All our films and animations!
This is the oldest known film version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, made in 1910. It was made by the Selig Polyscope Company and did not involve the author, L. Frank Baum.
Smithsonian Magazine has an article called Frank Baum, the Man Behind the Curtain. It describes how Baum came to write what amounted to the first American children’s book and how he was so convinced he’d written a great book that he framed the pencil stub he’d written it with.
Japanese artist Takumi K. made this animation that’s based on ideas from his daughter. It’s a moving story that has been featured on YouTube.
I found this via Cold Hard Flash.
Created by Hendy Sukarya, Aaron Chiesa, Toru Kageyama and Lisa Temes as a student production, this film offers interesting information about the revolution of young people in Iran who have made the repressive Islamic nation the third largest nation of bloggers in the world. It is very well done and packs a good informational punch. Young bloggers getting their words out from under the watchful eye of an extremist religious government is admirable. But a nation that becomes a fanatical religious state run by clerics who kill people for speaking out cannot be trusted even a little. That goes for its young bloggers too. I am wholly unconvinced by the urge to ‘freedom’ in Iran. It requires a fire much stonger than a blog to burn religion out of a government.
I love this! It’s a video created by artist Marco Brambilla for installation in the elevators of the Standard Hotel in New York City. The artist worked with a production company called Crush. The video takes you on a journey from hell to heaven. Where’s Dante when you really need him? On the elevators at the hotel, the film goes up toward heaven if the elevator is rising, down to hell if you’re going down. Clever. I think I’ll spend a weekend at the Standard Hotel inside the elevator.
Film director Jean-Luc Godard is making a film that appears to be called Le Socialisme. I’m not entirely certain, but it sure looks to me from this trailer for the film like Mr. Godard is shooting with a small video camera. I can even hear the wind hitting the microphone during shots on board the ship. He’s always had a keen interest in shooting with small cameras, going so far at one point as to have a tiny 35 mm camera designed for one of his films in the seventies. I like this kind of filmmaking. This is how a filmmaker approaches a method that resembles the method of the painter or the writer. Filmmaking, for all its technical achievements and its massive budgets and enormous popularity, lags far behind painting, photography, writing and music. A filmmaker, in order to really be an artist, must be capable of functioning with the autonomy of the writer or the painter or the composer. Until then, the filmmaker is simply interested in socializing, not making art.
Mr. Godard’s films are often difficult, infuriating, perplexing, gorgeous, ugly, profound, ridiculous, and experimental – but they are always, without a single exception, the expressions of an artist who owes nothing to anyone.
Whether this video news report is real or fake, whether the story is made up or not, it is sheer genius. It is a remarkable modern day fairy tale that expresses almost everything you need to know about our questionable human condition. While repairing an old house somewhere in Pakistan recently, some children found a tiny alien woman walking around. These well-adjusted children immediately understood this tiny creature to be a terrible threat, so they stoned it until it fell down and remained motionless. Then they put her in a bottle for a while and eventually threw her onto some very hot bricks. Following this brutalization of a 4-inch female, flocks of onlookers arrived, at which point the locals decided to bury the dead alien in a hole in order to protect the community from hysteria.
Well, I don’t think the tiny aliens will be interested in returning to Pakistan, that’s for sure. But they can certainly come to Los Angeles where they will be warmly welcomed and given tiny outfits from Giorgio Armani.
I heard about this via Xeni at BoingBoing.net.