All our films and animations!
Fard is a 2009 French animated short by Luis Briceno and David Alapont. The story is quite visual, but my limited French tells me that the main character is part of a colorless corporate world and he’s just done a good presentation at work. However, he gets a package that contains something which allows him for a brief time to see what really lies underneath the surface of things.
Via SF Signal
It’s National Poetry Month and here is my favorite poet of the month. Azeem. We see a lot of writing about cute poets with education credentials and then someone like this brilliant Azeem fellow comes along and says a few things into a camera and reminds everybody that poets can shoot word bullets. I watch this video and my heart starts pumping and I get fidgety and I want to leave my chair and get to know words as well as this guy knows them. I noticed Azeem because he is one of the few subscribers to my YouTube film channel and so I checked him out. I’m extremely impressed. You want people to be interested in poetry? Show them this guy and they’ll be interested in about 5 seconds flat. I think what makes most poets uninteresting to the American reading public is that they all secretly have an image of a bookshelf in mind. Bookshelves are fine if you are browsing for a book, but they are death for anyone who’s making something. Azeem is also working with some hugely talented filmmakers who make fantastic imagery and do it with ease. If he comes to Los Angeles, I want to know about it and go see him play.
Set a Blaze:
Jean-Luc Godard interviews Woody Allen… sort of. What is clear to me from watching this video is that Woody Allen is an ordinary thinker. Jean-Luc Godard is not. And frankly I’m not certain who is funnier. I think this is a devastating dismantling of Mr. Allen. It’s bordering on open mockery. Watch how Allen looks at Godard. He hasn’t the slightest idea what’s going on. Every single answer Allen gives is perfectly expected and we’ve heard all of them before from a hundred other filmmakers. Godard’s questions however, come dropping out of the bottom of a 747 that’s flying without a pilot.
Film director Jean-Luc Godard has made one of the sharpest comments on copyright, piracy and film advertising that I have ever seen by releasing a trailer for his upcoming new film, Socialisme, that is actually the entire film in super-fast forward for 1 minute and 7 seconds. This is wit and intelligence like no other filmmaker in the world can muster. Once you see the opening presented to you by the films of Godard it becomes very difficult indeed to get up the energy to go watch highly paid American film stars mug and smile their way through belabored mega-scripts that seek opportunities to display Coke bottles and laundry detergent alongside Aston Martins and designer shoes. You begin to see that the Hollywood product is in reality just a very large catering operation and that movies are made with approximately 10 to 20 times the resources actually required to make any given film. American films, even the ‘independent’ ones, are shot from exactly the same point of view and think that movies are about telling stories. They are conceptually still living in the 19th century. They all adhere to the ‘beginning, middle and end’ framework and they uniformly lead to a ‘climax’ and a ‘resolution.’
Godard, on the other hand, functions in the present, treats film as an actual art form, and always uses a unique point of view that cannot be pinned down or turned into a style. He is death to James Cameron. He murders people like Woody Allen. He makes Scorsese look like the heavy-handed New York buffoon that he is. Godard makes films by persuading people to give him money on the basis of totally fake scripts, then shows up with a note pad and a bunch of confused actors and decides literally on the spot what he might want to be making that day and hopes for the best when it comes to fitting his material inside the structure of a project he might happen to be working on. In short, he works just like an artist is supposed to work. He works from himself. The fact that we have been misled by a century of industrial product aimed at showing us Paul Newman’s teeth is not of any concern to him.
If James Cameron showed up at my door with a contract to be in his next film, I would shove him backwards off my front porch. But I would fly to Europe to stand in the background of a Godard film for free.
Another film by Arthur Lipsett, the filmmaker who is the subject of an upcoming animation by Theodore Ushev. This one is called 21-87 and it’s a masterpiece. It seems to have something to do with trying to see how people are deadened somehow by the modern world. The filmmaker uses documentary clips in a mix-up with collage audio that unsettles the viewer. What is this life force behind us? And why do we keep trying to behave like machines?
Here is a well-known film by Arthur Lipsett, the filmmaker who is the subject of an upcoming animation by Theodore Ushev. It’s called Very Nice, Very Nice. It features a layered collage soundtrack with still photos and film clips. It conveys a general sense of unease and remoteness in urban people of 1961. I like it with the possible reservation that it relies too heavily on photographs. I think it’s very tricky to use still photos in a film and pull it off and I’m not sure that Lipsett is entirely successful. It’s good, but has a static quality, a reserve that I don’t fully admire. The filmmaker is too well-behaved and does not pull the trigger.