Category Archives: film

moment (stephen dwoskin, 1969)

Posted on by

https://youtu.be/XMQJVttVRCI

Stephen Dwoskin’s experimental film records in a single continuous shot a woman’s face before, during and after orgasm.

A static camera records, in one single continuous shot, a woman’s face before, during and after orgasm. The act of looking and the limits of the film frame are highlighted in this intimate sexual episode with Tina Fraser. Stephen Dwoskin presents a powerful, personal moment while maintaining a distance and resisting the viewer being subsumed into the action on screen.

Stephen Dwoskin was a highly regarded underground filmmaker who had moved from New York to London and helped to found the London Filmmakers’ Co-op in 1966. His extremely striking work quickly received critical attention and he made several feature-length works through the 1970s with support from German television and the BFI. He continued with both personal and essayistic films and documentaries, and in the 1990s began shooting on handheld video. He made collage films and explored his family’s home movies as he reflected on age, sexuality and the passing of different generations.

Info from the BFI.

john berger – ways of seeing (1972)

Posted on by

I cannot overstate how immensely John Berger contributed to awakening a critical understanding of Western cultural aesthetics and ethics in me. I feel deeply indebted. Here’s a wonderful recent interview with the man.

On this, his 90th birthday, I thought it fitting to look back on this BAFTA award-winning TV series from 1972, which rapidly became regarded as one of the most influential art programmes ever made. Ways of Seeing is a four-part BBC series of 30-minute films, created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger’s scripts were adapted into a book of the same name.

The series and book critique traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. The series is partially a response to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series, which represents a more traditionalist view of the Western artistic and cultural canon.

In the first programme, Berger examines the impact of photography on our appreciation of art from the past.

The second programme deals with the portrayal of the female nude, an important part of the tradition of European art. Berger examines these paintings and asks whether they celebrate women as they really are or only as men would like them to be.

With the invention of oil paint around 1400, painters were able to portray people and objects with an unprecedented degree of realism, and painting became the ideal way to celebrate private possessions. In this programme, John Berger questions the value we place on that tradition.

In this programme, Berger analyses the images of advertising and publicity and shows how they relate to the tradition of oil painting – in moods, relationships and poses.

More John Berger on Fleurmach:

John Berger on being born a woman

John Berger – “Les Petites Chaises”

What I rail against, impotently, and wish I could embrace

faith47 & the grrrl – aqua regalia – projection mapping (2015)

Posted on by

A projection mapping sequence created as a collaboration between inka kendzia (the grrrl) and faith47.

Faith created a shrine-like installation made out of found objects. The mapping sequence was then projected on top of this shrine structure.

The projection was created specifically for the opening night of Faith’s Aqua Regalia exhibition in New York at the Jonathan Levine gallery in November 2015.

artist – faith47
animation and mapping – inka kendzia | the grrrl
music – fletcher beadon – fletcher in dub
filmed – zane meyer of chopemdownfilms

louis moholo’s 4blokes, live at straight no chaser, cape town (15 january 2016)

Posted on by

It’s weird how the recording industry warps experience. We can sometimes forget that every recording is only one iteration that was captured and set in stone as “The” Definitive Performance, when really it just happened to be captured that particular time among many, many other possible times. Records, like photos, pluck moments out of time and concretise them… And they are the only thing we’re left with later to glimpse a whole era. That’s why densely detailed archives such as Ian Bruce Huntley‘s, where there were many recordings of the same bands made during the same era, are so interesting. I’ve posted here, and in the preceding post, recordings of the same band on two consecutive nights.

One of the lovely things about everyone having a camera in their pocket on their phone is that this is not something that is rare anymore, and the democratisation of shared experience is a very powerful and positive thing. One of the horrible things is that there is just such a volume of recorded stuff (much of questionable quality) being generated that the brightest nuggets of wonder can be drowned in the dross… Too much recording and we have a shaky, pixelated backup of every moment kept on hard drives, that no one ever has time to live through twice, to the extent that everything melts into undifferentiated, indigestible “big data” and can only be apprehended as statistics. I feel very ambivalent about it.

I think it’s really important that, whenever possible, we still have experienced photographers, videographers and sound recorders assigned to do this stuff, so that in years to come what we are left with are some beautiful and considered recordings, and not just a haunted avalanche of muddy glimpses.

khaçadur avedisyan – oratoryo

Posted on by

From the soundtrack of the film Gelecek Uzun SĂŒrer (Future Lasts Forever) (Turkey, 2011).

Synopsis from IMDB: Sumru is doing music research at a university in Istanbul. To work on her thesis on gathering and recording an exhaustive collection of Anatolian elegies she sets off for the south-east of the country for a few months. The brief trip turns out to be the longest journey of her life. During the trip, Sumru crosses paths with Ahmet, a young guy who sells bootleg DVDs on the streets of Diyarbakir, with Antranik, the ageing and solitary warden of a crumbling church in the city and with various characters who witness the ongoing ‘unnamed war’. During her three-month stay in Diyarbakir, while looking for the stories of the elegies, she finds herself confronting an agony from her own past.

pÔrgu (hell) (1983)

Posted on by

Estonian animated film by Rein Raamat, Tallinnfilm, 1983. The film brings to life in one nightmarish vision three detailed engravings from the early 1930s created by Estonian artist Eduard Viiralt: “The Preacher”, “Cabaret”, and “Hell”.

tune me what? – getting over sugarman (2016)

Posted on by

If you’re interested in the history of the musical struggle against apartheid in South Africa, this is a worthwhile listen:

Did the Oscar-winning documentary Searching For Sugarman make things up and distort facts to the point where international audiences got a false impression of the South African music scene? Did they make Rodriguez an undeserving hero at the cost of local South African musicians? With their special guest, music sociologist Michael Drewett, Brett & Leon reveal the scandalous truth about Malik Bendjelloul’s ‘fake-umentary’.

Featured in this episode of Tune Me What? are:

  • Roger Lucey
  • National Wake
  • David Kramer
  • Edi Niederlander
  • Kalahari Surfers
  • Juluka
  • James Phillips
  • Mzwakhe Mbuli
  • Jennifer Ferguson
  • Bright Blue
  • Just Jinger

miles davis and jeanne moreau (1957)

Posted on by

From Miles Davis’s original album for the Louis Malle film Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud. Recorded at Poste Parisien, Paris, France on December 4-5, 1957. Miles Davis (trumpet); Barney Wilen (tenor saxophone); Rene Urtreger (piano); Pierre Michelot (bass); Kenny Clarke (drums).

Miles Davis – Ascenseur pour l’Ă©chafaud – Lift to the Gallows (Full Album HERE.)

walt disney & salvador dalí – destino (1946/2003)

Posted on by

https://youtu.be/1GFkN4deuZU
Why had I never heard of this?! In 1946 Disney and DalĂ­ conceived this animated story of Chronos, the personification of time who falls in love with a mortal.

DalĂ­ described the film as “a magical display of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time”. Disney called it “a simple story about a young girl in search of true love.”

Read more about the collaboration and realisation of this beautiful little film HERE.

The song is performed by Dora Luz.

donna haraway – anthropocene, capitalocene, cthulucene: staying with the trouble (5 september 2014)

Posted on by

Sympoiesis, not autopoiesis, threads the string figure game played by Terran critters. Always many-stranded, SF is spun from science fact, speculative fabulation, science fiction, and, in French, soin de ficelles (care of/for the threads). The sciences of the mid-20th-century “new evolutionary synthesis” shaped approaches to human-induced mass extinctions and reworldings later named the Anthropocene. Rooted in units and relations, especially competitive relations, these sciences have a hard time with three key biological domains: embryology and development, symbiosis and collaborative entanglements, and the vast worlds of microbes. Approaches tuned to “multi-species becoming with” better sustain us in staying with the trouble on Terra. An emerging “new new synthesis” in trans-disciplinary biologies and arts proposes string figures tying together human and nonhuman ecologies, evolution, development, history, technology, and more. Corals, microbes, robotic and fleshly geese, artists, and scientists are the dramatis personae in this talk’s SF game.

wired

For Donna Haraway, we are already assimilated.

“The monster opens the curtains of Victor Frankenstein’s bed. Schwarzenegger tears back the skin of his forearm to display a gleaming skeleton of chrome and steel. Tetsuo’s skin bubbles as wire and cable burst to the surface. These science fiction fevered dreams stem from our deepest concerns about science, technology, and society. With advances in medicine, robotics, and AI, they’re moving inexorably closer to reality. When technology works on the body, our horror always mingles with intense fascination. But exactly how does technology do this work? And how far has it penetrated the membrane of our skin?”

Go HERE to read the rest of this article about Donna Haraway from way back in 1997.

nostalghia (1983)

Posted on by

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6_kBg3_g10

Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film from 1983. I’m not going to link to any analysis here because to do so would narrow the interpretive possibilities of this opaque, allegorical masterpiece. Very superficially, though, the storyline is about a writer who, trapped by his fame and an unhappy marriage, seeks out his cultural past in Italy. Here he meets a local pariah who declares that the world is coming to an end. The writer finds this prophecy curiously more alluring than the possibility of a dead-end future. Nostalghia won the Grand Prix de Creation and the International Critics Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

You can pick (slightly crappy) subtitles in several languages.

ĐșŃƒĐŒŃƒŃˆĐșĐž

Posted on by

“Among all the remarkable Usvyaty singers it is necessary, first and foremost, to single out the name of Olga Fedoseevna Sergeeva [I can’t find any English website for her]. We communicated with Olga Sergeeva for ten years and recorded over 300 songs in the most various genres performed by her. I brought the singer to Leningrad three times and she performed in ethnographic concerts in the House of Composers, on Leningrad radio and made some records with “Melodia” company.

“Sergeeva is an outstanding folk singer. Ritual songs and old lyric prevail in her richest repertoire which indicates the high artistic taste of Olga Sergeeva, as most of her contemporaries prefer singing new lyrical songs of the romance type. In the lyrical songs especially loved by the singer, her voice sounds plummy, deep–however, reserved at the same time and even subdued a bit, and from the very first sounds it spellbinds the listener with its beauty and cordiality.

“There is nothing outward, emotionally open in her performance, this is singing for herself with no relation to the listener. At the same time plainness, naturalness, strictness, is combined here with improvised freedom and excellence of micro variation. “Each song has one hundred changes”, the singer remarked once. It is not by chance that Andrei Tarkovsky chose the recording of Olga Sergeevas’s 1971/2 recording of the old song ‘Kumushki’ for his film Nostalghia.” (From HERE.)

The second version that follows here is also very beautiful, but a more contemporary interpretation, by singer Pelageya off her album Girls’ Songs in 2007.

Here is a translation of the words that I found:

Oh, my girlfriends, be sweet;
be sweet and love one another,
be sweet and love one another,
Love me too.

You will go to the green garden,
take me with you.
You will pick flowers,
Pick some for me too.

You will weave garlands,
take me with you.

You will go to the Donau,
take me with you.
You will offer your wreaths to the river,
offer mine too.

Your wreaths will float on the water,
but mine will sink to the bottom.
Your boyfriends came back from the war!
Mine didn’t return.

first sounds – humanity’s first recordings of its own voice (1857- )

Posted on by

Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville was the first person to record his voice and send it into the future. David Giovannoni recounts how First Sounds discovered and played back these recordings 150 years later. This is a fascinating documentary! Goosebump-inducing.

hans richter/the real tuesday weld – one more ghost before breakfast (1927/2005)

Posted on by

Hans Richter’s 1927 short Dadaist masterpiece: Ghosts Before Breakfast, re-scored.

“This film initially had a soundtrack which was lost when the original print was destroyed by the Nazis as ‘degenerate art’.

This music – with Jacques Van Rhijn on clarinet, Don Brosnan on bass, Jed Woodhouse on drums, Clive Painter on guitar – was recorded at Clive’s prior to the sessions for our re-score of Richter’s full length magnum opus: Dreams That Money Can Buy for the British Film Institute in 2005.
(Turn off the sound if you want to hear it as Richter didn’t really intend it.)”