Writer/director Wanuri Kahiu has made a twenty-minute science fiction film in Kenya about a future that takes place after great water wars have left the earth barren and lifeless. The short, called Pumzi, is playing at the Sundance Film Festival. It was produced by Inspired Minority Pictures. The film follows a woman who works for a museum in one of the great self-contained indoor cities of Africa. She finds a single germinating seed and escapes to the dead landscape outside where she wants to plant the seedling. The film looks beautiful. I can’t wait to see the whole thing.
Category Archives: Movies
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Filmmaker Jonas Mekas on Living in Poetry
This is a clip from a documentary film, Meanwhile, a butterfly flies, about filmmaker Jonas Mekas. He shares a few thoughts about culture, country, poetry and what those things really are.
Jonas Mekas Film: As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Jonas Mekas is one of our great independent filmmakers. He spent years writing a film column in the Village Voice. He founded the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. He makes lots of films with small cameras that he can carry almost anywhere he goes. That is, by the way, how filmmakers should be working today. If a filmmaker needs a truck, he or she is making a commercial. I found this via the exceptionally brilliant underground film site, Bad Lit.
Bob Dylan’s Pink Christmas People
I love Bob Dylan’s recent album, Christmas in the Heart. Listened to it many times on Christmas day. This is his video for Little Drummer Boy. The people do seem awfully pink but maybe it’s just my eyes playing tricks on me.
Scarlett Johansson Has Made a Magnificent Short Film: These Vagabond Shoes
I spend a lot of my very limited brain capacity wondering why Hollywood directors don’t run around with small cameras making their own little movies for YouTube. Scarlett Johansson has made an excellent short film called These Vagabond Shoes which puts on display her obvious interest in and love for true cinema. The person who has uploaded it to YouTube has somehow squeezed the image from widescreen to standard, but the film shines nevertheless. I’m not sure why there’s a Russian overdub either, but just ignore it. I think Ms. Johansson should upload the film herself properly and if she does, I’ll change the video link. She has made a film that I’m certain is exactly what she wanted to make. It’s her personal expression of a fleeting and elusive subject. The film’s about being alone and damn well liking it. Kevin Bacon plays the film’s main character who gets dressed at just past 4:00 pm to leave his apartment and take a trip to a nearly empty Coney Island. The film contains only small incidental sounds and very minimal dialog. Its beauty lies in the attention to tiny details of behavior. The multiple clocks in Mr. Bacon’s tiny apartment, all precisely set. His careful re-tying of his shoe. His placement of a hat upon his head and his hesitation when locking his door behind him. These are the details of the lone person who sets out upon a small but important voyage through the terrifying public space. Mr. Bacon’s character puts on the armor of his attire with a resolute dread that I can remember from my own time alone. Ms. Johansson knows exactly what she’s doing. Her character’s trip to Coney Island where he will purchase a hot dog and sit on a bench by the sea is a seeking out of the pleasure of being alone with one’s very own self and the not knowing what will come of that. The uncertainty and the wide open strangeness of possibility when one is all alone in a very busy and enormous world is too much for most people to face.
Lord of the Rings Fan Film: Born of Hope
Born of Hope is an independent feature fan film inspired by The Lord of the Rings and produced by Actors at Work Productions in the UK. Kate Madison is the main producer/director. The film is a 70-minute original drama set in a time before the Lord of the Rings stories. It tells the story of the Rangers of the North and was inspired by a few paragraphs in J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices to the trilogy.
Stan Brakhage Film: Water For Maya
Stan Brakhage was one the most important experimental filmmakers of the 20th century. He used many techniques to make his films, one of them being direct painting on the film itself. This is one of his pieces from 2000. It is very beautiful and goes through several distinct movements during its short length. I am going to post some more examples of his films because I think they capture an essential quality of an artist’s happiness that must be very rare.
Film: Revisit November North Five
Here’s a new film for the film fans who happen to stumble by. It’s a film about memory shifts, searching, losing something, trying to find the old image, trying to regain an old feeling or impression, capturing a season of life or the mind. As if one were thinking, “I can almost remember how it was and what we did that day so long ago. Where were we again? North somewhere? It was dark? No, the sun was out… wait, it was cold… I think.
Film: World Builder
Here’s a beautiful science fiction film from Bruce Branit, about a man who builds a world for the woman he loves. If you’ve ever made anything in a 3D program, you know exactly what this film is up to.
Watch a Book Being Made
Here’s a stop-motion film about the making of a book called The Complex of All These. It was made at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York and consists of 3,000 photographs taken over a 2-month period.
Via Dangerous Minds
Paris Filmmaker in 1929 Shows Us What a Camera is For
This is an odd post and I’m not entirely sure I can pull it off. The film above is called Montparnasse. It was made in 1929 by Eugene Deslaw. I watched the film and want to write about it cold, without looking up Mr. Deslaw on Google. I’ll check up on him after I’ve posted this and see if I’m even in the ballpark.
Watch the film all the way through. If you think it’s just a collection of boring tourist shots in Paris with nothing happening, then stop reading and leave now because this post is for the four out of one hundred who catch the drift of the camera work. Deslaw was shooting in the Paris of Pablo Picasso and Matisse. He appears to have had a close connection to art and the cafe life of the city. His film is full of odd angles and closeups. He runs up onto a balcony in order to shoot straight down at some tabletops. He catches a woman applying makeup at about the 13-minute mark and makes a shot that is worth paying for. He films traffic and buildings, windows, curbs, chairs, newspapers, smokers, drinkers, snake-handlers, paintings, and water. He’s fascinated by his city and by his camera. He’s making art. He set out one morning with his camera and went around making art. Everyone was happy to be alive there in Paris in 1929 and he was playing his part in it. Films made at that time tend to have this cheerful experimental quality. Deslaw is nearly drawing with his camera. It’s an immediate act of finding visual meaning. He was walking and was struck by something and filmed it in an excited state. He was consciously being an artist.
The film he made is beautiful. It’s very hard to make a film with its kind of beauty today. Think about it a little. What would you do? Go to a Best Buy and look around for a brand new digital camera. You know, one of those shiny silver things with the HD viewfinder and all the buttons. One of those? Then what? You’d march out into the neighborhood with this gleaming tourist gizmo and look like a ninny bending over to film trash as it floated down into a storm drain? You’d walk up to a guy behind a news stand and ask to film him? Really?
Yes. That’s what you’d do. You’d get a little camera and do just that. And here’s your assignment: you must do this with the total conviction that you are about to make the greatest film ever made about your subject matter. Set out for a particular street corner and make a magnificent short film or a long one about that corner and everything on it. Spend an entire day doing only that. Skip lunch. Just stay there and make your film without ever entertaining even the slightest doubt that you are working on something of incredible importance and value. It’s going to be very hard to do. Some people will walk by and giggle. Some will become belligerent and tell you to stop. Film those people. Run away if they chase you. Then come back and continue your work. Remember that you are an artist on a mission to make something and absolutely nothing will stop you. Then come back home and figure out how to edit it and then put it online. Tell me about it even and I’ll watch it.
In 1929 it would have been recognized by the maker of this film that a camera is a camera and it will make your film if you want it to. Ever wonder why you don’t ever see Steven Spielberg out and about with his little camera making a movie for himself? It’s strange isn’t it? Could you imagine Pablo Picasso or David Hockney never carrying a sketchbook to make some quick pictures while having coffee or dinner? I couldn’t imagine such a thing? So when was the last time you ever heard of a Spielberg or Scorsese out with a camera making little films for their web site?
You could almost think of all the decades of massive budget film production and the studio structures built to support the film industry and film schools as an organized effort to confuse the issue and make people forget what a film actually is. We think of screenwriters and producers and agents and superstars and all the talk shows. But it’s very hard for the artist to walk out with the camera and go make a film the way a painter would work alone on a canvas. The Montparnasse film should help to illuminate the proper use of the camera for anyone who’s interested.
Film: Tommy Kane Draws Lebanon
Art Director Tommy Kane went to Lebanon and made a film about his wanderings. He also drew magnificent illustrations of what he saw. Those are in the film too. The combination of the beautiful street scenes and the cheerfully expressive drawings make me want to get on a plane and go visit this stunning country.
I found this via Drawn!
Film: The Wild
This film was made by Franck Deron. On his blog he says that he filmed it without a lens, using a pinhole through some aluminum foil. I’m not exactly sure what that means. I’d be curious to know more about exactly how he set that up. But I like the results. It’s a mysterious and moving film. I watched it with total absorption and the blurry glowing camera work reminds me of old super 8 movie cameras. The director has quite an accomplished list of films he’s made as music videos and promo spots. They are very well shot and edited. But I always like a director’s more personal films, made with no other client in mind than his or her own demanding internal artist. This is just such a film.
I found this on a beautiful web site called The Rumpus.
Reverend Billy Wants New York City and He Can Have It
This is a short documentary called The Gospel According to Reverend Billy, from an outfit called Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers. This guy looks like a preacher but he’s decidedly against what most preachers seem to be preaching in our angelic little country. He’s Reverend Billy and he’s running for mayor in New York City. He thinks Mayor Bloomberg is a corporate Wall Street guy who represents the takeover of the monoculture. He’s right. I lived in New York for eight years in the 1980s. I remember it as being rough, exciting, nervous, overly work-oriented, and dirty. I visited just a few months ago. It’s now an open-air mall with a Starbucks and a Gap. Gee, thanks Rudi Guiliani for your cleanup. Micky Mouse would feel right at home on Times Square. New York is also home to the several thousand creeps on Wall Street who are personally responsible for trashing the U.S. economy and running criminal scams on a worldwide scale. Well, at least we know where they all live, right? When I lived in the city I worked with many different types of people in many businesses. I would always give the same advice to my friends and acquaintances who were looking for jobs: Never Never Never work for the money people. They are vicious and very poorly educated. I recall working for one of the biggest real estate investors in all of New York. He owned some of the famous big buildings. He was also prone to throwing insults around and yelling at employees. He spent eight hours per day for a full week having meetings in his office about the design for his new closet at home. On Friday at about 1:00 pm he emerged to ask me about a pile of papers I was supposed to have finished that week. I had put them all untouched in a pile that I labeled ‘Complete.’ He picked them up and riffled through them for several minutes. Then he threw them at me and screamed, ‘What the f— do you think you’re doing?’ I picked up the phone while giving him a giant smile and called my employment agency. I said, ‘I’m going to put you on the phone with Mr.____ and I’d like you to tell him to kiss my ass.’
As I walked down the hall, he was screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘Don’t you people ever even think about sending an a-hole like that over here again!’
Yep, that’s the kind of New York SOB I was back in the 80s. And I haven’t learned a thing. I’d still do it on any sunny Friday afternoon.
New York has about as much cultural energy now as Dallas, Texas. It’s like a zombie apocalypse in Manhattan. Everyone looks like they’re trudging to the office on a Sunday. The East Side – Woody Allen’s favorite – is the land of strange men in khaki dockers who buy baskets in small stores. I’m not sure why Reverend Billy would give a damn about being mayor of a dead city but he’s got my vote of confidence if he wants it.
As for the preacher bit, I’m not sure I like it. It’s some kind of a joke or then again maybe not. He likes the vocal patterns of the preacher for sure, but that’s not all of it. Couldn’t he borrow the vocal technique of the preacher without the costume? Oh nevermind, that would be Bill Clinton.
Via Coilhouse
Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder
Famed Charles Manson prosecutor and three time #1 New York Times bestselling author Vincent Bugliosi wants former President George W. Bush indicted for murder. Bush and his vice-president Dick Cheney misled the nation into a brutal and needless invasion of Iraq which has resulted in the deaths of nearly 4,000 American soldiers. They should both be indicted by a Grand Jury and tried for murder. Absolutely no question about it. The string of lies that they told in order to accomplish an invasion and put a sovereign nation under the control of a private corporation is the equivalent of what Nazi Germany was doing in the buildup to World War II. It was a criminal act against both Iraq and the United States. It amounts to treason and is punishable in the severest sense.
We need more people like Mr. Bugliosi around. Everybody’s afraid. Afraid to offend. Afraid to be angry. Afraid to make nasty comments on a web site. What’s up with this country? Bugliosi’s aggressive and sustained argument for prosecution is exactly what is needed.
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