism for most of the things I have seen by Man Ray. He seems a little bit too pleasant. I might be wrong about that. I have to look a little more.

The Rolling Stones – Highway Child – Unreleased 1968 Song

by Cimaxion


I like it. Chug chug. It sort of motors along. Nobody plays this way anymore. Nobody makes rock. I think to make rock you have to enjoy being an asshole and you have to look around at the world without worrying about being a good person. You also can’t commit suicide if you want to be good at rock. If you commit suicide, it means you wanted to be nice but couldn’t. Nice people get eaten. They don’t become rock stars. It’s not an anger thing. If you’re mad at something, you can’t do rock either. I think you’ve got to enjoy the anger, drift above it, relishing it, mocking it, using it for an advantage, but you can never let anger be your thing… like the punks. Only funny punks are worth listening to. The mad ones suck because ultimately they’re only mad about ice cream. Jagger is a laughing little bitch punk who wins every song he plays.

The Living Want Me Dead: Short Horror Film by Bill Palmer

by Cimaxion | 1 Comment


‘The Living Want Me Dead‘ is a short independent horror film that’s won a bunch of awards at festivals because it deserves to. I enjoyed every minute of this wild ride along with a desperate slacker as he realizes that he’s been contaminated with a substance that causes everyone within sniffing distance to want to disembowel, devour, decapitate and dismember him. He’s hounded by vomiting, mouth-foaming lunatics who simply won’t rest until he’s dead. It’s a clever commentary on the overdone zombie genre that manages somehow to be frightening and hilarious at the same time. The film was written and directed by Bill Palmer who employes techniques typically seen in independent feature films. Vimeo is full of filmmakers who want to strut their pro-quality stuff, but very few of them make anything I can watch for more than several seconds. I’m sure that director of photography Jeremy Hayward had a lot to do with this because the camera work is fluid and clear, even when following intense action and movement.

Director Palmer handles his equipment, crew and actors without letting the job overwhelm his natural instinct for telling a ripping good story and making us want to know what’s going to happen next. In fact, he made much of his own equipment, including a simple rig for filming underwater! He used water guns to shoot fake blood. I love that kind of filmmaking. And I love that he did it all without ridiculous shooting permits. He just hit the side streets with his little crew and turned the whole neighborhood into what I imagine was a hell of fun time. He has created a tight little view into a California suburb at Christmas time by littering the landscape with decorations that lend a sort of lunatic and false joy to the dark comedy and spurting blood.

So the main character, played to intense and despairing perfection by Adam Conger, tries to get away from his attackers by lying low at a friend’s house. Conger really hits his role on the money. He’s perfect as the overwhelmed slacker-type dude who’s actually fairly driven and maniacal in survival mode. But he just can’t seem to find a good way to explain the desperate situation to his friend who is played with great comic ability by Tony Nunes. I believe that during the violent proceedings in his backyard, this friend is primarily engaged with heating up a HotPocket. Needless to say, the hero’s plan for lying low does not work out very well!

1958 Mike Wallace Interview with Brave New World Author Aldous Huxley

by Cimaxion | 1 Comment


Mike Wallace talks to ‘Brave New World‘ author Aldous Huxley, focusing on the danger of slipping into totalitarian government as a result of overpopulation, increasing hierarchical organization of people in corporate structures, and improper use of television and subliminal advertising. He continually refers to the similarity between the methods of advertising agencies and those of political dictators.

Wallace: …and we’ll be persuaded to vote for someone that we do not know we are being persuaded to vote for?

Huxley: Exactly, I mean this is the rather alarming feature… that you are being persuaded below the level of choice and reason.

Perhaps that explains the election of George W. Bush, a raging drunk without the slightest education – a psychopathic false cowboy with delusions of a holy mission to invade the Middle East. It was national suicide. The election of Bush was the worst thing to happen to the United States since the Civil War and it cannot be explained by logic. The world is only at the beginning of decades spent recovering from the criminality and death unleashed by Bush. I think Huxley might have said that Bush was the easily predictable outcome of uncontrolled corporatization. Every corporation likes to push dull-witted and unimportant people into middle management positions where they can function as the tiered facade standing between the board members and the Chinese slave camps.