Gordon Matta-Clark - Fresh Kill(1972), Day's End(1975), Clockshower(1973) & Tree Dance(1971)
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Gordon Matta-Clark's artistic project was a radical investigation of architecture, deconstruction, space, and urban environments. Dating from 1971 to 1977, his most prolific and vital period, his film and video works include documents of major pieces in New York, Paris and Antwerp, and are focused on three areas: performances and recycling pieces; space and texture works; and his building cuts.
Fresh Kill 1972, 12:56 min, color, sound, 16 mm film
This film records the complete process of the destruction of Matta-Clark's truck (which he called "Herman Meydag") by a bulldozer in a rubbish dump. Part of 98.5, a compilation of films by Ed Baynard, George Schneemar and Charles Simons, this piece was shown in Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany.
Camera: Burt Spielvogel, Rudy Burkhardt. Producer: Holly Solomon, Burt Spielvogel.
Day's End 1975, 23:10 min, color, silent, Super 8 film
In May 1972, Matta-Clark worked on an abandoned pier in New York for two months, where he cut sections of the door, floor, and roof.
Camera: Betsy Susler.
Clockshower 1973, 13:50 min, color, silent, 16 mm film
In this film of one of his most daring performances, Matta-Clark climbed to the top of the Clocktower in New York and washed, shaved and brushed his teeth while suspended over the streets in front of the huge clockface.
Tree Dance 1971, 9:32 min, b&w, silent, 16 mm film
For the exhibition Twenty-Six by Twenty Six at the Vassar College of Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, New York, Matta-Clark created a performance inspired by spring fertility rituals. He performed in a structure made of ladders, ropes and other materials, which he built at the top of a large tree.
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at 7:59 PM
Jørgen Leth - The Perfect Human / Det Perfekte Menneske (1967)
"Look, the perfect human moving in a room. The perfect human can move in a room. The room is boundless and radiant with light. It is an empty room. Here are no boundaries. Here is nothing."
Portrait of Jørgen Leth in English.
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at 1:58 PM
Juan Downey - The Looking Glass (1981)
Sunday, July 22, 2007
"Shot in London, France, New York and Spain, The Looking Glass is a multilayered essay whose visual complexity parallels its subject: the meaning of reflections, illusions and mirrors in Western art, culture and life. In his analysis of the rich iconography of the mirror in painting, including Van Eyck's Arnolfini wedding portrait, Holbein's Ambassadors, and Velasquez's Las Meninas, Downey reflects on the psychological tension in the relation of the artist, the subjects of the painting, and the viewer beyond. Exploring perceptions of pictorial space, he uses computer graphics to diagram art historian Leo Steinberg's analysis of perspectival systems in Las Meninas, a painting Steinberg refers to as "a mirror of consciousness" in which the "viewer partakes of an infinity that is psychological." In a subjective illustration of the mirror as a reflection of the subconscious, Downey recalls his own experience of viewing Las Meninas as a young man in Madrid, when he immersed himself in the "Baroque space of the picture, in a total art experience... similar to orgasm." The Looking Glass is the first part of Downey's The Thinking Eye series."
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at 12:58 PM
Jon Jost - Speaking Directly (1973)
"Speaking Directly is an essay-film making for a kind of State of the Nation address, from the perspective of someone other than the President of the United States, circa 1972-4. This film addresses both the political and cultural situation of the US at the height of the Viet Nam war, Watergate and its aftermath, and likewise addresses the personal life, in this context, of the filmmaker, at that time thirty years of age, recently out of two plus years in federal prison for refusal to accept military service."
"I can think of no other film like it. As a radical critique of American in the early 70's it is as essential a document, in a way, as the collectively made Winter Soldier... although the experiences it bears witness to are distinctly different (Jost was imprisoned in Federal custody from March 1965 through June 1967 for draft resistance.)"
"Far and away the most inspired feature by the tenacious US independent Jon Jost, Speaking Directly is a reflexive film about Jost's attempt to make a reflexive film during the Vietnam War. Despite its importance, the movie has surfaced here only rarely during the decade since it was made."
"In the history of the American avant-garde, Speaking Directly stands as a remarkable achievement: between the currents of pure cinema and "committed" documentary/fiction, it asserts a deliberate primitivism, a return to the ideological roots of American radicalism. As such, it also bears comparison with Godard's Le Gai Savoir, another discourse on method which refuses to take for granted what we think we know."
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at 12:53 PM
Peter Greenaway - 4 American Composers: Cage, Glass, Monk, Ashley (1983)
Friday, July 20, 2007
Based on London performances under the aegis of the New York/Almeida Festival, this set of four one-hour documentaries, originally produced in 1983, introduced these avant-garde composers and their music to general British audiences. It is a tribute to the filmmakers' accomplishment (and a sorry comment on how we honor our own prophets) that the set provides no less valuable an introduction for American audiences a full decade later.
These videos merit viewing not simply for exporting the avant-garde to a general public, but for explaining it-or, rather, for letting the composers explain themselves. Compared to Meredith Monk and Robert Ashley, John Cage and Philip Glass are household names, yet their relative fame frequently turns on the persistence of misconceptions. All too often, even scholars who might be expected to know better portray Cage as either charlatan or nihilist. Critics in the 1980s tagged Glass's music as "classical music for people who don't like classical music," suggesting his shrewd exploitation of the yuppie market. Director Peter Greenaway and producer Revel Guest weave representative musical excerpts with interviews to present the personalities more accurately, and, in so doing, establishes a broader context for listening. Perhaps the most striking revelation of these documentaries is that such notorious iconoclasts are so soft-spoken in person (compared to the shy, halting Ashley, the loquacious Monk seems downright assertive).
Fans of Peter Greenaway will be disappointed (and his detractors relieved) that here, whether from documentary restraint or simple budgetary restrictions, he largely subordinates idiosyncrasies found in his other film work to the rhythms and forms of the live performances. A Music Circus, a seventieth-birthday celebration, features twelve Cage works performed within two hours, often overlapping, and thus motivates a kaleidoscopic assortment of brief snippets; the Philip Glass Ensemble's visually static performance inspires more prolonged swaths of uninterrupted music. Monk's cinematic approach to staging and choreography ("all the cinema language is how I think in terms of theater") and Ashley's video conception of his opera Perfect Lives more directly shape approaches to the filming of their work.
Of course, Greenaway is never the entirely invisible observer; he occasionally finds opportunities to assert his own style. These range from rapid, rhythmic intercutting images of the sound sources used in Cage's works, such as "27 sounds manufactured in a kitchen," to the slow-motion close-ups of Glass nodding cues to his ensemble. Most openly individualistic are the interviews with Ashley and his collaborators, in which they appear simultaneously in one or more on-screen video monitors, filmed from different angles and at different magnifications, and intercut with typescript title cards to underscore selected words and phrases. Though clearly modeled on a technique used in Ashley's opera, the result is unmistakably Greenaway.
At its best, the interplay of sound and image strikingly illuminates each composer's philosophy. Puzzling over the quirky, even bizarre choreography in Monk's Turtle Dreams (1983), which expresses the "pre-World War III anxiety" of contemporary urban life, we hear her explain: "It's like little templates or something, like little evocative nuggets, little psychic triggers. And it's all these little moments of explosion within this very formal, very abstract form that, in a way, you could look at and you could say it doesn't have any idea or content." Likewise, as we see musicians intently performing Cage's indeterminacies, we hear his account of orchestral shenanigans during 1958 performances, and his realization that he had to "find a way to let people be free without becoming foolish, so that their freedom will make them noble."
Occasionally, key information almost slips by unnoticed, as when Glass observes that "the whole development of popular music over the last ten years has been very helpful to us." One longs here for a narrator to emphasize that, thanks to commercial pop music's trends in the 1970s toward static harmonies and ubiquitous synthesizers, minimalism's popular appeal was neither a birthright nor an achievement, but genuinely thrust upon it (as Glass notes dryly, "It's not music with clearly populist intentions."). Of course, some contexts were unknowable at the time: although some of the images in Ashley's video opera strongly resemble rock video clichés, 1990s viewers must recall that the 1983 Perfect Lives immediately predates the rise of MTV.
Inevitably, the contexts provided in a one-hour format are tightly circumscribed. With Cage and Monk, we do acquire some sense of stylistic development. A Music Circus incorporates works from 1940 to 1979, and rather than follow a chance arrangement in performance, Greenaway and Guest present them chronologically. Although Monk's musical and stage works are presented in a more flexible ordering, her film works 16mm Earrings (1966), Quarry (1976), and Ellis Island (1981) do appear in sequence. But other than a quick excerpt from Music in similar motion (1969), the Glass segment includes only his work from about 1983, and the Ashley segment presents only Perfect Lives. Therefore, viewers for whom any of these documentaries provide a first encounter will have to turn to other media to build a fuller sense of the composers' outputs, especially in relation to contemporaneous developments in music and the visual arts. Nevertheless, the filmmakers' skillful integration of image, music, and text, especially in some of Greenaway's more subtle visual puns and symbols, as when the Cage segment begins with what appears to be the slow-motion demolition of a church-which, in fact, turns out to be its renovation, will reward viewers of all backgrounds.
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search; 'meredith monk' and 'robert ashley' at del.icio.us.
Ps. I've still got 38 invites for karagarga, so write me, if you want one.
at 12:22 PM
Chris Marker - La Jetée (1962)
Thursday, July 19, 2007
First; if you've written me about an invite for karagarga after this post, you should have received one, if not; write me again.
The survivors of a destroyed Paris in the aftermath of World War III, live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send someone back to before the devastating war to recover food, medicine, or energy for the present, "to summon the past and future to the aid of the present". The traveler is a male prisoner, his vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the main terminal ("The Jetty") at Orly Airport is used as the key to his journey back in time. He is thrown back to the past again and again. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman who was present at the terminal. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the deep future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society. On his return, he is cast aside by his imprisoners to die. Before he can be executed, he is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time, but he asks to be returned to his childhood. He is returned and finds the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult.
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at 5:12 PM
Jem Cohen - Free
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
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at 11:54 AM
Vít Klusák - Ceský sen aka Czech Dream (2004)
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Czech Dream is a documentary about a grand scale practical joke played on the Czech people by two student film makers. They pretend to be home-grown entrepreneurs opening a new discount hypermarket, named "Cesky Sen", and they launch a slick advertising campaign (funded in the main by the Czech Ministry of Culture) to advertise this non-existent retail outlet. Posters, flyers, jingles and TV ads all lure several thousand people to a meadow for the opening of the hypermarket. Needless to say, some people weren't best pleased when they found out that the front of the building was just a large billboard with nothing behind it except grass. The film goes behind the scenes of the advertising campaign and the opening of the shopping centre and presents itself on one level as a critique of consumerism, but on another as a satire of the Czech government's desire to persuade it's citizens to join the E.U. (the prospect of which the film makers clearly are not enamoured with). The film makers sneer at the "sheep" who walk through a field to find that their aspirations of emulating a Western European consumerist lifestyle are, both symbolically and literally, flawed. However their point was made at the expense of making fools out of several thousand people, many of whom were elderly, poor and handicapped. An interesting and unusual film which exposes the power of advertising and mocks consumer capitalism.
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at 11:41 PM
Jem Cohen - Lost Book Found (1996)
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
