Jem Cohen - Lost Book Found (1996)
Sunday, July 15, 2007
The result of over five years of Super-8 and 16mm filming on New York City streets, Lost Book Found melds documentary and narrative into a complex meditation on city life. The piece revolves around a mysterious notebook filled with obsessive listings of places, objects, and incidents. These listings serve as the key to a hidden city: a city of unconsidered geographies and layered artifacts—the relics of low-level capitalism and the debris of countless forgotten narratives. The project stems from the filmmaker's first job in New York—working as a pushcart vendor on Canal Street. As usual, Cohen shot in hundreds of locations using unobtrusive equipment and generally without any crew. Influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin, Cohen created "an archive of undirected shots and sounds, then set out to explore the boundary" between genres. During the process, Cohen said, "I found connections between the street vendor, Benjamin's 'flaneur', and my own work as an observer and collector of ephemeral street life."
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at 4:33 PM
Alexandra Weltz & Andreas Pichler - Antonio Negri: A Revolt That Never Ends (2004)
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
July 1st, 1997. An elderly man arrives in Italy on a flight from Paris. The special forces of the Carabinieri immediately arrest him. Antonio Negri had returned voluntarily to his home country after 15 years of exile. The newspaper Liberation hails it as, "The return of the Devil"
Over the years few intellectuals have experienced as much admiration and hatred, or as much praise and rejection, as Antonio Negri. His book Empire, coauthored with Michael Hardt, was an international bestseller. A critical analysis of the new global economy, it was hailed as a bold new manifesto for the 21st century and overnight it turned Negri into a leading spokesperson for the international anti-globalization movement.
ANTONIO NEGRI-A REVOLT THAT NEVER ENDS profiles the controversial life and times of this university professor, philosopher, militant, prisoner, refugee, and so-called 'enemy of the state.' It traces Negri's roots in the history of radical left-wing movements in Italy during the Sixties and Seventies, illustrated through archival footage of workers' strikes, factory occupations, terrorist actions, violent street confrontations, political repression, and government trials of dissidents.
During these tumultuous decades, finding himself branded as an evil ideologue with alleged ties to the Red Brigades terrorist group, Negri spent ten years in prison and fourteen years in exile in Paris, where he contributed to philosophical debates with authors such as Deleuze and Guattari. The film features interviews with Negri, conducted following his April 2003 release from confinement, as well as public speaking appearances at seminars and protest demonstrations, plus commentary from his coauthor Michael Hardt, and Italian and French colleagues.
Against the backdrop of scenes of recent anti-globalization protests, Negri discusses the dangers of the economic, cultural and legal transformations being wrought by the forces of globalization as well as the opportunities to resist these changes. ANTONIO NEGRI explores this visionary theoretician's lifelong political struggle, now being expressed in works of contemporary relevance such as Empire and its sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, a powerful intellectual project in protest of the new global order.
"A rich--nearly Hollwoodian--cache of biographical material... assembled with great skill and obvious passion. Crackles with unexpected twists and is braced by lucid excurses on Negri's political theories... Great!" - Cineaste
"Negri relates his story without rancor or regret. Today an indisputable figure in the anti-globalization movement, he observes with humility that only his thirst for knowledge has saved him. A fair and impartial portrait, this documentary gathers archival footage and passionate testimonies to constitute a magnificent and much needed illumination of those 'years of lead' which remain obscure." - Telérama
** 2006 Society for Cinema & Media Studies Film Festival
** 2005 Berlin International Film Festival
** 2004 Amsterdam International Documentary Festival
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at 4:18 PM
Lukas Moodysson - Container (2006)
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
The speed and narrative voice in Chain reminded me of Container by Lukas Moodysson, so here it is again, updated with a better description, link to karagarga and screenshots.
With his 74-minute feature Container, Swedish avant-garde filmmaker Lucas Moodysson plunges, headfirst, into a surrealistic dreamscape and offers a sharp critique of contemporary society. In crafting this motion picture, the director pulls the audience into a different cinematic mindset - a stream of consciousness mode of storytelling, where he floods the viewer with everything at once - "relevant and irrelevant" - in lieu of a more conventional, linear narrative mode. Shot in patchy, grainy, high-contrast black-and-white, the film follows an obese man as he carries an Asian woman, piggyback, through a garbage-filled landscape. Meanwhile, an American actress (Jena Malone) narrates a series of free-association thoughts and voices a number of characters on the soundtrack, drifting languidly (in the Pynchonian sense) in and out of coherence - her observations laden with references to pop culture, spirituality, and consumerism. An interesting presentation Cineuropa: "Described by its author as "a black and white silent movie with sound", Container was shot in Chernobyl, Transylvania and in Sweden’s Film i Väst’s studios in Trollhättan. One sentence from its author gives an idea of the director’s new poetic and experimental piece of filmmaking: "a woman in a man’s body. A man in a woman’s body. Jesus in Mary’s stomach. The water breaks. It floods into me. I can’t close the lid. My heart is full"..."
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at 4:13 PM
Jem Cohen - Chain (2004)
“In order to understand the arcades from the ground up, we sink them into the deepest stratum of the dream”—Walter Benjamin
Dedicated to Chris Marker and Humphrey Jennings, and namechecking Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed in the end credits, Jem Cohen’s extraordinary feature Chain is a glimpse of the future, here and now. Call it “Present Shock.” A melancholy photo collage of chain stores, malls, and conglomerated concrete spaces unfurls as a single, anonymous ambiance, a desolate spiritual limbo that could be anywhere. Anywhere and Everywhere, in fact. The end credits reveal the film was shot across 11 States, France, Germany, Poland, Australia, and Canada.
Chain is a movie in establishing shots. Except that these shots serve the opposite purpose: obscuring and disorienting— dis-establishing, if you will. (Let’s note in passing that another term for the establishing shot is the “linking” shot.)
On this formal level, perhaps the most pertinent Marker influence is La Jetée (1962), his famous sci-fi in stills. Cohen may use a 16mm camera and a camcorder, but his films (which include the muso portrait Benjamin Smoke [2000] and a number of shorter city portraits like Amber City [1999] and Lost Book Found [1996]) have always been evocative of the older photographic tradition, governed by the impulse to record daily reality as it happens, shooting on the fly, as the mood takes him. The “meaning” of this footage is divined later, in the assemblage, and through Cohen’s impressionistic, poetic soundscapes (Cohen has also been linked with underground and alternative music groups like Fugazi and Godspeed You Black Emperor!).
Beginning in this same fashion, Chain collates material shot over a ten year period—20-40 hours of it in total—some of which also found its way into a 40-minute three-channel installation work (Chain x Three, 2000, with music by Godspeed). About halfway through the process, Cohen began to think of incorporating fictional narrative elements, which are much more pronounced here than in his earlier, Marker-like introspections.
Not that there is an over-arching narrative design here. Rather, we get two shadow narratives. In one, Japanese businesswoman Tamiko (Miho Nikaido) researches American amusement parks for her Tokyo-based company, which is planning a park of cherry trees in perpetual blossom (one of a number of sly satiric digs). At first she is honoured by the assignment, but gradually comes adrift as communication from her employers dries up and she’s abandoned to an endless parade of hotels, flyovers, and lonely public spaces.
In the other strand, teenage runaway Amanda (Mira Billotte) scratches out an existence, squatting in abandoned or unfinished homes on the edges of a mall. She likes to hang out near shops even if she can’t afford to be a consumer herself. In another mordantly witty detail, Cohen shows her conducting endless imaginary conversations over a dead cell phone to legitimize herself and allay the suspicions of the mall’s security guards.
On some level both these women are where they want to be. The consumer paradise exerts its own magnetic attraction, yet they seem numbed, passionless, only half awake. Two lost souls incapable of making a connection. Most of the dialogue comes in the form of interior monologues, disembodied voiceovers rendered all the more automaton-like in Nikaido’s strongly inflected accent.
Coming across a lost video camera, Amanda tapes a series of letters to her sister about her life—not that she seems likely to send them. Filming in the darkness using the camera’s eerie green night-vision she looks like a ghost—and though she eventually lands a minimum wage job, there’s little reason to hope it will revitalize her.
What’s scary and depressing is that 20 or 30 years ago Chain would have looked like a nightmare movie. Today it looks so much like a documentary that some audiences assume it is one. It's precisely this synthesis of the real and the imagined, the poetic and the pedestrian, which makes the film so intriguing. A bricoleur by intuition and political conviction, Cohen has stitched together a very personal response to the impersonal forms of late-capitalist culture: the homogenous globalscape of concrete retail and theme “parks”; the Muzak of cold-callers’ unanswered voice-messages. Perhaps it is in the nature of such a culture to reject such a singular, discomforting, meditative mirror image of itself.
Cinema Scope: The film reminded me of dystopian science fiction, but a science fiction of the present.
Jem Cohen: I’ve been travelling around with the film, and in some places it’s more futuristic than others. Edinburgh doesn’t look like that yet, but last week I was in Houston, Texas, and everywhere you look there is a mall. At the same time, I should say, I didn’t go out of my way to make a depressing movie. It would have been very easy to take pot shots, to make fun of shopping malls. But I didn’t want to be superior, or to condescend to the people who are stuck in that world. That was one of the hardest things to pull off.
Scope: What brought you to the mall in the first place?
Cohen: Well, the film uses footage I shot up to ten years ago. I shot for four years without even broaching the question of narrative at all, just taking on the topography. In the past I’ve done city portraits of places I like in New York or Eastern Europe, but I realized I was focusing on disappearing spaces, old neighourhoods, and I was framing out what should be inescapable: the malls and chain stores which are so monolithic they’re almost invisible to us. So I started collecting these urban spaces on my travels—then I had the idea of joining them together.
Scope: Which is a pretty frightening comment on globalization.
Cohen: I didn’t want it be a parlor game where you’re ticking off these places, recognizing Potsdamer Platz or Vancouver or wherever. That could be gimmicky, if it was all about just making a generic landscape. But it’s pretty remarkable how seamless it is. That you can do a shot cutting from Atlanta to Berlin and there is no sense that we’ve changed location. No matter where I went in the world I could always be shooting this film. It’s a little bit harder in Italy, but it’s just a question of time, I guess. It’s perverse too. I would go somewhere quite lovely and they would ask me, “What to do you want to see?” and I’d go, “Take me to the mall!”
Often with my filmmaking I take a political abstract, like capitalism or globalization, and look at it from ground level, rather than an academic or political point of view. Just to see how people are living this abstraction. Someone asked me at a screening yesterday about my role in this as an American, and although it goes beyond America, a lot of things in the film are (or were) primarily American exports. We didn’t exactly invent the shopping mall, but the way the mall exists now is American, it comes up in the 50s in California and spreads across the country, and then across the world. When our government talks about exporting freedom and democracy I think often we’re talking about making a world that looks like the one in this movie. I mean, a new Wal-Mart goes up every day and a half!
Scope: And the mall as a space seems to turn people into zombies—it’s like Dawn of the Dead (1978).
Cohen: Yeah, I remember when I was a kid I was really excited by that idea and then when I saw the film I was disappointed they were more concerned with the splatter aspect than this wonderful metaphor. The average visit to a mall is four or five hours. People are not just popping in to pick up something they need. These places are so carefully engineered to be a magnetic, disembodied experience where people will buy things they had no idea they wanted. To me they’re disconcerting, and I have a hard time being in them for a long time, they’re very disorienting. On a sensory level these spaces are doing weird things: the lighting is so brutal, and they have these drop ceilings. Visually they’re hard to organize—it’s very hard to shoot in a mall (even if you were allowed to and given time to set things up). It’s hard to get a composition that isn’t shattered.
Scope: And the defunct mall you find feels kind of like a ghost town.
Cohen: I was really lucky to come across one that was being torn down. You get these blessings some times. It was a small town in upstate New York and security wasn’t very tight. I was able to wander around—I was sure I was going to get thrown out. I felt like I was Charlton Heston in The Omega Man (1971). It was so spooky: there was that one store that was powered up and lit. I snuck closer waiting for the people inside to see me, but they never did. That’s another thing I wanted to reflect in the movie: the constant fall and decay and obsolescence of the malls. They’re never made to last.
Scope: There is also something very ghostly about all the night-vision footage with Amanda.
Cohen: I am drawn to that feature on the video camera, I confess. But it is spectral, and I think she is a kind of a ghost. So many people in the service economy are invisible. I see her as this little spook on the highway, talking into a dead cell phone. Is she really going to send this video letter to her sister? I don’t know or care, really, but I think on some gut level we all need to talk to somebody. She may not be aware of it, but that need is there.
Scope: Four years ago you put together an art installation, Chain x Three.
Cohen: Yes, the installation is a triptych. It lasts 41 minutes and shares about 20 percent of the same footage. The three screens work quite well for this material. Instead of cutting from one country to another, you can create a panorama across the three screens. It has intimations of other narratives. You don’t see any other actors, but you have voiceovers coming in and out, and there’s a lot more music, so it’s a very different experience. But I have to say the feature is probably a bit closer to my heart.
Scope: Why did you decide to incorporate narrative elements?
Cohen: After I had been filming for a while, I became interested in how people navigate these spaces, who they might be, and what they might be thinking. It was a big leap for me. I was afraid of narrative for a long time—I have such a problem with acting that isn’t believable. I mean, you can get a lot of pleasure out of watching Sean Penn transform himself and still be Sean Penn, and in the context of a normal narrative, even if things aren’t spot on, you can get away with a lot because everybody is in this bubble, this cocoon of narrative. But when you make a film that is half documentary the risk is that the documentary elements make the narrative look false—you’re shattering that bubble. It’s not easy to pull it off. I’m not completely sure that I did, but I gave it a good run.
Scope: So how did you go about developing the characters?
Cohen: Well, I started reading the business pages for the first time in my life. I wanted to deal with people, but not to make the people more important than the other elements in the film. You know how they stick B-roll footage on DVDs now? I’ve often thought I’d rather be watching that interstitial material than the film itself.
I met Miho Nikaido (who was in Tokyo Decadence [1992]) in New York, and she was interested in working with me. And I was reading a book on Japanese business practices at the time—in fact I read a book by a woman whose company was converting an old steel mill into Space World, or something like that, and who sent this woman out to study American theme parks. So all that went into the character. As usual, I was working backwards.
Scope: The other main character is Amanda, played by Mira Billotte. How did you find her?
Cohen: Originally I was thinking of four or five characters, and she was going to be one. I wanted the people to be in the space, not critical or sarcastic. Like I said, I didn’t want to be superior. So I had a rough idea of this character, but then I thought how awful it would be to go the normal casting route—I didn’t want five billion headshots of dolled up young women desperate to be the hot young actress, you know? I didn’t want anyone “cute.”
There are things that are hard to ask for in the traditional channels: I wanted a certain kind of toughness. It’s great that her skin isn’t perfect, that sort of thing. Then I was talking to my friends from Fugazi, my “executive producers” (which is a joke term to us), and their immediate thought was she’s probably in an underground band. They suggested Mira, she was in bands out of Baltimore, Maryland, and Guy [Picciotto] had produced some of her stuff. They said she has an interesting presence, and she’s had a pretty rough life. Not much money. Very self-determined but kind of hard to read.
She had just moved to New York and I met with her. She didn’t have any particular interest in acting. I figured let’s give this a try, do a couple of little things. I didn’t know at the time I was going to expand it out as much as I did. Listening to her songs was what really sold me, and watching her perform. The voice that comes out of the body, it’s very startling.
Scope: Was there a script?
Cohen: There was never a script I could have handed to anybody, and the actors never got it. I would give Miho a few pages of her voiceover so she could work on the English pronunciation a little bit, but there was never a full script. Halfway through I couldn’t have told you how I was going to end it or what the structure would be. All of that is discovered in the edit. But at the same time it is carefully written. There isn’t much improv in the traditional sense. Once in a while with Mira she is telling me about her life and I am either using it directly or we’d modify it as we shot, to make it fit with this character. Because we were using the video camera for those sequences, that was very inexpensive to shoot. I’d had this idea that she would find a video camera, and the tapes inside it would lead us into other narratives. But the only stuff that survives from that is the footage from inside Enron—which is genuine, by the way. But otherwise I became so interested in these two women, I let the rest go.
Scope: And how did you work with the actors?
Cohen: Because I don’t have a casting director, a wardrobe, or a make-up person, the first thing we did was we’d go shopping. With Tamiko we went and picked out businessy clothing. With Amanda it was more second-hand stores. I remember the first thing I said to Miho was “I’m not really interested in acting. See that guy coming out of a building over there, smoking? That’s what I want. I am much more interested in having you sit on a bed and have it be totally believable than I am in having you perform some big drama about how your parents hated you.” And she was great. Incredibly patient. We worked on this for three years on and off. She couldn’t cut her hair for three years!
Scope: Some of Tamiko’s voiceover is shocking. I’m thinking of the line about how the races mix in America; when she observes, “Without a pure race it will be harder to have a pure business plan.”
Cohen: That line comes directly from a speech by a Japanese CEO who came over to America a few years ago and said that, not realizing how controversial it would be. I gave it to Tamiko because I didn’t want her to be too simple. I mean, you meet likeable people who will shock you by saying something incredibly racist.
Scope: It sounds like even the “fiction” elements in the film are factual!
Cohen: I brought the documentary material towards narrative and vice versa, so that they meet in the middle. It’s a little bit uncomfortable for some people, but I like that. I do feel like the conventional narrative/star system Hollywood form is bankrupt. The people who inspire me are the Dardennes and Kiarostami. Four out of five “normal” movies I don’t have any interest in. But narrative is wonderful. Human interaction is endlessly fascinating. So we do need to forge some new channels, and I think there is something about approaching it with a documentary mind that’s fruitful. It’s interesting territory.
Scope: It seems to be happening from the other end too: documentaries are using more fiction film techniques—which may be why my companion assumed Chain was a documentary for at least the first half of the film.
Cohen: It makes me very happy when people take it for a documentary, but on the other hand I am concerned that we’re headed towards “docu-tainment.” The cutting is getting so hyped up now: like that surfing doc, every single shot was flipping around doing digital somersaults—like an audience wouldn’t sit still for surfing?! You’ll hear executives telling documentary filmmakers that they should have this and that happening by the third act—it’s really acceptable for them to talk about it in these dramatic terms now. That makes me very uneasy.
Scope: Which brings us to your own relationship with the mainstream, which you brushed against, I guess, with your music videos for REM, Sparklehorse, and Elliott Smith, among others.
Cohen: These were musicians who were interested in the same things I was. Once I saw where the industry was heading I walked away. I haven’t made a music video since 1996. I never did any fashion work or advertising or shopped myself around. But if I watch MTV now it makes me feel awful—it’s just things to sell other things. I don’t want to add anything to the pile.
Some very talented people say it doesn’t matter—it’s all creativity. But I think there’s a difference between creativity to express something from inside you and creativity that’s been modified to make people in a boardroom happy—your creative vision modified for The Gap. Admittedly, I don’t have a family to support, so one day I may change my tune. But I want my tune to be my tune, you know?
Scope: You told me that it doesn’t look like Chain will get distributed.
Cohen: It’s disappointing. I’ve had some good screenings, but not with distributors, and I didn’t get into some festivals I hoped to. It would have been nice to get this film seen in the malls. See, I never look at myself as being experimental or avant-garde. I make films about the world we live in. Why should that be more inaccessible than the films that have nothing to do with it?
More reviews at villagevoice.com, eyeweekly.com, cinema-scope.com(review above) and chicagoreader.com.
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at 3:34 PM
Harun Farocki - Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989)
Algerian In 1944, an Allied aircraft took topographic photographs of Auschwitz during a routine surveillance operation for power plants, munitions factories, chemical plants, and any other industrial complexes that could potentially serve as bombing targets that, in the military's myopic search for these high collateral targets that would cripple the German war machine, failed to recognize that they had actually taken an aerial survey of the layout of the Auschwitz concentration camp - an explicitly detailed, but mentally unregistered discovery for which the implicit meaning would not be realized until decades later, long after the tragic reality of the Nazi death camps had been exposed. It is this assignment of significance to the act of visual observation that underlies Harun Farocki's thoughtful, understated, and engaging exposition on the interconnection - and at times, disjunction - between cognition and recognition in Images of the World and the Inscription of War.
Prefaced by a humorous anecdote on 19th century architect, Albrecht Meydenbauer whose near death experience while making physical measurements for a cathedral project, combined with an interest in the visual reproduction capability of a still camera, led to the development of photogrammetry (which provided for the accurate, graphically scalable, two-dimensional, measurable image of the studied object), the film illustrates, not only the inherent correlation between production and technology, but also the conceptual introduction of quantifying images measured from a distance into discrete elements that can be uniquely identified or accurately reproduced remotely into scale models and detailed simulations.
From this logical trajectory, Farocki cites another point of reference in a French government campaign during the 1960s to dispatch conscripted soldiers to Algeria in order to photograph native women for the issuance of identity cards in the occupied colony - a process that required the women to remove their veil in public, contrary to traditional custom. Having spent much of their public lives obscured behind a veil, the question then arises if an identity card that captures these women in full, unobstructed gaze can accurately reflect their distinctive characteristics to the point of recognition? Would an officer tasked to verify identity find semblance between these unveiled photographs and the women physically presented before him? Unable to find specific, isolated features within the human face that remains unaltered through the years, these photographic images can only serve as a referential document of physical attributes, and not a record of truth - of the actual reality.
Farocki illustrates this recursive cycle of distanced, "safe" action and estranged surveillance operating under the vacuum of social (and cultural) responsibility (a familiar preoccupation in the filmmaker's oeuvre that is also evident in the equally provocative essay, War at a Distance) through repeated references of the Auschwitz, Algeria, and Meydenbauer paradigms, as well as the film's thematic use of the German word aufklärung - a term that alternately means enlightenment and flight reconnaissance - that reflect the technological quest to define empirical, universally identifiable data that can remotely identify (or characterize the essence of) an image. It is this passive, alienated act of seeing that is ultimately rejected in a publication's symbolic call to action, "The reality must begin", in reaction to Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler's revelation of the concentration camps - an active resistance that is punctuated by the October 7, 1944 uprising by Sonderkommandos (prisoners who were tasked to operate the gas chambers and crematoria) at Auschwitz that succeeded in the disabling of a death apparatus - a heroic act of conscious and formidable human engagement.
English Narration. Occasional German dialogue with hardcoded english subtitles.
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at 2:45 PM
Harun Farocki - Inextinguishable Fire (1969)
"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
