Harun Farocki - Schnittstelle/Interface (1995)
Saturday, August 11, 2007
This video was derived from an installation Farocki made for the Lille Museum of Modern Art, about his own work and working methods. Farocki sits behind his editing stations and describes and illustrates his ways of working, the difference between film and video, working with found footage vs filming new material. As most of his films, it is thus a reflection on how we see or how we mediate, but reflected back upon his own work. He shows fragments of his previous films and analyses and contextualises them anew juxtaposing them as he did in other two-channel installations as I Thought I was Seeing Convicts and Eye/Machine.
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at 7:18 PM
Jem Cohen - This Is a History of New York (1987)
"This is a History of New York" constructs a fictional landscape of the city from prehistory to the Space Age. Cohen uses an evocative soundtrack to compile genres of architecture and visual arts into a hybridized evolution of New York City. Although the videomaker's intent was to create an accessible street document, on an abstract level, the tape inquires if the Great Ages of Man might not co-exist here and now, before our very eyes.
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Jem Cohen - Chain(2004), Lost Book Found(1996) & Free.
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at 11:35 AM
Harun Farocki - Workers leaving the Factory/Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (1995)
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Workers Leaving the Factory - such was the title of the first cinema film ever shown in public. For 45 seconds, this stillexistant sequence depicts workers at the photographic products factory in Lyon owned by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière hurrying, closely packed, out of the shadows of the factory gates and into the afternoon sun. Only here, in departing, are the workers visible as a social group. But where are they going? To a meeting? To the barricades? Or simply home? These questions have preoccupied generations of documentary filmmakers. For the space before the factory gates has always been the scene of social conflicts. And furthermore, this sequence has become an icon of the narrative medium in the history of the cinema. In his documentary essay of the same title, Harun Farocki explores this scene right through the history of film. The result of this effort is a fascinating cinematographic analysis in the medium of cinematography itself, ranging in scope from Chaplin's Modern Times to Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Accattone!. Farocki's film shows that the Lumière brothers' sequence already carries within itself the germ of a foreseeable social development: the eventual disappearance of this form of industrial labor. (Klaus Gronenborn, Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung, November 21, 1995) The first film ever projected is listed under the title The Workers Leaving the Factory. Chaplin played a worker, and Marilyn Monroe once exited the gate of a fish factory... but the workers' film has not become a main genre in film history. The space in front of the gate is far from being a preferred cinematic location. Most films begin when the work is over. I have collected images from several countries and many decades expressing the idea "exiting the factory", both staged and documentary - as if the the time has come to collect film-sequences, in the way words are brought together in a dictionary.
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'harunfarocki' & 'farocki' at del.icio.us.
Harun Farocki at UBU.
farocki-film.de
ps. this will probably be the last post, until late august.
at 11:12 AM
Ross McElwee - Time Indefinite (1993)
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Autobiograhpical filmmaker Ross McElwee uses his camera to record various events and people in a cinema verite style, often taping conversations he is having at the time he is having them. Much of the film is accompanied by his personal stream-of-consciousness voice-over recorded after the footage is shot. In Time Indefinite McElwee deals with many things in his life, but ends up focusing on death in his family and in his friend Charlene's life. The final scenes deal with he and his wife's newborn son.
The defintion for indefinite includes meanings such as "having no exact limits or no limits at all" and "not precise or clear in meaning." A central content issue that McElwee addresses in Time Indefinite is the concept of death. Death is the inevitable limit in boundless time; yet like time it is vague and abstract. After a somewhat rapid succession of events, McElwee is forced to deal with death's presence throughout his family. Because of his chosen autobiographical format, the viewer receives extremely personal, first person reactions to this universal issue as well as being shown its comparable effects on others. Unlike the detachment felt when filming his blood test, the filmmaker finds that the camera does not dissipate or explain the pain of loss. It does, however, provide the medium for an interesting and ambiguous account of man's reaction to something as serious and indefinite as death.
McElwee begins his emotional and intellectual struggles with death somewhere around the middle of the film. He suffers the death of his grandmother, his wife's miscarriage, and his father's death one soon after the other. This timing intesifies the effects of these catastrophic events to the audience and establishes this subject as a focal point for the rest of the film. When McElwee returns to his father's home, he finds life carries on there as it did in the past; the same man mows the lawn as he has done for years, and the unused piano receives its yearly tuning. These small details place death in the context of a "time indefinite" that endlessly leaves things in the past through its continuation. McElwee and the viewer are now more sensitive to death as the film accentuates the extermination of bees at his father's house and the last moments of a fish on a pier. The filmmaker poses the question of existence and its limits but cannot find an answer. Similarly, he cannot find anyone to articulate the pain of his father's passing; he eventually turns the camera on himself to talk about his family and death. Still, he cannot resolve these issues and ends up using voice-over narration to drown out his ramblings.
Unable to cope in a satisfactory manner with his loss, McElwee visits the advisory figure in his earlier success Sherman's March as well as this film, Charlene. The viewer learns of her husband's tragic death in a fire a few years back, and she has also had problems dealing with this issue; she keeps the ashes of her husband stored away in a plastic bag in a closet. It is a disturbing image when she brings out the bag full of gray particles and talks of this jumbled mass being her late husband. Also quite unsettling is the fireman's talk of identifying the presence of a body during the fire by the smell. Charlene expresses a desire to sprinkle Jim's ashes in the ocean but cannot bring herself to do it, worried that the fish and sharks might get them. McElwee states later in the film about how he wanted to keep death from becoming abstract, and it seems that Charlene feels the same way. She refers to the ashes as Jim, as if they still contained the essence that was her husband. Furthermore, she expresses concern over the well-being of the ashes and prefers to keep them safe in the closet instead of sprinkling them in the water. The film shows that Charlene still struggles with her pain, and her way of dealing with it seems both distorted and sad. McElwee has a sense that dispersing the ashes and "letting go" would be the best thing but realizes that his inability to deal with his own situation does not afford him an guiding role. One feels sorrow for Charlene, usually knowing and confident, now seeming very unsure and confused. McElwee doesn't get the example or answer he undoubtedly had hoped for in coping with this situation, except perhaps that there is no answer.
It is vitally important for the film to show the worth of life, and even more so, the great tragedy of death when these issues are constantly cheapened, glossed over, romanticized and exploited in today's popular fictional cinema. Death has become something to laugh at, an unimportant plot device to further the storyline; it's used to give the story an 'edge' or to easily manipulate the audience's emotions. Perhaps that's why the Charlene segment is so unsettling—because it is real. In a dark comedy, a woman holding on to her husband's ashes for fear that the sharks and fish will eat him would be comical. But this film presents this attitude in a way that its absurdity only adds to the feeling that death is too enigmatic and difficult to handle in a normal way. That McElwee addresses this subject in a serious manner by putting his own personal painful experiences onto film is admirable and makes for an interesting viewing experience.
McElwee sticks basically to the verite style he utilized in Sherman's March. There are more static shots and outside footage in Time Indefinite, however, establishing it as a more pensive and serious work as opposed to the improvisational and whimsical feel of the earlier film. The monotone voice-over narration, while adding to the sarcastic wit of Sherman's March, functions equally well in adding to the overall melancholy of this film. The long shots of clouds outside an airplane window emphasize the filmmakers meditations on more abstract and spiritual concepts. Although McElwee finds no direct answer to his questioning of how to deal with death, he finds solace in the love for his wife and child. On the plane ride back home he comments on his failure to "corner death with his camera" but also on how much he missed his wife. The birth of his son overshadows his fixation suggesting that finding hope in new life is the easiest way to cope with death. Perhaps he also finds some comfort in having his family preserved on film in a "time indefinite."
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More about Ross McElwee here.
at 12:51 PM
Peter Greenaway - Vertical Features Remake (1978)
Vertical Features Remake is a playful parody of avant-garde theorising in which academics argue about the life and work of Tulse Luper, Greenaway's best known fictional character. In their efforts to reconstruct one of Luper's early projects, the publically-funded Institute of Reclamation and Restoration (IRR) end up with four versions of the film.
"Vertical Features Remake is a partly autobiographical absurdist fantasy that could have been conceived by Lewis Carroll. It presents the world of the IRR, the powerful Institute of Reclamation and Restoration, which has just discovered some sketchy surviving records of a ‘film project undertaken by Tulse Luper when he was working officially, but it seems reluctantly, on a State landscape Programme.' That programme was code-named Session, and its ominous aim was ‘the creation of a dynamic landscape'. Vertical Features was a document made in protest by Tulse Luper, and Vertical Features Remake consists of the IRR's four attempts to reconstruct that film.
In fact the film is an attack on the whole British film-culture, with the IRR on one side and pedantic academia on the other. Both sides are seen as unconscious partners in a sinister threatening Session 3, laying waste the cinematic landscape. This never becomes a crude allegory or a simple protest, though; the short films-within-the-film are remarkable on their own terms and the musical collaboration with Michael Nyman makes for a harsh lyricism".
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at 12:33 PM
Lars Von Trier & Jørgen Leth - De Fem benspænd AKA The Five Obstructions (2003)
Monday, August 6, 2007
"The Five Obstructions", a 100 min. theatre documentary directed by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth. An investigative journey into the phenomenon of "documentary", based on manifestos written by each director. About a filmmaker not only revisiting, but also recreating one of his first films, The Perfect Human / Det perfekte menneske (1967), a document on life in Denmark, containing the familiar Leth idiosyncrasies.
English subtitles included.
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at 11:35 AM
James Benning - Los (2004)
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Nearing the completion of El Valley Centro, I began planning an urban companion piece, Los, that was to be a portrait of Los Angeles. It seemed logical, for the politics of water certainly run from the Valley to the City. Los would have the same structure as El Valley Centro and would look and listen with the same intensity. The two films would be connected with the last shot of El Valley Centro pumping water out of the Valley over Wheeler Ridge while the first shot of Los would show Mulholland’s first spillway (still in use) bringing water into LA.
James Benning, December 2001
Conceptual-art portrait of Los Angeles County, comprising 35 two-minute shots of streams, hills, buildings, factories, gardens, highways, rivers, cattle, trains, people, the ocean, a cemetery, the skyline, policemen, back streets, a jail, soccer players… Bennings’ camera remains static, and in the absence of commentary the only sounds we hear are whatever’s audible in each of these places: snatches of dialogue, distant background music, the rumble of cars and trains.
Benning has been one of American leading avant-garde film-makers for over 20 years, but remains barely known by the wider cinemagoing public, especially abroad – partly because he doesn’t allow his works to be available on video. And while Los is no-one’s idea of ‘commercial’ film-making, Benning’s low profile is an indictment of the timid policies of our supposedly adventurous arthouses: this is much too fascinating a use of film for it to be relegated to art galleries.
Los can be taken as 35 short movies, each of them saying something about the county, each of them posing some question about Benning’s technique, providing Viewing becomes an active, enthralling experience – even when there’s apparently ‘nothing happening’ on screen. It soon becomes clear that the timing, order and contents of each image has been very precisely calculated, and in many cases it’s what we can’t see that’s the ‘subject’ of the shot. The penultimate shot is of ‘homeless people’, and at one point an unseen passerby exclaims “What the f*ck are you lookin’ at, stupid motherf*cker?” But there are no answers – everything about the film is a matter of subjective interpretation, and every response is equally valid. Benning’s gaze transforms the whole of ‘greater’ Los Angeles into a vast work of art, in the process making it even ‘greater’ still – and this is only the central part of a projected ‘Southern California’ trilogy.
The film is full of engrossing incidental details, cross-references, tantalising clues that might mean everything or nothing. Early one we see a DKNY advertising billboard owned by a company named ‘Outdoor Systems’, and this phrase sums up Benning’s real subject – the human and natural processes that combine to form the bizarre anomaly we know as LA: a huge cloud of dust rising from a brush fire; the evening lights of cars zooming along a six-lane highway; the flight path of a landing jet-plane. This is a game with specific rules of form (the length and horizon-lines of each shot are similar) and content (each shot must contain some aspect of human activity; each shot must be outdoors) and, finally, memory test. We’re exposed to each of the images for so long, that by the end, when Benning brings up a series of captions identifying the locations of each, we can run through the whole movie again, in our mind.
Needless to say, Los won’t be to all tastes – in today’s market-oriented climate, such a project necessarily runs the risk of ‘pretentiousness’ accusations – but it’s surprising how quickly you adjust to the film’s unique rhythms, and this is a very straightforward, accessible kind of experimentalism. In terms of an artist using cinema to express himself, it dwarfs almost all this year’s ‘conventional’ releases: if any film of 2001 can possibly change the way its audiences think about and view their world, it’s James Benning’s mysterious, majestic, magical Los.
(via)
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at 2:03 AM
Loek van der Klis - Works of Art by Theo Jansen (2006)
Friday, August 3, 2007
Theo Jansen (1948) studied physics at the University of Delft (The Netherlands) from 1968-1975. He left University to be - come an artist. He painted for the first seven years. In 1980 he built a flying saucer (15 ft flashing lights, beep sounds) that flew over Delft and set the town in commotion. Then he built a light sensitive spray-gun which paints an object on a surface. Since 1986 Theo Jansen has been writing a column for the Volkskrant (national newspaper). Since 1990 he has been working on a new creation: skeletons made of electric-conduits which walk on windpower. These animals have evolved into several generations over the last twelve years. Eventually he wants to put the anima Is out in herds on the beaches, where they live their own lives.
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at 6:39 PM
