Michel Montecrossa continues his underground assault on currently active oppressors, liars and cheats who simply don’t know how to live properly. I like this guy, Montecrossa. He’s hitting something that is sorely lacking these days and he keeps hitting it cheerfully and with conviction. He digs himself and what he does and that is good because it puts irony in the dumpster where it belongs. You know, of all the basic forms of humor, irony is actually the most depressingly childish. Here is Montecrossa countering the bullshit from Rupert Murdoch and keeping it simple.
Category Archives: Underground Film
Helping Hand: Horror Short
Listen carefully. I made this to upset my friends at a party.
Short Film: Attackazoids!
Here’s a wild underground science fiction short produced by a company called Robot Hand. This fun and narratively loose assault on the alien invasion/mechanical overlord genre was directed by Brian Lonano and uses old-style lo-fi analog techniques for its special effects. The apparently concerned and helpful robots seem intent on wiping out every last vestige of life on the planet. Maybe they come from Wall Street!
Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film has posted more about the filmmakers and festivals showing their work.
Ready (Re’Search Wait’S), 2009-2010: A Film by Ryan Trecartin
Do you know who Ryan Trecartin is? You better. He’s making the wildest and best videos to be found online or in a gallery anywhere. This piece is about to open with six others to form an epic at the Museum of Modern Art P.S.1 in New York. It’s a warped and wicked view of corporate career life and behavior as practiced by characters whom I suspect would not even want to be considered normal. They spout company lingo and get it all twisted back inside of itself until it starts to sound like perfect sense and is just as valid as what you hear daily in the offices of any company. Trecartin is onto the fact that our economy has failed and millions of people are out of work because their jobs were bullshit to begin with. At minimum, 75% of jobs in corporate America are completely unnecessary. They are a busy-work scam based on particular rhythms and mannerisms and they produce nothing at all. The characters in this video revel in their uselessness. They gloat, the whine, they insult, they mock. They are amped up to be as irritating as possible. Their voices grate like demented cartoon characters. These videos are like the visions of a child computer in orbit that scans human beings and then tries to reproduce them but gets it wrong. These are digital creatures more than they are actual human characters.
Not to mention the fact that Trecartin’s intentionally clumsy and cheeseball imagery is simply gorgeous. The videos are extremely deceptive. They are so freely expressive as to be nearly psychotic. But always just enough under control to imply meanings with great subtlety. Right now these films of Ryan Trecartin represent the avant-garde’s leading edge.
Warhol and Maciunas: A Film by Jonas Mekas
This is a film by Jonas Mekas that features Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, and George Maciunas who founded the New York art movement known as Fluxus. The film shows a Whitney Museum art opening in 1971 and an artists’ party in New York. Home movies become an artform in Mekas’ hands.
The Resurrection Movie: A Film Trailer by Michel Montecrossa
MATURE CONTENT AND NUDITY:
This is Michel Montecrossa’s peace and climate change musical. It tells a great passion story which is the love-tale of cyberrocker-astronaut Starlight and his mate Earthpower and how they change hellish mega city planet through their music into a free world. It’s full of rock & roll, motorcycles, leather jackets, keyboards, cowboy hats, sex drawings, mirror sunglasses, hip rocker women, New Age and science fiction. I don’t know who these people are, but they sure do look fun and they have some kind of wild movie going on here. It features the poetry of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and William Wordsworth! My general take on it is that the film is a cry for individual expression and freedom in a time of unending war and conflict managed by the forces of homogenous corporate control. Director Michel Montecrossa is described as a ‘prolific songwriter, orchestral composer, painter, writer, moviemaker, futurist architect and cyberartist.’ Wild people like this should make more films.
Propaganda Mussolini: A Film by Massimo Balloi
Italian filmmaker Massimo Balloi has made an abstract film that attempts to explain the descent of Italy into modern fascism. The rapid turn of Western democracies toward a virulent corporate fascism does in fact resemble the ideas put forth by Mussolini in the 1930s and 40s. But his effort was to mimic the efficiencies of the corporation in government. The new effort currently underway is to replace government control with corporate control. The danger is real and it is extreme. Even in the United States we see a Supreme Court allying itself with corporations. In Italy, you have a very basic corporate buffoon running the country as if it were a criminal enterprise. In the U.S. you have completely false liberals maneuvering a corporate front man into the Presidency so that every decision is made with a seemingly logical inclination toward the interests of the large corporations. We are now fighting entire wars based solely on decisions by corporations.
The twenty first century will not be the century of war against terrorists. It will be a century of war against corporations. They will gain an upper hand initially, but this will be short-lived. I say this because once you get inside these corporate structures you can observe how shockingly weak they are. BP is your perfect example. A single broken valve can weaken the entire stack of cards. These corporate entities can only flourish while people are asleep.
Broken English: A Film by Derek Jarman Featuring Marianne Faithfull
MATURE CONTENT:
This might be the most beautiful film you will see all year. It is the full version of ‘Broken English,’ starring Marianne Faithfull. It was made by Derek Jarman. It incorporates three of Faithfull’s songs. Jarman learned a great deal from American avant-garde filmmaker, Kenneth Anger. Interestingly, Marianne Faithfull also starred in an Anger film called ‘Lucifer Rising.’ The montage and superimposition going on in this film is simply stunning. It’s full of dark pagan ritual, sex, violence, romance, adoration, and mystery. I think Jarman is one of the very few filmmakers who understood what Anger was doing in his work and tried to carry on from there.
Runts: A Short Film by Lori Felker
Ahhh… sibling rivalry in a warped and earthy garden of delights! Mike Everleth at Badlit found this grisly but charming tale of two doll-babies who joyfully tear each other to bits. The film by Lori Felker features dark and murky photography that enhances this tale of plastic dismemberment.
Artificial: A Short Science Fiction Film by Mónia Camacho
Mónia Camacho of Portugal made this short science fiction piece about a fragmentary broadcast from an alien artificial intelligence. There’s some talent here. The film is made in the simplest possible fashion but conveys some interesting emotions and ideas. I think the film should be expanded into something quite a bit longer. The odd, almost out of place expressions of the character make me curious. I want the AI to ramble on for a while. That final landscape shot is fantastic. You could almost take this short film and drop it right into a Tarkovsky film like Solaris. It would fit.
Downtown 81 – A Film Starring Jean Michel Basquiat
Mature Content:
This is a 1980 film starring American artist Jean Michel Basquiat. It follows him around and through the downtown New York art and music scene, presenting real people and events in a barely fictionalized semi-documentary. It’s a fascinating look into the world of 1980 New York and the quickly rising star painter who was to pass away in 1988. It’s a glimpse of a New York just a few years before it was bombed by The Gap. It was directed by Edo Bertoglio.
You can stare straight into the open face of Basquiat and find more mystery than Banksy could conjure with a black velvet cloak, top hat and a mask.
Red Riding Hood Meets Frankenstein – A Film by Ricky Lewis Jr.
Here’s a humorous tribute to the Universal horror films of old. It was directed by Ricky Lewis Jr. and features a forest, an inn, Frankenstein, Red Riding Hood, an invisible man, vampires, fog and various comedic chills. The production has a large cast who give themselves over entirely to the mood of the piece. There’s a nice underground vibe to the proceedings and the effects are surprisingly good.
Monologue Under White Light! – A Film by Samira Eskandarfar
A ravishing beauty from Iran! Look at this mysterious and subtle film by director Samira Eskandarfar. Her figures drift through time and space in a stage setting that seems open-ended and universal. The underlying themes and messages are probably far more complex than I can ascertain without a proper understanding of Iranian culture. But the film stands as a mysterious and slightly harrowing glimpse into the progress of attraction, love and communication between individuals. The characters, played by Kazem Sayahi Saharkhiz and Faranak Miri, engage in mundane conversation, offer each other drinks, smoke cigarettes, make eyes at each other, play music on a tape recorder and disappoint each other in all the little ways of a normal life. But they seem symbolic of something greater and perhaps very much to do with the filmmaker’s Iran. There are some amazing artists working with enormous expressive power in Iran. Samira Eskandarfar is one of them.
By the way, the filmmaker is also a painter.
Visit the filmmaker’s web site.
The Last Harvest – A Film by Heidi Phillips
Canadian experimental filmmaker Heidi Phillips made this little ghost story film that could almost as easily be called a memory film. Mike Everleth over at Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film has some good comments in his review of the film.
Culture Shock, Level One – A Film by Bill Mousoulis
Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film posted a film by Bill Mousoulis called The Experimenting Angel. I liked it. So I’ve posted another of Mousoulis’ films. It features Jennifer Levy who returns from a long absence to Australia and feels dislocated while visiting a city. She wonders why the people seem so ‘deflated’ as they wander through various public/corporate spaces like malls. The film captures something increasingly common worldwide which is that quiet, blank, but seemingly normal behavior encouraged by any structure designed and erected with a corporate idea behind it. We all know how we are expected to behave when we walk past a row of Gaps, Starbucks, Banana Republics and Wetzle’s Pretzels. We obey. We perform the routine and go about our business making sure that we are perceived as correctly normal. We are guests in someone else’s house, even in our public spaces. We behave like new guests, ingratiating ourselves to the dome camera in the ceiling. The cell phone is the absolute symbol of complete obeisance to the corporate superstructure looming above us. We are told to engage in meaningless chatter while we walk, drive, breathe, eat, date, watch movies, run, bike, and work. We are told to do this until it seems like normal and seems to make perfect sense. It is as logical as being told to drop a penny on the ground every third step for every day of your life. Steve Jobs tells you to leave him a penny on the ground every third step of every day of your life… and you damn well do it. You know how many times Steve Jobs uses a cell phone during an average day? None. Why? Because he’s much smarter than you are.