“A minute of silence in images for all the absent images, censored images, prostituted images, machinated images, delinquent images, buggered images, images beaten up by all the governments, televisions and westernized cinemas that rhyme information and repression with trash and culture.”
— Jean-Luc Godard – Le Gai Savoir (The Joy of Learning), 1969
“We can’t really understand. Of course. They’re speaking out of order.”
‘Female Freedom Has an Expiration Date’ – Being 35 and Single
An Argentine woman, documenting her relationships, begins an intimate investigation searching for love and answers: must she settle down or continue to be a free spirit in order to be happy? Read the related story HERE.
Physically scratched out… I love the celluloid violence of this clip for Angel Olsen’s explosive new single, off her forthcoming album, Burn Your Fire for No Witness, due out in February 2014 on Jagjaguwar.
Uncanny scene from the film Beetlejuice (1989), in which a frightfully posh dinner is ruptured when the table is re-possessed by the voices of exploited plantation labourers, specifically via Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O”. One of Tim Burton’s most politically subversive moments.
Sometime ideas, like men, jump up and say ‘hello’. They introduce themselves, these ideas, with words. Are they words? These ideas speak so strangely. All that we see in this world is based on someone’s ideas. Some ideas are destructive, some are constructive. Some ideas can arrive in the form of a dream. I can say it again: some ideas arrive in the form of a dream…
… There is a sadness in this world, for we are ignorant of many things. Yes, we are ignorant of many beautiful things — things like the truth. So sadness, in our ignorance, is very real. The tears are real. What is this thing called a tear? There are even tiny ducts — tear ducts — to produce these tears should the sadness occur. Then the day when the sadness comes — then we ask: “Will this sadness which makes me cry — will this sadness that makes me cry my heart out — will it ever end?” The answer, of course, is yes. One day the sadness will end.
— David Lynch’s Log Lady, in Twin Peaks
Created and published by the Edison Manufacturing Co., 1894
Performer: Annie Oakley.
Camera: William Heise.
Filmed November 1, 1894, in Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio.
From Archive.org:
Annie Oakley was probably the most famous marksman/woman in the world when this short clip was produced in Edison’s Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey. Barely five feet tall, Annie was always associated with the wild west, although she was born in 1860 as Phoebe Ann Oakley Mozee (or Moses) in Darke County, Ohio. Nevertheless, she was a staple in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and similar wild west companies. Because of her diminutive stature, she was billed as “Little Sure Shot.”
The man assisting her is this appearance is probably her husband, Frank E. Butler. Annie had outshot Butler (a famous dead-eye marksman himself) in a shooting contest in the 1880s. Instead of nursing his bruised ego because he had been throughly outgunned by a woman, Butler fell in love, married Little Sure Shot, and became her manager.
Theirs was a solid and happy marriage that lasted 44 years, and when Annie died on November 3, 1926, at age 66, a heartbroken Butler followed her to the grave 18 days later.
Montage from film footage: Fingered and The Right Side of my Brain, attributed to Richard Kern, starring Lydia Lunch.
Music: “Cesspool Called History” (Lydia’s reciting over a version of the jazz standard, “Harlem Nocturne”), from the Lydia Lunch album, Hangover Hotel (self-released in 2001).
Rock and Roll Heart traces Lou Reed’s career from the formation of the Velvet Underground to rock icon to his more recent artistic endeavours. Includes lots of rare and vintage footage along with interviews with David Bowie, John Cale, Patti Smith, Thurston Moore, David Byrne, Jim Carroll, Maureen Tucker, Suzanne Vega, Dave Stewart and Philip Glass. Directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders for American Masters and screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998.
WARNING: This may be considered very NSFW if you live in the same society that got Petra Collins’ Instagram account deleted.
MissAsssnatch goes naa-na-na naa-na. Hairy Ass Girlpits (2007) by MissAsssnatch – Music credits: “Pistolet Joe” performed by Anna Karina.
Misanthropic Girlpit Petting (2010) by MissAsssnatch – Music credits: “Sleep Alone” performed by Rowland S Howard.
Excerpted from an article by Martha Kempner, published at RH Reality Check, October 9, 2013 – 12:43 pm
A new study finds that almost one in ten teens and young adults admit to forcing someone into some form of sexual activity. Even more surprising: 50 percent of perpetrators blame the victim for the incident. According to the study, “links between perpetration and violent sexual media are apparent.”
(RobinThickeVevo / YouTube)
A new study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that one in ten teens said they had coerced another person into some form of sexual activity. In an online survey in 2010 and 2011, researchers asked 1,058 young people ages 14 to 21 whether they had ever “kissed, touched, or done anything sexual with another person when that person did not want you to?” The results surprised even the lead researcher, Michele Ybarra, who told NPR, “I don’t get creeped out very often, but this was wow.”
This intense reaction stems from the fact that 9 percent of teens said they had coerced another person. Specifically, 8 percent said they had kissed or touched someone when they knew that person did not want to, 3 percent said they “got someone to give in to unwilling sex,” 3 percent said they attempted rape, and 2 percent said they actually raped someone. (This adds to more than 9 percent because young people could admit to more than one behavior.)…
… The authors also note that 50 percent of all perpetrators said that the victim was responsible for the sexual violence. Moreover, most perpetrators said no one ever found out about their actions. The authors conclude, “Because victim blaming appears to be common while perpetrators experiencing consequences is not, there is urgent need for high school (and middle school) programs aimed at supporting bystander intervention.”…
… The survey was conducted as part of an ongoing study called Growing Up With Media. In addition to asking about sexual coercion, respondents were asked about the media they watched. The study found that perpetrators tended to report more frequent exposure to media that depicted sexual and violent situations than those who had not coerced another person, but the results were not always statistically significant. Still, the authors conclude:
[L]inks between perpetration and violent sexual media are apparent, suggesting a need to monitor adolescents’ consumption of this material, particularly given today’s media saturation among the adolescent population.
Elizabeth Schroeder, the executive director of Answer, an organization that educates young people about sexuality and trains teachers, agrees that media consumption is part of the problem. She told RH Reality Check, “This study is extremely distressing, but unfortunately, not a surprise. Sexuality education rarely starts before high school, and by then young people have already received very distorted messages about sex, relationships, and boundaries from other sources such as the media, their peers, adults in their lives, and so on.” Schroeder added, “Age-appropriate lessons about relationships need to start in early childhood and continue throughout high school.”
Read the full article HERE.
Published on 19 Sep 2013.
Are women responsible for protecting themselves from rape? Indian comedy group All India Bakchod’s sarcastic It’s Your Fault video shows Bollywood actresses Kalki Koechlin and VJ Juhi Pandey blaming themselves for what they wear, working late into the night, and not fighting back. HERE is an explanation of the rationale for the video.
Scenes from the 1992 Robert Zemeckis black comedy, Death Becomes Her (with Goldie Hawn, Meryl Streep and Isabella Rossellini).
From the album Kittenz and Thee Glitz (City Rockers, 2002).
Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950 – co-written and directed by the great Billy Wilder).
A cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” on Laforêt’s Album 3 (Disques Festival, 1967). The video contains footage from the film, The Graduate (1967), in which this and other Simon and Garfunkel songs feature prominently during pivotal montage scenes.
This is so trippy.
©2013 Anthony Cerniello
“I attempted to create a person in order to emulate the aging process. The idea was that something is happening but you can’t see it but you can feel it, like aging itself.”
Still Photographer: Keith Sirchio
Animator: Nathan Meier
Animator: Edmund Earle
Nuke Artist: George Cuddy
Music: Mark Reveley
Find out more about the creative process HERE.
This short film by Jory Hull was inspired by Kristin Hersh’s live multimedia performance adapted from her memoir, “Rat Girl” published by Penguin.
Thanks to Jamie Taylor for passing this on.
Fiona Apple’s chillingly subversive cover of Willy Wonka’s song from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , originally sung by a supremely creepy Gene Wilder in the 1970s film (if you saw this as a kid, didn’t he scare the crap out of you?), appears in a new animated ad for Chipotle which slams factory farming.
Trained as a sculptor as well as an animator, Piotr Dumala calls his innovative stop-motion technique in which an image is scratched into painted plaster, then painted over and the next image scratched on top “destructive animation”. He devised the method while studying art conservation at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.
Crime and Punishment (Zbrodnia i Kara), Dumala’s expressionist half-hour long Dostoevsky adaptation, is a succession of shadowy, minimalist tableaux that emerge slowly from darkness and return to it. Stripping the Russian masterwork down to two scenes — the murder and Raskolnikov’s meeting of Sonia — Dumala interprets the novel’s themes with chiaroscuro intensity, choosing to highlight just a few strands of the story:
“It was not my aim to copy the book. I was really close to the book. I took one level of the book. It’s not possible to show everything from this book… This is about love and how obsession can destroy love. In our life we are under two opposite influences to be good or bad and to love or hate.”
In the worlds Dumala sketches, the lines between light and darkness are stark, but also shifting and mutable.
Read more about the background to Dumala and this film in Chris Robinson’s article for Animation World Magazine, HERE.
“Face Deep is an experimental, animated (stop motion) film that allows for a free-flow of thought and exploration of self within an otherwise overly produced, technical and character driven practice. This sequentially photographed film looks at animator as lead character, allowing internal personalities/burning stories to emerge on skin surface whilst a sense of play within the medium is explored.
By listening to the songs of local low-fi Cape Town band Tape Hiss and Sparkle on loop, the raw and honest lyrics/sounds from Simon Tamblyn lead the animator deeper into herself to explore her own raw and honest inner spaces. The film allows one orator to evoke new stories in another orator, and for their different methods of story telling (sound/visual) to co-exist together; sometimes it is another person’s truth that helps us explore our own.”
— Meghan Judge, Simon Tamblyn
More of Meghan’s work is HERE.
From the soundtrack to the 2004 documentary, Be Here to Love Me.
From this report/video, and several others like it from different sources, it appears that journalist Anderson Cooper and CNN have been caught staging fake news about Syria to justify military intervention.
The following was published on Intellihub.com on August 30, 2013:
“The primary “witness” that the mainstream media has been using as a source in Syria has been caught staging fake news segments. Recent video evidence proves that “Syria Danny”, the supposed activist who has been begging for military intervention on CNN, is really just a paid actor and a liar.
“While Assad is definitely a tyrant like any head of state, a US invasion of the country is a worst case scenario for the people living there. By pointing out that the mainstream media is orchestrating their entire coverage of this incident, we are not denying that there is a tremendous amount of death and violence in Syria right now. However, we are showing that the mainstream media version of events is scripted and staged propaganda.”
The following video shows so-called activist/citizen journalist Danny Abdul-Dayem apparently contradicting himself while off air, and even asking crew members to “get the gunfire sounds ready” for his video conference with Anderson Cooper on CNN.
“Syria Danny” has also appeared on many other news programmes [Here’s an example of him on Al Jazeera last year – note the highly emotive and graphic nature of his commentary/the footage].
This is also not the first time that mainstream media reports have been exposed as propaganda, especially during times of war. Some of the most hyped news images of our time have actually been elaborate public relations stunts, designed as psychological warfare operations.
The article continues with further examples:
“No one in America can forget the image of Saddam Hussein’s statue being toppled and covered with an American flag, yet few people realize that this was a hoax, a staged psychological operation coordinated between the military and the media. In July of 2004 journalist Jon Elmer exposed an internal army study of the war showing that the statue scenario was indeed a set up.”
Elmer wrote: “the infamous toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in central Baghdad on April 9, 2003 was stage-managed by American troops and not a spontaneous reaction by Iraqis. According to the study, a Marine colonel first decided to topple the statue, and an Army psychological operations unit turned the event into a propaganda moment… The Marines brought in cheering Iraqi children in order to make the scene appear authentic, the study said. Allegations that the event was staged were made in April of last year, mostly by opponents of the war, but were ignored or ridiculed by the US government and most visible media outlets.”
That Psy-ops were involved in making these momentous images was independently corroborated by the LA Times and then NPR in 2008.
Read more about other allegedly staged newscasts HERE – I only say “allegedly” as I haven’t done enough research on this myself yet not to (the main problem being that I don’t speak Arabic and need proof that the translations are accurate); what I have seen so far is chillingly convincing, however.
I have been working for the last while as researcher and production manager on a weekly SABC-commissioned TV documentary series, I Am Woman – Leap of Faith. Here’s one of the episodes, directed by Jane Kennedy:
In January 1996 Shelley Barry was 23 and on her way to a job interview in Cape Town when she was caught in the crossfire of taxi violence caused by rival taxi groups battling for ownership of the same routes.
She was sitting next to the taxi driver in the front of his minibus when an assassin pulled up alongside the moving vehicle and opened fire. The driver was shot seven times and was killed instantly. The taxi crashed, injuring many of its passengers.
Shelley was hit by one of the assassin’s bullets and was instantly paralysed. Her life hung in the balance and it was assumed she would not survive. The friend she was travelling with was seriously injured but has recovered, despite the bullet still lodged in her chest. Shelley has been in a wheelchair ever since. Today she is 42.
How does one create a life for oneself after something like this? How does one find work and meaning once again? Importantly, what happened to Shelley Barry’s dream, held close since childhood, of becoming a filmmaker?
Join this remarkable woman, teacher, activist and filmmaker as she describes her life before and after the shooting: The life of a young girl who told her childhood friends that one day her films would be on the big screen and has achieved that, despite a bullet getting in her way and forcing her into a wheelchair for over twenty years… The life of an activist who worked in the Presidency and has made a significant difference to the lives of the disabled in South Africa… The deeply spiritual journey of a sensitive, funny and bolshy woman who, despite her circumstances, is determined to continue making her mark on the world.
Shelley Barry graciously lets us into her world, describing the many Leaps of Faith she has taken so far and continues to take each and every day.
Catch the broadcast of this programme on SABC 3, Sundays at 09h30, or watch archived episodes on the I AM WOMAN – LEAP OF FAITH WEBSITE.
Rembihnútur – video by Arni & Kinski, 2012. Taken from the “Valtari Mystery Film Experiment” – more details here.
Tonight at 20h00, Bolo’bolo in Observatory presents a free screening of a documentary about the life and ideas of Emma Goldman: anarchist, feminist and lifelong rabble rouser.
For nearly half a century, Russian emigrant Emma Goldman was the most controversial woman in America, taunting the mainstream with her fervent attacks on government, big business, and war. To the tabloids, she was “Red Emma, queen of the anarchists,” but many admired Goldman for her defense of labour rights, women’s emancipation, birth control, and free speech.
Goldman’s life was indelibly marked by two violent acts: the attempted assassination of anti-union industrialist Henry Clay Frick by her comrade and lover Alexander Berkman (he spent 14 years in prison for the crime) and the 1901 slaying of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz, a young anarchist who claimed he had been “set on fire” by Goldman’s exhortations to political assassination and martyrdom. McKinley’s assassination led to widespread condemnation of Goldman and other anarchists. Fearing for her life, Goldman went underground.
In 1906, she reemerged as founder and editor of Mother Earth, an anarchist magazine devoted to politics and literature. Once again a public figure, she returned to the lecture circuit. Her talks on the struggling revolution in Russia, on the rights of workers, on civil liberties — even on anarchism — drew large, sympathetic crowds. For almost a decade, Goldman maintained a grueling schedule, spending nearly half of every year on the road. In one six-month period, she delivered 120 lectures in 37 cities.
An outspoken opponent of America’s entry into World War I, she was arrested and imprisoned for demonstrating against the draft. In 1919 she, Berkman, and 247 others were deported to Russia, just two years after the October revolution replaced the Czarist regime with Bolshevik tyranny. After two dispiriting years, Goldman and Berkman left the Soviet Union and dedicated themselves to revealing the truth about a revolution gone wrong.
“The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.” – Emma Goldman
PS: Non-alcoholic drinks and vegan snacks will be on sale. You may bring your own beer or wine if you’d like. The screenings are free, but donations are welcome.
Richard Neill to Bodyform (a maxipad manufacturer), 8 October at 21:30 via Mobile
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Hi , as a man I must ask why you have lied to us for all these years . As a child I watched your advertisements with interest as to how at this wonderful time of the month that the female gets to enjoy so many things ,I felt a little jealous. I mean bike riding , rollercoasters, dancing, parachuting, why couldn’t I get to enjoy this time of joy and ‘blue water’ and wings !! Dam my penis!! Then I got a girlfriend, was so happy and couldn’t wait for this joyous adventurous time of the month to happen …..you lied !! There was no joy , no extreme sports , no blue water spilling over wings and no rocking soundtrack oh no no no. Instead I had to fight against every male urge I had to resist screaming wooaaahhhhh bodddyyyyyyfooorrrmmm bodyformed for youuuuuuu as my lady changed from the loving, gentle, normal skin coloured lady to the little girl from the exorcist with added venom and extra 360 degree head spin. Thanks for setting me up for a fall bodyform , you crafty bugger.
Bodyform’s response, via Youtube:
fleurmach 