Here’s a short film by Shaun Clark that was submitted by Mew Lab to Candlelight’s Vimeo short film group. Mysterious and dark. I like those hands a lot. My favorite shot is the hand in the candle flame.
Tag Archives: Film
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: Yellow Plastic Raygun
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.
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Animation: The Machine
A machine tells the tale of another machine and its hunger for control. A beautiful and frightening fairytale about the machinery of power. Rob Shaw and Sarah Hulin animated it.
Jean-Luc Godard Interviews Woody Allen
Jean-Luc Godard interviews Woody Allen… sort of. What is clear to me from watching this video is that Woody Allen is an ordinary thinker. Jean-Luc Godard is not. And frankly I’m not certain who is funnier. I think this is a devastating dismantling of Mr. Allen. It’s bordering on open mockery. Watch how Allen looks at Godard. He hasn’t the slightest idea what’s going on. Every single answer Allen gives is perfectly expected and we’ve heard all of them before from a hundred other filmmakers. Godard’s questions however, come dropping out of the bottom of a 747 that’s flying without a pilot.
Jean-Luc Godard’s New Trailer is the Entire Film!
Film director Jean-Luc Godard has made one of the sharpest comments on copyright, piracy and film advertising that I have ever seen by releasing a trailer for his upcoming new film, Socialisme, that is actually the entire film in super-fast forward for 1 minute and 7 seconds. This is wit and intelligence like no other filmmaker in the world can muster. Once you see the opening presented to you by the films of Godard it becomes very difficult indeed to get up the energy to go watch highly paid American film stars mug and smile their way through belabored mega-scripts that seek opportunities to display Coke bottles and laundry detergent alongside Aston Martins and designer shoes. You begin to see that the Hollywood product is in reality just a very large catering operation and that movies are made with approximately 10 to 20 times the resources actually required to make any given film. American films, even the ‘independent’ ones, are shot from exactly the same point of view and think that movies are about telling stories. They are conceptually still living in the 19th century. They all adhere to the ‘beginning, middle and end’ framework and they uniformly lead to a ‘climax’ and a ‘resolution.’
Godard, on the other hand, functions in the present, treats film as an actual art form, and always uses a unique point of view that cannot be pinned down or turned into a style. He is death to James Cameron. He murders people like Woody Allen. He makes Scorsese look like the heavy-handed New York buffoon that he is. Godard makes films by persuading people to give him money on the basis of totally fake scripts, then shows up with a note pad and a bunch of confused actors and decides literally on the spot what he might want to be making that day and hopes for the best when it comes to fitting his material inside the structure of a project he might happen to be working on. In short, he works just like an artist is supposed to work. He works from himself. The fact that we have been misled by a century of industrial product aimed at showing us Paul Newman’s teeth is not of any concern to him.
If James Cameron showed up at my door with a contract to be in his next film, I would shove him backwards off my front porch. But I would fly to Europe to stand in the background of a Godard film for free.