Really frightening film adaptation of Goethe’s Der Erlkönig. Raymond Salvatore Harmon made this film that revels in the dark terror of fairy tales. It’s a densely layered film that conveys the sense of riding through the forest beautifully. Those trees keep going by and the dolls bounce along on their horse. Amazing! I love terrifying fairy tales! A child, held tight in his father’s arms, senses a supernatural being of some sort approaching. You’ve got to pay attention to this one right up to the end!
Category Archives: Film
All My Life – Film by Bruce Baillie
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.
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.
Early Avant-Garde Animated Films by Harry Smith
Harry Smith was an American artist, experimental filmmaker, folk music collector and mystic. His film work is considered to be some of the greatest avant-garde work of the 20th century. Here are the first 2 parts of 4 showing some of his early animation from 1941 – 1957.
Film: Prénom Ernesto
Marvelous movie! Prénom Ernesto was made by Gabriel Dib and it stars Ernesto Salles as Ernesto and Debora Gaspar as Anna K. It’s in Portuguese and I don’t understand more than several words of it but I don’t have to. It’s a wonderful film that is inspired and heavily influenced by the work of Jean-Luc Godard. The filming of traffic at the beginning of the film is a Godard signature, the gunshots on the soundtrack, the sudden on-screen titles and the quote from Godard that goes, ‘All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.’ That’s essentially what this film is about. It’s shot with that casual sense of people interacting with objects that Godard perfected in the early sixties. Dib has made a very careful and productive study of Godard’s technique and uses it in a way that shows how fresh and modern it still is.