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: 21-87

Another film by Arthur Lipsett, the filmmaker who is the subject of an upcoming animation by Theodore Ushev. This one is called 21-87 and it’s a masterpiece.  It seems to have something to do with trying to see how people are deadened somehow by the modern world.  The filmmaker uses documentary clips in a mix-up with collage audio that unsettles the viewer.  What is this life force behind us?  And why do we keep trying to behave like machines?

Film: Very Nice, Very Nice

Here is a well-known film by Arthur Lipsett, the filmmaker who is the subject of an upcoming animation by Theodore Ushev. It’s called Very Nice, Very Nice. It features a layered collage soundtrack with still photos and film clips. It conveys a general sense of unease and remoteness in urban people of 1961. I like it with the possible reservation that it relies too heavily on photographs. I think it’s very tricky to use still photos in a film and pull it off and I’m not sure that Lipsett is entirely successful.  It’s good, but has a static quality, a reserve that I don’t fully admire.  The filmmaker is too well-behaved and does not pull the trigger.

Yellow Plastic Raygun: Film Images

For Only Your Eyes.  These images are from my upcoming Yellow Plastic Raygun.  Distilling single frame images is almost as much fun as making the film.  What kind of a film does it seem like?

Traffic Flow

Wave Rider

Planetary Intersection

War Drive

Hairpin

Whatever You Do, Don’t Look Back

Telefog

Gun Sight

Vision Rays

Mourning Sun