Luciana Botelho turns cab rides in Tokyo into a gorgeous abstraction that maintains its romantic atmosphere flawlessly. What I like about these films is how the filmmaker seems able to surrender herself to a particular time and place over the extended period of time necessary for making the film. Not an easy thing to do. I’ve posted about this filmmaker’s work before.
Tag Archives: experimental
Nightlife in a Puddle – A Film by Fabio Scacchioli
Fabio Scacchioli is an Italian filmmaker who turns ordinary shots on Super 8 film and video into magical and mystical pieces about memory and all that it does for us. I am always impressed by his work and how he finds the perfect moments to let glimmer through the haze to catch us unaware. I maintain that as we move further into the 21st century, we are developing a new cinema completely removed from the theatrical aspects of the last century’s cinema. It is filmmakers who do not try to make films that look like American features who will make the new cinema. Filmmakers making films that look like American features are looking at forms as outmoded as 19th century theatrical works were during the age of the early silents. The new cinema is as natural and immediate a form of expression as writing or painting.
I know that Scacchioli is currently working on something new and I’m looking forward to seeing it. I’ve posted about Scacchioli’s work before.
The Fantastic Adventures of Cloudman
Look at this! Will you just trust me and watch this thing all the way through? It’s absolutely brilliant! It mixes techniques like they are child’s play! Stop-motion, hand-drawn, live action super 8, claymation, psychedelic explosions, fireworks exploding from the heads of alien attackers when they die, forest battles, miniature model sets! It’s incredible. It deals with mythical forces at battle. The director, Phoebe Parsons, has enormous talent and filmmaking know-how and is going be making very excellent films well into the future. Look out for this young filmmaker.
So this Cloudman is created when a pilot gets shots down and his blood mixes with a cloud. That’s the gorgeous opening animation that sets our crazy story rolling.
This film is… well… I love to use a cliché, but it’s mind-bending! Super cool and totally far out!
This is one of my favorite films online I think. Spectacular.
There’s a PhoebeParsons.com.
The Films of Luciana Botelho
I once suggested on this web site picking up a camera and spending the day on a street corner making a film. Moulin Rouge is a film that does that with spectacular and sublime results. Filmmaker Luciana Botelho wanders the world with her camera and makes films that take my breath away. Standing in front of the Paris landmark, she makes a film that celebrates movement more effectively than anything going on inside the actual Moulin Rouge. Her film is also a very simple and charming celebration of the act of photographing or filmmaking. Botelho’s films are beautiful and subtle and extremely emotional. She fits image to music perfectly. I’m ready to go and buy all the songs after watching these!
With the great pile of film and video available on the web, one must maintain some sensitivity to the gentle – the delicate. Botelho is a gentle filmmaker. She impresses me because she seems to me to be an artist of the glance. Her art seems based on immediate vision and impressions made almost in passing. She makes films about travel that capture the essence of a place, but primarily focus on the behavior of people, turning the overlooked into something captivating. The films hold an enormous grace and convey very powerfully the impression of an artist whose every turn of the head can lead to a film.
I like the fluctuating frame rate of these films. It focuses you in on the interesting physical movements caught by the camera in everyday situations. And yet the films flow smoothly in overall effect. The small camera in hand that follows the eye is modern cinema. In the film, Tokyo Slices – People, when the camera swings to catch the girl in the scarf on the subway platform you are seeing most of what you need to know about modern cinema.
I look forward to Luciana Botelho’s Los Angeles film.
Knout – a Film by Deco Dawson
The film is all gnarled and fuzzy and stained. It looks like something shot in the twenties and dug up in a basement somewhere. Right around the 8:15 mark there’s a sequence of images that are just simply stunning. The actress, Jenovia Tretiak, is frenzied and beautifully insane. The original score by Patric Caird is perfect and hair-raising.
The Production and Decay of Strange Particles – A Film by Jon Behrens
Seattle avant-garde filmmaker Jon Behrens made this gorgeous piece in 2008 with 16mm film, latex paint and inks applied directly to the film surface. It creates a mysterious space travel and exploratory sensation that has some connection – at least in my mind – to Kubrick’s 2001. There’s a big pile of magnificent work waiting for you to enjoy from this filmmaker. Visit his Vimeo page and personal website for more information.
You can rent Behrens’ films for 16mm projection from Canyon Cinema. He also has a DVD of collected works.
Jack’s Dream by Joseph Cornell
A short film that’s mostly puppetry by one of the wild insane men of American twentieth century art, Joseph Cornell.
Glass Boulevard
Filmed in the dullest imaginable environment of shops along a major Los Angeles street at night when the shops were closed.
My Christmas film.
The music is a public domain recording of Artie Shaw and his orchestra playing ‘There’s Something in the Air’ in 1936. The singer is Peg LaCentra. I found it at the Internet Archive.
Impressions [Visby] by Anders Weberg
Anders Weberg is an artist in Sweden who uses cell phone cameras to make his fluid, multi-layered works that are like quiet explosions of color.
It Came From Kuchar: Underground Film Documentary
Mike Everleth at Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film, has posted this fascinating documentary about legendary filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar. They’ve been making films separately and together for over 50 years. Don’t be misled by the term underground. These are simply wonderful and exuberant filmmakers who work in their own way and make films exactly the way they want to make them. Their enthusiasm for film, from totally independent low-budget to full-blown Hollywood spectacular, is infectious and should inspire any young filmmaker to follow his or her own muse and make what they really, deeply, necessarily want to make. You can find out a lot more by reading the Bad Lit article about the documentary.
By the way, Bad Lit is in fact the most infectiously enthralling film site you will read for a long time. Go there!
Jonas Mekas – As I
What’s the main thing you notice?
Directed by Alexandre Perrier. Produced by Kidam.
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.
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.