Ryoji Ikeda - C4I and formula [ver 2.2] (2004)
Monday, March 24, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
This is a recording of Ikeda's concert of C4I and formula [ver 2.2] given on the 13 february 2004 at YCAM, Yamaguchi in Japan. It was the world premiere concert for the work C4I. This is from a press-release by forma in UK they released the booklet and DVD formula that you can find here link (note that I think this will never have a general release as I have had this DVD for three years without seeing any actual release)
C4I is 37 minutes long and contained on the first DVD.
formula [ver 2.2] is 40 minutes and contained on the second DVD.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 11:58 AM
Ryoji Ikeda - Formula (2005)
Download this at KaraGarga.
This untouched DVD upload is aimed at fans of Ryoji Ikeda, or, extremekly unlikely as it might seem, individuals who enjoy minimalist electronic compositions/constructions but somehow aren't familiar with Ikeda. The content here is not the IDM side of Ikeda but is squarely the electro-minimalist composer and installation artist Ikeda.
There are two parts to this DVD. The first part is audio tracks only, with no visuals (about 30 min.) and the second part is audio and visuals, a filmed installation by Ikeda done in 2001 (about 35 min.). Details below in the tracklisting.
I think it is Ikeda at his best, at least the Ikeda I like best, especially the sound & image portion of the DVD. In that section, at times the images are very minimal, fittingly so, but at other times there is a lot going on and going on rather quickly so that multiple viewings are rewarded.
The content of the DVD is exclusive to this release, which is from 2005, in a numbered, limited edition of 3000. It was originally released in 2002 apparently.
Japan's leading electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. His work exploits sound's physical property, its causality with human perception and mathematical dianoia as music, time and space. Using computer and digital technology to the utmost limit, Ikeda has been developing particular "microscopic" methods for sound engineering and composition. Since 1995 he has been intensely active in sound art through concerts, installations and recordings.
Tracklisting:
Tracks 1 to 8 are Stereo and Dolby AC-3 soundtracks without visual images.
Tracks 9 to 19 are stereo soundtracks with visual images.
Installations (Extracts) (29:18)
1 0°: CBK Villa Alckmaer, Rotterdam, 1998 (1:02)
2 Matrix (For Acoustic Dislocation): The Mind Zone Of The
Millennium Dome, London, 2000 (3:01)
3 Matrix (For An Echoic Room): ICC, Tokyo, 2000 (4:38)
4 A: Hayward Gallery, London, 2000 (5:01)
5 Spectra: MicaMoca, Milano, 2001 (5:03)
6 Matrix (For Container): Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2001 (4:33)
7 Spectra II; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2002 (3:03)
8 Db: ICC, Tokyo, 2002 (2:52)
Concert. Formula [Prototype] At The Garden Hall Yebisu, Tokyo, October 14, 2001 (36:19)
9 Intro (2:43)
10 Headphonics 0/0 (4:47)
11 Headphonics 1/0 (3:11)
12 Headphonics 0/1 (4:09)
13 +../- (5:06)
14 Testone + Trans-missions (0:15)
15 Time 1'11" (1:10)
16 Time 3'33" (3:31)
17 Time 4'44" (2:24)
18 .Matrix 1000000000 (3:28)
19 Zero Degrees [3] (5:30)
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 11:53 AM
German Federal Cultural Foundation - 40 Years of Video Art, Vol 1 (1963-1969)
Friday, March 21, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
DVD STUDY EDITION - DISK 1 OF 12
A panorama of video art produced in Germany with more than 28 hours of historic as well as current works by 59 artists, distributed as a box of 12 DVD.
In the summer of 2004, a jury (Dieter Daniels, Rudolf Frieling, Susanne Gaensheimer, Søren Grammel, Wulf Herzogenrath, Nan Hoover, and Doris Krystof) compiled an exemplary selection of works, a panorama of 59 historic but also current works ranging from 1963 up to the present. This initial, overview-oriented selection will now travel as an archive to several locations in a concerted action, exhibited at the same time by the five participating museums. Apart from this, each museum presents its own focal point as an expansion and contextualizing of these videotapes. The spectrum of these exhibitions embraces the "1960s" (Bremen), the "1980s" (Düsseldorf) as well as the present "Update.06" (Munich). Handled at two locations is a "Revision" of the selection – in light of the chosen artists from the former GDR (Leipzig), and with regard to the existing collection of Video Art and restoration practices (Karlsruhe). From the standpoints of form and content, this allows the concert of thematic focal points to investigate the conditions of an historic and present-day exhibiting potential and the relevance of Video Art.
Two publications are accompanying this initiative-project of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes: a comprehensive, full-color catalog edited by Rudolf Frieling and Wulf Herzogenrath, and published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, which includes excerpts of all the works on a DVD-ROM; for copyright reasons, the DVD Study Edition, including all the works in their full length, is only available to institutions in the fields of education, teaching, and research.
Disk 1 of 12 contents:
1963 - SUN IN YOUR HEAD - WOLF VOSTELL - [5'17"]
1965 - FILM-MONTAGEN I-III - PETER ROEHR - [23'55"]
1965/66 - HE JOE - SAMUEL BECKETT - [33'54"]
1968/69 - BLACK GATE COLOGNE - OTTO PIENE / ALDO TAMBELLINI - [47'02"]
1968/69 - TV AS A FIREPLACE - JAN DIBBETS - [22'07"]
1969 - LAND ART (JAN DIBBETS: 12 HOURS TIDE OBJECT WITH CORRECTION OF PERSPECTIVE, 7'35") - GERRY SCHUM - [31'56"]
These two images, above/below, are just to show the difference between the old Sun in Your Head available on the Fluxus Film Compilation and this new restoration.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 1:23 AM
Tacita Dean - Kodak (2006)
Monday, March 17, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
After discovering that the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, was closing its film production facility, Dean obtained permission to document the manufacture of film at the factory with the soon-to-be obsolete medium itself. The 44-minute-long work Kodak constitutes a meditative elegy for the approaching demise of a medium specific to Dean’s own practice. Kodak’s narrative follows the making of the celluloid as it runs through several miles of machinery. On the day of filming, the factory also ran a test through the system with brown paper, providing a rare opportunity to see the facilities fully illuminated, without the darkness needed to prevent exposure.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 7:27 PM
Yang Fudong - Seven Intellectuals In Bamboo Forest (2003)
Download this at KaraGarga.
In one of my earlier works, the photographic triptych The First Intellectual, I touched on a concept that still preoccupies me: One wants to accomplish big things, but in the end it doesn't happen. Every educated Chinese person is very ambitious, and obviously there are obstacles--obstacles coming either from "out there," meaning society or history, or from "inside," from within oneself. In this work you could see that "the first intellectual" has been wounded. He has blood running down his face and wants to respond, but he doesn't know at whom he should throw his brick; he doesn't know if the problem stems from himself or society. Ideals and the way they distinguish people, but also the way that they can unite people and encourage them to form bands, partnerships, brotherhoods--this was something I wanted to investigate in more depth, taking my time to do so. When I eventually completed An Estranged Paradise, I started defining this new, vast project, which will untold as five different films. Because I feel that this topic is extremely important to an understanding of China, both past and present, I wanted to articulate several temporalities together: one that is really ancient, the stories of "The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove"; another set during the '50s and '60s, when there was a profound questioning of the status and role of intellectuals (and so the films will have a clear '50s, '60s kind of New Cinema flavor); and, ultimately, one dealing with the concerns and ideals of today.
The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were a group of Chinese scholars and poets who fled the troubles accompanying the transition between China's Wei and Jin dynasties during the mid-third century. They assembled in a bamboo grove, where they forgot all of their worldly troubles, losing themselves in pure thought and discussion. This sort of retreat was typical of the Taoist-oriented ch'ing-t'an ("pure conversation") movement, which advocated freedom of individual expression and hedonistic escape from extremely corrupt politics. Their ideal consisted of following their impulses and acting spontaneously, and being sensitive to the beauties of nature.
So the first film in this project stands for me like the beginning of a book, the preface; it's an introduction of the story and the fate of these "new" seven intellectuals. "The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove" doesn't exist as a book; there are legends, popular stories, hearsay knowledge, and, of course, what's interesting is also the distortion, the fact that the stories have continually been adapted to changing contexts and times and to the intentions of different storytellers. That's also something that I want to investigate, in light of contemporary China and its relationship to history--this state we're in, which can be described as a moment when we have to negotiate our past while imagining our present.
The first film shows the intellectuals traveling to and dwelling on Huangshan, a very famous mountain situated in the southern part of Anhui Province. The landscape, the nature, is just beautiful there. The peaks rise one on top of another, and the pines and cypresses are luxuriantly green. There are almost a hundred big and small peaks and ridges, and plenty of lakes, brooks, deep pools: It's a kind of dreamscape. I really like showing this sort of atmosphere--very calm, very beautiful, but with a strange, disturbing aspect, exactly like in a dream. Or like when you wake and you cannot accurately recall the dream. Still, a feeling lingers that you had a strange or even frightening dream, and you know if you try to describe it to someone else, that person just won't be able to relate; you can only keep it inside you. In our real life, it seems that where we are heading is always the opposite of where we want to go. It is the same with the dream. We are dreaming we are somewhere, but when we wake up, we find that we are somewhere else. Perhaps this reflects the perfection of the dream.
My new film investigates how this dreamlike environment affects relationships and discussions among the intellectuals--as well as their solitary meditations on individuality and liberty. We need to pursue something, and then we have our spiritual sustenance and belief. In the subsequent films, the intellectuals will be shown living in a building, in a metropolis--say, Shanghai; in a village in the countryside in the company of peasants and villagers; and on a deserted island where they'll start to invent a new world from scratch by defining new modalities of social life and interaction and a new distribution of labor. (Of course, the separation of material and immaterial labor and capital will be questioned.) And in the fifth and last part, eventually the intellectuals will return to the city--and so return to reality, confronting their contemporaries with their new experiences.
At the 50th Venice Biennale, Shanghai-based artist Yang Fudong presented The Seven Intellectuals M Bamboo Forest, 2003, the first part of his new filmic pentalogy, The Seven Intellectuals, an adaptation of the traditional Chinese stories known as "The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove." The first Installment (shot in 35 mm black and white) begins the series' exploration of the ambiguous position of intellectuals in contemporary China--their longing for individual freedom in the shifting context of an emerging capitalist economy. Yang, who was born in 1971 in Beijing and graduated from the China Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou, has shown an interest in the conundrums of idealism in his earlier works, such as the photographic triptych The First Intellectual, 2000, where he reflects on the difficulty of finding and adopting a rebellious and critical attitude in a society undergoing changes that are as rapid as they are profound. On other occasions, his approach has been poetic and nostalgic, showing stylistic references to Chinese films of the '30s and '40s, such as Yuan Muzhi's Street Angel (1937) and Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town (1948). Yang's Internationally praised first feature film, An Estranged Paradise (2002), tells the story of Zhuzi, a young intellectual befallen by a strange illness, a restlessness that arrives with the rainy season and disappears with its end. In Yang's own words, the film stands as "a meditation on life," in which nature seems Intimately bound to psychology. It is a poignant convergence of mind and outside world that presages the first episode of The Seven Intellectuals.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 7:25 PM
Brice Dellsperger - Body Double X (2000)
Download this at KaraGarga.
Body Double (X)
Maxime Matray
– C’est pas maintenant que vous sortez votre liqueur médiévale ?
– C’est pas là que vous me traînez par les cheveux jusqu’au lit ?
– You supposed to take out your medieval liquor now
– You supposed to grab my hair and drag me to bed now?
Fabio Testi and Romy Schneider
L’important c’est d’aimer
Life in the gallery of replicas
For several years now,Brice Dellsperger has been an expert in the art of faking in the most blatant respect: he remakes and recycles specific movie scenes. The first episodes of his series of palimpsests, entitled Body Double, add a subversive cosmetic layer to the original sources, turning them inside out and allowing them to span several genres. The source material includes carefully selected pieces from the works of Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho), Brian de Palma (Dressed to Kill, Body Double, Blow Out, Obsession), Georges Lucas (Return of the Jedi), and Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho). However, every last vicissitude of the linear narratives of these films has been meticulously removed, with a nearly surgical care, so that in the end each one of these sequences seems to harbor within itself, and for itself, something immediately archetypal. Though designed as a fictional shortcut, each sequence is always shown outside the boundaries of fiction. Murder scenes – three in total, one by strangulation and others through a wide range of injuries – a love scene set on a romantic seashore, a chase scene set in an amusement park, a homecoming scene set in an airport, a tragic scene with fireworks as a backdrop, a confessional scene with oedipal and incestuous overtones, a night drive set to disco music, and so on. Systematically, the viewer finds that the same cinematic turns consistently allow the filmmaker to attain the same effects. For the sake of the remake, each gesture, each shot, and each expression have been dissected in depth before being brought into play again in a new and synthetic context. Sometimes, the same sequence has been shot and edited several times with different actors. This could indicate the beginnings of a sort of checklist of passions and actions shown in an over-simplified way, for the use of proto-filmmakers and crypto-Hollywood freaks and their emulators. However, in the end, you find yourself in a totally different dimension. Because most of the characters born from Brice Dellsperger’s mind are men wearing wigs, fake boobs, make up, and gaudy women’s apparel. Within the confines of our traditional lexicon, we would name them “transvestites,” which is somewhat of a definition, but still falls short. These characters sometimes play multiple roles, in dialogue with their alter-egos, crowned with incredibly huge masses of fake hair of all hues and shapes. If we ignore the considerable weight of this anecdote, these scenes are often a chance to portray the ideas of otherness and the concept of twins or doubles, and the relationship that each and every one of us has with death, perched atop too high-heels. And indeed, Death often appears like this.
What counts is appreciating the extension
Better say it before someone gives us grief: Body Double (X), opus number 10, has nothing to do with a tribute. It is a palimpsest, a dubbing act; or maybe merely a painting in all its grandeur on a second-hand canvas scavenged from an old garbage can. At its origins, the film is bloody; beginning and ending with scenes of bloodshed. The former is very obviously fake. The latter is, too, (though in a less blatant way), this is, after all, a movie, but if we believe in the veracity of film and its prerogatives, we necessarily believe in the veracity of this cinematic blood. In the space between these two bloody sequences, a complex narrative thread unravels, woven with unsure feelings and vague intensions, business deals and failures. Quite a few failures. Notably, one actress learns to say “I love you.” People die. It is a movie by Andrzej Zulawski, based on Christopher Frank’s novel La nuit américaine, starring Romy Schneider, Fabio Testi, Jacques Dutronc, Klaus Kinski and a few other actors.L’important, ce n’est pas d’aimer le film de Zulawski. What matters is not whether or not you like Zulawski’s film. You can even watch the enhanced version produced by Brice Dellsperger without knowing anything of the original.
Opinions shared with the common people
“No one will believe you if you claim it is a remake”. Indeed, Dellsperger’s films are too far removed from their sources to be considered remakes. Regarding the Body Double series, Brice Dellsperger stated: “Our aim was to empty out the fiction, to drain all the energy from the original movies, so they would become just empty shells.’’ Therefore, each component was traced, re-considered, re-thought and re-shaped separately not so much to meet an independent narrative requirement, but rather to offer the viewer the solidity of a conglomerate composite. This film is a piece of particle board glued together by a cabinet-maker. It is a mongrel dog that has constructed itself from the ground up, legs, back, and hide, then teaching itself its own vocabulary. You always walk better when you start by building your own legs, even when treading on the cast-off limbs of your forebears. This is a well-known fact. There is not a single dog that would dare to refute this. Not even a single dog’s armature.
On a practical level, what Brice Dellsperger does is essentially touch-up work: he applies a slight layer of make-up to the framework using paintbrushes loaded with excess and overflow; which lends the whole piece a brand new hue, rouged cheeks and a bit more formality overall. Sometimes, something reminiscent of the Ancien Régime (still wriggling underneath the water’s surface, as discreet as hot lava) pierces through the cosmetic crust. And this emergence gives life to hills and valleys, as well as many discrepancies, some noises, and a smile. One does not know how to get rid of it; or even if one should get rid of it. Let’s keep it, then, because this sprucing up, and the resulting bumps and creases in the make-up, all converge towards painting and its pointless, modernist pursuit of a smooth, flawless surface. Brice Dellsperger’s method is based on stratification, superposition of shots and collage of vignettes. Resorting to the power of thickness, he exhausts the image so as to transform these layers something abstract. Take a look at the image: its sole purpose seems to be continuing to signify what it has always signified. Poor thing. But it will soon give up as the significance is buried deeper and deeper under each layer. However, it will resurface somewhere else, transformed, worn out and magnified all at once. It resurfaces within the margins, through the presence of these heavily made-up characters showing too much cleavage and perched on excessively high heels.
All these potentially grotesque elements that strike us from the first moments of the film fade away very quickly as the eye becomes accustomed to them. All that remains, then, is the astonishing tipsiness elicited by the formal elements of the film: the flickering of the screen and the inability of the gaze to settle on any real object. That is, on any object other than the figure of the transvestite, vital element in all of Brice Dellsperger’s works, and a figure belonging to no defined dramatic category. Just like the figure of the clown as defined by Christian Baud-Mercier in his Ennui Spectaculaire, the transvestite has this “perfectly measured taste for nearly tragic emphasis, conveyed by face paint, onomatopoeias, and a wide range of provocative gestures […] nobody has asked him for the moon; yet he brings it back anyway. But, as always, it is made out of cardboard.”
What do I look like?
Needless to say, Body Double (X) is a complex and ever-changing fortress, and the machinery behind all this is called Jean-Luc Verna. He plays every single part. His duplicity is made obvious through his many hairpieces and garments, which change at the whim of his characters. One recognizes his arms, his hands dotted with constellations enhancing their smooth and soft appearance.
During the course of the film, he is his only interlocutor, under the weight of his various eclectic hairdos. Sometimes represented by a half-funeral latex mask of his own face, he gives himself his cues. At other times, exploring the far reaches of the vast territory of acting, he speaks to no living creature. Several times he resorts to simultaneous, lip-synched monologues.
Jean-Luc Verna is the nucleus around which revolves the setting of this drama already compromised by others, at an earlier time. Take a look at these tables, these removable carpets, these mobile fireplaces, all playing off the actors’ movements. The bodies move as if they were weightless. Both furniture and people seem permanently caught up in subsidiary torments, in weird, asynchronous states of confusion. In the end, there remains but one distinguishable element: Jean-Luc Verna acting the whole movie for his own sake, for the film’s sake, through and through to its basest elements.
No pictures, please
Andrzej Zulawski’s L’important c’est d’aimer tells the tale of individual cowardice caught within the grander scheme of universal cowardice, and the attempt to sort out one from the other. Amidst rampant conflicts of interest, only one character seems to remain truly lucid: the part played by Michel Robin. Before feverishly climbing upon a table, he tells Servais Mont (played by Fabio Testi): “Come on, let’s be realistic. We’re in the Western world, the solution will be a capitalistic one. How much do you love your cute little actress?” Brice Dellsperger’s adaptation manages to exclude this enlightening scene, in which lies the entire moral core of Zulawski’s film, without compromising his film’s artistic integrity. This is, undoubtedly, because the moral and edifying aspects of Zulawski’s film have, themselves, been annulled. Along with all traces of pathos. Gone with the wind.
The whole “Body Double” series takes root in this very territory. A body double, in English, is someone’s stand-in. But if we look at the concept very literally, as in “two bodies,” it describes so well what it is Brice Dellsperger aims to produce: the impression that there is, thanks to these added cosmetic layers, more than a body. This way, he can – as he recently stated in a Parisian newspaper interview– “lend some texture and roughness to the image”. And vice-versa.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 7:24 PM
Richard Serra - Frame (1969)
Download at KaraGarga.
In Frame (1969), Richard Serra emphasizes the disconnect bewteen the real space of the cinema and the illusory space of the screen. We first see Serra's hands methodically measuring and marking the boundaries of the film frame, followed by the projected image of a blank surface whose perimeter is similarly marked. The surface is then moved aside to reveal a window which looks out upon a bustling city street. The In the final stage, Serra interacts with the projected image of the window, remeasuring and remarking its borders.
Download at KaraGarga.
at 7:21 PM
Dan Graham - Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975)
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
1975, 22:52 min, b&w, sound Recorded at Video Free America in San Francisco, this work is a phenomenological inquiry into the audience/performer relationship and the notion of subjectivity/objectivity. Graham stands in front of a mirrored wall facing a seated audience; he describes the audience's movements and what they signify. He then turns and describes himself and the audience in the mirror. Graham writes: "Through the use of the mirror the audience is able to instantaneously perceive itself as a public mass (as a unity), offsetting its definition by the performer ('s discourse). The audience sees itself reflected by the mirror instantly while the performer's comments are slightly delayed. First, a person in the audience sees himself 'objectively' ('subjectively') perceived by himself, next he hears himself described 'objectively' ('subjectively') in terms of the performer's perception."
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 6:55 PM
Roger Beebe - New Maps of the New World (2007)
The entire collection, The Strip Mall Trilogy and Famous Irish Americans.
NEW MAPS OF THE NEW WORLD
experimental shorts by Roger Beebe
As part of his 55-day East Coast tour, filmmaker/programmer/professor/video store owner Roger Beebe will be presenting a program of his short films and videos. These films and videos attempt to marry experimental forms with a documentary interest in a cinema as a means of engaging with pressing issues in our everyday lives. If the works are diverse in subject matter—covering such disparate topics as women in the air force in World War II, the origin of Shaquille O’Neal’s last name, and the horrors (and beauties) of suburban sprawl—and are equally diverse in format—with work in both film (16mm, super 8mm, regular 8mm) and video—they are united by their use of an ironizing poetics to cast a sidelong glance on some often overlooked realities of 20th and 21st Century Americana.
"[Beebe’s films] implicitly and explicitly evoke the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, all photographers of the atomic age whose Western photographs captured the banalities, cruelties and beauties of imperial America." --David Fellerath, The Independent Weekly
"Beebe's work is goofy, startling, and important." --Daniel Kraus, Wilmington Encore
ABOUT ROGER BEEBE:
Roger Beebe is a professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. Beebe has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as McMurdo Station in Antarctica and the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square as well as more traditional venues such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Pacific Film Archive in addition to numerous festivals, among them Sundance, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and New York Underground. He has won dozens of awards including a 2006 Individual Artist Grant from the State of Florida and Best Experimental Film at the 2006 Chicago Underground Film Festival. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, he is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and is currently Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival. (If that isn’t enough, he also owns Video Rodeo, an independent video store in Gainesville, FL.)
TB TX DANCE (2006, 16MM, 2 min. 30 sec.)
A cameraless film made in a balck & white laser printer with an optical soundtrack made of dots of varying sizes provides the backdrop for revisiting Toni Basil’s appearance in Bruce Conner’s 1968 film “Breakaway.”
S A V E (2006, 16mm, 5 min.)
A study of a disused gas station provides the occasion for a reflection on our interest in the decaying monuments of mom & pop capitalism. "An elegant, elegiac film…The "SAVE" sign acquires the dignity one ordinarily would assign to an old poplar tree, struggling for life against the ravages of time and the elements." --David Fellerath, The Independent Weekly
(rock/hard place) (2005, 16mm, 6 min. 30 sec.)
Two massive structures—one manmade, the other natural—sit on opposite ends of a causeway in Morro Bay, California, waiting for someone to put them in the same frame.
One Nation under Tommy (2004, DVD installation/digital video, 15 min.)
The telephone game (a.k.a. “grapevine”) gets a new twist as scriptwriters and filmmakers take turns attempting to faithfully reproduce a cynically patriotic Tommy Hilfiger commercial.
Famous Irish Americans (2003, digital video, 8 min.)
A hyperflat exploration of the limitations of our binary thinking about race, featuring appearances by stars of sport & screen. "There just aren't enough films out there like Roger Beebe's 'Famous Irish Americans,' a graphic lecture insisting that black celebrities with Irish last names really are Irish." --Kimberly Chun, SF Bay Guardian
Composition in Red & Yellow (2002, super 8, 2 min. 30 sec.)
A strange homage to Mondrian, featuring McDonald’s restaurants stretching from Gainesville, FL to Oakland, CA, culminating in an appearance by every McD’s in the East Bay. "Astoundingly hilarious" --Matthew Holota, Artvoice (Buffalo)
A Woman, A Mirror (2001, 16mm, 15 min.)
A anti-dance film dance film about gender and technology and the “technologies of gender. “Essential viewing for anyone interested in true visual experimentation.” --John Citrone, Folio Weekly
The Strip Mall Trilogy (2001, super 8, 9 min.)
A look straight into the heart of the most postmodern of architectural forms, the strip mall, shot in a mile-long parking lot that could be Anywhere, USA. “He has actually managed to bust apart the mind-controlling code of relentlessly commercial space and reconfigure it into a landscape of beautiful colors and forms. It is a remarkable piece of Super 8 alchemy." --David Finkelstein, Film Threat
The entire collection, The Strip Mall Trilogy and Famous Irish Americans.
at 10:37 AM
Noam Toran - Desire Management (2004-2006)
Download this at KaraGarga or buy it directly from the director.
Film shot on 16mm and HD
Desire Management is an installation and film celebrating the use of products as platforms for dissident behaviour. In the project, the domestic space is defined as the last private frontier, a place where alienated people use bespoke appliances to engage in unorthodox experiences. Based on real testimonials and news reports, the objects created attempt to reveal the inherent need for expression and identity formation in the face of conformity. The installation was originally shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale in Summer 2004. The project was commissioned by the CNAC Pompidou as part of the D.Day – Design Aujourd'hui exhibition and was screened at the 2005 Raindance Film Festival. In collaboration with Director of Photography Per Tingleff.
Download this at KaraGarga or buy it directly from the director.
at 10:35 AM
