Shot with a Nokia N8 mobile phone, Anders Weberg’s film is multi-layered trip through a night dreamscape. He seems to form landscapes of diffused glowing light.
Category Archives: Film
Digital Underground in the People’s Republic of China
Rachel Tejada shot and edited this film about independent and underground film in China. It was produced by dGenerate Films. It’s in six short parts and covers the basics of independent film festivals and efforts to make films that will somehow survive the oversight of the repressive government. I post this out of a measured interest, but I cannot overlook the depressingly passive sadness of everyone who so much as glances into the camera. They consistently refer to themselves as independent filmmakers or underground filmmakers. Underground they may be out of necessity, but they are most certainly not independent. They are comfortably passive and have an absolute zero level of confrontation or rebellion in them.
I cannot muster significant respect for billions of people who want to express themselves and flourish but do not ever make the decision to pick up their totalitarian government leaders and drown them in the sea. You can talk to me until you are blue in the face about your independent cinema, but until your cameras shoot something I’m not listening.
Parts 2 – 6 after the jump
Facts About Projection – A Film by Temujin Doran
Filmmaker and projectionist Temujin Doran made a film about his love of his work in a small London movie theater.
Via Brain Pickings.
Tokyo Night Trip – A Film by Luciana Botelho
Luciana Botelho turns cab rides in Tokyo into a gorgeous abstraction that maintains its romantic atmosphere flawlessly. What I like about these films is how the filmmaker seems able to surrender herself to a particular time and place over the extended period of time necessary for making the film. Not an easy thing to do. I’ve posted about this filmmaker’s work before.
Evolution Made Us All – A Film by Ben Hillman
An informative and lovely little film by Ben Hillman for all the nitwits out there who think the earth is only around 5,000 years old.
Nightlife in a Puddle – A Film by Fabio Scacchioli
Fabio Scacchioli is an Italian filmmaker who turns ordinary shots on Super 8 film and video into magical and mystical pieces about memory and all that it does for us. I am always impressed by his work and how he finds the perfect moments to let glimmer through the haze to catch us unaware. I maintain that as we move further into the 21st century, we are developing a new cinema completely removed from the theatrical aspects of the last century’s cinema. It is filmmakers who do not try to make films that look like American features who will make the new cinema. Filmmakers making films that look like American features are looking at forms as outmoded as 19th century theatrical works were during the age of the early silents. The new cinema is as natural and immediate a form of expression as writing or painting.
I know that Scacchioli is currently working on something new and I’m looking forward to seeing it. I’ve posted about Scacchioli’s work before.
Tribune-American Dream Picture – 1924 Surrealist Film Contest Winner
In 1924, the Oakland Tribune and American Theatre held a contest in which people submitted their dreams. The winning dreams got made into films and the dreamers won $25. This surreal piece came from a dream submitted by Mrs. L.L. Nicholson. It more closely resembles a dream than many films since then, including Hitchcock’s Spellbound. It involves a couple on a trip and a missing baby.
Horse Glue – A Film by Stephen Irwin
Stephen Irwin is the animator behind this horrifically beautiful and mysterious film. Its heart is located right in the deep dark forests of fairytales, but its story is a conflagration that puzzles even while it astounds. Irwin slyly weaves two films together inside an old cathode ray TV tube to create his fascinating hybrid horror.
I posted about this filmmaker’s previous film, The Black Dog’s Progress.
You can visit the filmmaker’s site at SmallTimeInc.com.
Dreams That Money Can Buy – 1947 Underground Feature Film by Hans Richter
Inspired by a Hans Richter film posted by Dangerous Minds, I went looking for more. I found this extraordinary gem, Dreams that Money Can Buy, which is a low-budget feature film produced and directed by Richter with some of his incredible friends in 1947. They shot the film in a New York loft. It’s essentially an underground experimental film about a guy who gets an apartment and worries about how to pay the rent. When he discovers that he has the power to see into his mind through the reflection of his eye, he seizes upon an idea to create a business selling dreams to people who are unhappy with their lives. So of course the film features seven surrealist dream sequences!
Brilliant! Some of the people involved with this fantastic film were Max Ernst, Paul Bowles, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, John Cage, Fernand Leger, and Man Ray.
You can watch the film in its 8 YouTube parts right here or you can go download it from Archive.org.
Part 2
Parts 3 – 8 after the jump!
Ghosts Before Breakfast – Surrealist Short by Hans Richter
Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds posted about this 1927 film by Hans Richter. Considered one of the first examples of surrealist film, it’s a daydream that uses stop-motion animation to make people and objects do totally irrational and impossible things. Richter was a part of the Dada movement in art which rebelled against ordinary life and assumptions, attempting to expose the meaninglessness behind modern life. Out of Dada came the Surrealist movement. The music for this version is from a new score by Nikolai von Sallwitz.
Thank you Mr. Metzger and Dangerous Minds!
Road to the Stars – 1957 Soviet Space Vision with Stunning Special Effects
Excerpt 1 – First Men in Space:
The film is in Russian but you absolutely do not need to know Russian to enjoy it! Unfortunately, I can’t find the entire film, only these three excerpts.
Pavel Klushantsev’s 1957 film, Road to the Stars, features astoundingly realistic special effects that were an inspiration and obvious blueprint for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ten years later. The film is an extended form of science education, building upon existing 1950s technology to predict space exploration of the future. The sequences with astronauts in zero gravity are incredibly realistic. The second excerpt from the film features the construction of and life aboard a space station in earth orbit that is not only convincing but also beautiful. There are several scenes with space station dwellers using videophones that anticipate the famous Kubrick videophone scene.
Excerpt 2 – Space Station:
Excerpt 3 – Moon Landing:
Not Every Time – DSLR Film from Yemen
This is a preview for a television show from Yemen. It’s all shot on a Canon 7D digital SLR camera by Aimen Kasem who functioned as the show’s cinematographer. The show is directed by Sameer Al-Afeef. People are making very beautiful things with these DSLR cameras. I’ve been using one recently for my own films and appreciate the flexibility and quality that they offer. The post production work can be very challenging but the end results are often gorgeous. I like the looks of this dramatic show from Yemen. The preview stands on its own as a short film. With such high-quality equipment and editing tools available for a modest investment, it is becoming increasingly possible to see how people in different cultures approach and think about color. The fine manipulation of color in digital film is now available to any filmmaker and has become just as much a personal expression as it has long been for the painter.
The Fantastic Adventures of Cloudman
Look at this! Will you just trust me and watch this thing all the way through? It’s absolutely brilliant! It mixes techniques like they are child’s play! Stop-motion, hand-drawn, live action super 8, claymation, psychedelic explosions, fireworks exploding from the heads of alien attackers when they die, forest battles, miniature model sets! It’s incredible. It deals with mythical forces at battle. The director, Phoebe Parsons, has enormous talent and filmmaking know-how and is going be making very excellent films well into the future. Look out for this young filmmaker.
So this Cloudman is created when a pilot gets shots down and his blood mixes with a cloud. That’s the gorgeous opening animation that sets our crazy story rolling.
This film is… well… I love to use a cliché, but it’s mind-bending! Super cool and totally far out!
This is one of my favorite films online I think. Spectacular.
There’s a PhoebeParsons.com.
Modern Times – A Digital Homage to 2001
Here’s a science fiction film, nearly every frame of which is an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s unsurpassed masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The homage extends into the set design, the windows, the doors, walkways and more. It was made by a UK art design group called BC2010.
The Films of Luciana Botelho
I once suggested on this web site picking up a camera and spending the day on a street corner making a film. Moulin Rouge is a film that does that with spectacular and sublime results. Filmmaker Luciana Botelho wanders the world with her camera and makes films that take my breath away. Standing in front of the Paris landmark, she makes a film that celebrates movement more effectively than anything going on inside the actual Moulin Rouge. Her film is also a very simple and charming celebration of the act of photographing or filmmaking. Botelho’s films are beautiful and subtle and extremely emotional. She fits image to music perfectly. I’m ready to go and buy all the songs after watching these!
With the great pile of film and video available on the web, one must maintain some sensitivity to the gentle – the delicate. Botelho is a gentle filmmaker. She impresses me because she seems to me to be an artist of the glance. Her art seems based on immediate vision and impressions made almost in passing. She makes films about travel that capture the essence of a place, but primarily focus on the behavior of people, turning the overlooked into something captivating. The films hold an enormous grace and convey very powerfully the impression of an artist whose every turn of the head can lead to a film.
I like the fluctuating frame rate of these films. It focuses you in on the interesting physical movements caught by the camera in everyday situations. And yet the films flow smoothly in overall effect. The small camera in hand that follows the eye is modern cinema. In the film, Tokyo Slices – People, when the camera swings to catch the girl in the scarf on the subway platform you are seeing most of what you need to know about modern cinema.
I look forward to Luciana Botelho’s Los Angeles film.