What’s the main thing you notice?
Directed by Alexandre Perrier. Produced by Kidam.
Tag Archives: avant-garde
Early Avant-Garde Animated Films by Harry Smith
Harry Smith was an American artist, experimental filmmaker, folk music collector and mystic. His film work is considered to be some of the greatest avant-garde work of the 20th century. Here are the first 2 parts of 4 showing some of his early animation from 1941 – 1957.
Thinking About Underground Film – Part 1
If you live in Los Angeles you’ve probably seen it many times: the caravan of white trucks parked along the block and around the corner, diesel generators roaring, cables strung along the gutters, piles of lights, rolls of cables, racks of costumes, makeup trailers, bored extras, bored crew members, bored motorcycle police, and fascinated passersby.
That’s all you need to see to know that something mainstream – feature film, TV show, or commercial – is being made.
But what’s an underground film?
Bad Lit, my favorite site devoted to underground film, has an article about the problem of defining something as slippery as ‘underground film’ in which several definitions are offered by different people. Mike Everleth, the site’s editor, defines underground film this way:
Essentially, I believe it is a film that is a personal statement by one person and a film that dissents radically in form, or in technique, or in content, or perhaps in all three. However, that dissension can take on any number of forms.
I agree with that, but would add the requirement of hostility. There should be an element of combativeness which attempts to counter a much larger established force. There must be some rebellion in the work. It can be very subtle – nearly imperceptible – but it’s usually there somewhere. In fact, I think the hostility should even tend to include the general culture surrounding the filmmaker/s. Dissent, by itself, can be rather subdued, soft-spoken and shy. I think underground film requires a willingness not only to dissent but to kick apart.
While thinking about all this mainstream versus underground stuff, I went searching around on YouTube for something that might fit the discussion. I found this peculiar British documentary film about filmmaker Donald Cammell who co-directed, along with Nicolas Roeg, the 1968 film Performance. The film is one of those odd mixtures of underground and mainstream. It features Mick Jagger and involves a lot of mind-bending drugs, sex and criminal underworld shenanigans. It’s actually impossible to forget once you have seen it.
This film contains adult subject matter, language, nudity and sexual situations.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
The documentary, Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance, describes a time when a group of intensely creative artists from various disciplines could operate on the fringes of the mainstream to create an essentially underground film with something resembling support from a mainstream production company. It’s a scenario that does not exist today. If you watch all 7 parts of the film, you will be immersed in that strange hybrid world of the ‘popular underground’ that defines much of what was happening in the 1960s and 70s. Today, if it cannot be jammed into a mall and sold with Sour Patch Kids, it won’t get any money. That holds as true for ‘independent’ films as it does for summer blockbusters.
Watching this documentary makes me wonder why so many filmmakers seem to have such trouble making the films they really want to make. After all, one can purchase a cheap camera and make exactly what one wants regardless of what one’s career and money-earning responsibilities might be. Tormented filmmakers who are battling studois for creative freedom should simply make films with video cameras during their spare time. This would not only foster a healthy underground, but it would quite possibly prevent a few tragic endings.
Yellow Plastic Raygun Wins Best Experimental Film Award at Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles
Well I’m just very pleased about this. The Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles has given my film, Yellow Plastic Raygun, the award for Best Experimental Film. I was having quite a nice week attending various parties and screenings at the festival. Its use of multiple locations in the heart of downtown Los Angeles gives one a real sense of taking part in the life of the city and being involved with something that’s helping to foster the exploding art and film scene in downtown. Most of the short films were screened in the new Civic Center Theater at the intersection of First and Main Streets, in the shadow of the famous City Hall tower that has appeared in so many crime shows and film noir classics. I attended the screening of my own film this past Saturday evening and was amazed at seeing it large since I had put so much work into it on small monitors. What’s great about the Downtown Film Festival is that it shows a wide range of filmmaking styles, crew sizes and budgets. They show films made with lots of production resources right alongside films made by individual artists working with inexpensive HD cameras and even cell phone cameras. I am very proud to have won this and I look forward to more great festivals in downtown Los Angeles from the people who put this together.
Kenneth Anger Makes a New Film for Missoni Fashion House
The great American filmmaker, Kenneth Anger, has made a new film called Missoni. He shot it for the Italian fashion house Missoni as part of their Fall 2010 advertising campaign. The film includes members of the Missoni family engaged in dance-like movement and poses. Can advertising be art? Yes, when it’s done by an artist.
Anger has made another beautiful and mysteriously layered film. Apparently, he has gone digital, using something called a RED digital camera. It has some characteristics in common with 35mm cameras. Anger appears to be using it as freely as he used 16mm cameras.
What’s really interesting about this whole project is its reason for existing. I think the Missoni advertising angle is just an excuse. I think they just wanted to be in a film by Kenneth Anger.
Film: Outer Space
Marc Campbell posted this 1999 film called Outer Space by Australian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherassky. Using found footage from something featuring actress Barbara Hershey, Tscherassky creates a jumping and jittering psychotic version of a haunted house movie. The simplest of shots showing a woman entering a house, sitting down, looking into a mirror, looking out a window, are turned into extravagant, multi-layered cubist visions from a nightmare.
Film: From a Land of Ashes and Mist
From an Italian master of short film memory, Fabio Scacchioli, comes this beautiful 23-minute work that expresses the illusion of solid permanence and the heroic attempt to build a reality based on fragments of memory. Even found memories and images can become part of one’s own person. This fleeting and subtle idea becomes more discernible as the film progresses. The impressive imagery revolves around the recent earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy and compares the desolation of a town reduced to rubble with the lives that once literally danced through home movies. It is a film about looking for ghosts.
Film: Objets Oubliés
Italian filmmaker, Fabio Scacchioli, works with zero budget and creates masterpieces of Italian cinema. I think the great movement of cinema in the 21st century is underway and it looks to me like Italy is riding the top of the wave. We are finally reaching the point where an artwork is created with a ‘zero budget,’ just like a painting is. Picasso painted for just the cost of his canvas, his paints, and his own time. Filmmakers can now work the same way, enjoying the privacy of their studios and making things with their hands and their computers and their cameras. Filmmaking has finally become a visual art. Online cinema is the most powerful movement in all of art today. It is alive and aware of its potential. Artists like Scacchioli are going to take it very far indeed and they are going to become the Picassos of the future. It is time to start paying attention to this cinema, not as a silly form of entrance into the moribund feature film studio career, but as a major art form in and of itself.
This film, Objets Oubliés, is built upon four pieces of film found on the street. The filmmaker attempts to connect the unknown images into some sort of coherent whole. The narrating voice exists only in relationship to this attempt to create life and continuity from unknown materials discovered by pure chance. There is something like a form of grace and true love of film or cinema in this act. It seems to me to represent the very life of film. It also seems like an effort that would quite obviously and most certainly originate in Italy. It is mindful romance. It is the literal taking of the baton from an unknown hand and carrying it forward to make something unexpected and marvelous. One person makes something without knowing it is part of an artwork that has not come into existence yet. But it will and it does. The artist comes along and picks it up and shows us that the artwork existed even before he arrived.
Film: Look at that fire! Oh boy!
Sit down, turn off your cell phone, close the door. You are about to see something magnificent. Several days ago, I posted a film, Yellow Plastic Raygun, on Vimeo. And today I catch this big fish of a filmmaker from Italy who made a comment about the film and who has made a gorgeous and moving statement about war and destruction. It grabs you and just won’t let you go until it finishes. The use of old images, combined, layered and cut into pieces to form new images and artworks fascinates me when applied to video. This is an example of the art form at its finest.
Fabio Scacchioli made this. He’s made others, but this is the first one I’ve viewed and I’m convinced already. Italy appears to be very healthy in its cinema heart.
The filmmaker has a web site.
Film: Subway Cosmos
Subway Cosmos is a film by Brad L. Cooper. It was shot in Tokyo. I like the way the filmmaker moves through the world observing things and filming what interests him. His shots of people through glass are fantastic. Here’s another film he did called Tsukiji about a fish market in Tokyo.
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.
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.