glimmpse

Fires on the Plain | Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films | Kon Ichikawa | Japan Films

2011-04-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

Fires on the Plain | Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films | Kon Ichikawa | Japan Films

Fred Astaire & Elanor Powell - "Begin to beguine"

2011-01-20T15:10:00.000-08:00

original score- begin the beguine adn also somewhat better quality

Eleanor Powell -

2011-01-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

getting into dances on youtube, for upcoming ideas

Fred Astaire Hip Hop

2011-01-20T15:07:00.000-08:00

this is actually a case where this really works, though the quality is terrible -

this is eleanor powell

dressmakers for danny - the dance

2011-01-20T12:05:00.000-08:00

as a farewell to dan the costume guy, we're going to do a dance on the dummies, and actually they can end up where the dancers take off their clothes and put them on the dressmaker dummies! is one option - but what i really want to do is to put cameras on their heads, and the're on wheels and we'll whell them around. this is the plan, anyway.

Fred Astaire Dances with Props

2011-01-20T11:49:00.000-08:00

from comments:

Not just greatest dancer, Cole Porter said he was the best singer, he could act, play many musical instruments, he choreographed his routines, he personified "Rhythm", he was a nice guy and very very modest. No one today even comes close.
Dannydoc1951 1 week ago
@goshnessmaggy talent, class, elegance, professionalism, just plain god given talent!
lsvtecb18c1 2 weeks ago
@Arjetube
i guess u better say Mj got some Fred moves , MJ was a great Fred Astaire fan...
mettoler 1 month ago
he got some mj moves. espescially from "dangerous" and "smooth criminal"!
Arjetube 2 months ago
Eleganza e la classe innate.
gutarit 2 months ago
I never knew that Fred was such a great pianist! Is there no end to this man's talents?!
lukiloos 2 months ago
who isnt tapping feet? he can play drums with his feet - literally has more talent in his big toe than me

The best dancers of 2day would agree with you.Check out the dance/choreograpy on USHER LIVE IN ATLANTA>YOU MAKE WANNA. a good example of "post/present" stunning dance routines..LOL id still consider this stuff as a NO COMPARISON in a strange kinda way.Good stuff inomus

shutter speeds on dancers

2011-01-20T11:47:00.000-08:00

Martin Scorsese gets honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2010...

2011-01-18T18:45:00.000-08:00

Robert De Niro at Golden Globes 2011

2011-01-18T18:43:00.000-08:00

70s class - a blog about cassavetes from this recording's molly lambert

2011-01-12T16:37:00.000-08:00

Emotionally I Am In Deep Trouble

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Husbands (1970)

dir. John Cassavetes

You never felt the camera. You didn't know where the camera was. Only when he picked up the handheld camera, and then you knew you were being taken care of. He really made love to you. He really knew how to use a handheld.

- Ben Gazzara

In real life the screaming monologue is unusual, but it's the centerpiece of an actor's repertoire. Most interactions are less obvious. People generally put on more of a big dumb show the less they actually care, and less of a show when they care the most. Genuine reaction flares in the eyes but then most people try to cap it, because feelings like jealousy, anger and sadness are associated with embarrassment and weakness.

John Cassavetes' movies are so good because they don't point at themselves. That's how they go so deep without tipping into pretentiousness or kitsch. The emotional moments feel real because they are subtle, and most emotional moments are subtle.

Husbands explores the conflict between personal selfishness and the desire to connect. The blocking is clumsy and realistic. Watching the three characters continually reassemble themselves in the frame is fascinating. The action always feels like it just occurs. All of the sequences feel like they are in real time, and it is as excruciating to watch uncomfortable events unfold as it is pleasant to watch the long bits of improvised physical nonsense. Cassavetes goes especially extra hard on himself.

Most of the movie is closeups, a dialogue of glances between the three best friends. It's a love story about male friendships and the ways men display affection for each other. Some critics argue that male romantic friendship is the founding trope of American literature, back to Huck and Tom (Gatsby and Nick, Ishmael and Queequeg).

Male friendship fascinates me because it's not a thing I can observe firsthand without changing the dynamic. Although god knows I try. What I love about ensemble casts is that they replicate how romantic a whole friend group can be. I am so fucking bored of bromances. How hard is it to write a conversation between a man and a woman that resembles anything that happens in real life? I have conversations with men every day.

Black Swan's shortcut around writing realistic female characters was surrealistic female characters. What do women talk about alone together? What does anyone talk about? Stupid bullshit trying to make each other laugh. Songs we've been listening to a lot. Sometimes we gossip, but if I've learned anything in life it's that men gossip the most.

Husbands is so great, so rueful. It reminds me of my other favorite 1970s borderline misogynist depending on your personal feelings about whether it's a critique (I think they both definitely are) film Carnal Knowledge. I'd throw Shampoo in there. They romanticize masculinity from a standpoint of extreme cynicism. Can you romanticize a subject and critique it simultaneously? I'm not sure there's any other way to do either.

I don't believe that men are naturally worse than women. I worry a little that men might think that. They underestimate their goodness and our badness. Women are definitely not more moral or responsible at all. The most moralistic responsible people I know are all men. Men have more opportunities to abuse power, but I don't believe that women wouldn't abuse it in exactly the same ways. Ask Madonna's twenty year old boyfriend what he thinks. People with power use it to subjugate those without.

Obviously I wish there were more media depictions of how romantic female friendships are (we're working on it). I don't mean romantic like Black Swan, I mean romantic in the road-trip sense. Sismance is still a pretty small genre. Things depicting women are usually about female rivalry. Female rivalry as a media trope is way overrepresented andfemale friendship is super fucking underrepresented.

That is what women really love about Sex And The City. Did they ever even want to fuck the same guy once? Isn't it crazy that they maybe didn't do that plotline during the whole run of the show? When they fought, it was always over something regarding the friendship, usually Carrie semi-accidentally being an insensitive jerk. Definitely those kinds of conflicts are more common in real life than cut a bitch catfights.

I really like Mary McCarthy's novel The Group about a group of female friends from college, because I have a tight-knit group of female friends from college that I love more than anything, and I am totally curious about how people fucked in the thirties.

I can't really put into words how much I love my friends. I wouldn't even know where to start. Husbands goes without dialogue for long stretches and just relies on the characters interacting with each other, demonstrating their deep devotion to one another in the most indirect ways. It is frustrating and occasionally transcendent.

I realize this post isn't really very much about Husbands, but I can't possibly improve on Husbands. I never have too much to say about things I just love, and I am always seeking things that will make me want to stop talking. I guess my articles are never really about the thing they're supposed to be about, and I improvise. There is a four and a half hour version I would like to see that Ben Gazzara says is his favorite cut.

Cassavetes initially cut Husbands around Ben Gazzara, then made other cuts where he and Peter Falk were the principal lead, before ending up with the final cut where they are all represented equally. Thinking about your own life from the point of view of your closest friends will make you go blind. It's hard enough just being yourself.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She's on twitter and runs GIF PARTY, JPG CLUB, and Google Image Search. You're sensitive? You can't even vomit.

"Ohio" - The Black Keys (mp3)

"Act Nice and Gentle (Kinks cover)" - The Black Keys (mp3)

"Tighten Up" - The Black Keys (mp3)

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tagged john cassavetes, mia farrow, molly lambert

Bennington College:DVD pioneer David Anthony '96 on the evolution of the medium

2010-12-07T19:15:00.000-08:00

Bennington College:DVD pioneer David Anthony '96 on the evolution of the medium

Hot Trailer: '127 Hours'

2010-11-11T10:05:00.000-08:00

Hot Trailer: '127 Hours'

Spider-Man 2 Opening Title Sequence

2010-11-01T15:40:00.000-07:00

decasia

2010-11-01T08:51:00.001-07:00

At 67 minutes Decasia is Morrison’s found footage/’ruined’ cinema magnus opus. And while barely feature length, the overall experience is of such great intensity –with Michael Gordon’s incredibly loud, throbbing symphonic soundtrack threatening to melt the imagery- that one loses the sense of any objective time. As the film’s credits begin we hear what sounds like whirring Steenbeck plates. The film moves from a shot of a dervish dancer to a film lab, reflexively suggesting the birth and creation of the ‘film within a film.’ The film’s circular structure begins and ends on the same image of a dancing dervish, which links up the many recurring motifs of birth, death, and the apocalypse. In between there are images that range from ominous beauty (falling bomb-like parachutes) to painterly beauty (panoramic silhouette long shots of men on camels walking across a desert landscape).

Maya Beiser performing excerpts from "I Am Writing to You From A Far Off...

2010-11-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

Maya Beiser performs "Light Is Calling"

2010-11-01T08:50:00.000-07:00

Light Is Calling (OFFICIAL)

2010-11-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

Decasia excerpt 2

2010-11-01T08:48:00.000-07:00

Decasia excerpt 1

2010-11-01T08:47:00.000-07:00

light is falling - bill morrison - destruction of the image

2010-11-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.vimeo.com/1 017110 3 http://www.offscreen.com/index.php/pages/essays/postmortem_evolution/

In The Light is Calling all that we can make out from the extreme deterioration are shots of officers on horseback riding through the woods, and a young woman with long braids who is found and aided by the officers at the end of the film. An interesting observation I had while watching the three ‘deteriorated’ films is that no matter how great or advanced the distortion and deterioration, there is one inevitable constant: the distortion is always in the foreground of the image. This leads to an equally interesting ‘formal’ and stylistic quality, because regardless of how flat the original footage may have been, the distortion introduces an element of ‘depth’ and ‘texture’ to the frame. This is especially noticeable in The Light is Calling, where the characters (the horseback officers and the woman) always appear to be ‘behind’ something. For example, in one scene we see the woman in long shot and, because of the formation of the deterioration, she appears to be peering through what looks like a fire or a cloud formation.

“Depth” in Light is Calling

The greatly deteriorated passages where the film stock seems cindered and scorched, at times appearing like a moving Rorschach chart or Mandelbrot set, recalls Stan Brakhage’s hand painted films as well as his theory of “closed eye” vision. The visceral nature of the imagery also reminded me of a live performance piece by two German multi-media artists (Alchemie) during the 1997 FCMM, where they literally poured chemicals and compounds onto a film loop before it passed by the projector lens, throwing an unpredictable and volatile series of light and color patterns onto a wall, and culminating with the projector catching fire.

Hand-painted or deteriorated? Light is Calling

“Depth” in The Mesmerist

The extremely different music which accompanies these two films is representative of both the aesthetic range and importance of music in Morrison’s films. For The Mesmerist Morrison uses two existing Bill Frisell songs (“Tell you ma, tell your pa” and “Again”); and for The Light is Calling he uses a composition written exclusively for the film by Michael Gordon. What these two choices broadly represent are scores which have an organic relationship to the image track (The Light is Calling, Trinity, Ghost Trip, City Walk) and scores which interact with or against the image track (The Mesmerist, The Film of Her, with Decasia operating on both levels). Bill Frisell is a contemporary guitarist-composer who is no stranger to film music, having written several interpretative scores for Buster Keaton films. His musical style is an intellectual blend of jazz, blues, folk, country, and rockabilly, a postmodern eclecticism which, on the one hand, can be seen as a parallel to Morrison’s own re-appropriation of film history. But the clearly modern, contemporary feel of his music makes it feel as if it is playing to the film rather than alongside the film, and emanating from without the film rather thanwithin the film. On the other hand, the pitch and rhythm of Gordon’s haunting combination of an undulating electronic loop and high pitched violin is a perfect harmony to the The Light is Calling’s overall sense of a spiritual or transcendental rise.

for cynthia stewart - on the school bus

2010-10-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

http://sheilanewbery.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/on-the-school-bus/

frame in a hand

2010-10-26T21:56:00.001-07:00

astonishing ANNA GASKELL

2010-10-26T21:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.utata.org/salon/19597.php

andy warhol and velvet underground

2010-10-26T21:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.all-art.org/history658_photography13-26.html

limewrie-based download of butch cassidy

2010-10-19T13:50:00.001-07:00

http://www.mypdfscripts.com/screenplays/butch-cassidy-and-the-sundance-kid

zapruder film in ACE - 1998 - home movie technology

2010-10-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

Shots Heard Around the World
by Eric RudolphShortly after high noon on November 22, 1963, a sixtysomething Dallas dress manufacturer stepped into the history books when he shot a startling 8mm motion picture depicting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Abraham Zapruder's short strip of narrow-gauge film went on to become one of the most scrutinized visual documents ever, and has stirred up a seemingly unending stream of debate for 35 years. The Zapruder film has been so controversial that a group of assassination researchers — known casually as the Alterationists — believe that the film itself is a fraud produced and/or greatly doctored by government agents.
Poor-quality copies of the Zapruder film have been available through various sources since the late Sixties, but up until recently this astonishing document has never been commercially available to the general public. That situation changed this summer when Chicago-based MPI Home Video released Image of an Assassination: A New Look at the Zapruder Film on videocassette and DVD. This new digital version of the film was struck directly from Zapruder's camera original and contains the controversial visual information recorded between the film's sprocket holes. The lack of availability of this additional information in high-quality form has spawned a host of theories about the film's veracity.
In actuality, the Zapruder film has quite prosaic origins. In November of 1962, Abraham Zapruder purchased a Bell & Howell model 414 PD Zoomatic Director's Series 8mm movie camera, fitted with a Varimat 9-27mm f1.8 zoom lens, at Peacock Jewelry on Elm Street in Dallas. Zapruder's dress company — Jennifer Juniors — was also located on Elm Street, directly across the road from the Texas School Book Depository and Dealey Plaza.
On the fateful day of JFK's slaying, Zapruder did not bring his movie camera to the office. He went home and retrieved it only after an assistant convinced the amateur cameraman that he would want to show his grandchildren a film of the Presidential procession.
As Kennedy's motorcade approached Dealey Plaza, Zapruder found an elevated filming position atop a concrete abutment close to the famous grassy knoll (near the spot where most denouncers of the Warren Commission Report claim that several of the shots, including the fatal one, originated).
According to Martin Shackelford's paper A History of the Zapruder Film, Zapruder was standing 185' from the southwest corner of the Depository building (from where the Warren Commission said lone assassin Oswald fired upon the President) and 65' from the center of Elm Street, the spot where Kennedy was killed.
Marilyn Sitzman, the same assistant who urged her boss to go home for his camera, stood behind Zapruder on the concrete pedestal, and held onto him to allay his fears of losing balance if he happened to become dizzy. With the lens of his high-end home movie camera set at maximum telephoto range and loaded with a partially used roll of Kodachrome II film, Zapruder set about capturing one of the most wrenching incidents in American history.
The Image of an Assassination project began when Zapruder's heirs decided that an archival copy of the film should be made. (The family regained control of the film from Life magazine in April of 1975, one month after a poor-quality copy was first aired on national television.) A decision was made that the copy should take advantage of advances in digital imaging, which would include eliminating the need for the 35-year-old film to be subjected to potentially damaging runs through a mechanical film gate.
After it had been determined that the best approach would be to shoot large-format still transparencies of each frame to be scanned and re-animated digitally, the Zapruders' attorney contacted Joe Barabe of McKrone Associates, an Illinois firm wihich specializes in photo microscopy.
Barabe packed up his gear and shipped it to the National Archive II in College Park, Maryland, where the camera original of the Zapruder film is kept under temperature and humidity-controlled archival conditions as a courtesy to the Zapruders.
Barabe devised a simple polyester film-holding system that doubled as a frame-numbering mechanism, as well as an easel made of microscope slides which held the film as flat as possible under the camera. Barabe hastens to note that no glass existed between the 8mm original and the copying camera's lens; the special easel was designed with a half-inch hole in the center.
Using a 4 x 5 format copy camera fitted with a Zeiss Luminar 40mm f4.5 lens which magnified each frame 12 times, Barabe made six-second time exposures of each of the approximately 480 frames of the film itself, which was illuminated by a light box fitted with a transparency copying bulb.
The stills of each frame were made onto Kodak 6121 color transparency sheet film taken from the same emulsion batch. The 8mm film was photographed from edge to edge in order to include the area between the sprocket holes.
The five-day photographic process did present several problems. "Shooting stills at high magnification makes the choice of the f-stop important for matters of depth of field and resolution," says Barabe. "We wanted the greatest depth of field to compensate for the fact that film curls. However, to stop down too much at this high magnification would have lowered the resolution because of defraction effects. We had to find the ideal balance, which we determined was to stop down from f4.5 to f6.3. We tested the resolution and depth of field at this setting and found it to be quite good."
A .60 neutral-density filter was included in each of Barabe's stills. "The .60 ND, with the light from our source coming through, photographed as a middle gray. Since each transparency was later checked with a densitometer and by eye, this gave us a solid density reference point," he explains.
After the processed still film was reviewed and reshoots were done, the transparencies were sent to a company which scanned each 4 x 5 transparency at 1,500 DPI resolution. The frames were then sequenced and registered on a computer, using the images of the sprocket holes and frame edges as guides. Scratches and dirt were removed and dark areas opened up via Photoshop; some camera shake was also eliminated digitally.
The still frames were then animated back to the camera's running speed of 18 frames per second, creating a new digital motion picture version of the 480 still frames. (The home video also includes several slow-motion and tightly cropped versions of the Zapruder film, as well as versions showing the area between the sprocket holes.)
One of the Zapruder film's most important features 35 years later is the fact that it was shot on a standard home movie stock of the time — Kodachrome II. This emulsion has long been proven to possess excellent sharpness, color saturation and image stability. What is immediately striking about the revamped Zapruder film is the appearance of its sharp, bright, saturated colors.
The home video version of the film is reportedly the first copy fashioned from the camera original since Kodak struck three copies of it in Dallas on the day of the assassination. Now, the general public can view a pivotal moment in history with a clarity close to that seen by those handful of people present at the initial Kodak screening.
The video release of the Zapruder film facilitates close scrutiny of its images, allowing one to easily absorb the event's truly heartbreaking aspects.
As the Presidential limousine emerges from behind a street sign, Kennedy has both hands at his throat after being shot for the first time. Noticing that something is amiss, Jacqueline Kennedy turns toward her husband with concern. At the same time, Texas Governor John Connally turns in his seat and speaks to the President. An instant later, Connally himself is shot and slumps over.
The vehicle proceeds for a moment, then clearly slows and appears to nearly stop. At the exact instant that the car comes to a halt, the left side of Kennedy's head is blown open in an explosion of blood and gray matter. At the moment of the fatal shot, Mrs. Kennedy had been leaning her head quite close to that of her husband. At first, she gently places an elegantly white-gloved hand around the back of her husband's neck just below his obliterated head. Then, after absorbing what has happened, the First Lady responds in horror and climbs onto the back of the car.
Another astonishing aspect about the film is the fact that Zapruder (who nearly loses the President from the bottom of his frame just prior to the fatal shot) had positioned himself in what appears to be a direct line with the President at the moment of the deadly shot. This instant is also the point at which Kennedy and Zapruder are closest in terms of physical space.
The MPI video also clearly displays the visual information between the sprocket holes, where ghostlike images of the scene are occasionally present. Alterationist researchers state that these images are proof that the entire Zapruder film is a cleverly fabricated fraud. Supposedly, this discrepancy results from a hastily planned overnight alternation of the film by the government, which used ultra-sophisticated filmmaking techniques completely unknown to the motion picture business in late 1963 and for many years to follow. But according to MPI staff member and Image of an Assassination writer/producer H.D. Motyl, "There is nothing in the sprocket area that proves or disproves a [theory] that the film was altered."
Researcher Anthony Marsh maintains that the ghost images are the result of a design anomaly in the aperture plate of Zapruder's camera. A groove next to the actual aperture area permitted the pull-down claw to access the sprocket holes instead of the more conventional notch at the top of the aperture plate: this design, Marsh insists, is responsible for those sprocket area images.
Others theorize that crucial evidence in the scene's imagery was actually recorded between the sprocket holes. However, the video release seems to refute those arguments as well, since no nefarious activity is apparent in this area.
Anyone wishing to see the actual Bell & Howell movie camera with which Abraham Zapruder made his famous film need only visit the Sixth Floor Museum located in the former Texas School Book Depository building. The humble camera, on loan from the National Archive, sits under a museum case in subdued archival lighting, along with 12 other movie and still cameras also in use in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

http://www.theasc.com/magazine/mar99/best/set2.htm

touch of evil - american cinematographer

2010-10-19T13:41:00.001-07:00

http://www.theasc.com/magazine/sep98/cop/index.htm

film links online

2010-10-19T12:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.filmint.nu/?q=links

amazing list of film info links

eternal sunshine american cinematographer

2010-10-19T10:42:00.000-07:00

http://www.theasc.com/magazine/april04/cover/index.html

Forget Me Not

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, shot by Ellen Kuras, ASC, explores a man's fight to retain his romantic memories.
by John Pavlus
Unit photography by David Lee

The plots of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's bizarre movies (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) have always defied easy description. Thus, it might be surprising to some that his latest tale, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, follows the universally familiar romantic pattern of "boy meets girl, boy loses girl" - that is, until the point in the story where "boy arranges to have all memory of girl erased."

Eternal Sunshine tells the tragicomic story of Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet), a loving yet hopelessly mismatched couple who, after breaking up, decide to have their painful memories of each other permanently removed. Providing this dubious treatment is Lacuna Inc., whose funky young technicians identify and delete their clients' troublesome recollections. But when Joel accidentally becomes lucid during the procedure and begins to surreally re-experience all of his vivid moments with Clementine, he realizes he has made a grievous mistake, and struggles to mentally preserve the remaining details of his bittersweet love affair.

The film's director of photography, Ellen Kuras, ASC, notes that director Michel Gondry, whose acclaimed music videos "often deal with the morphing of time and space," was ideally suited to visualize a story whose primary setting is the boundless realm of its protagonist's memory. However, Gondry was eager to depart from the hermetic, studio-bound experience he'd had on a previous Kaufman project, Human Nature. With its slippery shifts between reality and distorted memories, Eternal Sunshine required a look that could blend location-shoot authenticity with unpredictable flashes of whimsy. Kuras, whose own work often strikes a balance between raw and stylized imagery (notably on Summer of Sam; see AC June '99) proved a perfect match.

The cinematographer soon discovered just how challenging it would be to marry the two halves of Gondry's vision. "Starting off, he wanted to shoot the entire movie in practical locations, and he would have preferred me to shoot everything in available light," says Kuras. "He felt that the more real the film looked, the more you would believe it when the memories melted into reality. It was important for him not to get overburdened by the lighting, which I agree with in theory. But in practice, you have to be able to light so the camera assistants have a stop to work with to get the movie in focus! I said, 'Michel, even on a documentary, I wouldn't shoot exclusively with available light.'"

But running parallel to the director's desire for naturalism were his decidedly "unnatural" ideas for the film's transitions between reality and memory. "Much of the syntax of the dramatic action leads you to believe that you're in a memory, or a memory of a memory, but the reality of where you are in time and space is not exactly clear," Kuras explains. "One of the ways Michel wanted to suggest this visually was by calling back to early cinema, where magicians were using live-action practical effects in order to change time and space. He didn't want them to feel or look completely seamless. In one of the scenes, he wanted me to shake the camera so we could see it was a handheld effect in camera, as opposed to a locked-off superimposition effect or double exposure. That was the enigma of the film to me: we would have these unconventional, trompe l'oeil transitions that were not transparent film language, but the lighting sources had to be naturalistic at the same time."

Kuras and Gondry used most of their six-week prep to determine the feasibility of these ideas, as well as scout locations in and aroundNew York City for the wintertime shoot - "one of the coldest winters on record," Kuras recalls. Although most of the picture was filmed in practical locations, the filmmakers knew that some studio work was unavoidable. "We always had two cameras running, so it was impossible to do some of these effects [in a practical location] because there wasn't enough room," says Kuras. Production designer Dan Leigh recreated key locations - including Joel's Yonkersapartment and an oversized, 1950s-style kitchen from Joel's childhood memories - at a former U.S. Navy base in New Jersey.

Eternal Sunshine was Kuras and Gondry's first collaboration, and the cinematographer says that the first three weeks of production were devoted to developing a lighting strategy that would combine an extensive use of practicals with a handful of movie lights. "On the first day of shooting, I wasn't allowed to use any real movie lights because Michel wanted me to light to eye," she says. "For a night exterior, for example, I had to clip some sodium vapors onto telephone poles to augment the existing sodium vapors. On stage, Michel wanted to recreate the conditions we had encountered on location. After they'd built Joel's apartment set, Dan [Leigh] pulled me aside and said, 'All of the ceilings have been nailed down, so you won't be able to light from above.' That made me laugh - the last nail in my coffin!"

Complicating matters further was the fact that two handheld cameras were filming near-360-degree coverage most of the time. "There were no marks and very few rehearsals, so we didn't have any kind of gauge for where the actors would be," recalls Kuras. "Ultimately, that meant we were lighting the room, not the actors. Sometimes they were in the key light, and sometimes not. If I knew where the actors were going to be, I'd try to put something in, but it wasn't as though we had electricians hanging around with Chimeras for beauty lights. Although I understood the kind of movie Michel wanted to make and tried to give him what he wanted, there were moments when the cinematographer in me just cringed, especially when the actors danced in each other's key light. In one scene, when Clementine brings Joel to her apartment for the first time, we had two cameras covering the scene from start to finish, and because we were seeing the entire room, I had to use the practical lamps as the only source of key light; I couldn't get any other kind of ancillary light low enough to look natural. We ended up cutting holes in the lampshades and hiding light bulbs around the set to illuminate the scene. Unfortunately, what happens in this situation - and what happened in this scene - is that one actor ends up shadowing the other."

Throughout the shoot, Kuras and her longtime gaffer, John Nadeau, strove to jerry-rig units that would provide ample illumination but would also fly under Gondry's definition of a "film light." Kuras explains, "We had different assortments of lightbulbs - refrigerator bulbs, or small bulbs on hand dimmers - that we'd hide behind furniture or lampshades in order to give ourselves some stop. In Joel's apartment, we fabricated a light we jokingly called the 'Mini-Musco,' which was essentially a C-stand with four clip lights and blackwrap on it. We ended up lighting all the interiors with either available practicals or those clip lights, which had 150-, 250- or 500-watt bulbs. It was a game of hide-and-seek, determining how and where we could hide our little kit of light bulbs.


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"One might ask why I was lighting the entire room rather than the actors," she continues, "and it was because the two cameras shooting simultaneously were moving in the room according to Michel's instructions. He had both operators [listening] on ear rigs, through which he would extemporaneously ask them to pan or move into a close-up. I must admit, we were less than enthusiastic about the ear rigs." To help the actors maintain the flow of a scene, Gondry often shot entire scenes from beginning to end. Covering the scenes in dual moving master shots while keeping the opposing camera out of frame demanded spontaneous choreography by A-camera operator Chris Norr and B-camera operator Peter Agliata - and plenty of 400' mags. An 11-page scene that depicts Joel and Clementine's first meeting on Montauk was especially arduous, according to Kuras. "We were shooting on a real moving train on real tracks, and we only had a certain amount of time to get the scene. We had to use 1,000-foot mags to cover the scene in a one-shot deal, which is a killer way of shooting because you always have to be 'on.' While rolling, Michel would often ask us to move the angle of the shot. We didn't know whether he would use these shots as one move, so we tried to make everything usable. With all of that shifting, squatting and standing, working with the weight of 1,000-foot mags, and trying to slip between train seats with the assistant holding focus, the camera movement is not always the most graceful." With a laugh, she adds, "In the final cut, not surprisingly, Michel doesn't use any of the moves." Inspired by the French New Wave, the filmmakers used some unusual methods to accomplish many camera moves. "Michel was very interested in calling back to Godard, whose work I know very well, by having us handhold the camera while sitting in a wheelchair," says Kuras. "My key grip, Bob Andres, and I did all these tests that had me in a wheelchair or in a chariot dolly, running all over sidewalks and up and down curbs, to see how bad it would be, especially on cobblestone streets. The wheelchair dolly move wasn't always perfectly smooth, but there was often real beauty in that low-angle, wobbly movement, and I was willing to go with it. With the entire film shot handheld, we ended up using sled dollies, wheelchairs and chariot dollies, but no traditional dollies at all." Occasionally the overlapping demands of long takes, naturalistic lighting and cramped locations resulted in a downright comical configuration behind the camera. For instance, instead of staging a car scene with a process trailer, Kuras, Norr, two cameras and one assistant squeezed into the rear passenger seat to film both angles of a scene in which Carrey drives a car for real and Winslet rides along. The bulky mags required for the long take wouldn't fit inside the car, so the crew hung them out the windows, which then had to be boxed in for sound. "But as usual, we were shooting with only available light," says Kuras, "so we had to build a tiny muslin-and-Plexiglas exterior [for the mags], or we would have been totally dark in the back. And of course, the car wasn't a Lincoln Continental with four doors, it was a tiny Toyota! [First AC] Carlos Guerra was sitting between the two cameras, pulling focus on both at the same time. Talk about going in the completely opposite direction of a studio picture!" However, Kuras was able to stylize a sequence she refers to as "the chase scene." As Joel burrows deeper into his own memories in a vain attempt to "hide" what remains of Clementine from the Lacuna technicians, the scenes' quality of light becomes distinctly dramatic. "We didn't want to make it a huge departure from the film's look, but we wanted to signal to the audience that we were in the tunnel of the mind," Kuras explains. "Michel's visual analogy, which was brilliant, was inspired by the French film Le Boucher: a car is driving on a deserted country road at night, and you can only see what's illuminated by the throw of the headlights. When you're remembering something, you don't get a full picture; you only see certain glimpses of the scene in your head, depending on what you're focusing on. So, for our 'memory light,' we attached a single clip light on top of the camera for closer shots; we used a Par can to similar effect in the wide shots." Kuras filmed Eternal Sunshine on Fuji Reala 500D, mainly because she liked its cyan bias in the shadow areas and the smoothness and saturation of the colors and grain. "Although cyan in the blacks is perhaps not 'traditionally accepted,' I actually built additional cyan into the shadows at the post stage, because I really liked the look and color palette created by warm sodium-vapor yellow in conjunction with cyan green and cyan blue," she says. She made maximum use of the Reala by pushing it one stop and eschewing correction filters on her Zeiss Superspeed lenses. At some key moments, the filmmakers simply let the frame go dark. "Michel really wanted this to feel like a European film, and many of those have shots where everything is dark and you can only glimpse one thing in the frame," says Kuras. "I admire the way Nestor Almendros [ASC] used available light, and the way Robby Műller still does. They and Raoul Coutard are some of the most amazing cinematographers. They use light sparingly, and I ascribed to that [approach] on this film." The filmmakers' straddle between frank naturalism and visual metaphor didn't stop when Eternal Sunshine wrapped. Indeed, when Kuras and Gondry first began to work out the details of Eternal Sunshine, they decided to finish the film with a digital intermediate (DI). Kuras had used the process on two prior projects, Spike Lee'sJim Brown: All American (Post Process, AC Sept. '02) and Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity (AC April '02). On Jim Brown, Kuras used the DI to provide a high-quality blowup on a short schedule; onPersonal Velocity, she used it to sweeten her original DV footage into something more "filmic." She notes that there were a number of reasons, both creative and logistical, for taking Eternal Sunshine to a DI. The most salient was Gondry's desire to insert digital-composite effects throughout the film; the DI process would allow Kuras more flexibility in matching the effects shots with images scanned from the original negative. But the cinematographer was also keen to make the most of digital tools' abilities to affect select areas of the frame: "I knew the DI would enable me to influence colors in the highlight and shadow areas within the image itself, which you can't do in traditional timing. Power Windows afford a great amount of control." For the color-correction, Kuras returned to EFilm in Hollywood, where she had supervised the DV-to-35mm transfer on Personal Velocity. "[Postproduction coordinator] Mike Kennedy and [colorist] Mike Eaves at EFilm and [vice president] Beverly Wood at Deluxe all bent over backward to help me realize the unique vision of this picture," she notes. "With changing film stocks and different goals for each film, the DI process is a new learning experience each time." Before production commenced on Eternal Sunshine, Kuras conducted a photochemical color-timing test with the Reala stock, and she used that as a reference during the DI. She noted some key differences between color-timing for a DI and photochemical timing that she says will influence how she photographs films from now on. She emphasizes that "timing for a DI is vastly different than timing photochemically." For night exteriors and interiors, Kuras had exposed the daylight-balanced Reala uncorrected to allow for maximum stop under available-light conditions; her photochemical tests had indicated that the resultant yellow cast could be timed out. "It looked really beautiful, and I liked the way the blacks took shape. I've never been a huge proponent of blacks being really inky. I don't want them milky, but I like them to have roundness and, as I said before, sometimes even a bit of color. But what I didn't foresee was that when we began to take out those 12 points of yellow in the digital realm, we started to pick up video noise." Kuras then began to use digital sharpening and grain-reduction tools to reduce the noise. But, she notes, "when you do grain reduction, you're essentially making the image less sharp." Working with Eaves, Kuras began creating a series of filmout tests to determine which digital tweaks, with their attendant color shifts and noise consequences, would render the best image. "When I saw the first filmout, I said, 'We can do better. This looks muddy. Let's try again,'" says Kuras. "It's a problem that's inherent to the DI process, and you have to be careful. I didn't have that experience on Personal Velocity, but that originated on MiniDV, so it stayed in the digital realm. This was different. You might assume that working with a film original means you immediately have sharpness and clarity [in the digital realm], but you don't, even if the image is really well exposed. The nature of that image and what color lights you were using - whether you biased it toward the warm side or the cool side - significantly affects the way you perceive the film in a DI. Although I liked the Reala, I did notice that the whites had a tendency to be very grainy in the digital realm, even if the negative was well exposed." But Kuras stresses that if one keeps "a vigilant eye," the sharpness issue is easily managed. "We did our grain reduction in combination with image sharpening," she adds. "You'd think they're canceling each other out, but they're not. The sharpening tool really helped to smooth out the image in a way that I wouldn't have been able to do photochemically, and I was able to make the images a lot more seamless." The cinematographer also noted some less obvious differences in color rendition, primarily in the highlight areas, while timing the Eternal Sunshine scans. "In a night interior that I'd lit with tungsten units, I found that the hotspots in the highlights took on a bit of blue, which gave the skin tones a harsher feeling. But it's a very subtle feeling. I had to wonder whether it was because I was looking at so much tungsten that I felt that blue in the whites, or whether it was actually there." Kuras found that after subtracting a few points of blue from the highlight zones, the skin tones noticeably softened. "When Mike and I first started correcting, [I wanted to] stay as close to the scans as possible," says Kuras. "The scans contain as much information as you've got on the negative, and I thought we shouldn't mess around too much with that because it would be snappier and truer to the image. But because of the digital process, I found little subtleties that were affecting the image, like that rogue blue in the highlights. So in some instances, we altered the look of the film specifically for the DI filmout." The chief lesson to be learned from any DI, Kuras cautions, is that the process "is not a panacea for all ills. You can't rely on it to fix certain things you might assume you can fix in post." She learned this the hard way while timing a scene comprising footage shot in different locations that had been dressed to look identical. "One part w as shot in a real location and featured a little boy in a period kitchen, and the other part was shot in an oversized set of that kitchen and featured Jim Carrey playing the little boy. When we shot the first part on location, I used smoke to haze out the blacks a bit and make it look a little more 'period.' Then we shot the oversized set in our so-called stage in New Jersey; it was our last day of shooting, and it would have taken days to smoke up the entire space. If I'd realized how much the smoke was going to influence the matching of the scene, I would have started smoking the warehouse up the weekend before. The lack of smoke posed a problem the DI couldn't fix. Even decreasing the black levels in the shadow areas didn't help, because it started making the image look too thin." Kuras says these lessons proved invaluable, and a DI is already in the works for her next feature, The Rose and the Snake, which she shot on Super 16mm. "The DI has been a very useful tool for me, regardless of whether the original material was film or video," she says. "Everybody asks me, 'What's the secret? How did you makePersonal Velocity look like film?' But that's a question more easily posed than answered." B-camera operator Peter Agliata and Kuras film dual master shots, a technique employed throughout the shoot.

magnifying glass as circular frame le temps retrouvé-In Search of Lost Time)Part01

2010-10-13T15:10:00.000-07:00

Paul Sharits, "Shutter Interface," 1975.

2010-10-13T14:18:00.000-07:00

Fake Blondes - evan marsh

2010-10-11T13:23:00.000-07:00

R.E.M. - Bad Day (Video)

2010-10-10T18:00:00.000-07:00

this is brilliant -

Daniel Powter - Bad Day (Video)

2010-10-10T17:50:00.000-07:00

Movement documentation

2010-10-10T16:00:00.000-07:00

long takes, cont. in Bruges

2010-09-13T15:43:00.003-07:00

In the 2008 film In Bruges, the opening shots of Touch of Evil can be seen playing in the background during the scene when Harry (Ralph Fiennes) instructs Ken (Brendan Gleeson) to kill Ray (Colin Farrell) - in a six minute continuous take.

online multi-screenform with google

2010-09-07T11:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

greg miller just sent this to me - if you don't remember your childood address, just put in your current one, just to get the full effect -

six povs on a concert - walkmen & others

2010-08-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

http://pitchfork.com/tv/pov/the-walkmen/#2-blue-as-your-blood

this courtesy of friend, colleague and actor Angela Dee - thanks, angela. this is a website that offers the chance to see six camera angles on a rock or jazz concert. you can choose among the angles ORRRRR --

the center button of the six cameras is 'all' and hitting this gives you an ongoing multi-cam six-grid, three up three down. blogger won't let me upload this as a .mov - darn.

but it's reminiscent of course of the baseball mosaic options from MLB for online viewers -

Lauryn Hill - Doo Wop (That Thing) [[Official Video]] HQ

2010-08-24T10:35:00.000-07:00

reallife multichannel - nasdaq interior , NYC

2010-08-24T10:28:00.002-07:00

pennies from heaven - some briefly split dancing in 1981 movie

2010-08-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

inspired by dennis potter's british TV series.
directed by herbert ross, steve martin learned tap dancing in six months in order to perform the role of a miserable song salesman in the depression who wants to believe in the lyrics of the songs he sells.

in the money scene in the bank, which is split horizontally at the very beginning.

superimposition in the 'pennies from heaven' dance - done very slowly in the rain against a backdrop of an old diner, which becomes a stage of shimmering gold and walker evan's photos of the era.

doubling with fred astaire & ginger rogers:

and the male stripper dance by Christopher walken on the bar is amazing, a great moment in American film.

and of course, just for reference, the great take-off on hopper's nighthawks.

YouTube Doubler | Mashup Helper

2010-08-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

YouTube Doubler | Mashup Helper

Natalie Imbruglia - Torn

2010-08-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

My Father's Eyes - Eric Clapton

2010-08-24T10:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IigRv6B763k

Turbulent by Shirin Neshat - a not great depiction of her two-screen work

2010-08-24T10:18:00.000-07:00

faux newsroom as pretext for multi, cont.: fly away home - dir. by carroll ballard

2010-08-22T20:40:00.001-07:00

carroll ballard said in an interview that he had so much material on the girl flying south with her geese that he put it into a fictional newsroom monitor wall - here's one tiny version of a it.

split screen video - cold water by frances - two screen

2010-08-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKYmhq0K-Z8&amp

this is a fairly standard double-screen video which i'm having to click on rather than embed because the music immediately starts up whenever the blog opens.
but worth a look.

end credits for Body of Lies - by ridley scott

2010-08-22T20:18:00.000-07:00

are a series of split screens of four-grid satellite surveillence footage, interspersed with titles. have to see how i can get a copy of this, since below isn't it - except for a flash at end

you can see a bit of this at the end in this trailer.
also the flag flying behind di caprio in the window in one of his scenes shown here - very multi.
can't find a good copy of the end credits. not even a still.

you know, it seems to me that the title and end credit designers still aren't credited, even in the end credits now, but i need to check this.

jody zellen on spring multichannel viewing 2010

2010-08-22T14:52:00.000-07:00

http://artwrit.com/VOL3/11.html

Narrative Fragments

Spring has brought warm as well as cold weather to Manhattan and with the change in air there has been a change in attitude toward digital media. The presentation of digital works ebbs and flows, it is present, then conspicuously absent from the commercial galleries that dot Manhattan. This Spring there have been numerous exhibitions that have invited viewers to sit and look and listen to communications from multiple screens. The awkwardness of walking into the middle of a single screen projection is compounded when entering a space that presents many. Rather than dwell on the pros and cons of scheduled time and a cinema-like setting in a gallery (for example in Eve Sussman's curated film series at Winkleman Gallery (March 27-May 2)), it is the nature of the fragmented narrative that is ripe for discussion. It is curious to note that almost all of the multi-screen works on view are political in nature, i.e. content driven works which begs the questions: Why fragment the narrative across multiple screens if there is meaning to be gleaned from the viewing of the work? and How can a fragmented narrative embellish content?

When imagery is split across multiple screens there is a fracturing that occurs. The advent of two three or more simultaneous projections becomes a distraction for the viewer as they often do not know where to look, when. Amongst the many multi-screen works on view in New York museums and galleries This Spring included: Barbara Kruger "The Globe Shrinks" at Mary Boone Gallery (March 27 - May 1); Adrian Paci "Gestures" at Peter Blum Chelsea (April 2 - May 15); Michelle Dizon "Civil Society" at Cue Art Foundation (March 23 - May 12); Amar Kanwar at Marian Goodman Gallery (March 16 - April 24); "Ouroboros: The History of the World" at Ise Cultural Foundation (March 9 - April 23) and William Kentridge "Five Themes" at MOMA (Feb 24 - May 17). What ties these shows together is the fact that in all the presentations, multiple projections fill a room, requiring viewers to think about how the fragments coalesce as a whole.

Barbara Kruger is a master at choreographing the sequence of projections that fill a given space. For her installation "The Globe Shrinks" she "engages with the kindness and brutality of the everyday, the collision of declaration and doubt, the duet of pictures and words, the resonance of direct address, and the unspoken in every conversation" (Boone gallery press release) through the sequencing of floor to ceiling projections that encircle the darkened space. Viewers can sit on the benches positioned in the center and sides of the gallery but must then turn their heads or bodies to take all the screens during the twelve minute loop. Within the projections, actors speak to the audience and to each other matter of factly, describing real-life situations where they acted badly. Intermittendly textual fragments fill the walls. The larger than life sized talking heads relate carefully scripted scenarios. A head occupies one wall, then moves to another creating a conversation across the space. Sometimes its a monologue other times a dialogue, others a recreation of an event, nevertheless, the experience is one of bombardment, of being talked at and through. Kruger syncopates the fragments with the utmost care, allowing the dark moments in between to resonate. In Kruger's signature style the in betweens are filled with phrases including "Blame it; Buy it; Kiss it; Fear it; Believe it; Love it; Blind it; Temp it; Share it" flash on the walls, guiding the interpretation of the work. As always there is a societal critique embedded in the presentation. The work is nasty, yet realistic. Kruger's installation is purposely fragmentary. She understands the attention span of her audience and creates a looping sequence that can be entered and exited at any point. There is no beginning, middle or end. The floor to ceiling projections engulf the viewer and immerse them in the narrative. The audience is not merely watching but is being assaulted by the projections and the texts. This strategy, often employed by Kruger is consistent with her desire to bombard the viewer.

How a narrative can be read across numerous screens becomes something of a challenge. With simultaneus projections one often does not know how to look or in what order to watch the videos. When watching the eight screens in Amar Kanwar's "The Lightning Testimonies" it is necessary to moving from seat to seat around the room in order to take in all the screens. Once can watch one video for a period time, or through its sequence, then move to anther, but more often than not, one's eyes drifted from one screen to another. In works like this trying to engage with the content of the narrative(s) requires finding a point of entry, without one it is impossible to fully grasp the project's integrity. Sometimes this is the point, but in a work like "The Lightning Testimonies" the combination of fragments are meant to give meaning to the whole. "The Lightning Testimonies" is a haunting work that relates the experiences of female victims of sexual violence. Kanwar collected these woman's stories during his travels through India and Bangladesh weaving them into factual accounts as well as into poetic meditations. The work is about the memories of the traumas, and the power of the will to move on, but not to forget. The work addresses the question: How can one come to terms with such brutality and how can one visualise it? When the works was first shown in Documenta 12 it was at once praised and criticized, less for the subject matter than the commitment required from the viewer. Presented in a small claustrophobic space requiring more than 32 minutes of viewing time, the fragmented presentation of what was for the most part a documentary left many viewers frustrated because they wanted to glean the meaning rather than indulge in the aesthetics. In Kanwar's new work at Marian Goodman Gallery he further fragments his narrative creating an installation that plays across 19 small screens. The required hours of viewing becomes less the point than taking in what becomes a moving collage. The display that holds the works takes precedent over the content. In an installation of moving images, especially in one presented as a montage, it is never assumed that the viewer will actually watch all the videos from beginning to end. If this is the case, then what is the artists intention and when is enough, enough to understand the work. In Kanwar's "The Torn First Pages" it is virtually impossible to see the entire work from beginning to end, so one relies on the textual description. While the installation is stunning, does it do service to the content of the work?

In an exhibition such as Adrian Paci's "Gesture" The multi-screen project is an element within the larger context of the exhibition. Although "Last Gestures" can stand alone it is informed by the other works on view. "Last Gestures—a rear projected 4-channel video installation—shows four different scenes of the Albanian wedding ritual in which the bride spends the last moments with her own family before she leaves to start her new life. Unaccustomed to the presence of a video camera, the family positions themselves as if for photograph, allowing the camera to capture some unintentionally tender and awkward moments." (Gallery press release) The intimacy of the silent piece allows one to recreate the scene in their mind's eye, thinking about the past, present and future life of the family. If shot as a single channel work the simultaneity of the gestures and expressions would be lost. Ths work, because of its short duration can be seen again and again and on multiple viewings the nuances of the moment shine through. There is a difference between standing and glancing at the screens and the commitment made when sitting. Each of the four screens is suspended from the ceiling and illuminated by a rear screen projection. The viewer's body does not interfere with the projections upon close examination making the installation something akin to a moving painting. The four screens work in concert with each other, presenting a slightly different point of view or a shifted moment of a particular event observed in realtime but presented in slow motion.

Although Michelle Dizon's triptych "Civil Society" loops indefinitely, it has a beginning, middle and end. The elegantly choreographed piece flows between the three screens allowing the action to unfold individually as well as collectively. "Civil Society" is a meditation on urban violence, using text and images that depict the global crisis. Beginning with the LA Rodney king beatings in 1992 and moving to the unrest in Paris in 2005, Dizon creates a work that speaks about displacement and loss drawing from both documentary and experimental film traditions. The use of the triptych allows her to not only show three scenarios at once, but also to take advantage of the larger wide screen format. The pacing and use of projected texts guides the journey of unrest. The use of voice over directs the narrative, but it is the beauty in Dizon's imagery that while depicting images of violence carefully avoids the trap of aestheticizing it. "Civil Society" is a powerful work, one that resonates beyond its three screens embedding itself in memory. What sets Dizon's three screen work apart is that it is meant to be watched as a whole. The single bench positioned in front of the screens and the films eighteen minute duration ask the viewer to commit to its duration rather than floating in and out of fragments.

In addition to seeing multi-screen works in galleries, the Museum of Modern art was full of projected imagery. Was it coincidental that Joan Jonas had an exhibition at MOMA, Location One and Yvonne Lambert simultaneously; and that her work was on view at MOMA concurrent with William Kentridge and Marina Abramovic? Jonas creates installations that combine numerous projections, monitors, objects and drawings that surround viewers and immerse them in her world. The duration of the works vary and often when viewing her installations it becomes about taking in multiple fragments that hopefully become a whole when digesting the experience. Kentridge creates single channel as well as multi-channel works that become immersive environments. In his MOMA exhibition audiences could see the works chronologically and trace how the ideas evolved to become installations that encompass multiple projections. In works like "7 Fragments for Georges Melies" the action unfolds across seven screens. How to view the installation becomes a question. Is it necessary to watch each projection all the way through or is it enough content gleaned when wandering from one to another? Because Kentridge's visual are so seductive, it is easy to get lost in his installations.

Art viewing that requires a time commitment is often rebuked by audiences who are used to taking in a wall full of painting a few seconds at a time. Installation/video artists who fragment their works perhaps are referencing the traditional mode of presentation where one looks are multiple works a bit at a time, but more likely they are pushing the boundaries of the form. More often than not, when greeted by a darkened space a viewer will choose not to engage with the works, siting it would require too much time and they'd rather get the DVD later and watch it at home. Perhaps this excuse could work for single channel pieces but never for an installation. Looking at multi-channel multi-media work isnothing like taking in a show of paintings.Today most boundaries have already been pushed to their limits, so the display of multi-screen works is not about how to seduce a viewer, but rather about how to display provocative and intelligent content in a way that maximizes its effects. That this takes time is given. In an era that embraces the new, it is curious that the taking in of a video installation is not celebrated. Most art audiences are experienced viewers, yet they are often amongst the laziest. The commitment to the new, is a commitment of time. The investment more often than not is rewarding. The challenge is in the reconstruction, albeit in the minds eye and the making sense of the disparate fragments that brighten a room.

letterboxed ads & series

2010-08-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

of course, there's my lecture on letterboxing, which lives i'm not sure where. the basic point is the irony of wide-screen having been developed to compete with television, itself having been created with the exact same aspect ratio as fimls in 1939 had: 4:3.

just randomly watching the natinoal geographic channel -
i'm seeing four different kinds of letterboxing -

the show itself "journey to the center of the universe" has an aspect ratio of looks like 16:9.

the chase ad actually has a Cinemascope aspect ratio - at least 2.85:1.

then the america online has a hand-drawn line and white letterboxing in an animated commercial

and a Nat'l Geo promo has another aspect ratio

and then there's a funny direct tv ad where all the guys in a diner are watching a ball game on their iphones.

let's see if i can find them. hm. actually these are not online. i might ahve the ad wrong.

this is the widest I've seen: logitech, although i suspect it's for the web, which is the widest aspect ratio of all as per the billy elliot ad which i think i posted already.

QuickCam® Fusion - More free videos are here

leo di caprio interview

2010-08-22T08:58:00.000-07:00

i just think it's kind of amazing that Di Caprio can go from Revolutionary Road to ridley scott's body of lies in the same year -- both of which i watched only because i have HBO for the summer. the description of how ridley scott shoots is informative. I first saw him in Marvin's Room and it was obvious he was going to be one of the great actors of his generation:

from http://newsblaze.com/story/20081011050212mill.nb/topstory.html

This espionage operative you play in Body Of Lies is a pretty mysterious guy. So what can you let on about Ferris?

LEONARDO DICAPRIO: To put it simply, there's this dilemma that this character has, of where he's asked consistently to do things he doesn't believe in, for the betterment of his country and this war on terror. He's being manipulated by both sides. And so besides this being a great political piece that's pertinent to this time, it's this fantastic cat-and-mouse, espionage thriller that works on its own.

Did you find out stuff from real spies?

LD: I got to talk to some people who worked in that field. But unless you're talking about the CIA in the context of history and what they've done historically, which we are only now starting to learn about, the fact is that it's shrouded in secrecy. So there is a certain leap of faith that you take with all of this stuff. And it takes on a life of its on.

Okay, but what about all the physical ordeals Ferris has to go through, did you do all those stunts yourself?

LD: I did most of my own stunts.

You mean like dialing up all the time on your cell phone for further instructions on dodging danger?

DICAPRIO: That, I didn't do, I didn't do any of the dialing! Yeah, I absolutely refused. But we had beautiful hand doubles!

And I guess you skipped the finger smashing too. Were the stunts you did really difficult?

LD: Yeah, it was difficult. It was a very, very difficult shoot. But that's the nature of working on a Ridley Scott movie, you have to sort of embrace that. The pace in which he shoots is really intense, really fast-paced, so you have to be prepared for anything at any given moment. And he'll be like, let's not do any of that other crap because this is the moment that I am going to choose .

Like he literally has helicopters on standby, circling around and ready to get an overhead shot of you running through an entire city. And he's like okay, why don't you walk down block and we're going to have three helicopters chasing you down an Arabic street in real time. Of course, we will block off some traffic, so you'll be fine, you'll be great. Okay? You just have to be prepared for that.

And that was just the biggest adjustment. I had just come from this other movie, called Revolutionary Road, where it was like doing a 1950s play or something. You know, where we were talking about our feelings for months at a time! Then, I end up in Morocco, with missiles being shot at me.

But Ridley's just this filter, this bulls**t filter. And he trusts his instincts on such a gut level, that it's great to work with somebody who will say, okay this entire scene is wrong. Let's get rid of three pages of dialogue, or move this outside. You know, whatever it is, I'm not believing it. Or I am believing it, so push it to the extreme.

So it's amazing to watch him But it was a bizarre transition. Though once you sort of become accustomed to that pace, you would embrace it and enjoy it. And it would start to become this adrenalin fueled work environment that he loved. Oh god, even thinking back, it was tough, but Ridley enjoys that kind of stuff.

People always ask me, was it fun? And I don't know if fun is the operative word. But it was challenging and interesting, and all those other things. But, fun isn't always the operative word!

What was it like to get tortured, even if it was just a movie?

LD: It was one of the more complicated scenes. And it was tense, because we knew we had to knock it out of the park. So, I actually got sick after the scene for three days, because there was so much intensity put into that.

Did they really blow up that stone house behind you, Leo?

LD: Oh, yes, that was a big explosion.

What are you memories of working before with Russell Crowe On The Quick and The Dead?

LD: He had done Romper Stomper, and I had done Gilbert Grape. So we were both bright-eyed and bushy-tailed! But Russell couldn't be more professional and more of a normal guy to hang out with. He's a good pal, he's great and all that stuff, blah, blah, blah! And he hasn't changed, and that's it.

And what about getting together with Kate Winslet again, for Revolutionary Road?

LD: Kate has remained one of my closest friends, and is the best actress of her generation. We're these two people in the movie who are basically torn apart. And they feel like they have become cliches of what they're expected to be like, and have lost their identities.

Kate and I basically knew that we could push each other's buttons, performance-wise. And we knew that we could pull stuff out of each other. I mean, we've known each other since we were teenagers. And it was something I felt I wanted the opportunity to do.

Do you and Kate get to be lovers?

LD: Lovers? Do we play lovers! We play husband and wife. So hopefully, we're lovers!

What have you learned about life, hanging around Hollywood?

LD: When I first started out, I had these images of these cliches, of what movie stars are. You know, that they're egomaniacal pricks and tyrants. But, in general, for the most part they're nice people, to tell you the truth.

Leo, everybody knows about your commitment to the environment, but we're getting ready for the biggest bailout in economic history. How do you feel about a lot of the money that was earmarked for the environment, that will now be going to save Wall Street executives?

LD: If you're talking about the environment and our country shifting to alternative technologies and ways to power the country, I've been profoundly disappointed for years. So it's no news to me. We should have started eight years ago to be less dependent on foreign oil, and started to invest in some of these new technologies.

But we are way behind the curve again, and the United States should be the one to set the example for the rest of the world. Brazil is doing it and other countries are adapting these principals. And the only thing I want in this new election , my new thing, is to say alright, look. Obviously people don't want other people to tell them how to think or what to believe, or to tell them what's right politically and what's wrong. But the only point for me in this election, is I just want enough young people to go out to the polls, and to register and vote.

Because then we'll get a real consensus of what this country needs. We'll be able to understand where morally our country is. And these young people will dictate policies for the next fifty to a hundred years. So it's about time we do that. And that's my only wish, that we get a real representation of the future of this country until the next election. Whoever wins.

the late Remote Lounge

2010-08-22T08:27:00.000-07:00

Remote Lounge - - East Village - New York Magazine Bar Guide

i had completely forgotten about this place which was, indeed, creepy, seldom artful and is now closed.

from a review in the NY Magazine Bar Guide:

In theory, Remote Lounge is pretty cool: A high-tech wonderland of cameras and Cosmopolitans, in which the '50s-kitsch console at your table lets you spy on people throughout the bar, and contact other tables through the built-in telephone handset. In reality, however, Remote is an occasionally awkward theme bar, in which the attention-grabbing technology is the only thing to talk about, your neighbors aren’t worth spying on, and those Cosmos? At $10-12, a bit overpriced. Still, there are times—early evenings, Sundays, certain events—when Remote transforms into something otherworldly. You sit among the lights and monitors, catch flashes of color on the plasma screens, absorb some avant-garde DJs abstract beats, and wonder if this blissful cyber-scene will last forever. — Matt Gross

from a blog: http://www.synesthete.com/blog/2003/08

One of the attractions at the club are 50 cameras and remote control consoles. You can sit down at a console and with a joystick, control any of the cameras in the club. You have a monitor and a phone in addition to some other buttons to do things like take a snapshot that is put up on the web, send a message to a remote user, and talk with a remote user. It is pretty fun.

We watch the show for a while. It has been arranged by Repellent, a local zine and Micromusic, a user group based in Germany. The video content is being generated by two Amiga computers and run through a Edirol V4 mixer. We get John to give us a behind the scenes tour. The video cameras are all run into separate receiving units that are akin to channels at a Cable TV provider. They have 96 “channels,” which can be accessed with a VCR or similar device. A server is running the software to control the consoles, so it is fairly easy to update the whole system. They also have some custom systems to control various sets of monitors throughout the club. [from a 2003 blog]

Radiohead - Like Spinning Plates from "Bomb the System"

2010-08-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

rules of attraction - split screen

2010-08-17T11:28:00.001-07:00

The Rules of Attraction-Split screen scene

TEODOR ,The Glass Man | MySpace Video

snake eyes

2010-08-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

the split screen is 'subjective' - i.e. in the fourth version of what happened -

1 hour in - split screen although we are in both an omniscient reality - AND her POV.
it's only about a minute long, then we go into split screen again after a single of Lt. doing the shooting briefly.

and then to the staircase with the two of them - cage & girl

this is another review:
http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue06/reviews/snakeeyes.htm

brian de palma interveiw on snake eyes

2010-08-17T11:09:00.000-07:00

Having only recently scored his biggest career success to date with Mission: Impossible, DePalma is enjoying more creative freedom than he has had in years. It comes as little surprise, then, that he should seize the chance to once again return to the genre for which he is best known, the psychological thriller. Starring Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage and Oscar-nominee Gary Sinise, Snake Eyes is a highly-stylized, claustrophobic, real-time thriller set during and after an Atlantic City boxing match where the United States Secretary of Defense is assassinated. Sinise plays Navy Commander Kevin Dunne, the head of the security detail charged with protecting the Secretary. Cage is Dunne's childhood buddy, a tainted Atlantic City police detective forced to rise to the occasion when the murder literally falls in his lap. Together they must race with fate and an impending hurricane to unravel a labyrinthine puzzle meticulously designed by DePalma and his preferred screenwriter of late, David Koepp (Mission: Impossible and Carlito's Way).
Still, all due labors on the script notwithstanding, it wouldn't be a true DePalma film without the director's trademark visual fireworks. And on that count, DePalma makes it clear that, if nothing else, Snake Eyes is a way of celebrating his own personal independence day.
Just when you finally appeared to have left the Hitchcock comparisons behind, what drew you back to doing a thriller?
The thing you can determine from me and my career is that I never gave a damn what anybody thought. I always did what I thought was best for myself, and if anyone else thought it was like Hitchcock, too bad! I was there, basically, to learn something, or else I was interested in a piece of material. And if I wanted to make that kind of movie and everybody else thought it wasn't the right thing for me to be doing, or if they had some kind of comment about it, it never made any difference to me. As long as I thought I could get the movie made, I didn't care.
Could you talk about designing the visual map of the film, specifically conceiving the complex visual and flashback structure?
Hopefully, because we thought of it from the ground up, we came up with a strong visual idea for the film. David [Koepp] wanted to write a movie from multiple points of view. Well, when you do multiple points of view, how do you do that? Also, the big problem of going back and forth over a crime is that you're at the same place all the time and you just keep going back and forth. So you ask yourself, "Does it feel repetitive?" and "Are our flashbacks going to stop the story from going forward?" So I had to come up with a visual way in order to do that.
The whole trick of it was to get the characters back to where they started and make it look different and let them find out information they hadn't had before. That was a big physical challenge. Plus there was the whole challenge of whether I could make a movie where we're basically indoors the whole time, working in these very limited spaces. Could I get away with that? It's that Rope concept of trying to box yourself in aesthetically. It's like Rear Window where you can't move the camera outside the room. How do you make that work? It forces you to come up with all kinds of ingenious solutions and pushes you into a visual area that would have never even occurred to you before.
How hard was it to execute that elaborate opening tracking shot?
Basically you have to find the spaces to do it in. You start on the boardwalk with the television interview which is on the monitors. And from the monitors you have to follow Nic upstairs and then he's got to see Luis and chase him down the escalator and sort of beat him up. And then you've got to start this voyage of the bloody hundred-dollar bill. I think we did that in three sections. Then you've got to find a place to wipe the frame so that you can go from one section to another so it'll look seamless. And then once you get them downstairs, there's the stuff in the arena. We actually go around the arena twice—once he walks around the arena and then he goes once around with Gary. And then you've got to sit them down and you have to have them look at all the places around them and try to make that work as a shot, make it visually and aurally exciting so the audience is listening to stuff so that later on it's going to drive them crazy when they're hearing the fight but not seeing it. Nobody's been to a fight where you never saw the fight. Then they're going to really want to know what happens when the fighter tells his story. Are we going to see the fight now we just heard? And after you do the fight, then that reveals the woman in red, and who the hell is she? But I'm taking you all the way through the movie now.
Did you conceive that the first shot was going to be continuous or did that evolve from the script?
As we laid out all this exposition in the beginning, and I was wrestling with the idea of how to make it visually different from the different flashbacks. It occurred to me to do it like one steadicam shot, make it all on Nic, his world, his life, and make it move as fast as you physically can, make him talk a mile-a-minute, just get the energy pumped up to the max and make it look like a freight train going by so fast the audience can't take everything in. I find movies so redundant in the way that they're photographed. I mean, you're like, "Oh, please. Get me out of here." The ideas are redundant. The visual ideas are hopelessly redundant. So you want to give them just a taste, and then you're going to force them to go back.
One of the big problems with detective movies is it's basically going from place to place and getting information. Well, that may work great in a novel but it's kind of boring in a movie.
But not in this movie.
Because we made it so that it's not that place you've seen before. It looks a little different because you're in an entirely different place in the arena. And the other reason is you've got some clues from the first time you went through and now you're starting to put the puzzle together yourself.

How hard was it to work out the flashbacks and the splitscreens so that the simultaneous threads all intersected just perfectly?
I'd say the trickiest part was the splitscreen because there's so much information that it's hard to follow both sides of the screen simultaneously. [The film] was a lot longer in earlier cuts, and there was a lot more of the splitscreen stuff. But you can't absorb it all. There's too much going on. So it's like, "Whoa! Wait a minute." I worked on that for a very long time. I couldn't even follow it there was so much going on. It is very tricky and, again, like with the end of the movie, we kept pulling stuff out, pulling stuff out, because it becomes too much to take in. You get confused. And once you get confused, you're dead in a movie like this.

[also with snake eyes - as in 'missing' - we're seeing a lie in one of the POVs, the Lt. ]

As long as you brought it up, why was the tidal wave sequence cut from the end of the film?
When we did the water sequence, we had a big wave and it just took people out of the movie. It was too big for the story, dealing with this confrontation and then suddenly they were looking at this big wave. This isn't a meteor picture. It was my mistake, basically, because I thought we needed the storm to be "The Storm," and it got a little out of hand. So we cut it all out.
Wasn't that hard to do?
We can make mistakes. It's possible.
That almost seems antithetical to present Hollywood thinking, where the end always has to be beefed up with bigger and bigger set pieces.
It's quite ironic. The trouble is you begin to find the shape of the movie and when you start putting it in front of audiences they react to certain things and not to others. And it sort of tells you what works and what doesn't. So you change it. It's just like previewing a show. Of course with the press and everyone else watching everything we do, they think, "Oh, my God! They're in trouble! They're changing the ending!" But this happens all the time. When you read 400 preview response cards and 399 of them say, "What's up with that wave? That didn't look right!," then you start to realize that maybe something is wrong with your wave.
Would you agree that your work falls into two categories: the uniquely obsessive and very personal Brian DePalma stuff—Sisters, Blow Out, Obsession, Dressed to Kill—and everything else like Scarface, Mission: Impossible, Carlito's Way and The Untouchables?
I kind of think it's like a writer that writes under two names. I get tired of making these Brian DePalma movies. You get tired of your own obsessions, the betrayals, the voyeurism, the twisted sexuality. I've made a lot of movies like this, so you're glad to get out there with those Cuban or Puerto Rican gangsters. It gives you a little relief. That's not to say you won't be drawn back to your particular world, but I look upon them as a welcome relief from what's going on in my brain.
Does it restore you creatively to switch off between the two?
Yes, it does. When I'm thinking about Puerto Rican gangsters, I'm not thinking about long tracking shots down corridors.
Have you ever found yourself at a loss for new visual devices or new ways to keep the style of a film fresh?
No, I've never had that. You are up against your limitations to some extent. So there are certain things I try to keep away from. I try to keep away from comedies.
Why no comedies?
Because I just feel that I have a kind of 60s sense of humor and you cannot compete with the kind of comedy that you see on television. It's a mastery of comedic form. You've got all those great writers and those great comedians. And making comedies in movies is almost, I think, one of the most difficult things to do. They're all standups and they train in front of live audiences. That's invaluable for comedy. It's really hard to be directing a comedy on a sound stage and have a sense that this is really funny. So I try to avoid that.
But, quite to the contrary, I'm feeling quite invigorated as I come to the end of my fiftieth year because I've made the most successful movie of my career, Mission: Impossible. It's better to make them at the end rather than at the beginning. And I'm full of ideas, more ideas than I can ever make. My head is just bouncing. I was up until 3:30 this morning working on the Howard Hughes movie that David and I are writing for Nic. And I've got a couple of other ones that are rummaging around in my brain. So I feel like I don't' have enough time now. That's why I have so little patience with everything. Plus I have a couple of children. So my life is basically divided between making movies and my children.
Since you are going to go on and work with Nic again on the Howard Hughes biography, is it fair to say that your pairing on this film worked out well?
We're very similar in many ways. Nic is an accomplished performer and he's a dedicated artist. And he loves to work, which is how I would describe myself, basically. Plus, he has no ego. It's all about the work. Which is exactly how I feel. How do we make it better? And he's a real gentleman. That always sounds like something from the nineteenth century, but it's true. He has incredible manners, he's very sensitive to how other people are feeling about things, and he feels real lucky, I guess, that he has all this opportunity, just like I do. How did we get here? This is great. We're going to get a chance to make a movie about Howard Hughes? Wow. And we're both Italian-Americans—maybe that has something to do with it. He's got brothers, I've got brothers. I don't know. Maybe there's a whole bunch of stuff there.
Considering all the changes you've seen in the industry, from the escalating budgets to the role of special effects, have these things made your job easier or more difficult?
I think that something new is coming. I really think that the conventional moviemaking world is over and the greatest work is behind us. I really do. The industry sort of peaked in the forties, fifties and sixties. Mainly because of the turmoil, the wars, all that stuff. The European influx into Hollywood. That was the beginning of the movies, and it's over. It's never going to be again. I think the next thing that's going to happen is going to happen on the internet and with interactive media. Now you can have all this video technology, your own little video camera and edit stuff at home. You can make movies like novels now, you really can. You can make them very inexpensively and get your friends together. You can do the whole thing yourself, post it on the internet for everybody to look at and have an immediate audience of billions of people. I think you're going to see some incredible things.
Does this mean that the art of filmmaking is a thing of the past?
This form, I think, is over. I really do. I mean, everybody complains about how they're not as good as they used to be. Well, they're not.
What would you say has been the downfall of the art form?
Well, again, I feel it has a lot to do with what's happening in history. What's happening now? Nothing. Can you remember the eighties? Do you remember anything? I was talking to one journalist and she said, "Well, I remember the sixties." And I said, "I remember the sixties. Things were happening in the sixties. But the seventies? Disco? What is there to remember? What is there to remember in the eighties? And the nineties? Greed is good. That's what we remember. That's the signature for the end of this century.
So if we're moving into a new phase, what is it that keeps you motivated?
Because I'm a guy that used to build computers. I'm right at the cutting edge of what's going on in this whole new revolution. I watch this stuff all the time and I'm fascinated every time some new development happens—and it happens every other month in this industry. Every time something new happens, every time some new technology comes in, you see whole new story forms developing and you go, "Wow. This is exciting."

sadly, we don't have access to these.

2010-08-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

mark webber's expanded cinema database in germany

videos to check out

2010-08-13T21:53:00.001-07:00

Some of the scenes in The Cell are inspired by works of art. A scene in which a horse is split into sections by falling glass panels was inspired by the works of British artist Damien Hirst.^[2]The film also includes scenes based on the work of other late 20th century artists, includingOdd Nerdrum, H. R. Giger, and the Brothers Quay.^[2] Tarsem — who began his career directing music videos such as En Vogue's "Hold On" and R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" — drew upon such imagery for Stargher's dream sequences. In particular, he was influenced by videos directed by Mark Romanek, such as "Closer" and "The Perfect Drug" by Nine Inch Nails, "Bedtime Story" by Madonna, and the many videos that Floria Sigismondi directed for Marilyn Manson. During a scene, Jennifer Lopez falls asleep watching a film, the film is Fantastic Planet.

the gladiator dvd menus (the Multi VHS tapes)

2010-08-12T20:19:00.000-07:00

are very good for showing where your eye goes - without anyone necessarily planning for it, in an otherwise evenly spaced multichannel world.

it goes to the CUT
it goes to MOTION
it goes to LIGHT

these ugly hokey divisions of the screen for off-track betting are also very good. i think if i take the DVD menu from my VHS tape, blogger might upload it.

hard day's night is a nicely designed menu on the new DVD, which blogger wouldn't let me post but which i jsut made a snap-pro video of.

in terms of learning multichannely, the last waltz dvd menu is a great use of six.

and i know there were other six-grid moving image dvd menus, back in the days when they did these. i wonder why they stopped -- taking up too much room?

surveillance in saudi arabia

2010-08-10T14:39:00.000-07:00

Saudi policeman monitors screens connected to cameras set up at all holy places in Mina near Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2008, during the annual Hajj. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

uslim pilgrims are seen inside a building where, for three days, they will cast stones at pillars symbolising Satan in Mina, Saudi Arabia on December 9, 2008. More than two million Muslim pilgrims performed a second round of stoning walls symbolising the devil on Tuesday, as Hajj pilgrimage rituals neared their end. (REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah

INSTANT REPLAY

2010-08-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

another great early gary hill cutting to language

2010-08-05T17:46:00.000-07:00

which they're not letting me rip or embed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnuHVAlpY2I&feature=related
i'll have to rip this on my compute with mpeg steamclip

gary hill - sound and image

2010-08-05T17:43:00.001-07:00

bowie and oursler - tech is form here...

2010-08-05T16:34:00.000-07:00

I worked with Mr. Bowie around his ’97 tour doing the video stage sets and rock videos; it was a very collaborative and experimental moment for me."

good interview - students could read this:

http://bombsite.com/issues/96/articles/2823

TONY: That’s funny because Kim called me up right before Sonic Youth did this set of tours three or four months ago and said, “Would you be interested in doing projections for the show?” And I was like, “Yeah, that would be great. How long?” She said two hours, and I asked by when she’d need it, and she was like, “The end of the week.” (laughter) I happen to have this ongoing series that I call my ambient series, that I will show sometime somewhere when I find the right moment, where I just set up cameras, kind of like what you did, where I feel like something good is happening, and I just let it go. Sometimes there’s camera movement, but usually not. It might be a water theme park, and I just find a frame where there are people in fluorescent inner tubes going off a slide, and shoot that for 20 minutes. I’ve been doing this since the late ’80s, since Hi-8 introduced two-hour tapes. So I took a lot of these things and cut them together with Josh Thorson, my editor, and gave them to Sonic Youth for their tour. When I went to see their show at NorthSix in Brooklyn I was totally moved by the experience, it blew me away. They turned off the lights, and the stuff that was happening was just totally insane. It was projected right over the band, with a white wall behind it—birds were flying across the stage, images like liquid appeared on people’s faces. And I couldn’t believe the complexity of the relationship between these randomly put together clips and the music. We had no idea what their playlist was; it probably would have ruined it had we known because as soon as you start to illustrate any kind of music, it’s horrible.

AL Yeah, I had the same realization at one of the early Text of Light gigs in Philadelphia. We had done our show a couple of times before, and up until then I had thought of them as regular improv gigs, where a bunch of name players come together and see what happens. I looked up at some point to see what was going on up on the screen, and the drummer, William Hooker, who was right in front of the screen and couldn’t see it, was doing something with his hand on the drum that corresponded exactly with what was happening on the screen.

technology is form, which may have to become its own blog at some point

2010-08-05T16:18:00.000-07:00

Rewind and repeat to fade
Ian White

Ian White writes about Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler's The Poetics Project 1977-1997 at The barbican and Iain and Jane's File under Sacred Music at the ICA. He opens "Is it film? Live art? Rock? Who cares? Subversive re-enactments are the way forward."

Extract: "If the simultaneous fusion and dissolution of boundaries charaterise The Poetics, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's latest work occupies a not dissimilar territory. No Strangers to the intersection between popular culture and the spectacles that fuel it, their 1998 re-enactment at the ICA of David Bowie's final Ziggy Stardust concert was an amazing moment of iconic avant-rock as live art. File under Sacred Music pushes their practice further, recreating the Cramp's legendary performance at Napa Mental Institute in 1978 in order to produce the bootleg video of that event. The gig, also at the ICA, though this time in a closed set, was staged for the benefit of carefully controlled cameras, themselves mimicking the original, limited recording equipment with awkward panning shots and fixed positions, to an audience of "users and survivors of the psychiatric system" invited by the artists and mental health charities.

The magnitude and sensitivity of this engagement should not be underestimated. Its terms, beyond any binary, liberal accusations of exploitation, dared to embrace, more extremely than before, the tragic flaw lying between chance and action that makes Forsyth and Pollard's epic structures of re-performance such extraordinary works of art. While The Cramps' anarchic energy was passionately re-enacted by Alfonso Pinto, Holly Golightly, Bruce Brand and John Gibbs, the audience's freedom was collapsed simultaneously onto the pressure of recording. The gap between past and present became the difference between acting and being, a process both facilitated by and commenting upon today's mental health service and a lost dynamic between radical 'pop' and political action - something no less articulated by the coveted, cult-status bootleg video made art object, another facade from that glorious theatre of failure we ought by now to call the truth."

This article originally appeared in Art Review, June 2003

ton oursler, cont. -- not to synchronize - 0s & 70s video art

2010-08-05T16:07:00.000-07:00

"That’s the weird thing, that John Cage was a teacher in a way. But then all my installations, from the beginning, that had more than one channel going were random. What determined that initially is that there was no way to synchronize decks unless you had a lot of money. With the entire budget of an installation like 1,200 bucks or something, it would take the whole amount to synchronize a couple of decks. Plus I felt it deadened the experience, so I never synched my installations, and that operated on the sound track as well as the visuals. So it’s something I’ve been doing since the early ’80s. Being a hyperactive person, I like that the sound track can always be different. I plug it in, which is really cool, because I’ve always made ridiculously long tracks, so the combinations are many and varied, and make long loops. I can walk into the space and be surprised by my own work, like, Oh that’s interesting what you’re coming up with today. It has a life of its own."

perfect partner - find this - superimposition

2010-08-05T16:03:00.000-07:00

Perfect Partner, a film by Kim Gordon, Tony Oursler and Phil Morrison, starring Michael Pitt and Jamie Bochert with a live sound track featuring Tim Barnes, Kim Gordon, Ikue Mori, Jim O’Rourke and DJ Olive. Courtesy of Tony Oursler.

recutting scenes

2010-08-05T15:32:00.000-07:00

this opening of Casino Royale - the daniel craig one - with this parkour -- would be great to cut multichannelly.

painting on a screen

2010-08-05T14:50:00.000-07:00

painting on a photograph - like gerhardt richter does.
just to do it
or to show the passage of time

PAINTED PHOTOGRAPHS by GERHARD RICHTER, 2005

or emphasize a color.

faust - robert le page

2010-08-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

live singing with her projection - one of the most powerful things in the oepra.

ideas from FELA

2010-08-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

1. film projected onto a still
2. moving on the image - stills w/ moving images on them
[hmmm. not quite sure what i meant by this]
3. fragments of print - huge letters moving across the screen
4. there was a brief triptych - a three screen, i don't know of what.

oh yes, i remember this - the main character Fela asks the audience, who here has been to jail? My hand shot up -- and then i looked around and realized i was the only one with a hand up! in that entire, white, broadway audience. i guess people who can pay a hundred dollars a ticket don't tend to get to jail.

5. music that works with what the boxes are actually doing (well, i knew this)
6. having different screens automatically makes it the same but different - of his face, and i think i mean projected onto different surfaces, and in different places onstage as well.

7. Three moments on a face. (the same face, obviously)

8. a long frame: with on third or fifth, the rest kept long. i can't really draw it here.

9. projecting on the brick, giving that texture, and also i believe they projected on paint, which i also like a lot, a la gerhard richter.

saw this in FELA, on broadway. Peter Nigrini and andrew, joan's andrew, did the video.