Category Archives: film

matthew 6: 22 – 34

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The Lamp of the Body

22“The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light. 23But if your eye is evil, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

24“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve both God and Mammon.

Do Not Worry

25Therefore, I tell you, don’t be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26See the birds of the sky, that they don’t sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you of much more value than they?27“Which of you, by being anxious, can add one moment to his lifespan? 28Why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don’t toil, neither do they spin, 29yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these. 30But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today exists, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, won’t he much more clothe you, you of little faith? 31“Therefore don’t be anxious, saying, ‘What will we eat?’, ‘What will we drink?’ or, ‘With what will we be clothed?’ 32For the Gentiles seek after all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33But seek first God’s Kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well.

34Therefore don’t be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day’s own evil is sufficient.”

so, happy in cape town?

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ORIGINAL  (threw up in my mouth a little):

DETOURNEMENT (all that is basically changed is the soundtrack):

http://youtu.be/cXoyHBNMCsM

We want to thank you for flying with us
We know you coulda stayed home, just cried and cussed
May all your guns go off if it’s time to bust
May all they tanks have time to rust
They got the armies turning bullets into gold
They got the hookers turning tricks in the cold
And every time the police kicks in the door
An angel gas brake dips in the O
And even if a d-boy flips him a O
It ain’t enough to buy shit anymore
Sleep in the doorway, piss on the floor
Look in the sky, wait for missiles to show
It’s finna blow cause
They got the TV, we got the truth
They own the judges and we got the proof
We got hella people, they got helicopters
They got the bombs and we got the, we got the

Don’t talk about it
It won’t show
Be about it
It’s ’bout to blow

I just spit the dope lines, I don’t snort ’em
Tell the boss to call police to escort him
You don’t write all them lies, you just quote ’em
Get offline, plug in to this modem
No, you can’t out-vote ’em
The rules is still golden
Only jewels we holding is if we guarding our scrotum
If you press your ear to the turf that is stolen
You can hear the sound of limitations exploding
Please sir, may we have another portion?
We’re children of the beast that dodged the abortion
Neck placed firm ‘tween the floor and the Florsheim
We’ll shut your shit down, don’t call it extortion
Caution — we’re coming for your head
So call the Feds and get files to shred
Every textbook read said bring you the bread
But guess what we got you instead?

Let’s keep it banging like a shotgun
We in a war before we fought one
Now if you’re tired of working so they can play
A common enemy, we got one
Now keep it banging like a shotgun
We in a war before we fought one
Now if you’re tired of working from day to day
A common enemy, we got one

come with us to the edge of wrong tomorrow

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I’m part of the South African curatorial/organising team for this series of collaborative multi-medium performances. If you’re in Cape Town, check EOW 9.1 out tomorrow night.

It will involve an insane mash-up of guitarists, violinists, opera singers, noise musicians, circuitbenders, chiptunists, avant-percussionists, pianists, body modification, visuals generated from cellular automata, experimental improv dance, provocative video art and the livecoded sound of the Ebola genome…

More information HERE.

poster2b

 

on cutting the crap

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(Amen!)

UPDATE, 3 SEPTEMBER: I have just checked and the following quote is actually from the author José Micard Teixeira, but has been widely misattributed to Meryl Streep (apologies — I picked it up on Facebook). However, these words do resonate with Ms Streep’s uncompromising attitude to life, which is why the erroneous attribution has stuck, I guess. I love the sentiment, and am happy to pass this on, whoever said it!

meryl“I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I’ve reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me.

“I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. I do not tolerate selective erudition nor academic arrogance. I do not adjust either to popular gossiping. I hate conflict and comparisons. I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. In friendship I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. Exaggerations bore me and I have difficulty accepting those who do not like animals. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience.”

lumumba’s ghosts: immaterial matters and matters immaterial…

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peerenThe Archive & Public Culture Research Initiative (where I work) has invited Esther Peeren, author of The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave, 2014), for a week of intense discussion, academic exchange and engagement around the theme of the ghost/spectre both as archival metaphor and as conceptual figure in post-colonial and cultural studies.

Peeren is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, Vice-Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS) and senior researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Her current research projects explore global spectralities and rural globalization.

On Tuesday, 26 August, she will deliver a lunchtime lecture, Lumumba’s Ghosts: Immaterial Matters and Matters Immaterial in Sven Augustijnen’s Spectres, in the Jon Berndt Thought Space (A17, Arts Block, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town). In her analysis of Belgian artist Sven Augustijnen’s 2011 multi-media exhibition, Spectres (which focuses on the mystery of the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the independent Republic of the Congo), Peeren argues that a focus on immaterialities-as-spectralities prompts the viewer to take seriously that which is not immediately apprehensible, or deemed inconsequential. At the same time, it transforms our understanding of matter itself, since immateriality is inevitably implied in materiality, both metaphorically (materialities may be considered immaterial, insignificant) and literally (over time, materialities may transform, decay or even disappear).

Appealing to Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality, her analysis shows how Augustijnen’s work, especially the feature-length film included in the exhibition, moves the materiality of the immaterial and the immateriality of the material centre stage, and lays out the consequences of this double imbrication for individual and collective understandings of history, memory and the archive.

If you’d like to attend pn 26 August, RSVP to APC-admin@uct.ac.za.

miners shot down

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This chillingly insightful documentary on the Marikana massacre should be required viewing for every South African. It’s two years tomorrow since that terrible, indelible day. The film is available to watch in full on Youtube for a few days only. Don’t miss this opportunity. EDIT: 18/8: The film is no longer available on Youtube. Please visit its website to find out about future screenings.

http://youtu.be/fPfz4MGIWtY

In August 2012, mineworkers at one of South Africa’s biggest platinum mines began a wildcat strike for better wages.

Six days later, on 16 August 2012, the police used live ammunition to suppress the strike, killing 34 and injuring many more.

Using the point of view of the Marikana miners, “Miners Shot Down” follows the strike from day one, showing the courageous but isolated fight waged by a group of low-paid workers against the combined forces of the mining company Lonmin, the ANC government and their allies in the National Union of Mineworkers.

What emerges is collusion at the top, spiralling violence, police brutality and the country’s first post-apartheid massacre. If you still have any doubts that this was a premeditated massacre by Lonmin, the government and the police, this documentary will change your mind with a lot of previously unseen footage. Nobody will have an excuse after watching this to continue to blame the miners.

South Africa will never be the same again.

marikana1

 

harun farocki – inextinguishable fire (1969)

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“(1) A major corporation is like a construction set. It can be used to put together the whole world. (2) Because of the growing division of labour, many people no longer recognize the role they play in producing mass destruction. (3) That which is manufactured in the end is the product of the workers, students, and engineers.”

http://youtu.be/2LBReqdLJCE

“When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you’ll shut your eyes. You’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close them to the memory. And then you’ll close your eyes to the facts.” These words are spoken at the beginning of an agitprop film that can be viewed as a unique and remarkable development. Farocki refrains from making any sort of emotional appeal. His point of departure is the following: “When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. You have to fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories.”

Harun Farocki, rest in peace.

nina paley – this land is mine

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Animator Nina Paley, she of the wonderful public domain film Sita Sings the Blues (WATCH IT, please, if you haven’t yet!), also made another short cartoon a while back*, this one caricaturing the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

So, who’s killing who? Nina has provided a handy guide to the various historical groups HERE.

*Please do note that this was made in 2012, before the most recent turn of events.

kola boof

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This Ohio bookseller refuses to carry African writer Kola Boof's novels because of nudity.

This Ohio bookseller refuses to carry African writer Kola Boof’s novels because of nudity.

“I don’t agree that I am controversial. What I feel is that most people are not critical thinkers.  The society tells them what to believe, what to think…and their knee jerk reactions are guided completely by that conditioning.  They usually realize later on that what I’m saying is not controversial… when they take time and think in depth.  Even if they don’t agree with me… they understand what I’m saying without all the claims of being shocked by controversy.  I’m not a controversial person if you’re a critical thinker.”

Check out Kola Boof’s website, where you can also read more of this interview.

stories we tell

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http://youtu.be/ytq4VZ2Nyxg

Go and see this at the Encounters Documentary Festival, on right now in Cape Town and Jo’burg: the brilliant Sarah Polley‘s genre-defying examination of the workings of memory and narrative related to her own family’s secrets. It’s a gentle yet unflinching interrogation of how truth is shaped by the stories we tell ourselves when making sense of the things that happen in our lives. Humorous, poignant, profound… highly recommended.

“four corners” opening friday 28-03-2014

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Opening this Friday, this film directed by Ian Gabriel looks like it should be interesting… and my old buddy Markus Wormstorm worked as composer on the soundtrack, which accesses a soundscape of ‘found’ and original South African music by talents as diverse as Felix Laband, Khuli Chana, Hemel Besem, Rattex, Jitsvinger, Cream, Kyle Shepherd and Isaac Mutant. I’m looking forward to checking it out.

ken jacobs on the archive

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“I wish more stuff was available in its raw state, as primary source material for anyone to consider, and to leave for others in just that way, the evidence uncontaminated by compulsive proprietary misapplied artistry, “editing”, the purposeful “pointing things out” that cuts a road straight and narrow through the cine-jungle; we barrel through thinking we’re going somewhere and miss it all. Better to just be pointed to the territory, to put in time exploring, roughing it, on our own. For the straight scoop we need the whole scoop, or no less than the clues entire and without rearrangement. O, for a Museum of Found Footage, or cable channel, library, a shit-museum of telling discards accessible to all talented viewers/auditors. A wilderness haven salvaged from Entertainment.”

— The impossible idealism of Ken Jacobs (check out his films on UBUWEB). This is a quote from the hand-illustrated programme of his 1989 retrospective, Films that Tell Time – see a PDF HERE.

well, that escalated quickly.

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This is what Facebook is really for. Here is a funny conversation that evolved into a collaborative portrait in layers on my wall over a few hours today, a particularly suffocating Monday. I’m keeping this as a snapshot of what creative people used to do when bored silly with social media in 2014.

Photo by Julia Mary Grey, Kalk Bay harbour, Saturday 8 March, 2014

Photo by Julia Mary Grey, Kalk Bay harbour, Saturday 8 March, 2014

sea 1 comments

sea 2

By Gareth Jones,  in response to comments under the original image

sea 2a
sea 2b

sea 2c

sea 2d

By Jean-Pierre Delaporte

By Jean-Pierre de la Porte

http://youtu.be/IpZAWP-H9ws

sea 2e

Meanwhile, on another thread…

sea 3

By Gareth Jones, third iteration, after further comments under his first drawing

sea 3a

sea 3b

http://youtu.be/JgZbYaLqTLM

sea 3c

sea 3d

stepan razin’s dream (Казачья Притча)

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“Oy, to ne vecher” (Ой, то не вечер) is the incipit of a Russian folk song, also known as “The Cossack’s Parable” (Казачья Притча) or as “Stepan Razin’s Dream” (Сон Степана Разина). It was first published by composer Alexandra Zheleznova-Armfelt (1870–1933) in her collection Songs of the Ural Cossacks after her fieldwork in the Ural District during 1896–1897.

The original lyrics were in seven verses, with verse six making explicit that the dreamer is 17th century cossack rebel Stepan Razin. Razin has a dream, and his captain (esaul) interprets it as an omen of their defeat.

The song has been performed in several variants, sometimes expanded to up to eleven verses, but in the most common variant as sung by modern interpreters, it is reduced to four verses, removing the mention of Razin, and reducing the three omens in the dream to a single one.These lyrics may be translated thus:

Ah, it is not yet evening but I have taken a little nap, and a dream came to me. In the dream that came to me, it was as if my raven-black horse was playing about, dancing about, frisky beneath me.  Ah, and evil winds came flying out of the east, and they ripped the black cap from that wild head of mine.

And the esaul* was a clever one, he was able to interpret my dream: “Ah, it will surely come off”, he said, “that wild head of yours”.

Source of information: Wikipedia.

*Esaul: a post and rank in prerevolutionary Russia in the cossack hosts after 1576.

chris marker - staring back

Photo: Chris Marker, “Staring Back”

au revoir, alain resnais

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“You never seem to be waiting for me, but we kept meeting at every turn of the paths. Behind every bush, at the foot of each statue, near every pond. It is as if it had been only you and I in all that garden.”

— From Last Year at Marienbad, 1961

mon oncle

Alain Resnais and Delphine Seyrig on location shooting “Last Year At Marienbad.”

I made this in 2007 (hence the bad Youtube quality – compressed to all hell).

the known universe

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MINDBLOWING.

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The film, created by the Museum, was part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.

Data: Digital Universe, American Museum of Natural History
Visualization Software: Uniview by SCISS
Director: Carter Emmart
Curator: Ben R. Oppenheimer
Producer: Michael Hoffman
Executive Producer: Ro Kinzler
Co-Executive Producer: Martin Brauen
Manager, Digital Universe Atlas: Brian Abbott
Music: Suke Cerulo

george formby – fanlight fanny

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From the George Formby vehicle, Trouble Brewing (1939), also featuring Googie Withers, Gus McNaughton, Garry Marsh and Esma Cannon. This little number was composed by George Formby  with Harry Gifford and Fred E. Cliffe, and is full of his trademark innuendo delivered with fumbling, faux naïveté.

This Guardian review of a biography on Formby published in 2001 is worth taking a look at if you’re interested in the strange, sad man behind the goofy grin and banjolele.

éléonore pourriat – oppressed majority (majorité opprimée)

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What does a day in the life of a woman look like? Maybe it’s easier to see if the woman is a man. Oppressed Majority (2010) is a French short by Éléonore Pourriat which uses role reversals to shine a new light on the micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions that are an all-too-common part of the female experience. Via wifey.tv.

happy birthday, simone de beauvoir

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When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a colour, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man.

WALKABOUT tumblr_mb7ukzuYA71qe0eclo1_r4_500

Jenny Agutter in “Walkabout” (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)

Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity.

The young girl throws herself into things with ardour, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All.

― Simone de Beauvoir,  from The Second Sex (first published in French as Le Deuxième Sexe in 1949)
If you’re interested in reading this hugely influential text, you can find it online HERE.