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New Film: Lunch With Bardot

by Cimaxion



My latest little film. It’s actually a cinegram. The subject is trains. Time. Memory. The present doesn’t exist. You can’t find it with measurement. You can’t even define it. The future is not there yet. You cannot see it. The only thing that really exists is the past. I say that because we can all see the past – some more clearly than others. But we can most certainly see it.

A cinegram is a short motion picture that uses images and text that are packed with meaning and suggestion. It’s my new word for things I once referred to as film poems.

Here’s the poem from inside the movie:

Lunch With Bardot

Trains run on time
With passengers asleep
Temporarily forgotten
Between observation points
Colliding lines
Of fictional transport

TheAuteurs.com Offers International Cinema Online

by Editor

laventuraThe Auteurs (www.theauteurs.com) is a site for art film lovers.  Their mission is to offer a huge selection of international art films by the world’s best directors for simple online viewing.  Last night I watched an Italian film from 1960 called L’Avventura, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.  The image quality was excellent and the sound was also very clear.  It was one of the best experiences with watching a film online that I’ve ever had.  The image in this post is a reduced screenshot taken while I watched.  The film itself is one of the great examples of Italian cinema and is one you will never forget.  Apparently, The Auteurs has partnered with The Criterion Collection to bring many of the best films online.  Each month The Criterion Collection selects three or four films to run on the site for free viewing in a sort of revolving festival of great cinema.  This is an important connection for The Auteurs because Criterion is probably the very best thing that ever happened to DVDs.  Their efforts at finding the very best sources for their films set them far apart from any other DVD producer.  If you are serious about international cinema on DVD, you always look for what Criterion has to offer.

The site, which is still in beta, has about 120 films available at this point.  Most of these cost $5 for a 7-day viewing period.  There are also articles, film reviews, and member forums for discussing films and writing your own reviews.  The monthly curated festivals look like a really good idea and seem to be offering a few free films each month.

But the key to success with a film site like this is volume.  They must secure the rights to show many more films very quickly.  Nothing makes people lose interest in a film site faster than a limited selection.  For now, there are many films listed on the site which are not actually available which is somewhat disappointing.  The site is trying to give visitors an idea of the kind of films they will offer, but it is a distraction that is unnecessary.  Hopefully, the site will use its relationship with Criterion to drastically increase its library which shows great promise.  The idea for a site that culls the best of international cinema is an excellent and overdue one.  Now it remains to be seen if TheAuteurs.com can keep the attention of film lovers.

Green Lantern in Absurd Fan-Film Trailer

by Editor

Jaron Pitts has made a movie trailer for a non-existent Green Lantern superhero movie.  Quite frankly, it’s an odd thing to do and I don’t honestly know why anyone would do it.  I certainly like the way it looks for the most part.  I’ve always liked the idea of the Green Lantern.  But a fan film trailer?  I don’t know.   There’s a mashup of various films going on in here with some effects on top. The main problem with this kind of work is that you take popular and well-understood tropes from Hollywood super-hero action movies and reproduce them with sometimes astounding faithfulness, but what you end up with is a photocopy of current filmmaking habits.  It’s like jumping up and down shouting, “Look!  I can do it!  I can make the ship, you know… like fly just like in the big Hollywood pictures!  Like, you know, it zooms in at you and then it stops, and dips its wings and then darts off in another direction with a big ‘WOOSH’ and a little burst of energy and then the music goes ‘CRASH’ and then we see the guy in the pilot’s seat…”  and so on and so on.  My Green Lantern trailer would just have a tired nut-job sitting at his dining room table with a flashlight and a roll of Scotchtape, trying to fashion himself a green light logo to stick on his chest while he poses in front of a full-length mirror.  But that’s just me.  I would generally advise skilled and talented filmmakers to avoid wasting their time.

Film: I Dreamt of Flying

by Editor

Filmmaker Alex Bland made this animated/live action film about RAF bomber squadrons during World War II.  He mixes hand-drawn illustration and archive footage from the war.  The soundtrack is excellent.  I really like how the film explodes into abstraction as the planes fly through the spotlights during an attack.  Mr. Bland also made an excellent animation called Unforgettable Evil From Mars.

French Navy: Video from Camera Obscura

by Editor

This video is from the album My Maudlin Career, by Camera Obscura.  The song is good and bears repeated listens.  The video is sort of an homage to films about love, or about couples anyway.  There’s a little French New Wave in it.  A little Fellini too.  It works.  We should all dance down the sidewalks and jump over things and climb lampposts when we’re out on dates, shouldn’t we?

ApSci Makes Music Video from Still Photos

by Editor

Electro-hop husband and wife duo ApSci have made a music video for their upcoming album Best Crisis Ever consisting entirely of still photos with no post-production effects at all.  It’s a great idea and makes for an excellent little film.  I like the music too.  They shot the black and white photos that you see held up by a hand with an iPhone and then printed out all the shots in sequence.  Then they travelled around the world and took more still photos while holding each black and white photo up in the original sequence.  So you get the odd effect of two still photo animation tracks going on at the same time.  It’s very clever and very simple.  Of course, it makes no difference whatsoever that it was all shot with an iPhone.  It could have been any camera.

The Limits of Control: Jim Jarmusch Film and Interview

by Editor

Here’s the trailer for The Limits of Control, a new film by Jim Jarmusch. I’m always very impressed by Jim Jarmusch when he speaks.  Extremely intelligent and serious artist working in film.  In fact, he might be one of the only serious artists working in American film at present.  He’s kind of scary and punkish and seems more like a rock star than a film director.  I’d probably run screaming from the room if he came in to talk to me.  But maybe not.  I always find a person’s weakness and exploit it.  Jarmusch’s weakness is Bill Murray.  Too much focus on stars in Jarmusch films.  He shouldn’t do this.  Great directors in the 21st Century should not cast so many stars.  Stars ruin movies.  Imagine reading a great novel in which every single character is played by a movie star.  Sort of like when you buy a novel that’s been adapted to film and right there on the cover you see a big fat picture of Leonardo DiCaprio.  Ruins the entire book.  Ruins a serious film quite often too.  Why movie stars have become so essential to film is a total mystery.  A great director spends all his energy trying to direct the movie in circles around his star performers.  What a waste.  A movie that becomes a parade of the director’s movie star friends is not worth watching.  He should make new friends.  There’s nothing more time-consuming than watching a movie star pretend to be an artist.  It would serve Mr. Jarmusch better to find people on the street and use them instead.  He needs to get over this Bill Murray fixation and move on.  Murry is a deadly boring actor with a frozen face.  These stars are a major headache and a distraction from what the director has to say with film.  By the way, here’s a fascinating interview with Jim Jarmusch that is casting off sparks of connective ideas all over the place.  They talk about novels, essays, poetry, William Burroughs and the cut-up technique, secret societies, Scientology, Stanley Kubrick, and more.  Fascinating talk.  I really wish he’d stop hiring movie stars.  Jim Jarmusch is not a good director of movie stars.  This guy would be a real artistic threat if he’d just run around with a video camera and work that way.  Why he would want to be eating catered food with the walkie-talkie brigade is simply beyond me.

Life Inc.: A Book About How the World Became a Corporation

by Editor

Life Inc. is a book by Douglas Rushkoff that details the invention and evolution of the corporation as a means of privatizing life and maintaining economic power in the hands of the few. In the film above which promotes the ideas of his book, Rushkoff talks about how our entire lives are spent working for some corporation and searching for mass-produced items that we think we need in order to be happy. He describes how this creates isolation and destroys communities because we are all in competition with each other all the time – even when we are doing something as simple as cooking on a barbecue.

The WotWots: Excellent Pre-School TV Show

by Editor

Two fantastic, insane and rambunctious little alien characters travel around in a steampunk spaceship.  The WotWots is a children’s television show from Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop, the company that did the special effects for Lord of the Rings.  This introductory episode shows the two WotWots landing at the zoo to explore the various animals there.  The WotWots are very inquisitive and energetic little beings with a great joy for adventure.  I like it.  It looks really good and the characters are the best I’ve seen in years.

Thanks to Boing Boing for posting this.

President Obama Reads ‘Where the Wild Things Are’

by Editor

He reads the entire book out loud to a group of kids at the White House Easter Egg Roll.  Watch him.  He wings it.  He improvises.  He throws himself completely into what he is doing for these kids.  He knows they can’t all see the pictures so he describes and even performs them.  I know just how difficult this performance really is.  There are few people who can pull this off.  We have a president who is actually an intelligent person and who enjoys reading and talking to people.  I think this is a very good video for Children’s Book Week.

The Hunt for Gollum: Excellent LOTR Fan Film

by Editor | 1 Comment

huntforgollumThe Hunt for Gollum is a 40-minute fan-made film that is available for free online viewing. The film was made through open collaboration of enthusiastic fans working under the leadership of director Chris Bouchard.  I’ve just finished watching it and can report that it is a wonderful success that tells its story with the perfect touch of mystery, action, and romance.  It captures the look of the Peter Jackson trilogy expertly and incorporates highly professional costuming, makeup, photography, script writing, and acting.  I think the producers of the LOTR trilogy should include this film when they release the eventual DVD of the upcoming film of The Hobbit.  Perhaps this is the best fan film ever made.  It probably is.  I have not seen all the available fan films, but it is difficult to imagine that anyone has made a better one.  Watch the film and then think about the fact that it was made for under $5,000.

The Cool School: LA Art Scene Film

by Editor

This video is from a PBS Independent Lens documentary about the Ferus Gallery that shaped much of the Los Angeles art scene in the early 1960s.  It’s short but it conveys some of the sense of LA’s wild, nervy, uncontrolled art attitude that is still in force today.  I love the zoom in on Andy Warhol who’s standing in front of one of his works and he just says, ‘Oh.’  LA still has that sense of offering the individual artist the clear opportunity to walk into a gallery, shake hands, say ‘How’s it going?’ and end up with an art showing a few weeks later.  It’s a city of entrepreneurs.  New York is a city of deeply knowledgeable and experienced people who understand that there is a system in place that’s been there forever.  That’s why people walk fast in New York.  They’re all trying to stay on schedule so the system keeps running.  In LA, everyone is throwing crowbars into the system and breaking it so that they can make their own.  The gallery scene in downtown LA is really interesting these days.  You can walk for blocks, stopping in at the galleries for a wide variety of offerings.  There are a couple of galleries that have copped an arrogant New York attitude and they are the ones I stay away from.  In general, you get a real feeling of the art being right there and totally accessible to you.  Everything is for sale.  The artists are interested in your money.  It’s very simple and healthy.  When I buy a piece of art in LA I feel like I’ve pulled a fast one on the art world somehow.  I feel complicit in something with underground tones.

First Star Trek Fan Film Made by Kids in 1969

by Editor

Ha ha!  This is great!  Jr. Star Trek is one of the very first fan films ever made for the original Star Trek series.  Peter Emshwiller made it in his house at the age of ten.  It actually made its way onto PBS television and has been a feature of many Star Trek conventions over the years.  Do kids still do this kind of thing?  They should.  What a fantastic effort and how much it must have taught the kids about making a movie.  They somehow capture the atmosphere of the classic television show by taking it very seriously.  Kids at that age didn’t see anything funny about Star Trek.  Their imaginations and intellects were fired by the show and they revelled in its deeply optimistic vision of the future.

You can read much more about this film and its maker at a great fan film blog from Clive Young called Fan Cinema Today, which chronicles all things related to films made by fans.  This kind of filmmaking has an important place in art and entertainment.  Unauthorized films are an expression of profound interest and respect by fans who go this far with their endeavors.  They extend the life of a fictional world that has been established in a particular medium and provide many people with an excellent outlet for their creative minds.

La Jetée: Intense French Science Fiction Film

by Editor

La Jetée is a French science fiction photo-novel made by Chris Marker in 1962.  It is composed almost entirely of still photos that tell the story of a man who is selected as an ideal subject for time travel experiments conducted by survivors of World War III.  What I like about this piece is that it is real science fiction.  It’s experimental.  It deals with some sort of future.  It’s about humanity and technology.  It’s mysterious.  It’s everything that most so-called science fiction today is not.  Chris Marker has been a filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer and digital multimedia artist for many decades.  He is considered one of the most influential experimental filmmakers in the world.