ART TORRENTS

Harun Farocki - Inextinguishable Fire (1969)
Tuesday, July 10, 2007

"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 this 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." Resolutely, Farocki names names: the manufacturer is Dow Chemical, based in Midland, Michigan in the United States. Against backdrops suggesting the laboratories and offices of this corporation, the film proceeds to educate us with an austerity reminiscent of Jean Marie Straub. Farocki's development unfolds: "(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 labor, 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." This last thesis is illustrated with an alarmingly clear image. The same actor, each time at a washroom sink, introduces himself as a worker, a student, an engineer. As an engineer, carrying a vacuum cleaner in one hand and a machine gun in the other, he says, "I am an engineer and I work for an electrical corporation. The workers think we produce vacuum cleaners. The students think we make machine guns. This vacuum cleaner can be a valuable weapon. This machine gun can be a useful household appliance. What we produce is the product of the workers, students, and engineers."

English subtitles included, hardcoded.

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at 2:38 PM  

Jill Goodmilow - What Farocki Taught (Inextengishable Fire remake) (1998)

This is a stubborn film, containing a perfect replica, of Harun Farocki's astute 1969 film, "Inextinguishable Fire" - about the production of Napalm B by the Dow Chemical Company for the War in Vietnam; about the abuses of human labor; and about documentary filmmaking.

Taking as its subject the formal and political strategies of Harun Farocki's 1969 black and white film "Inextinguishable Fire", WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT is literally and stubbornly a remake - that is, a perfect replica, in color and in English, of Farocki's astute, some would say crudely-made film, produced in Germany at the height of the Vietnam War. In 1969, Farocki attempted to make "visible", and thus comprehensible, the physical properties of Napalm B, and to demonstrate the impossibility of resistance to its production by Dow Chemical Corporation employees and ultimately to its use by the U.S. military forces fighting in Vietnam.

Farocki's film is radical in technique - taking up one of the hottest of political questions - the production of terror - and cooling it down to frank, rational substance through the strategy of "under-representation", refusing the pornography of documentary "evidence" and replacing it with Brechtian reconstruction and demonstration. Employing a set of propositions about the multi-national research corporation and the production of weapons of war in a unique "agit-prop" style, "Fire" reaches beyond the specific terrors of napalm and provokes baseline questions about the ethical uses of labor.

Because Farocki's "Fire" was never distributed in the U.S. at the time of its making and even today is unavailable to American audiences, Godmilow's WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT was conceived as a gesture of film distribution - taking this small, film footnote to a war, a barnacle stuck on the side of the moth-balled vessel of Vietnam, flicking it forward past the recent, more sophisticated, and successful technologies of Panama and the Persian Gulf, to see if the "ping" of recognition and the radical potential of the documentary film project can be revived.

In an epilog, Godmilow prods contemporary filmmakers toward "Fire's" political stance and strategies, emphasizing its direct audience address and refusal to produce the "compassionate voyeurism" of the classic documentary cinema.

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at 2:25 PM  

Robert Fantinatto - Echoes of Forgotten Places (2005)

Factories in the 1920s and ‘30s were once pregnant with our cities, with bricks and steel ready to ship to barren grounds soon to disappear under newly-built skyscrapers, roads, highways, all that could make life easy for a burgeoning humanity coming into its own with new ideas for businesses, new ideas for everything.

But “new” eventually became old. Once-active furnaces lost their heat, destined to age for decades, never to fulfill another purpose. It is also an allegory for humanity’s attitude toward history, to dismiss what we believe will not help us any further. Abandoned chairs in an expansive factory, curved pipes that no longer transport water, and controls that do not control anything. The poetic visual essay, “Echoes of Forgotten Places” tells us of a time when factories sprouted up and entire communities were created, families living nearby so husbands and other family members could get to work easily. In sparse, quick language, we are reminded of that history. And abandoned buildings, according to director, writer, and editor Robert Fantinatto are still reminders, if people still look. The majority of city-dwellers don’t bother with memory. What’s in a city is what exists. What’s outside a city, sitting forlornly near railroad tracks, run down, is long since dead.

Robert Fantinatto steps into factories where pipes run cross-wise and the floors are browned and getting older. He wants us to understand, to know what these factories and other buildings once had. A control panel in one factory was used to run various operations. Now those buttons are corroded, and whoever pushed them is most likely just as long gone as well. As photos appear and Fantinatto’s camera almost floats through doorways and enormous rooms, piano notes on the soundtrack echo as if they had been played in these very locations. Those hard notes sound like morose longing for the past. It asks where all the people went.

There are also a few clever moments where Fantinatto shows his interviews with a few passionate urban explorers on a small TV on a cart, with a VCR playing, as if to comment on us only being interested in watching these interviews on our own TVs, but also imploring us to go inside and explore abandoned places, if we live somewhere where empty factories are commonplace among the landscape. These people exude thoughtful passion about what they do, what they believe the ethics are in exploring abandoned places, such as not leaving footprints, not disturbing any equipment or anything else that’s been left there. And for one woman, no graffiti, no attempt to show that you were there. They are the hidden historians, though unnamed, and at best, they help Fantinatto strengthen the call to never forget history, never forget that other people were here before us and even though we might ignore them, they are a part of us everyday.

A photo gallery on the DVD evokes such emotion in the various shots of more abandoned rooms and buildings, including a brick factory and a psychiatric hospital. A 1936 industrial short about the steel industry is a perfect companion to “Echoes” in an active industry being shown. The steel-making in that short may have become the steel that’s merely a part of those buildings today. “Echoes” inspires awe in this possibility that what may have come from workers long ago is still somewhere today. What humanity has done before isn’t always easy to erase. And from the looks of these photographs and Fantinatto’s footage, there’s a lot to think about, especially in the way of artistic inspiration, of shafts of light shining through, of wondering who we were long ago. It’s beauty in modern forms. --Rory Aronsky (FILMTHREAT.com)

Echoes of Forgotten Places is an interesting visual arts disc from Canada and the brainchild of Robert Fantinatto and Leesa Beales, Toronto based industrial filmmakers. The 43-minute video explores the cavernous interiors of what the filmmakers call Industrial Archeological Sites -- the long-abandoned factories and warehouse complexes left to rot when industry moves on. Most of the film is composed of arresting video images taped in the vast decaying interior spaces of huge factories. Fantinatto's camera lingers on cavernous steel mills and power plants that look as if they haven't been entered in twenty or thirty years. Original flyers and paperwork litter the offices and banks of equipment sit as if waiting to be reactivated.

For the "explorers" who make it their business to trespass on these premises, the factory complexes are undiscovered countries for investigation. Much of the video plays with only the music of Robin Guthrie and Leesa Beales on the soundtrack, but Beales narrates part of each chapter with philosophical musings about the "Aesthetics of Decay," and several unidentified speakers add more comment in interviews glimpsed on a B&W monitor positioned at one of the sites.

The film fulfills only part of our curiosity. The speakers tell us of their awe and respect for these spaces and what the represent. Looking at the giant work areas, the locker rooms and the washing basins built to service hundreds, we think of the armies of highlyskilled workers that once were the pride of our nation. How many rows of machine tools lined the shop floor? One power plant contains lines of enormous turbine generators that cover an area larger than a couple of football fields. Each individual unit is a massive iron structure; the scene looks as if it came out of H.G. Wells' Things to Come. The young voices remind us that human societies tend to ignore, destroy and bury their own history until it's so forgotten that archeological scientists are needed to rediscover how we once lived. They lament the neglect visited on these sites, knowing they will soon be cleared away for new development.

Actually, what we seem to hear most is these explorers' regret for the loss of their private playgrounds. We all know the feeling of having 'special places' as kids and resenting it when they disappear. We 1950s and 60s kids had plenty of access to interesting areas on private and public property -- storm basins and canals, undeveloped fields, construction sites, old mission-era buildings -- to explore and call our own. And it hurts to go back to these same places and see nothing but wall-to-wall apartments and industrial parks. No wonder modern kids are sullen and rebellious -- we had much a greater attachment to our environment.

The more interesting story in Echoes of Forgotten Places is the untold one. The Urban Explorers edge around the term "trespassing" but admit that these are potentially dangerous areas. They talk about their code of conduct: No vandalizing, no thievery and no altering of the environment. They move slowly and carefully, treading carefully on rotten flooring and broken ladders as they scale structures six and seven stories tall. We even see them exploring forbidding, treacherous-looking tunnels.

The obvious next thought is that the story of the adventurers is not told because it might encourage more interlopers with less aesthetic motives. Some of the spaces we see are already tagged with graffiti. And some hazards may be invisible -- a few of the explorers wear particle masks. That mist in the air may be bad mold, or quite possibly carcinogenic asbestos powder.

What we remember from Echoes are the odd details -- pools of water and mud on the floors of giant factories where the weather has broken in, and snowdrifts and walls of icicles decorating another steel workspace in winter. Echoes of Forgotten Places is first and foremost a thought-piece for a crumbling, rusting past. (DVDTALK.com)

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at 12:53 AM  

Gus Van Sant - Elephant (2003)
Monday, July 9, 2007

Screenshot's:

The reason why i would share this work, should be clear for anyone viewing the screenshots above. I've only seen the work once, and didn't really want to focus on anything else than the speed of the camera through the halls of the high school. So, high school shootings is not my focus here. I would actually recommend you to stop the movie somewhere around the middle. Review below.

Gus Van Sant's ''Elephant,'' has a premise so simple that in the abstract it borders on the banal. Plotless and stubbornly resistant to conventional narrative structure, the movie has its camera follow students around the halls and grounds of a high school in Portland, Ore., for a day, until violence erupts. ''Elephant,'' which has its premiere tonight at the New York Film Festival and opens commercially on Oct. 24, is the director's take on the murders that took place at Columbine High School.

The title comes from the British director Alan Clarke's 1989 rough-and-ready short film of the same name, a tough and dense look at the violence in Northern Ireland, which also didn't paste answers onto the problem. Mr. Clarke's short outraged or absorbed viewers in the way that Mr. Van Sant's movie, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, is likely to do. (Mr. Clarke's title referred to the aphorism about the elephant in the living room that goes ignored -- a problem that people refuse to face for so long that they are no longer even able to see it.)

This new ''Elephant'' will also confound people looking for solutions or villains, because it doesn't supply them. There's no narrator perched omnisciently over the events, nor the kinds of exaggerated melodramatics and pop music that teen movies employ to insistently nag at emotions. There are few recognizable actors, since Mr. Van Sant populated the movie with kids who had never acted before, heightening the realism and the tension.

''Elephant'' is a formalist exercise with real affection for the kids -- like the photographer Elias (Elias McConnell), who assuredly slips through the school while grabbing shots of his friends or whatever catches his eye. Elias has a lazy, physical confidence, and his natural charisma is emphasized by the chilled-out immediacy of the camerawork. And the young actor's star quality becomes part of the filmmaker's misdirecting our attention, too: since Mr. McConnell holds the camera like a protagonist, we're lulled into thinking the film is his story.

His being a photographer would be a cheap way into the movie, which Mr. Van Sant rejects. Instead, the camera floats from one life to another, flirting with Michelle (Kristen Hicks), a loner with a plaintive face who doesn't fit in with the other girls. She takes us to the climactic scenes.

The cinematographer Harris Savides summons all of his talents to romanticize the naturalism, yet the constant movement and long takes aren't petty virtuosity. This skill is a part of what was once considered directing -- an evenhandedness that we become accustomed to quickly. The camera darts through extended scenes filmed in one take, like charting the action in a high school cafeteria that ends in a dark clichéd joke: a gaggle of young divas matter-of-factly head to the bathroom to purge.

Mr. Savides's work has a low-keyed brilliance, demonstrating that a master's work needn't be showy. His résumé includes filming Calvin Klein commercials, and ''Elephant'' sometimes circles the willowy, young male hunks as if they were on a candy dish. (The sound design by Leslie Shatz adds to the reality, with the pinging, echoey ambient noises of a school that create a lingering sense of dread in those halls.)

''Elephant'' blends the warm-hearted randomness of the Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr's movies with the familial offhandedness of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the minimal realism of the documentarian Frederick Wiseman -- yet the influences are not arch film-grammar quotations crying to be spotted. Mr. Van Sant knows the subject matter will increase the audience's attention.

The movie is also a departure from the director's career streak of films along the lines of ''Good Will Hunting'' that dramatize aimless young men whose lives seem like dented cans. Instead, Mr. Van Sant gives ''Elephant'' a spartan yet elusive life by shifting the film's focus from one group of students to another; the camera actually drifts like a bored high school student.

The presentation is partly attributable to the fact that this picture was made for a premiere on HBO and the filmmaker decided against the wide-screen formatting that many directors select for made-for-television projects. ''Elephant'' even looks like the kind of film you'd see projected in a high school. It's framed like a box, which gives the movie the illusory, numbed lack of import of a driver's-ed instructional film, until it moves from pedestrian normality to being drenched with the aftermath of violence.

Unlike Michael Moore's documentary ''Bowling for Columbine,'' which was suffused with an angry man's frustration and passion -- he demanded that we absorb, and act on what he had concluded -- the distanced view of ''Elephant'' is deceptively calming. It starts with a car roaming down a street and slowly weaving out of control, sideswiping the parked cars in its path. We overhear the voice of an outraged teenage boy, and immediately have our expectations thwarted. The boy, John (John Robinson) -- a lanky waif with hair that looks as if it came off a L'Oréal box -- pops out of the car and shouts at the driver, his drunken father (Timothy Bottoms).

The movie builds anecdotally toward the violent climax, arriving at the homes of the killers, Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen), a pair of outsiders who spend time together compulsively in the way high-school boys do, something that can lead cruel peers to hiss about their love lives. Mr. Van Sant reinforces such attitudes by having the boys kiss each other before they pack their bags and head off to their awful mission -- an ambiguous scene that could be sexual or a proud Viking moment before leaving home.

Unfortunately, Mr. Van Sant also takes an easy way out in one instance. The boy assassins order their weapons through the Internet, something that is not only hard to do but also robs the entire movie of the plausibility that most of ''Elephant'' contains.

But the rest of the film more than compensates for this -- especially a moment where a muscular, imposing young African-American, Benny (Bennie Dixon), wanders into the frame like a hero -- a touch that mixes reality with another film cliché: the sacrificial black man.

And by the end of the movie, we realize where much of the power and clarity of the film comes from. By making the camera an observer, we get a perspective that often comes out of horror movies, a choice that whips the ordinary with the terrifying, an unforgettable mix.
Elvis Mitchell, NY Times, October 10, 2003

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at 1:39 PM  

Roland Barthes, Image Music Text(1977)
Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Image Music Text brings together major essays by Roland Barthes on the structural analysis of narrative and on issues in literary theory, on the semiotics of photograph and film, on the practice of music and voice.

Throughout the volume runs a constant movement from work to text: an attention to the very 'grain' of signifying activity and the desire to follow - in literature, image, film, song and theatre - whatever turns, displaces, shifts, disperses.

Stephen Heath, whose translation has been described as 'skilful and readable', is the author of Vertige du déplacement, a study of Barthes. His selection of essays, each important in its own right, also serves as 'the best..... introduction so far to Barthes' career as the slayer of contemporary myths'.

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at 2:57 PM  

GOOD COPY BAD COPY - a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture
Saturday, June 9, 2007

http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/

Featuring, in order of appearance:

DR LAWRENCE FERRARA, Director of Music Department NYU
PAUL V LICALSI, Attorney Sonnenschein

JANE PETERER, Bridgeport Music
DR SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN, NYU

GIRL TALK, Musician
DANGER MOUSE, Producer
DAN GLICKMAN, CEO MPAA
ANAKATA, The Pirate Bay

TIAMO, The Pirate Bay
RICK FALKVINGE, The Pirate Party

LAWRENCE LESSIG, Creative Commons
RONALDO LEMOS, Professor of Law FGV Brazil

CHARLES IGWE, Film Producer Lagos Nigeria
MAYO AYILARAN, Copyright Society of Nigeria
OLIVIER CHASTAN, VP Records
JOHN KENNEDY, Chairman IFPI
SHIRA PERLMUTTER, Head of Global Legal Policy IFPI

PETER JENNER, Sincere Management
JOHN BUCKMAN, Magnatune Records
BETO METRALHA, Producer Belem do Para, Brazil
DJ DINHO, Tupinamba Belem do Para, Brazil

Directed by:
ANDREAS JOHNSEN, RALF CHRISTENSEN, HENRIK MOLTKE


Music:
RJD2
TRACK 72
PHOENICIA
JOHN TEJADA
REQ
SHEX
SANTOGOLD
REX JIM LAWSON
DR VICTOR OLAIYA
PHARFAR
GIRL TALK
DANGER MOUSE
MIKKEL MEYER
GNARLS BARKLEY
DE LA SOUL
NWA

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at 1:56 PM  

Critical Art Ensemble - Marching Plague: Germ Warfare and Global Public Health
Thursday, June 7, 2007

Marching Plague, the long-awaited new book from Critical Art Ensemble, examines the scientific evidence and the rhetoric surrounding biological warfare, particularly the development of anthrax and other bio-weapons, and makes a strong case against the likelihood of such weapons ever being used in a terrorist situation. Studying the history and science of such weapons, they conclude that for reasons of accuracy and potency, biological weapons lack the efficiency required to produce the widespread devastation typically associated with bioterrorism.

Why the public urgency around biowarfare, then, and why the channeling of enormous resources into research and development of tools to counter an imaginary threat? This is the real focus of Marching Plague: the deconstruction of an exceedingly complex political economy of fear, primarily supporting biowartech development and the militarization of the public sphere. The book addresses the following questions:

* Why is bioterrorism a failed military strategy?
* Why is it all but useless to terrorists?
* How have preparedness efforts been detrimental to public health policy?
* What institutions benefit from the cultivation of biofear?
* Why does the diplomatic community fail to confront this problem?

The book concludes with a brief examination of the actual crisis in global public health, arguing for the redirection of health research away from the military, and promoting a number of strategies for civilian-based preparedness and education.

The conditions from which Marching Plague emerged are nothing short of bizarre. Originally scheduled to appear in 2004, the manuscript was in the possession of Steve Kurtz—one of the text's collective authors—when he came under the intense scrutiny of the Justice Department and the FBI for suspected biological terror crimes. Made paranoid by their own rhetoric, the Feds failed to tell the difference between an art piece scheduled for installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and something more nefarious. Kurtz' house was sealed off, his research was taken (including the manuscript and his computers), and his colleagues and publisher were subpoenaed, all for some trumped-up charges of mail fraud. Two appendices in the book comment on the political ramifications of Kurtz' trial, and what it means for the culture of dissent in a time of authoritarian political life.

CAE provides readers with a sober assessment of the interests animating many-headed corporate bureaucracies and the showy illusions they project. More than that, CAE’s theoretical ideas are grounded in the lab work of their practical experience and experiments in art and culture. CAE has continued to do their work facing overwhelming pressure from law enforcement. This book is a testament to their commitments advocating freedom of research and the liberating potential of autonomous creative labor.
— Gregg Bordowitz, author of The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings

Related links:
Critical Art Ensemble site: http://www.critical-art.net/
CAE Defense Fund, more info on Steve's case: http://www.caedefensefund.org/

at 5:31 PM  

Heinz Emigholz - Schindlers Häuser (2007)

The film shows, in chronological order, forty buildings of the Austrian-American architect Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953) from the years 1921 to 1952. Schindler's pioneering work in southern California founds a particular branch of architectonic Modernism. All of the photography took place in May 2006. The film therefore offers a current portrait of urban living in Los Angeles that has never been documented in this form before.
"In 1975 I came by chance upon the Lovell House in Newport Beach. At first glance the building seemed both singular and sensible. But at that time I was occupied as a filmmaker with extremely time-analytical compositions, with no thought to architecture beyond the medium of time. It was only later that I expanded my filmic work to include questions and depictions of space. I had forgot about the encounter with the house until I recognized it again while filming in May 2006. At the end of the 1980s I first consciously took notice of one or two other houses in Los Angeles [by Schindler]. A few years later I developed the plan for the film series 'Photography and beyond'. And Schindler, after Louis Sullivan and Robert Maillart and alongside Adolf Loos, Bruce Goff and Frederick Kiesler, was the missing link to the present - at least as far as my sense of space is concerned."
(Heinz Emigholz on his first encounter with the works of Schindler, from an interview with Marc Ries)

It was not unusual to find packed houses at films like Heinz Emigholz's marvelously spare documentary "Schindler's Houses", in which a series of static images of forty homes designed by modernist architect Rudolph Schindler had the cumulative effect of becoming one of the most compelling textural portraits of urban Los Angeles ever filmed.


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at 1:28 PM  

Jessica Bassett - MegaStructures: Dubai Palm Island (2005)
Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Impossible Islands In the Arabian Gulf, the world's largest artificial islands are being constructed in the shape of massive palm trees. This ambitious engineering feat is part of a plan to transform Dubai into one of the world's premiere tourist destinations. Find out what it takes to create these fantasy islands.

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at 6:26 PM  

Jennifer Baichwal - Manufactured Landscapes (2006)

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is a feature length documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky makes large-scale photographs of ‘manufactured landscapes’ – quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams. He photographs civilization’s materials and debris, but in a way people describe as “stunning” or “beautiful,” and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them.

The film follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. Sites such as the Three Gorges Dam, which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world and displaced over a million people, factory floors over a kilometre long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai’s urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera.

Shot in Super-16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narrative streams of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. What makes the photographs so powerful is his refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions. In the process, it tries to shift our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it.


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at 3:23 PM