tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26510098040347457012023-11-16T03:09:23.219-08:00Directors Lounge magazinecontemporary art and mediaplaceboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-73885749588950651392008-10-24T11:13:00.000-07:002008-10-24T11:53:47.388-07:00Impressions from Saint Petersburg<a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/Pob3Guvagfgn7de1W465vqw9o1_500.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/Pob3Guvagfglmpq6WcdGGSnoo1_500.jpg" /></a><br />In front of the Rodina with the team of Tour de Film<br /><br /><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="float:left;color:#DE7008;font-size:70px;line-height:50px;padding-top:1px;padding-right:5px;font-family:Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Verdana,Sans-Serif;">W</span>e are back from <a href="http://rodinakino.ru/events/directors-lounge-berlin-peterburg"target="_blank">Directors Lounge: Берлин-Петербург</a>, our first row of screenings in this amazing town. The festival, organized by our hosts, Tour de Film and the prestigious Rodina Cinema house, was one of our most successful events so far, in terms of audience as well as in terms of dialogue and exchange. <a href="http://rodinakino.ru/events/directors-lounge-berlin-peterburg"target="_blank">RODINA</a> cinema house is considered to be the major venue among other cinemas specialized in world classic films, art house and contemporary experimental film works. But it was first and foremost the tremendous efforts of Marina Korotkova and Alexei Dmitriev that made our stay unforgetable and all screenings as well as the accompanying discussions cineastic highlights in the book of Directors Lounge. This far too short stay is for sure the beginning of a long relationship between Berlin and Saint Petersburg.<br /><br />Enjoy some snapshots after the jump, more at our <a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank">blog</a>.<br /><br /> </p> <br /><br /><span id="fullpost"><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4KifgohsylPnfxwNWFo1_500.jpg" /></a><br />The dream team of Tour de Film, Marina Korotkova and Alexei Dmitriev<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://media.tumblr.com/Pob3GuvagfgljjpcWYAkxuFJo1_500.jpg" /></a><br />Marina, André and Klaus<br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Kifgoc2q2GGeWZ9vNo1_500.jpg" /></a><br />Rodina, impressive plastering<br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://media.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Kif5mskdqm57ZxKi5o1_500.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://media.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Kif5mqfnudcrB5mf8o1_500.jpg" /></a><br />the foyer of Rodina<br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://media.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Kif5mrn6v8idIb2oOo1_500.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://media.tumblr.com/Pob3Guvagfglg9jnv0DWKZfMo1_500.jpg" /></a><br />Marina<br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://media.tumblr.com/Pob3GuvagfglzvnqVG0YO1QXo1_500.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Kifgnxsk6ex28goHfo1_500.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://media.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Kifgobh5prBjy6FMqo1_500.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://media.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4KifgoauzoyiLTj5Hqo1_500.jpg" /></a><br />Klaus and Alexei in the translar booth<br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Kifgo923mlnw6rO15o1_500.jpg" /></a><br />Q & A<br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/Pob3Guvagfglacs4wXPZHXSMo1_500.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://media.tumblr.com/Pob3Guvagfglo9ctGbuc68M6o1_500.jpg" /></a><br />Masha Godovannaya, long time friend of DL<br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://media.tumblr.com/Pob3Guvagfgm2e5wSphp2UEDo1_500.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Kife05dhvhB0H73M7o1_500.jpg" /></a><br />Our last night in St. Petersburg. Alexei and Marina, André and Klaus. Finally everbody was wearing hats.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/day/2008/10/24/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/Pob3GuvagfglubhgQp5Q5Smlo1_500.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><br /></span>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-78585947290045297872008-02-17T17:04:00.000-08:002008-02-26T14:29:05.331-08:00Finale<p><a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mv6965QYrh5qTZ_500.jpg"target="_blank"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mv6965QYrh5qTZ_250.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>(S.S) Sunday, the 17th, was the final evening of Director's Lounge 2008 and the atmosphere was lounge-like indeed. The Flying Vibes played a set of inspired vibraphone jazz music and later in the evening they put their talents to use by providing a live soundtrack to a silent film from Brazil, <strong>André Ricardos´ </strong>Exequias (3 min 56S, DV, 2007)</p><p>The Directors Lounge crew made a 'greatest hits' set of films from the past 10 days and it was impressive to look back at the variety of films that were shown: comedy, documentary, text based pieces, textured film, poetic film...from all over the world. </p><p>Brendan Howell and Lars Kuenstler performed a live mixed DJ/VJ set using imagery from East German communist gymnastics training videos.The footage was really beautiful and Lars overlaid the found footage with different colors and textures, speeding things up or slowing things down in time to Brendan's wild synthesized beats.</p><br /><p><br /><a href="http://directorslounge.net/DL2008/12.html"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5ugbwidZIiwoEUM_500.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>One award was given to the Portuguese filmmaker<strong> Miguel Machado</strong> for The Long Overtone (18min 25s, 2006) and surely if their was an unofficial soundtrack to the Director's Lounge 2008 it was the ambling guitar solo from this film. For my part, I would have given the best film award to the Spanish filmmaker <strong>Xavi Sala</strong> for his entry <strong>La Parabólica (</strong>2007, 12 min). I will never look at satellites and umbrellas the same way again.</p><p>It has been a pleasure writing about these beautiful and off-kilter films and I hope to do it again next year. In the meantime, if any of you readers would like to contact me about what I have written for the Director's Lounge, my email is <a HREF="mailto:foodandfootage@gmail.com">foodandfootage@gmail.com</a> </p><p>Thanks for reading!</p><p> Sabrina Small</p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-5347831798336361022008-02-17T17:00:00.000-08:002008-02-26T15:24:52.641-08:00Impressions V<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5vg0ba1Un5y8asP_500.jpg"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5vg0ba1Un5y8asP_400.jpg" /></a><blockquote>Ladies of the Lounge: Judy and Ania</blockquote><br /><br /><span id="fullpost"><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5vg1epaWYT9PqTA_500.jpg"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5vg1epaWYT9PqTA_400.jpg" /></a><blockquote>dance all night</blockquote><br /><br /><a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5vfwvtmS6TCAwig_500.jpg"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5vfwvtmS6TCAwig_400.jpg" /></a><blockquote>screen queens and real booze</blockquote><br /><br /><a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5vfv0fwVBSzAufm_500.jpg"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5vfv0fwVBSzAufm_400.jpg" /></a><blockquote>late night fun</blockquote><br /><br /><a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mwotjpcOSKUEgA_500.jpg"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mwotjpcOSKUEgA_400.jpg" /></a>Reclaim the stage<br />Roy Wilde and El Perro and fans<br /><br /><a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mwmy26G5r2w0mX_500.jpg"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mwmy26G5r2w0mX_400.jpg" /></a><blockquote>Trio Infernal, directors Ramona Welsh (l) and Sandra Becker01(r) with the Mistress of the Team, Judy Schlesinger</blockquote><br /><br /><a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mwj7d6Ews0I9ac_r1_500.jpg"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mwj7d6Ews0I9ac_r1_400.jpg" /></a><blockquote>Happy to serve the best Mojito outside of Cuba, Ania & Thomas</blockquote><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw38ulqNc8rUPP_500.jpg"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw38ulqNc8rUPP_400.jpg" /></a><blockquote>The Flying Vibes</blockquote><br /><br /></span>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-55544823662836532082008-02-17T16:59:00.000-08:002008-02-26T17:25:50.167-08:00Everything Else is Everything Else<p><a href="http://shipwreckfilm.com/coffeesexyou.htm"target="_blank"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://directorslounge.net/DL2008/coffeesexyou-small.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>(JB) Time for my last post on this years Directors Lounge festival, which ended with a feature film, performances and a best-of screening on Sunday. To accordingly keep the mood down for a bit, I'll start with a rather not-so-good review of <b>Marcel Grant's</b> full feature film “<a TITLE="Synopsis on the film company's website" HREF="http://www.shipwreckfilm.com/coffeesexyou_synopsis.htm">Coffee Sex You</a>”, about a young, attractive and upwardly mobile banker who decides to kill herself on her 27<sup>th</sup> birthday for reasons of unresolved childhood issues and an insufficiently medicated psychiatric disorder. Also, her married lover dumps her right in the <a TITLE="00:38" HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeUpLrgezcE">beginning</a> of the film, and we will see these three, obviously inter-related quandaries repeated throughout the narrative in flashbacks lest we forget that it's really <i>tough</i>. Grant and lead actress Rosie Fellner do a good job in depicting clinical depression as a state which is essentially dullness and self-injury, and not a certain wackiness and <i>truly deep</i> emotions as shown often in mainstream cinema, but things go decisively wrong with the introduction of virtually every of the film's other characters, which all look and act like straight out of a H&M advert. There is the thoughtful-but-charming main male lead (a screenwriter and the heroine's obvious love interest) in a corduroy jacket, blue jeans and colourful oversized scarves, and a tough-but-sexy indie film director, who – believe me – sported a fedora and neck-tie, because that's apparently what you wear when you're gender-concious female artist. While the “romantic comedy” aspect of the film prevails most of the time (apart from various hints to the 2005 London bombings, which I disliked even more, as, well, Terror is about real people dying and not the emotional predicaments of the young urbanite), the heroine – I'll spoil this one for you, this time – does indeed kill herself in the end; you might try to, by force, interpret a kind of <i>unreliable narrator</i> device into the film and thus legitimize the clichéd plot & characters as something she had constructed / seen through during her downward spiral. But maybe you don't have to, just watch “<a TITLE="Last Life trailer" HREF="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/294123/Last-Life-in-the-Universe/trailers">Last Life in the Universe</a>” instead for a non-mainstream take on aimless & suicidal people in their late twenties.</p><br /><br /><span id="fullpost"><br /><br /><br /><p> There was a similar disparity between form and substance in several of the films during Friday's <i>Film and Poetry</i> programme, for example in <b>Kylie Hibbert's</b> animated short “Mirror” (2005) after a poem by Sylvia Plath, which was illustrated with cut-outs straight from drawings & adverts from 50ies magazines and set to a gaily bouncing, funky tune; it did look fluid and charming indeed, but stood in an rather irritating contrast to Plath's haunting and desperate <a TITLE="Faces and darkness separate us over and over." HREF="http://vmlinux.org/~ilse/lit/plath.htm">poem</a>. Again, one might understand this as a subliminal critique of the gender main-streaming propagated through fashion and advertising, but as – according to the description on the <i>zebra award</i>'s <a TITLE="ZEBRA Poetry Film Award '06" HREF="http://literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=198&L=1">website</a> – it's basically about “expand[ing] typographical conventions of published poetry“, Hibbert might not have been particularly interested in either the poem itself nor its author's era and biography.</p><p>Form & substance joined nicely in <a TITLE="Joe Merell's website, with clips" HREF="http://www.uhhuhohyeah.com/"><b>Joe Merrell's</b></a> outstanding “Universal Now”, though, another piece from the Urban Research programme shown in the foyer. Merrell used the usually corny technique of 3D glasses to create a eerie, dreamlike promenade through a night-time city by layering slightly displaced footage and aligning the layers to different levels of depth; in the most mundane sequences, it was a genuine recreation of the simple effect you get by looking through multiple, reflecting glass panes at night, in others, the displaced lights and signals hovered in front of the screen like the apparition of an elusive urban deity. Like many pieces of good media art, you can describe the concept of “Universal Now” in one sentence, but have to experience it at first hand to actually understand how it works.</p<br />><br /></span><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/framesURprogram.html"target="_blank"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/images/SML/Beatbox.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Another work I enjoyed was “Beatbox” (2007), a short film by Finnish artist <b>Jani Ruscica</b>, which sets the fine art of <a TITLE="The Godfather of Noize." HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HljXC4rzFmY">beatboxing</a> in a let's say very <i>spatialised</i> urban context (I missed it during Tuesday's screening, but it was fortunately shown as one of the highlights in yesterday's compilation). The film itself is roughly divided in two parts, the first one starring Brooklyn slam poet <a TITLE="What did the five fingers say to the face?" HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brlei3v7uBI">Vocab</a>, the second one showing a performance by several beatboxers, who recreate the sounds and rhythms of their home city in a both hyper-realistic and very theatrical, staged way; the second part being shot in the dark, using a flash-light or beacon to track the performers while they produce a live soundtrack you can easily mistake for the authentic noises of night-time animals and urban racket in the beginning. While difficult to pinpoint, it is obvious that this kind of performance has its political undertones, as has the high-speed flow of the spoken word artists; in a sense, they reclaim the rogue, irrational elements of the city's sound-scape to give it a new texture, and signature. I like this, and I hope you did as well, and also all the other fine films we had the opportunity to see during this year's Directors Lounge – </p><p>Thank you for reading,</p><p>Jacob</p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-89388123951398272242008-02-17T16:57:00.000-08:002008-02-25T17:03:25.498-08:00Keats and Yates are on Your Side<p>(SS) Saturday night, the Directors Lounge presented its second collaboration with the <i>Zebra Poetry FiIm Festival</i>. This project sets poems to film--film being anything that shows up on a screen--and for some poems, this process breathes new life into the medium. The good, from my perspective, was the poetic interpretation by <b>Jochen Kuhn</b>, who animated his poem <b>Sonntag 1</b>. This poem was a rambling narrative of one man's uninspirational Sunday walk through an archetypal deserted urban landscape. The poem and the animation explore how the absence of anything spectacular can actually produce an inspired work of art. The notion of writing a poem about not having anything to write a poem is about as postmodern as you can get. And yet, Kuhn makes the world of the narrator accessible and funny without losing the sense of ennui that inspired (or didn't inspire as it were) the poem. One of my favorite lines goes, "Normally your gifts regulate things but I'm too old to be gifted." The monologue has the quality of a balloon slowly leaking air and the animation does as well. The monochromatic gray palette reveals all kinds of typical scenes in urban dwelling but somehow they are magically empty as opposed to boring. </p><p>Another wonderful interpretation of film and poetry came from the Russian director <b>Igor Strembitsky</b> with his piece <b>Podorozhni (Wayfarers</b>). The poetry of this film is spoken not in a conventional story mode but through various living poets in the director's landscape. The camera leads us through a slightly terrifying mental asylum in the Russian countryside and we first meet a doctor who cheerfully looks after the inmates. He walks into people's rooms and introduces them to the camera. At one point he holds up a long-haired cat and tells it to smell the camera, "Smell the camera and be in the film," he says and there is this sense of spontaneous poetry alive in his words. The inmates also add to this sense of poetry by singing traditional Russian songs about love, the comfort of sleeping and waking to find your mother holding a glass of milk for you, the pleasures of springtime and all manner of subjects. At other points the film is silent and the inmates pose candidly before the camera reminding one of the photographs <b>Diane Arbus </b>became famous for in the 1960's. In richly rendered black and white, the faces of the inmates, rain dripping over leaves, the long spooky corridors of the asylum and the cat's curious face sniffing the camera all have the poetic power of a thousand words. Maybe it's cheating to call this poetry but the landscape is so lush and strange I don't mind. </p><p>The poetry/film combination was not always successful however, and one example stands out for me as really atrocious. <b>Taatske Pieterson's, One Person/ Lucy </b>was a poem and a film that struck a continual sour note. The visual trick to this film was to have a woman's head repeated over and over again, each head representing the deaths of unknown masses which she rattles off line by line. One person dies by swallowing a bad cheeseburger, four people die from a roof collapsing on their heads. Each line is structured in the same way and the effect is not chilling, as I think it was intended to be, but more like one of those reactionary American news programs where everyone is about to die from some toothpaste or bleach product or another and the newscasters faithfully incite terror in the average human being over activities as simple as walking or going to the grocery store. Death is a really interesting subject, no doubt, but relying on the profundity of death to carry a really bad poem is like presuming that just by wearing a tight dress and a lot of lipstick, you will become sexy. There's more to death and sex than merely following a formula and there's more to poetry than words. </p><p>-S.S. </p>>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-92080455868866817422008-02-17T16:45:00.000-08:002008-02-25T16:54:35.658-08:00Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Cities So Different, So Appealing?<p>(JB) Apart from the regular screenings, the Directors Lounge programme included several works that were shown in the foyer as projections or via PC screens; as I unfortunately didn't catch much of Saturday's screenings, I'd like to drop some lines on some of these pieces, which were also part of Klaus W. Eisenlohr's Urban Research series. <br /><a href="http://www.13tershop.de/"target="_blank"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/images/SML/13tershop.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>First, there was <a TITLE="13tershop website" HREF="http://www.13tershop.de/">[13terShop]</a>, a documentary project by <a TITLE="Florian Thalhofer's website" HREF="http://www.thalhofer.com/"><b>Florian Thalhofer</b></a> and <a TITLE="Kolja Mensing's blog" HREF="http://www.deadletters.de/"><b>Kolja Mensing</b></a>, shot during one month spent by the two artists in a <a TITLE="over a hundred shops." HREF="http://www.roland-center.de">mall</a> in Bremen. The DVD was made using a Flash-based <a TITLE="System, and syndrome." HREF="http://www.korsakow.com/">authoring system</a> by Thalhofer himself; the project's websites are rife with the usual buzzwords like “rhizomatic”, “non-linear” or the invariably misunderstood “interactive”, which I stopped caring about some time ago (and even more with the advent of a new breed of brilliant, cinematic video games like <i>Portal</i> or <i>Gears of War</i>, which make all the ruminations on narration and/or interactivity somehow irrelevant), but I do care about a intuitive interface, interesting footage and some good editing, which were all present in Thalhofer's and Mensing's DVD piece. The editing itself is part of the new-media approach of the [13terShop] DVD, which consists of a number of short scenes – interviews with workers and shoppers, and rather atmospheric footage with a voice-over by the artists themselves – that are arranged in a way that creates various possible paths through the material (after watching one of the clips, you can choose between two others). I'll refrain from using the term “story-lines” here, as this entire idea of the project seems not to be the creation of a coherent narrative, but an accumulation of fragments; you will recognize the faces of the different interviewees after a while, so it's up to you if you choose to listen to another of their stories, or somebody else's. Obviously, the choice of the material included on the DVD has been the artists' in the end, but the process that led to the film's creation was somehow opened to the public by a web diary and the possibility to comment on and even contribute to the work via the internet and, of course, directly in the shopping mall itself. This kind of both very subjective but, yes, interactive – obviously not through the simple click-to-choose element of the DVD, but rather through many layers of possible feedback included in the documentary process. I suppose this might be the way journalism will be going in the future; Gonzo journalism had unearthed the subjective core of the documentary process in the 20<sup>th</sup> century, and maybe it's time to pack even more subjectivity into it with some advanced media technology. Way to go, Web 2.0! (I suppose this will sound as stale as the entire nineties “rhizome” thing ten years from now, but, well, I'm writing a blog here)</p><br /><p><a href="http://www.ellen-bornkessel.de/"target="_blank"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/images/SML/HappyOnes.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>I had been writing about the parasitic use of the urban environment earlier in the context of the <i>Surveillance Camera Players</i> and other works; there was a hint of the irreverent usage of architecture too in “The Happy Ones”, a video installation by <b><a TITLE="Ellen Bornkessel's website" HREF="http://www.ellen-bornkessel.de/">Ellen Bornkessel</a></b> from 2007, although the scenes of urban leisure and relaxation she had captured might have been as much intended by well-meaning architects and planners, as also somehow accidental re-interpretations of various spaces by the cities' inhabitants (including rabbits). Official urban planners often try to stress the friendly and somehow utopian qualities of new-built environments, and Bornkessel managed to work out situations in which the often bizarre concepts of utopian aesthetics collided with similarly dubious or blunt displays of innocent fun & frolicking – including an image of a huge cluster of fancy balloons, which might have come out right of a <a TITLE="Kawaii!" HREF="http://english.kaikaikiki.co.jp/"><i>Superflat</i></a> painting with its rather demonic incarnation of juvenile paraphernalia.</p><p>Cheers, JB</p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-68919002407315127562008-02-16T16:30:00.000-08:002008-02-25T16:38:50.028-08:00China is Naked<strong><span style="font-size:180%;"><br />印<br />象<br />中<br />国</span></strong><br /><br /><p><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/post/27278237" target="_blank"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5v9l4bawhKymMOq_500.jpg" border="0" /></a>(S.S.) A continuation of Marina Foxley's Chinese selections...The last two films shown had quite a lot in common. The first, <b>Murmur</b>, (Zhang Xuezhou 4 min 2005) was a short about two girls living next door to each other on the 11th floor of an apartment building. The film begins with one of the women on a cell phone having a very loud metaphysical conversation in front of her neighbor. "Yeah he died...True true true...but I'm not you. I'm me. I am only myself." Suddenly the neighbor girl gets a cell call as well as the two women are riding up on a elevator. The metaphysical bug seems to be going around because the second girl has a similar conversation, "I am not you. I'm only myself..." But her call ends with her becoming increasingly exasperated and then screaming into the phone and promptly hanging up. It's rather a funny moment because it's sort of intimate and weird. The presence of her neighbor in the elevator seems to have no effect on her behavior. She screams and doesn't even acknowledge her neighbor as the two get off the elevator together. But soon they are both in their apartments in their bedrooms trying to fall asleep. The camera keeps jumping from the two women in their separate beds to a sort of other realm where the two women are sleeping naked together int he same bed, entwining their bodies in vaguely sexual positions. As we watch the women in these various dimensions, alone in their beds and then together in their coiled embraces, the idea of who one is and whether one actually exists seems especially pressing. Somehow these two women are interconnected and the filmmaker wants us to see that this relationship is stronger than reality. Who we are on an elevator is different than who we are when we sleep and different still from the id driven realm of our dreams, our archetypal shared consciousness.</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/post/27278341" target="_blank"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5v9mttmY6nvYheo_500.jpg" border="0" /></a>In the last film, <b>Equality</b>, (Xu Li, 24 min 2005) the idea of group consciousness versus individual will is taken to an extreme point. Homosocial relationships play a major role in this film. The term homosiciality is a sociological term which describes the relationships between members of the same sex, especially men. It is not obliged to be sexual relationships, merely same-sex social interactions. The term homosociality was advanced by Eve Sedgwick in her book <i>Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire</i>. Sedgwick's contribution is the notion that the boundaries between the social and the sexual are blurry; thus homosociality and homosexuality are connected and can never fully be disentangled. She acknowledges that the nature of this boundary varies from society to society and from era to era, and even within one society it can differ between women and men. </p><p>The homo-social bond becomes the ultimate oppressive force for one member of the group who doesn't want to go along with a plan to swap girlfriends. The group leader instructs all of the guys to gang up on this one dude, chase him through a beach at low tide, push him down into the mud and then tear his clothes off of his body with the threat to burn one piece of clothes every five seconds until he submits to the groups will. In the mean time, the character of this group is made evident by the filmmaker with shots of them endlessly smoking cigarettes, horsing around and making crude jokes to one another. It's difficult to compare the nature of a Chinese buddy film to that of an American or western film. There are codes of conduct that are just not part of my experience and therefore hard to draw conclusions from. For example, in one very funny scene after they leave the beach, the whole gang dresses in stolen women's clothing and in the middle of a two lane highway they perform a ridiculous surreal burlesque dance. The sight of so many young thuggy guys dancing in women's clothes with totally serious expressions on their face is enough to make <b>Mathew Barney</b> regret he wasn't the director. But what does it mean? to China? Is crossdressing the same sort of light and playful activity it is in the US, as long as it's only indulged in the rarest circumstances? Or is it a sort of extreme social taboo being enacted on screen by a fearless director? I suppose the only way to learn the subtleties of Chinese social customs is through films like this one and plenty of exposure to the new maverick films being made there now. Either that or a really expensive ticket to Shanghai. </p><p>Further befuddlement over what is homo-social and what is homosexual and how it is all intended to be interpreted arises when the stray member of the gang finally gives in to the group and they head out to a spa to prepare themselves for the girlfriend swap. The gang spends the last part of the film totally naked in close proximity. Locker room behavior is rampant with butt slapping, group showers and light wrestling. All I could think the whole time I was watching this long spa sequence is how trusting the actors were of their director to let him film them so intimately. The homosexual overtones were unmistakable to me, especially during a long take of water beading off the back of one of the guys. The sweaty sensual world of the spa was intoxicating to behold. It was as if the rules of normal conduct had been suspended in this environment. Martina Foxley, whom I spoke to after the film, considers this director to be a sensualist and she also told me that in China, nudity amongst all male company is nothing shameful. It's absolutely normal. Mixed gender nudity is quite improper however, and when the parade of girlfriends comes waltzing through the spa totally unperturbed by the rampant male nudity, this moment is sort of shocking for a Chinese audience. The butt slapping is par for the course.</p><p><b>Equality</b> has two levels of meaning--the equality of one girlfriend in exchange for another; and the all for one/ one for all attitude of the gang. In both circumstances the notion of equality is problematic. The film can be seen as a microcosm of the relationship between the will of the group and the will of the individual. The group will wins out over the individual but the conscience of the individual is strong and the guilt and shame over his behavior is palpable. </p><p>more soon...S.S. </p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-88635823050614382862008-02-16T16:00:00.000-08:002008-02-25T16:23:20.360-08:00It gets even harder with those pesky umlauts<p><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/post/27276756"target="_blank"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5v8sb326Yy61NQE_250.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>(JB) I'm a big video games geek, so I'd really like to like Second Life. Thus, I eagerly attended Fridays's show of further SL performances, concluding the festival's small detour into VR realms curated by <a TITLE="Olga Wunderlich's website" HREF="http://olgawunderlich.tk/">Olga Wunderlich</a>. As I noted in my first SL rant, the essential thing to look out for might be the performative aspect here, and the first part of the programme was a screening of a real-time performance by <b><a TITLE="Juria Yoshikawa's blog" HREF="http://memespelunk.org/blog/">Juria Yoshikawa</a></b> and <b>Noizz Papp</b> which somehow reminded me of the most traditional ideas of collaborative art, or, more precisely, artistic community. To an ambient tune provided by Noizz Papp, Juria Yoshikawa conducted a kind of virtual, kinetic ballet performance, in which every participant would change his pre-programmed outfit at his command; the outfit not only providing a costume & an array of brightly coloured shapes around the player's avatar, but also a script for the movements. There was a distinct retro touch to both the concept and the aesthetics; you might imagine that the pioneers of early <a TITLE="Unfortunately, free-flowing cloth is still difficult to render on a home computer." HREF="http://www.isadoraduncan.org/Gallery/gallery.html">modern dance</a> or the protagonists of the 60ies counter-culture would have enjoyed it thoroughly, also taking in account the factual establishment of a global community – Juria Yoshikawa from somewhere in Japan, Noizz Papp from Stuttgart in Germany, and the players from supposedly all over the world. Still, the ensemble being scattered across the universe is of no further relevance for the performance itself beyond the actual participation of the players, so it is somehow truer to an international agenda than many attempts to institutionalise so-called multiculturalism. Also, you are able to fly in SL, so this might indeed be what Timothy Leary was after, in the end.</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://directorslounge.net/dltv/betatestsmall.html"target="_blank"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://directorslounge.net/dltv/betatest_Drivasthumb.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> In the evening, we saw a show curated by <b>George Drivas</b>, whose “Case Study” had been a part of Thursday's shorts compilation and the opening programme. Drivas' selection included older films by several of the film-makers we had already encountered, like André Werner and Allan Brown, and also his own “<a TITLE="Watch it on Directors Lounge TV" HREF="http://directorslounge.net/dltv/betatestsmall.html">Beta Test</a>” (2005), which was highly reminiscent of the later “Case Study” in its conception – black & white photographs of Berlin architecture, a pair of protagonists, a narrative transported mostly though ticker-like titles – but with a different tone; instead of the menace transported in the newer film, “Beta Test” documents what might be a tragic android romance (as with “Case Study”, the entire Sci-Fi aspect is transported via the abstract qualities of the photographs and the technical wording of the titles). </p><p>“<a TITLE="More info on Meridian Days, with video" HREF="http://www.freewaves.org/artists/t_fife/">Meridian Days</a>” by <b>Trevor Fife</b> from 2003 is another entry in the semi-documentary, semi-experimental genre; shot in 16 mm during a three-week ship cruise, it merges highly composed images with more personal, nearly “touristic” footage of Fife's Grandmother, whom he accompanied on the cruise. The very subjective and the very abstract are hard to discern, though, as the pieces of dialogue or information inserted as audio clips or on-screen text might concern Fife himself, or might be something completely else he picked up during the travel. The luxury liner underscores the film's melancholic ambivalence, itself being a highly artificial, confined space which somehow produces an exceptional & existential condition, restricting the passenger's options to either leisure or boredom, or the utterly detached, purely aesthetic perception characterising some of the film's shots. </p><p><b>Kenji Ouellet</b> uses a starkly composed set-up for altogether different ends in “Lesson 13” (2003), a short based on some typical dialogue from a German language course. As most of the lines deal with dining and dating, there is a lot of humorous potential to be found here, and Ouellet elegantly steers around the various possibilities of transforming them into the obvious sitcom format; instead, the little scenes are performed by just two actors whose wooden renditions of the stock phrases are eventually disrupted by sudden bouts of over-acting (complete with overly dramatic sound effects & music) – they even throw in a fun little robot dance in the language lessons' obligatory partying episode. The great German comedian Loriot has often extracted the most poignant social commentary from the lines of everyday dialogue, and although “Lesson 13” is far more a Dada performance piece than comedy, Kenji Ouellet seems to have a fine ear for the subtle absurdity of conventionalised speech; this does make sense, however, as – according to his <a TITLE="KO cv on the Visionaria17 festival website" HREF="http://visionaria.eu/eng/autori.php?idautore=2018&nomeautore=Kenji_Ouellet">cv</a> – he had been a professional pianist before he went on to film-making. </p><p>See you later, JB</p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-30553326682350145192008-02-16T15:41:00.000-08:002008-02-25T15:56:41.279-08:00China is Tired<span style="font-size:180%;"><strong>印<br />象<br />中<br />国</strong></span><br /><br /><br /><br /><p><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/post/27276050" target="_blank"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5v8953vXUf9u06T_500.jpg" border="0" /></a>(S.S.) Marina Foxley's second night of films from China took up the personal rather than the political. The first film, Night Bus, a love story about two people in side by side trains that feel a connection inspite of the isolating and alienating environment they must travel through. When they finally get off their respective busses and meet in person, the man is lame and short. He is so embarrassed that he starts to cry and the woman, who was crying on her bus earlier, cheers him up by making a funny face. The two walk off together into the artificially lit night. The idea of facade and the revelation that no one is perfect seems especially poignant for China right now, or for any country that is obsessed with expanding and gaining power. It is the small, naked intimate moments between imperfect people that makes living anywhere worthwhile. And no matter how perfect we pretend to be or strive to be, we will always have our shortcomings. </p><br /><p><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/post/27275902" target="_blank"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5v84kcgf8T3KQYu_500.jpg" border="0" /></a>In the second film, Wanna Sleep, the modern world encroaches on two people who are exhausted by the pace of Shanghai life to the point where they can't even catch some z's. What is striking about this film, from my limited knowledge of Chinese domestic life, is just how normal everything looks. Laptops, big TV's, Ipods, futons, breakfast smoothies, bad Ikea lamps, and alarmcloks are everywhere. The isolation of modern living is evident with just a few key purchases. At the end of the film, the message from the filmmaker appears. THe translation reads something like, "Wanna sleep? The power to sleep is like the power to have a good life, it's in your hands." The message is that the speed of Shanghai can be resisted. You can choose to slow down and get some rest. A powerful message indeed as it is midnight in Berlin and I would like to rest myself! I will be back tomorrow with the last two films from Marina Foxley.</p><p>-S.S. </p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-3546585335023722172008-02-15T14:10:00.000-08:002008-02-25T14:43:57.096-08:00Jump They Say<span style="font-size:180%;"><strong>印<br />象<br />中<br />国</strong><br /></span><br /><br /><p>(JB) Marina Foxley showed the first part of her “Impressions of China” <a title="PDF of the programme" href="http://www.fragments-media.com/download/DL08China1_en.pdf">programme</a> yesterday, and I'd like to write some lines on my two favorites - “<a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/post/27270827">The Bridge</a>” by <b>Xu Xin</b> (2007) and “<a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/post/27270892">Terrace</a>” by <b>Song Di </b>(2006) .<br /><br /><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/post/27270827"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5v55wcvrWEGfxxO_500.jpg" border="0" /></a>“The Bridge” is a non-narrative documentary on the border to the cinematic essay, comparable perhaps to the films NYC and Belgrade films we had seen on Monday, but with a decisive political undertone. The film's subject is the gigantic <a title="Some facts on Wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Yangtze_River_Bridge">Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge</a>, which is not only a important part of Nanjing's infrastructure, but also a kind of monument to the Chinese People's Republic's engineering potential. Xu Xin's film, though, ignores the heroic aspect of the bridge, focussing rather on small scenes of people somehow associated with the bridge or simply passing by, like a young tourist couple taking pictures, some workers whiling away time in their cabin or a man in a raincoat trying to cross bridge at a traffic light, which – judging from the display attached to the lights – is set to just 7 seconds, so crossing it within the allocated time frame and not getting stuck in the middle of the road seems like a veritable feat in itself. Obviously – besides taking pictures for your album –, the bridge is not intended for any kind of true interaction between architecture and the people; a problem often plaguing institutions and structures in political systems which have to put the identifier “People's” into their denomination, as the connection between “people” and “society” might be eventually overlooked otherwise. There is an irony to the social realist statue depicting the traditional warrior/worker/doctrinaire standing on the side of the bridge, shown at the beginning of the film – it should have rather been a miniature replica of the bridge itself, or maybe the Chinese mainland (think of Ai Weiwei's sarcastic “<a title="Ai Weiwei exhibition details on Artfacts.Net" href="http://www.artfacts.net/index.php/pageType/exhibitionInfo/exhibition/13384/lang/1">Map of China</a>”, carved from the remnants of a destroyed historical temple), instead of any kind of even aesthetically & politically streamlined individual. Unsurprisingly, the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge is a popular <a title="Mr Chen's account is up to 104 people, just google him up" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/21/international/asia/21bridge.html">suicide venue</a> in China; Xu Xiu states a number of 2000 people at the end of the film, a supposedly <a title="never trust statistics, anyway" href="http://www.weirdasianews.com/2007/01/25/nanjing-yangtze-suicide-bridge/">unauthorised</a> but still shocking statistic.</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/post/27270892"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5v57cm4HoIYalH6_500.jpg" border="0" /></a>“Suicide is the subject matter of Song Di's film, too; however, this one is entirely fictional and decidedly narrative. In 12 minutes, Song Di develops the heart-warming story of a school-girl giving a lesson in practical escapism to a suicidal elderly man on the brink of hurling himself from a tower block. Just as the film seems to get overpowered by its feel-good magical realism tone, the story takes a rather tragic turning; I won't spoil the ending, but let's say that this isn't exactly Mary Poppins. It isn't <i>Suicide Circle</i> or a Takashi Miike movie, either; the tragicomical setting rather reminded me of the fine traditions of Czech or Finnish cinema, or, to build a bridge to a different art form, to the romantically infused accounts of utter failure by artists like Urs Lüthi or <a title="Peter Land vita and pics" href="http://artnews.info/peterland/">Peter Land</a>. There is no false melodrama in Song Di's short, but rather a kind of dandyesque defiance of the inevitable; the protagonist rigs himself up in swimming trunks and goggles for his attempt at the final jump.</p><p>Thursday's “Strange Stories” compilation had its share of unfortunate deaths, too; firstly, there was <a title="Erik Urlings' website" href="http://www.erikurlings.com/"><b>Erik Urlings</b></a>' “Knäbelflocken” (2007), an utterly bizarre and rather indescribable short which seemed like a crossover between a gangster movie, a Dada performance and a <a title="You'd wonder if there even is such a thing like a 'right gun'" href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DEFDD153EF933A25750C0A9629C8B63&scp=2">free-mason initiation ritual</a>, set in the ruins of a small countryside chapel; then, <b>Lucas Figueroa's</b> “<a title="Boletos' official website" href="http://www.boletosporfavor.com/">Boletos por Favor</a>” (“The Tickets, Please”) from 2007, with a Harold-Pinter-style take on the utter horror of fare dodging. Again, the plot takes a couple of twists, and I wouldn't like to spoil the fun for anyone; so try to catch it yourself if you haven't been able to attend Thursday's screening. On a side note – while the film was set entirely inside a moving train, and, more specifically, the already rather dubious space between two compartments, Figueroa had included some CGI special effect shots of the train passing through a kind of post-apocalyptic but retro-looking landscape, which I found remarkable because they were virtually superfluous for the plot itself, but still added an additional sense of style to the film.</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://directorslounge.net/dltv/eyesofmankind.html"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://directorslounge.net/DL2008/Nadya01sm.jpg" border="0" /></a>Finally, there was an underlying tragedy and the presumptive doom of one of the protagonists of <b>André Werner's</b> “<a href="http://directorslounge.net/dltv/eyesofmankind.html">The Eyes of Mankind</a>” (2007). While there was a considerable amount of archival cinematic snippets involved in Werner's take on expressionist Sci-Fi drama (think Murnau here), it had far more original footage than the afore-mentioned “Flash”, and a clear-cut and highly condensed plot. The nostalgic effect of the aesthetics and narrative structure was subtly undermined by the plot, which was essentially about, well, the triumphant victory of the moving image over its printed predecessor. I'd love to see a similarly made full feature film by Werner, but I suppose it would take years of work simply browsing the archives for adequate material (and, let's face it, expressionist film-making's narratives might indeed have deserved some radical compression in their own time, too, so maybe 14 minutes is just about the right length, after all).</p><p>Bye for now - JB</p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-24716036881200366882008-02-14T14:47:00.000-08:002017-03-23T06:05:41.403-07:00Impressions IV<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw7yuj8grQi2kM_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw7yuj8grQi2kM_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Lovely Lounge Lizards</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw6e5diOlStZrg_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw6e5diOlStZrg_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw5xbo5mzegHwv_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw5xbo5mzegHwv_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
<a href="http://www.donbadhabong.de/">Don Bad’habong</a></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw1lifmdqqdzne_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw1lifmdqqdzne_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw10bbJDEnjzXX_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw10bbJDEnjzXX_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
world premiere of Daniela Butsch´s Landschaft schnell</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvv8mpXb9GdRf9_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvv8mpXb9GdRf9_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Daniel Schubert of <a href="http://www.tagezphoto.blogspot.com/">Tagez photo</a> fame </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://.jpg/" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvs4ow65DUzlKv_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Director Telemach Wiesinger, long time regular of DL, arriving from Freiburg</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvqlgphtkaawve_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvqlgphtkaawve_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
a happy head of production, Joppel Buerkle</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mwalazCvJRip0l_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mwalazCvJRip0l_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Magician of the music systems, Parry Hotter</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw953aId5cR9Nj_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mw953aId5cR9Nj_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
DJ Jouka of <a href="http://www.whatisjazz.de/">W(h)at Is Jazz</a> fame</blockquote>
placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-25541585173553555102008-02-14T14:46:00.000-08:002017-03-23T06:09:34.935-07:00Architecture is Ruining my LIfe(S.S.) A little backtracking to do here...I'd like to start by talking about the fascinating lecture Merce Rodrigo Garcia gave about her research as an architect into the virtual representations of inhabited space in Japanese independent film. The idea of a Spanish architect studying Japanese independent films and scouring them for traces of inspiration about what it means to inhabit Japan is mind-boggling in and of itself. The fact that MRG can make such a coherent argument out of this practice is down right incredible. I think the key argument for her has something to do with the idea of built space versus the idea of inhabited space. Cities that change very rapidly, like Tokyo, have a lot of flexibility when it comes to the way the population uses space. There is this organic, real time, fluid approach to using space that is a model built by the everyday people that populate Tokyo and then there is this prescribed top-down model of building space which begins with some megalomaniacal architect and a lot of money and ends with a bunch of people who feel trapped by their working and/or living quarters.<br />
The film clips MRG showed represented both sides of this architectural dialectic. On the "built" side of things the film clips from <b>Crazy Family </b>(80's) and <b>Tokyo Fist</b> (90's) represented the suffocation of the average man by the oppressive architecture of Tokyo in the midst of an economic boom. <b>Crazy Family</b> told the story of an upwardly mobile family who move from the city to an American style suburban house on the outskirts of Tokyo. Once settled there, the family becomes obsessed with their individual privacy and they slowly disappear from each others lives culminating in an absurd parody of suburban life. The family leaves their home in the suburbs and takes up a nomadic existence in between two highways. In this primitive base camp, the family unites once more. The fact that their peaceful existence occurs in a space that is not recognized as a home speaks to MRG's notion that inhabited space is less suffocating than built space.<br />
In <b>Tokyo Fist</b>, a Japanese version of <b>The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit</b>, or <b>Fight Club</b>, a man's subjectivity is taken over by his urban environs. He mounts the platform for the subway, climbs the endless stairs to his cookie cutter apartment, and works in his cubicle like everyone else. At some point, he snaps and tries to destroy his environment. He pounds at the walls with a pipe and exasperates himself in the name of liberating himself from his oppressed lifestyle.<br />
The built landscape of Tokyo in the 90's melts into the virtual realities of the current decade. Tokyo has become a place for fetishized subcultures to flourish. In the film <b>Peep Show</b>, two seemingly unconnected subcultures function as alternative landscapes and define spaces in the city for their purposes. The first subculture is the Gothic Lolita fashion subculture, most prevalent in the Shibuya district. These women dress like Victorian dolls with Mary Jane shoes, ruffle dresses, pinafores and knee-high stockings. The effect is sexy and ridiculous at the same time. These women congregate in certain quarters of the Shibuya district providing the rest of the city with a chance to check out their world. The film explores the notion of bifurcated personas these women experience when they dress up as something or someone they may or may not really be. The notion of costumes and hiding within them in order to evade reality is a theme throughout the film. On the other end of this virtual coin are the Otaku, a real group of Tokyo-ites who are so socially withdrawn into their computer worlds that they never leave their rooms. They communicate via the Internet and find the greater physical world exhausting.<br />
MRG sees the inhabited spaces of Tokyo as being linked to a historical and cultural process so for her, the fact that subcultures occupy virtual space is just as important to the architecture of the city as when they occupy actual space. The fact that Tokyo shifts to accommodate new cultures and identities gives it a virtual quality as well. And when the streets are flooded with Gothic Lolita's, there is a carnival like atmosphere which exists both physically and virtually. Space is per-formative, MRG reminds us. This is very clear in the 16mm film <b>Private Novel, </b>in which a filmmaker shoots his life, his friends and and his surroundings over a ten year period. The city takes on a haunting quality under his gaze, especially when he films Emperor Hirohito's funeral.<br />
In conclusion, MRG suggested that the tactics of independent film could be beneficial to architects. Viewing the way people use space, virtual or otherwise, is a more useful process than contracting to build giant space sucking monsters that only serve to oprress their inhabitants.placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-5962892002517922322008-02-14T03:43:00.000-08:002008-02-26T17:22:36.958-08:00The chicken Tetsuo thing<a href="http://www.volatileworks.org/projects.html#witkacy"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5uigun74err9OAN_500.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><p>(JB) I'd like to expand a bit on the chicken Tetsuo thing from my last post, as there was another film by <b>Allan Brown</b>, “The Millard Symphony” (2007), shown during yesterday's screening which ventured even further into industrial territory (also, funnily, Merce Rodrigo Garcia showed some clips from <i>Tokyo Fist</i> during her lecture, a later film by <i>Tesuo</i> director Shinya Tsukamoto). The “Millard Symphony” is a longer film than “Uncle Cluck”, assembled from several pieces of various filmed & found footage showing everything from a sheep herd to scenes which look like they have been shot during rather unfortunate experiments with mental patients. Also, while the shorter film had relied on the off-camera narration, this one has a far more complex soundtrack, including the typical machine samples of industrial music. There has always been a kind of neighbourhood between the industrial music scene and experimental film-making, and especially the one including either found footage or the production of seemingly archival and artificially damaged or aged materials. There's Derek Jarman's work with London experimental band Throbbing Gristle, and of course the music video to Ministry's popular “<a TITLE="ding ding donga dong dong ding dong" HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RBKTo5K14M">Jesus built my hot rod</a>” single, with various clips of found footage mixed with shots of the band performing; Mark Romanek then tried to re-create an even more “archival” look in his video for industrial rock's Nine Inch Nail's “<a TITLE="They apparently called it 'music film' in the silent film era." HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWncI51ggH8">Closer</a>” – there's even a fake archival title card at the beginning. While it's a style thing in the end, the proximity of industrial music & experimental film might come from a mutual suspicion of an essential corruption of the technically produced sound and image, with the artists seemingly exposing the most irrational – and irrationally abrasive – qualities of their respective means of production.</p><p>Because I had already written on four of Wednesday's films in my postings on the opening last week, I'll pick out two more films from Tuesday's shows. <b><a TITLE="Angelica Chio's website" HREF="http://www.angelicachio.net">Angelica Chio</a>'s</b> short “I'm off to Mexico” from 2007 is a clever take on dialogue in the time of the internet; Chio chopped up one scene from a 1943 Mexican film and re-built it as a series of text lines from a web forum or chat, with the first appearance of each character recorded as their joining time and a counter for each “post”. It's a simple idea, but also a reference to the linearity of the dramatic dialogue employed by mainstream narrative cinema.</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.volatileworks.org/projects.html#witkacy"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/images/SML/PromontoryPoint.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>“D R I F T (Promontory Point)” by <b>Eric Fleischauer</b> and <a TITLE="Jesse McLean's website" HREF="http://jessemclean.com/"><b>Jesse McLean</b></a>, shown during the <i>Urban Resarch</i> screening, is a piece which somehow continues the surveillance topic of some of the previous entries. This is a kind of rogue surveillance, though; Fleischauer and McLean have attached a wireless camera to a drifting weather balloon, and there is no sense of control or voyeurism in the transmitted. While there are D R I F T films covering <a TITLE="More info on D R I F T from the UIC website" HREF="http://adweb.aa.uic.edu/web/events/news.php?id=177">various cities</a> and landscapes, “Promontory Point” shows a <a TITLE="Google sees everything." HREF="http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&hl=en&ll=41.795264,-87.577289&spn=0.006991,0.010461&t=h&z=17">piece of land</a> in Chicago, which was also the site of a radar tower for a <a TITLE="also available as a scale model kit" HREF="http://m-epperson.home.comcast.net/~m-epperson/nike/">nearby missile defence system</a> until 1971; it felt rather uncanny that the video image broke down again and again, as if the ghosts of Cold War technology somehow tried to secure their former homestead and disrupt any unauthorised monitoring.</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.volatileworks.org/projects.html#witkacy"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/images/SML/Mobility.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>“Mobility”, a short film by Hungarian artists <b>Tibor Gulyás</b> & <b>Balázs Irimiás</b> from 2003, takes the viewer on a trip through Budapest, ignoring troublesome obstacles such as walls or other solid manifestations of the urban layout. While the film did strive a bit to obviously for mainstream appeal with its recurring images of partying and other forms of recreation – it's a bit like a horizontal version of the Pepsi “<a TITLE="it's so quiet you can hear a pin drop." HREF="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2kzws_pepsi-black-eyed-peas-jump_ads">Jump</a>” commercial minus the mayhem – the editing and the use of camera zoom is virtually flawless. It seemed like the most close take on the <i>First Person Shooter</i> video game genre you might get with non-interactive film, without the shooting, obviously; the movement within the film displayed the same kind of absolute linearity like the one-way spaces in video games, which are meant to be traversed in the fastest and most direct possible way, with just some short breaks for the cinematics.</p><p>See you later, JB</p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-47099250788450159892008-02-13T03:04:00.000-08:002008-02-25T03:34:28.126-08:00Girls Just Wanna Have Fun<p>The idea of universal sisterhood is about as preposterous as the idea of universal language but advertising and the media machine pushes this insipid notion on women at every turn. We want makeup, jewelry, babies, yogurt, perfume...carefree fun. It's always profoundly revealing when women filmmakers, artists and writers endeavor to suggest the truth about their needs and desires or their particular spin on the desires of other women. Over the past couple of days, I've been taking special notice of women as directors, actresses and subjects of their own films and it has been a very revealing process.</p><p>Catherine Forster's<b> We Shop</b> (USA 8min 2007) took on the subject of shopping as a woman's favorite pass-time and chose the rural suburbs of North Carolina rather than the saturated commercial landscape of Madison Avenue as her microcosm. The film follows two women, a middle-aged granddaughter and her elderly grandmother, as they tour their favorite stores and then go home to refresh and beautify themselves. The film opens with an acapella rendition of Cyndi Lauper's hit Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Against the backdrop of passe department stores and dinky boutiques, the song has a haunting quality. The vocals alone sound so empty and the experience of shopping takes on an inevitable emptiness as well. But the two main characters are unperturbed by the supposed meaninglessness of shopping. They speak about the activity as if it were their life support. Shopping is a way to evade loneliness. Department stores are places to eavesdrop on funny conversations that you can laugh about with your friends later on. The middle-aged granddaughter insists that Belks, the store they most often frequent, is 'like a second family. We know everyone. We talk to everyone and we become a part of these people's lives.' She says without a hint of irony. </p><p>For Forsters part, she allows the women to speak openly and resists the urge to satirize her subjects. These are very normal Southern women with what they perceive to be very normal interests. They are feminine to a fault, even up into their 90's but Forster doesn't dwell on the futility of dressing up when you are so old you can barely reach the clothes in your closet. She does pan a couple of times to closets filled with junk and she suggests the American disease of consumerism in these moments but mostly she avoids this judgement. In fact, Forster does something really brave--she allows the women to enjoy their shopping without villianizing them or making them pathetic. Shopping becomes a ritual for female interaction, a chance to smell different, smooth your skin and chat about your life. It seems as harmless as a quilting bee. But that eerie acapella Girls Just Wanna Have Fun reminds the viewer that the ritual of shopping carries a good deal of mythology and can never just be shopping in and of itself. </p><p><b>Ann Hirsch</b> has a complicated relationship to consumerism and femininity as well. In her short film <b>I Love You, I Hate You, Emaciated,</b> (5 min 2007) she covers her mouth with a cellular phone and mouths 'I love you' over and over again, making exaggerated kissy faces at the camera. This goes on for quite some time and then their is a sharp cut to a girl in a t-shirt with her hair severely pulled back sitting on a dormitory couch. It seems like the same girl who was mouthing I love you just seconds before. With unmistakable candidness this girl begins to describe her anorexia and the complicated manipulations she must enact in order to continue to starve herself. She realizes that the disease is her burden and that other people don't want to shoulder it so she performs normal eating habits in front of them to trick them into thinking she is healthy. ' I just eat a donut a couple of times in front of them and they think everything is fine. Then I don't eat for the rest of the day. ' The irony of pretending to want anonymity as an anorexic and then making a film about yourself and your anorexia is a bit heavy handed. But the subject of anorexia itself is so indefatigable for viewers that Hirsch can get away with this hypocrisy. Our obsessive need for information about anorexia is like our addiction to shopping. It's unhealthy and it's a closed system that perpetuates itself. The more obsessed you are with image and consumerism, even on a supposed informational level, the more likely you are to have actual image and consumer issues. As in <b>We Shop</b>, the most winning aspect of Hirsch's short is her directness and honesty. Both films involve a greater media driven system but the perspective of these women is refreshingly sincere and unapologetic.</p><br /><br /><a href="http://directorslounge.net/NadyaCazan/nem.html"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5uhhyj4RgcYbRmX_400.jpg" /></a><br />Maja Borg SE Ottica Zero 8 min , 2007<br /><br /><br /><p>Nadya Cazan's unapologetic nature is surprisingly the sort of attitude that Madison Avenue tends to co-opt for commodification purposes. She's beautiful, cool, enchanting and she doesn't seem to need much. If I saw her in a commercial for perfume or yogurt, I would probably immediately go out and buy some. In the film <b>Ottica Zero</b>, Swedish filmmaker Maja Borg relies heavily on the muse like qualities of Nadya Cazan. The film is half biography, half futurist fantasy. Nadya is (or plays) a woman who was on the brink of major commercial success when she turns her back on the star system ('I didn't want to make anything that had no purpose,' she says) to live as an ascetic amongst modern society. She does not touch money. She wears a Muslim-style body covering. She lives on kosher food and fish heads. As Nadya speaks about her past and what has led her to her present, their is a second monologue from a 90 year-old futurist (can somebody say oxymoron) who has dedicated the rest of his life to offering an alternative resource based economy. No more money and all the messy social strife that goes along with it. In his Utopian vision, people would trade useful resources for other useful resources and we would all be free from judgement. </p><br /><a href="http://directorslounge.net/NadyaCazan/nem.html"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5uhm2fkPqlXgrWY_400.jpg" /></a><br /><a href="http://directorslounge.net/NadyaCazan/nem.html"target="_blank">NEM</a> in Maja Borg´s Ottica Zero<br /><br /><p>The film is breathtakingly beautiful. Borg captures Cazan as some sort of modern day Alice in Wonderland and asceticism hasn't looked this good since Carl Dreyer's <b>The Passion of Joan of Arc</b>. Somehow these three films orbit each other in their relationship to judgement, consumerism and the feminine ideal and I suspect beauty is at the heart of this constellation. </p><p>--more soon S.S. </p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-73046764688921500252008-02-13T02:37:00.000-08:002008-02-25T02:59:57.509-08:00I've watched you change<a href="http://www.volatileworks.org/projects.html#witkacy"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5ug37dozXxadF6w_500.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><p>(JB) Tuesday's shows were packed with short films ranging from the experimental to the dramatic and the outright funny, so I'll just pick out a few in no particular order. <b>Allan Brown's</b> “Uncle Cluck” (2007) – which was already shown during the opening preview – might be described as a chicken <a TITLE="Man-Machine Interface" HREF="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/49187/Tetsuo-The-Iron-Man/overview">tetsuo</a>. Allan Brown is a member of the Canadian media arts collective <a TITLE="Volatile Works website" HREF="http://www.volatileworks.org"><i>volatile works</i></a> and works under the <i>nom de plume</i> of Witkacy, after an well-known polish <a TITLE="Witkacy bio on Wikipedia" HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witkacy">avant-garde painter</a> & author of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century. There is indeed a hint of the whimsical but still utterly dark work of the polish artist in Brown's short film, which is essentially 5 minutes of altered 16mm footage of, yes, a chicken, with an off-camera monologue describing the ghastly transformation of a an avowed chicken-hater. While the tone of the monologue – something between Kafka and Roald Dahl – might suggest an aesthetic along the lines of a Tim Burton movie, it works really well with the deeply corrupted archival quality of the sound and images.</p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://directorslounge.net/DL2008/12.html"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5ugbwidZIiwoEUM_500.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Another fun piece was <b>Miguel Machado's</b> “The Long Overtone”, a “cine poem in five parts.” While some parts were rather architectural studies, others were brightly coloured, abstract animations reminiscent of the work of early animation artists like <a TITLE="Fischinger's Composition in Blue" HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o93RWtaLe-g">Oskar Fischinger</a>, set to a fine post-rock tune (which, in turn, reminded me of the virtually unknown but brilliant US band <a TITLE="Visit Southern Records palaeolithic website" HREF="http://www.southern.com/southern/band/PAULN/19721_audio.html">Paul Newman</a>, if anyone cares). Interestingly, both the architectural footage and the animated parts blended seamlessly due to Machado's attention for dominance of the rectangular shape in, well, basically everything. In a similar way, the precise montage of the “silent” parts developed an own visual rhythm, which was reflected by the actual rhythms of the following, “orchestrated” pieces.</p><br /><br /><object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/apqjMD0lp_s&rel=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/apqjMD0lp_s&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><p></p>The Watcher - Bem Vigiado (trailer)<br /><br /><br /><p>“<a TITLE="Bem Vigiado trailer" HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apqjMD0lp_s">The Watcher – Bem Vigiado</a>” (2007) by <b>Santiago Dellape</b> from Brazil came very close to being a “traditional” cinematic short; the story about homeless kids in a urban mall area might have been taken right from Italian neorealism, were it not for a indeed quite contemporary twist. In two scenes – filmed using a <a TITLE="You can make full feature movies with this, too" HREF="http://www.apple.com/trailers/warner_independent_pictures/ascannerdarkly/">rotoscoping</a> effect –, the figure of a writer enters the film, most possibly even defining the outcome of the story during a crucial moment. While the “watcher” from the title might fit one of the protagonists – a homeless boy taking care of shoppers' cars on a parking lot – on a first glance, it could just as well fit the author himself, who is nothing more but actually a spectator, and the happy ending of the film just an act of him re-writing the more obvious tragic outcome.</p><p>This much for now – JB</p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-17970483520632280462008-02-12T14:31:00.000-08:002017-03-23T06:06:24.452-07:00Impressions III<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvpa6iCOssJq2B_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvpa6iCOssJq2B_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Sexy</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-047.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki629jgxfHUJtz8jy_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvz11tGDFSD8sC_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvz11tGDFSD8sC_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Artistic director of Castle Plueschow, Udo Rathke</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-021.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki627l47oKDXUcD88_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr08-031.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki624imelyKqBLZvO_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>Woody on stage<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr08-030.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki616n4omP2nxfozB_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>Woody and Judy<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-018.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki624o6irF0SCSfnv_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Joachim, long time regular on DL and director of photography </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvobk6lwHkcA53_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvobk6lwHkcA53_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Trixie G., André Werner and the enchanting Ms. Cosima Reif from Vienna</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvkhbjQzY3HCYM_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvkhbjQzY3HCYM_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Heroes at dawn<br />
Klaus W. Eisenlohr and Audio supervisor Andreas aka DJ Parry Hotter</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvi3eynky7OB4t_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvi3eynky7OB4t_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Guardian Angels of the bar, Thomas Grandola & Ania</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mveoreVPiks0WC_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mveoreVPiks0WC_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Queen of the Team Judy Schlesinger in talk with technical supervisor Jobst Buerkle</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr12-012.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki6696xtxWCO3rXm9_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>Presenting Nadya Cazan: Actress and Fairy <br />
<br />
<a href="http://.jpg/" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki667vqcadmfAolG2_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Nadya Cazan in talk with Holger Ernst </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr12-010.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki668a1qvJ3vuS0tE_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Daniela Hendel and Martin van den Oever during Q&A</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr16-023.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki6cfsu0vUNHW82ge_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
The Laptop Orchestra Berlin</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr16-014.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki6cfr29oCjwWLYqo_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
The Laptop Orchestra Berlin</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr16-015.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mv7j4ypAWSqB18_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
The Laptop Orchestra Berlin</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr10-018.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki666mjgmJlKm91MG_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Fabiana Roscioli, NEM (Nadya Cazan), André Werner</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr10-025.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki667183zc4sT62I0_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr10-015.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki665o2ccFQGVUImE_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr10-005.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki665bkzlGxTKjAuE_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Klaus W. Eisenlohr introducing Live From Second Life </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<br /></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mv9bkpqoQYPO2Z_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mv9bkpqoQYPO2Z_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
The upper part of the screening room</blockquote>
placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-3805597980430472062008-02-12T13:53:00.000-08:002008-02-24T14:03:00.499-08:00... but the city's been bled white<p><a href="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/framesURprogram.html"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/images/SML/Gertels.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>(JB) I originally meant to include <b>Stephanie Gray's</b> “Gertel's Galore ... lore ... ore” from 2007 in yesterday's blog post, as it fits well with the both other films by Sebastian Bodirsky and Masha Godovannaya I wrote about. Actually, it fits right in between Bodirsky's formalist extraction of the graphical form and Godovannaya's more melancholic trip through NYC. “Gertel's Galore ...” is a 7 minute collage of various, often close-up shots of Gertel's Bakery, a now <a TITLE="The price of gentrification" HREF="http://nymag.com/daily/food/2006/10/impending_jewishbakery_apocaly.html">historical</a> kosher bakery on New York's Lower East Side. Gray's focus lies on the different signs and typographic elements found on the buildings' façade, eventually including a paper note announcing the bakery's closing in June '07. There is a obsessive-compulsive feel to the camera clinging to the store's front, seemingly unable to keep its attention fixed on any of the individual motifs; many of the signs and words are shown just as fragments, in anticipation of the gradual fading out of the bakery from both the actual and remembered cityscape.</p><br /><br /><a href="http://directorslounge.net/DL2008/11.html"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://directorslounge.net/DL2008/sigalit1small.jpg" /></a> Sigalit Landau IL Barbed Hula 2 min, DV 2000<br /><br /><br /><p>There were two other films on Monday I'd like to drop some lines on, <b>Sigalit Landau's</b> “<a TITLE="Video excerpt at videoartworld" HREF="http://www.videoartworld.com/beta/video_66.html">Barbed Hula</a>” from 2000 and <b>Eytan Heller's</b> “Love Sum Game” from 2006, two highly political pieces by Isreali artists. Sigalit Landau, born in 1969, is surely one of the most <a TITLE="Coming to a MoMA near you" HREF="http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=7821">established</a> artists in this year's DL programme, having represented Israel during the '97 Venice Biennale and having shown works on the Documenta X and on various solo & group shows all around the art world. “Barbed Hula” is a rather traditional piece of body art in the vein of Marina Abramovich; the film itself – Landau nakedly twirling a hula hoop made of, well, barbed wire – could have hardly been performed in an more reduced way, but the simple act of self-mutilation and the symbolism of the barbed wire itself (I suppose I don't have to specify the possible political connotations here) would have made much less impact with any kind of attached narrative or commentary. With its brutal rendition of what is essentially child's play, Landau's film also was a slap in the face to <b>Peter Snowdon's</b> “Two Thousand Walls (a Song for Jayyous)” (2006), shown right before, which used impressions of innocent, poetic childhood for an overtly simple equation of <i>poor Palestinian babies vs. evil Israeli oppressors</i>; Landau does not have to rely on any kind of explicit side-taking for her commentary; the oppression expressed in “Barbed Hula” might be as well military, as religious or patriarchal.</p><p> Like in Landau's Film, there's some subverted recreational activity at the centre of Heller's “Love Sum Game”, although without the self-mutilation; it's more of a Fluxus performance than Body Art. You might read his documentary on a tennis match played across the West Bank barrier as an absurdist take on the <a TITLE="Eytan Heller at Art Goes Heiligendamm" HREF="http://www.art-goes-heiligendamm.net/en/idea#top4">impossibility of communication</a>, but I'd prefer to see it as an anarchic embodiment of the Olympic Spirit. Of course, employing humour in rather dire situations might seem slightly frivolous, but I'd gladly try to laugh away political obstacles with Heller than reinforce them with obvious propagandist clichés, like Snowdon does.</p><p> Check back for some notes on Tuesday's programme later, and be sure to drop in at the lounge for today's shows – </p><p> Cheers, JB</p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-35572443540353390412008-02-12T13:34:00.000-08:002008-02-24T13:45:56.247-08:00I'm a color reporter ...<p>(JB) There were several films on Monday's programme which I would place in the venerable genre of the cinematic essay. As other interesting artistic genres, the cinematic essay evades a proper definition, and usually includes films that somehow have stepped outside one of the more concise genre definitions, e.g. the documentary, the narrative film or the formal experiment. The first of yesterday's films I'd like to mention in this context is “Sag nicht, es sei dunkel” (2007) by <b>Sebastian Bodirsky</b>, filmed in Belgrade in 2006-2007. <br /><br /><a href="http://.jpg"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5to7l18Xpj7HnRe_500.jpg" /></a>Sebastian Bodirsky DE Sag nicht, es sei dunkel, 27min, 2007<br /><br />As you can see looking at some other of his <a TITLE="Sebastian Bodirsky's website" HREF="http://paqc.de/sb/">works</a>, Bodirsky seems interested in both a very formal approach to the images and shapes we encounter in everyday life, and the socio-political issues which might be connected to these – often seemingly arbitrary – designs & constructions. In “Sag nicht ...”, he picks out small urban details like weirdly overlapping steps or pavings, street signs and other kinds of environmental (mis-)information; the depicted city seems like the result of a kind of crash between several other places, which then settled on an uneasy and rugged co-existence (so, there are clipping issues outside of Second Life, too). Of course – as this is Belgrade – this “crash” is far from being metaphoric. It usually makes me feel queasy when artists from affluent societies take a highly aesthetic look at life and living in other countries, as this often results in a kind of well-meant & paternalist exoticism of the poor or “different”. Bodirsky evades this trap be inserting three scenes, in which the detached impressions are suddenly disrupted by one of the “bystanders” suddenly addressing the author/viewer directly, and stating some poetically phrased, not-so-fun facts about life in former Yugoslavia and today's Serbia; the questionable viewpoint of the voyeuristic author and audience, until then revelling in the aesthetic qualities of the mutilated and chimeric cityscape, suddenly is inverted and turned against itself.</p><p> <a TITLE="Masha Godovannaya's website" HREF="http://www.mashagodovannaya.com/"><b>Masha Godovannaya's</b></a> “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” (2007), shown later as a special feature, had a analogous, but very different redeeming moment. Godovannaya, born in Moscow and now living in St. Petersburg, had spent some time in NY, where she also shot most of the footage for the full-feature “objects ...”. Unlike Bodirsky, whose every take resembles a carefully arranged composition (it seems as if he had meticulously taken down the ideal coordinates for the most perfect picture, even during panning – he should be a good contender for a future Michael Mann movie's cinematography), Godovannaya employs a shaky hand camera, seemingly random and spontaneous takes and impressions of her surroundings. This isn't a tourist's NYC, either; most of the footage is shot in or around the poorer parts of Brooklyn, often from a car or, presumably, out of Godovannaya's or a friend's flat's window. Equally, the soundtrack is a fairly non-linear collage of field recordings; in many cases, it is difficult to distinguish which one of the samples – if any, that is – might be the actual ambient sound of the video footage itself. While the material used by Godovannaya – arbitrary as it might seem at a first glance – retains a highly documentary feel, the montage transforms it into a kind of condensed retrospective meditation, in which every image and sound is just a catalyst for other impressions. Like Bodirsky, Godovannaya is neither a native nor a simple passer-by ticking off the most <a TITLE="I always thought it to be somehow larger" HREF="http://flickr.com/photos/74904657@N00/557390582/">obvious landmarks</a>; her journey through NYC seems to be a re-tracing of her own search for an adequate impression, most likely an impression not conveying only a authentic “NY moment” but also the artist's own self-reflection as a foreign visitor. To me, the most crucial moment seemed a scene shot during an art fair, in or beside the booth of – of all people – highly commercial NY gallery owner <a TITLE="He does show rather good art, though." HREF="http://www.davidzwirner.com/">Dave Zwirner</a>; the only scene I recall which actually took place in a “professional” environment, and not on the streets, some means of transport or a private space. With a crash, we suddenly remember that – after the slightly romantic, slightly depressing accounts of NY life shown before – Masha Godovannaya is actually a professional artist and thus part of the same – commercial – art scene as Zwirner, and we, the art crowd, are watching a product of this scene right now, in the very centre of Berlin, not far from the Auguststraße and with the glittery world of the Berlinale a couple of miles further down. This is, somehow, even more romantic, and even more depressing, too.</p><p>I might write something on a couple of other flims from Monday's programme tomorrow, right now I'm off for this evening's show -</p><p>Bye, JB</p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-37866323355423960442008-02-12T12:39:00.000-08:002008-02-24T13:48:55.149-08:00Critical Audience Overflow<a href="http://www.thehouseisburning.com/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5tm9nqdkdhjDO5j_400.jpg" /></a><br />Holger Ernst <a href="http://www.thehouseisburning.com/"target="_blank">The House Is Burning</a> 97 min, 35mm, 2006<br /><br /><br /><p>(JB) Sunday evening is <i>Tatort </i>time in Germany, and thus it felt appropriate that the Directors Lounge <em>(in collaboration with Rote Loge (pK)) </em>was showing a full feature film – <b>Holger Ernst's</b> <a TITLE="Official website for the film" HREF="http://www.thehouseisburning.com/">“The House is Burning”</a> yesterday. While it was obvious that Ernst was trying to pull a Guillermo Arriaga <i>Hyperlink cinema</i> thing with his depiction of US suburban youths, it indeed reminded me of a good <i>Tatort </i>episode minus the crime case, though. Don't get me wrong – while produced for TV, <i>Tatort </i>films often have production values and scripting far above German mainstream cinema, and <i>The House is Burning</i> had this very brand of brilliant cinematography and some terrific actors (we watched the film in the German-language dubbed version, and I wonder how the slang works out in the original). Nevertheless, it also shared the tragic inevitability which oozes from many recent Tatort episodes, in which basically everyone is unemployed and suffers from a variety of abuse issues, and eventually ends up dead. There is a subtle pedagogic undertone in this kind of detached and analytic view on the hopeless & wasted which makes me somehow suspicious; I'll rather stick with Danny Boyle, Lukas Moodysson or Anders Thomas Jensen for my fix of the decline of western society. But I suppose that's not where Holger Ernst is heading, anyway, so let's just look out for his and the <i>House is Burning</i>'s crew's next films. I surely wouldn't mind another good <i>Tatort </i>coming along.</p><br /><br /><a href="http://www.thehouseisburning.com/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5tmba8h7F0BDEfb_400.jpg" /></a><br />Holger Ernst <a href="http://www.thehouseisburning.com/"target="_blank">The House Is Burning</a> 97 min, 35mm, 2006<br /><br /><br /><p>Then, <a TITLE="Our World. Your Bucks." HREF="http://secondlife.com/">Second Life</a>, with live screenings of shows by the <a TITLE="AOM on MySpace" HREF="http://www.myspace.com/avatarorchestra"><b>Avatar Orchestra Metaverse</b></a>, the <b>Sparring Philosophers</b> at the <a TITLE="YOUniverse, the ZKM's SL Island." HREF="http://youniverse.zkm.de/">ZKM</a>, and a performance by <b>Second Front</b>. I have some objections to SL in general. First of all, there is the political issue of creating a virtual and allegedly free world around the concept of real estate, which, as some of you might remember, is the most obvious and archaic embodiment of capitalism and class society. So, anyone trying to sell you SL as a democratic and open community should be considered as a pawn of the neo-liberal agenda. My <i>real</i> problem with SL, though, is that it brings us back to the dark era of <a TITLE="Encouraging Eye Protection in the Workplace" HREF="http://discov.cs.kent.edu/resources/doc/images/dan_povray.jpg">POV-Ray</a> computer graphics; I really don't understand why anyone should care to invest time in building low-poly, badly textured environments in, wait, 2008. It's not that you have to buy Maya or something; just fork out a couple of bucks for Half-Life 2 with the included developer's tools and voilà, there's Frank Lloyd Wright's <a TITLE="The Kaufmann House for the HL2-Engine" HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqsk4WARk2I">Kaufmann House</a> with decent shading and less clipping issues. </p><br /><br /><a href="http://avatarorchestra.blogspot.com/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5tml8shDGsoMtjJ_400.jpg" /></a><br /><a href="http://avatarorchestra.blogspot.com"target="_blank">Avatar Orchestra Metaverse</a> <br /><br /><br /><p>I do understand that there is the whole community aspect in SL which you can't replicate that easily in commercial game engines. The three concerts and two art events we saw yesterday were performed by various players from supposedly all over the world, so there is a measure of spontaneous self-organisation that can be achieved through SL, it being both a community platform <i>and</i> a scriptable 3D games engine. Still, for the uninitiated viewer, it seems hard to discern if the ongoings during a SL performance are effects of a complex script, a real-time interaction between the players or just a bug in SL's engine; the music we heard yesterday might very well have been produced live by a single guy with a laptop, and not an on-line collective. In fact, the thing that strikes me as most interesting within VR arts is the possible deliberate misuse of the given technologies, like the phenomenon of the frame rate crashing due to crowding (so, you might outright kill a performance by simply <i>attending</i> it) – but perhaps this might be even more effective within even more bluntly <a TITLE="Maybe Mr.T is pretty handy with computers?!" HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqJE5TH5jhc">commercial</a> and restrictive on-line environments, like <i>World of Warcraft</i> or one of the <i>Battlefield</i> games; this would manifest the <a TITLE="Wikipedia on Neoism" HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoism">neoist</a> spirit – which I do sense in many VR performance concepts – in a far more pronounced way. And yes, it might even <i>look</i> better.</p><p>Cheers, JB </p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-58045972363425764082008-02-10T14:06:00.000-08:002017-03-23T06:07:31.914-07:00Impressions II<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-066.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki66544toLmgFB5PA_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-065.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki6652ojkd9UEsNw2_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
DJ Jochen of <a href="http://www.myspace.com/keeponmusic">Keep On</a> fame </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-062.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki664yl65cpDbpczc_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-063.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dkwdzdYCAvml60_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
DJ Akiyuki Tanno</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl2ab0KtsXPIos_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl2ab0KtsXPIos_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-016.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki624mud9QsM3huy2_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Werner Degreif</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-001.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki624jpi2QWdlHzNX_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Barbara Hindahl</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl38ih952WQZ7W_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl38ih952WQZ7W_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Barbara Hindahl with Veronika Witte </blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-034.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki629ga06NYYE1yB8_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-033.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki629f82dDw3x9Pb3_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Telemach Wiesinger, the reel one</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-027.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki627ock0HOtJZhu8_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-025.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki627nhmwXIK9JhMq_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Thorsten Fleisch, a handmade screening</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl15lypclUN0Qn_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl15lypclUN0Qn_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl1ncqbjS5sJgu_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl1ncqbjS5sJgu_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Thorsten Fleisch and Telemach Wiesinger screening S8 and 16 mm</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr08-006.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki60zvbbidahACVYI_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Kim Collmer preseting <i>Monumental</i></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr08-012.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki60zxdy39plUbK4t_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl4ut2Dtxj9ssd_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl4ut2Dtxj9ssd_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Kim Collmer, Sophia New and friend</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr08-024.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki614oi87znM8qbRr_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr08-028.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki616lksbgP85p1PJ_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr08-025.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki615jfnnpb0uS21I_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr08-027.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki616kri7c0od3aDR_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl3ox3aLD9gLOC_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl3ox3aLD9gLOC_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl48r4Wj7Aa6QN_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl48r4Wj7Aa6QN_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Ost West Achse Christoph Bauer ( git, voc), Viktoria Lasaroff ( voc) and Jens Voigt ( git, voc)</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl2qxbNzw0xwgV_500.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl2qxbNzw0xwgV_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-058.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki664v9mkDG52Bova_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Happy Famous Artists</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-055.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki664rjlis1wMMNrN_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Happy Famous Artists</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-053.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki664okofA3tkokfm_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-052.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki664m7duMH1ylARs_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
<a href="http://happyfamousartists.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Happy Famous Artists</a></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr07-030.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5z8dqg9I0IDEg51_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>Jacob Birken<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr07-028.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5z8cq1bxXbpiR0w_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>Sabrina Small<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.directorslounge.net/DL2008/snapgallery01/images/DL-Febr09-046.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki629iecahm0ycFOR_400.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-75638848526213415782008-02-10T11:22:00.000-08:002008-02-24T11:46:39.425-08:00A Rude Kind of Staring Contest<a href="http://shaunwilsonresearch.blogspot.com/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://directorslounge.net/DL2008/nocturnus.jpg" /></a><br /><blockquote>Shaun Wilson, Uber Nocturnus iii (2007), HDV , 9 mins</blockquote><br /><br /><br /><p>Saturday, February 9th--Tonight the real meat and bones of experimental short films were out in full force. The traditional narrative was no where to be found and the idea of film itself was taken for quite a philosophical ride by a variety of film makers from Australia and beyond. <strong><a href="http://shaunwilsonresearch.blogspot.com/">Shaun Wilson</a></strong>, whose name reminds me of the Factory records impressario Tony Wilson in it's seeming innocuousness compared to such a controversial personality, curated a set of Australian films that touched on his favorite subject matters--destruction, mystery, horror, the undead, and pornography. These films relied on odd juxtapositions, spooky lighting filters, and eerie music. <br /><br /><a href="http://tammyhoney.blogspot.com/"target="_blank"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5tjhtkqrklthIyJ_500.jpg" /></a><br /><blockquote>Tammy Honey, 9 Cinemas (2008), HDV as single channel projection, DVD, colour, sound, 5 mins</blockquote><br /><br /><strong>Shaun Wilson's</strong> wife <strong><a href="http://tammyhoney.blogspot.com/">Tammy Honey</a></strong> provided the most unique vision in this series of films. The film called <strong>9 Cinemas</strong> opened with a screen filled with nine boxes reminiscent of the opening credits for the uber drippy and inexplicably popular American tv series, The Brady Bunch. Instead of a Brady in each box, however, they were filled with scantilly clad women in various states of undress and arousal. The continuous soundtrack throughout the film was filled with the sighs, moans and heavy breathing we've come to associate with pornography. Slowly the differences between 'popular pornography' and this particular instantiation become more clear. These women are shaking their bodies far more vigorously than one would expect from a seasoned porn queen. Their breasts and stomachs and thighs bounce and jiggle with a spastic motion that seems only slightly out of place for the genre. Secondly, the costumes are close to the usual porn-fare but slightly off somehow. One actress has on construction worker's safety headphones, another wears a Rambo commando outfit complete with gun, still another wears a navy blue farmer-girl turned grunge goddess buttondown, her hair in pigtails. Somehow all of these costumes are a bit complicated visually. Typical pornography is so direct in its motivations and its presentation that the viewer does not need to think about what he or she needs to think about while they are watching. <strong>Tammy Honey's</strong> honies, on the other hand, provoked the slightest question mark. Or maybe it was the setting--an art film festival--that problematized the viewers relationship to the actresses onscreen. Every so often a woman would be shown shoulders up, in one of the saucy costumes, just staring at the viewer questioningly. I can't even be sure it was the same woman every time, although I seem to remember this. There were 9 screens afterall so it's hard to keep track. But this woman seemed to be staring at the viewer so directly that if you happened to be looking back at her, it was uncomfortable. Was that <strong>Tammy Honey</strong>, I wondered? It was over before I could form any solid guesses. The sighs and heavy breathing just gone and the room, like all rooms where pornography has taken place, was eerily silent.</p><p>The second curator Saturday evening, <strong><a href="http://www.ariadnefilm.de/">Daniela Butsch</a></strong>, showed a series of minimal films (<em>compiled by Barbara Hindahl (pK)</em> ) under the heading <strong>Minimale Veraenderung</strong>. These films were certainly all minimal but they had very different approaches to minimalism. Some were more contemplative including <strong>Butsch's </strong>own piece <strong>Speed Manipulations</strong> where she shot the jet propelled current of ocean water at different speeds changing the sound quality and the pattern of the water itself. <strong>Martina Wolf</strong> had two pieces about the reflections of windows, in the film <strong>Fensterbild</strong> (13 min, 2001) a window tilted into a room reflects the sterile industrial building outside. Using her hand or a string to pull the window closer and farther away from herself, <strong>Wolf </strong>creates a dreamlike undulating reflection where the outside and the inside conflate. Perhaps my favorite piece from this series was entitled, <strong>The Department of Water and Power</strong>, and the film was simply 7 or 8 minutes still shooting a generator during the night. Obviously this is boring. It's the same image and there is no expectation that the image will change while being filmed. It's a power station, they're pretty stable. But it wasn't at all Zen like either as water or a window or a wall might be Zen. No, this was a stare down between the camera and the generator and as soon as I wrapped my head around that, I began to really admire the piece. A still frame shot in real time with real sound, <strong>The Department of Water and Power</strong> was an experiment in confronting the menacingly banal. The generator whined and hummed continuously, one became aware that the generator would continue to make its generator noise even when the camera was gone. The camera was just doing the difficult work of an investigative journalist with a bad interview--simply observing and trying to push back against the monolith with its own presence. It's certainly a rude staring contest and a thankless job which the camera won't win but for the duration of the film, the audience was just as powerless as the filmmaker and just as exasperated. When the film finally ended, just as suddenly as it had begun, the absence of that awful whining noise was as gratifying as being released from nipple-clamps. <strong>Lars Von Trier</strong> needs A-list actresses and brutal schedules to create that kind of symbiotic torture with his audience. It's really more minimal and economic to go the route of the power station.</p><p>--More Monday, SS </p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-72695107992621723972008-02-10T11:02:00.000-08:002008-02-24T11:15:23.723-08:00Beneath the archway of aerodynamics<p>(JB) <a TITLE="Telemach Wiesinger's website" HREF="http://www.telemach-wiesinger.de"><b>Telemach Wiesinger</b></a> and <a TITLE="Thorsten Fleisch's website" HREF="http://www.fleischfilm.com/"><b>Thorsten Fleisch</b></a> showed a selection of their films on Saturday evening, which I did enjoy quite a lot. All films were shot in either 16mm (Wiesinger) or Super 8 (Fleisch), and projected using the respective equipment. <br /><br /><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl15lypclUN0Qn_400.jpg" /><br /><br />Like <a TITLE="Japanese imported only." HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGWBTsZQwZo">other technologies</a> on the verge of obsolescence, 16mm and Super 8 display certain aesthetic qualities, and evoke certain associations which might go well beyond simple nostalgia. Although I rather dislike the idea of the so-called analogue image (or sound) being somehow more authentic than the digital image for purely ontological reasons (well, it's light colliding with an receptive medium in both cases, so ...), “traditional” film – and especially the gauges below 35mm – has this kind of documentary feel which might be simply a matter of habituation. Very likely, the 16mm or Super 8 films most of have encountered will be either documentaries or amateur cinema – but this might be a generational thing, which, as I suppose, will be supplanted by Mini DV or even mobile phone videos for those born later in the late Eighties or the Nineties (<b>Jennifer Davy's</b> “Mulo” from 2008, shown in Kim Collmer's <a TITLE="Friday's films with more info" HREF="http://www.kimcollmer.com/dl2008/dl2008.htm">programme</a> on Friday, used this effect by shooting an entire film with a cheap pocket Camcorder, so we might have been witnessing a shift in cinematic strategies of authenticity here). </p><br /><br /><br /><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5mvs4ow65DUzlKv_400.jpg" /><blockquote>Director Telemach Wiesinger, long time regular of DL, arriving from Freiburg</blockquote><br /><br /><p>The documentary aspect is prevalent in Wiesinger's films, who concentrates on the peculiar beauty of aquatic machinery. This goes very well with the 16 mm medium; there is a certain air of intimacy between the movements of the weird maritime contraptions & draw-bridges and the steady buzz of the film projector. As Telemach Wiesinger told me, some of the machines shown in his films have been decommissioned since, so there is another analogy between these machines (which do look as if they might have been originally steam-powered) and the dwindling 16 mm technology. I was delighted to hear Wiesinger call the machines “Viecher” (German for “beasties”), as I did have the impression of watching an nature documentary myself several times during the evening. There must be a lot of waiting involved in the production. At least for yesterday's audience, the final event of a drawbridge performing a bizarre contraction for a couple of approaching boats was received with a sense of comic relief, so you might imagine that the slowness of Wiesingers work is rather different from the one you might experience while watching Richard Serra's great, similarly-themed <i>Railroad Turnbridge</i> from 1976.</p><p>Also, there is a almost graphical quality to the films of Wiesinger and Fleisch, which reminded me of the work of one of my favourite contemporary artists, <a TITLE="Guardian review on TD, by Adrian Searle" HREF="http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/feature/0,,728587,00.html">Tacita Dean</a>, who not only uses film material in an often similar way, but obviously shares some of the interest for tourism and maritime topics. There were two pieces during the screening that used text in a way that supported this graphical approach really well; one by Fleisch, starting with seemingly random nightly shots of car & traffic lights, a flashy red-white-yellow pyre from which eventually the illuminated sign of a Rettungswagen – the German ambulance – emerged; then, the so far whimsical conceptual footage harshly turned into a short impression of an actual case of emergency, making full use of the aforementioned documentary qualities of the film material. In a longer piece by Wiesinger – accordingly titled as a “visual poem” – quite at the beginning of the show, the footage was interspersed with shots of naval markings and ships' names; the clean-cut sans serif type-setting might be read as awkwardly placed subtitles or even – as all of the films were projected without soundtracks – as the title cards of a silent film. They did not seem to build a coherent narrative, though, but evoked an poetic and often absurdist atmosphere – “Grimaldi Lines” written on a sea ferry might seem pretty obvious, but, on the over hand, does ring some very different, possibly metrical or even mathematical bells (<a TITLE="there's math everywhere" HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFPESKPXBWs">Fibonacci Numbers</a>, anyone?) ...</p><p>OK then, see you later at the lounge – JB</p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-80696442575602274632008-02-09T10:53:00.000-08:002008-02-24T11:00:20.791-08:00Showdown at Stimmann Creek<p>(JB) Some more on two films from yesterday's Urban Research block. Like André Werner's “Flash” from the opening evening, <b>Berit Hummel's</b> “Ein weites Land” (2007) is a dissection of film clichés, this time of Hollywood's <a TITLE="It's honest, it's adult, it's realistic" HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHVSCribt3U">male Western Hero</a>. Unlike Werner's high-speed romp through Horror cinematography, Hummel's take on the genre archetype is rather a precise surgical undertaking, reduced to the performative reconstruction of immediately recognisable token gestures & movements. In a series of – if I recall correctly – fourteen scenes, we witness the encounters of two male figures; even though stripped from the usual iconography and plot progression, each and every interaction seems to be taken straight out of a classic Western. Which it is not, as Berit Hummel told me; but obviously, we do not have to rely on cowboy hats and tumbleweed to know our Hollywood staple heroes, even if they are clad in business suits and filmed solely on the grounds of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz.</p><br /><br /><p> <a href="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/framesURprogram.html"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/images/SML/EinWeitesLand.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Of course, the Potsdamer Platz & the Businessmen and the Cowboys & their homelands collide on several levels. There is the bizarre quality of the Potsdamer Platz itself – raised in no-man's land by former chief urban planner Hans Stimmann and a selection of international star architects – which echoes the fakery of the Spaghetti Western's “american” setting (while being far less entertaining, unfortunately), the slightly frivolous historicism of the post-modernist buildings and the artificial insertion of patches of a “natural” landscape, which allude to the suppressed dream of the untamed – hence natural – male conqueror expressed through the genre narrative. For which we, obviously, can find some parallels in the figure of the carnivorous yuppie businessman; we do all know that <a TITLE="Something wrong, Patrick? You're sweating!" HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=923xrzsb3hI">Pat Bateman</a> is still out there, somewhere.</p><p>(On a side note - in a irritating, though interesting twist, Hummel's Film was shown in half of its original speed due to an technical mishap – which at least I mistook for intentional, as slow motion is another staple effect of the Western genre and thus seemed rather natural) </p><br /><p><a href="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/framesURprogram.html"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/images/SML/GelbOhneZebra2.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>There was also a very short and very formalist film by <b>Steven Ball</b> – “No-Way Street” from 2007 – depicting police cordons and traffic re-routing in London, which might or might not have been shot with the 2005 London bombings in mind. On his <a TITLE="Steven Ball's Website" HREF="http://www.steven-ball.net/">website</a>, he calls this a “strategy of producing public spaces of exception” – I suppose I have ranted enough on politics and public space in the previous posts, but even besides actual interferences into urban transit, there is a rather strange correlation between terror and security issues on one hand and <a TITLE="Armour for Towers" HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/29/nyregion/29freedom.html">architectural and aesthetic decisions</a> on the other. The formal representation and organisation of dangerous or endangered spaces is something we might want to keep in mind as it affects our environment in a quite subtle but still immediate way. </p><p>OK – I'm off to the lounge again, see you later!</p><p>Cheers, JB</p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-6203877706508476652008-02-09T10:41:00.000-08:002008-02-24T10:46:38.129-08:00Carole Kim<p>Friday, February 8th--Carole Kim is mainly an installation artist from Los Angeles but last night Catherine Foster from the Live Box gallery in Chicago put together a series of Kim's short films. I have to admit that I had not seen any of Carole Kim's work before but as the first short, Old Faithful, filled the screen, I felt she was a girl after my own heart. Old Faithful, for those of you who don't know, is a geyser in Calistoga that goes off once every hour or so unleashing thousands of gallons of water into the sky. Old Faithful is also; a tourist trap, a metaphor for male erections and male orgasms, a kitschy excursion on the way to Calistoga wine tastings. You can sense immediately that Kim understands all of this. She sets up her shot a meter or so away from the Old Faithful crowd and lets the scene unfold as faithfully as any gathering of mixed American tourists will allow. Just before Olf Faithful spurts his juice, the screen fills with typed text, 'Did you ever light a firecracker and have it go fizzle instead of go BANG!' One is inclined to see these as Kim's words, her retrospective narration of the scene. And the words seem to function on multiple levels just as the name Old Faithful does. Is she talking about all the worlds small attractions and their mediocre-at-heart nature? Is it a metaphor for the lives of these tourists that sit patiently awaiting the blast off and then scuttle back to their tour buses on the way to another preconceived, regulated activity? Whatever it is, those words seem profound and function like an insider wink between the viewer and Kim.</p><p>It's always a bit difficult to figure out the tone of these 'hands off' pieces. Tourists are silly and sort of unsympathetic and they behave faithfully for Kim's camera, saying all manner of typically hilarious touristy things like--'now we're just in time for the bus,' and 'it didn't smell as sulfur-y as i thought it would.' Inevitably the sense that their's a cruel distance from Kim, that she's inviting us to laugh at these tourists, sinks in. But then something remarkable happens--a man on his way past Kim's camera toward the parking lot mutters the words that filled the screen only a few minutes before. With a slightly midwestern accent and a tone that conveys nothing and everything he says to his wife--'Did you ever light a firecracker and have it go fizzle instead of go BANG!' It's a small moment but it totally changes the meaning of the piece. She, Kim, was uttering someone elses words. She found them poetic enough to set the whole scene around and her intentions become more alligned with those of the watchful observer than the cynical satirist.</p><p>In Confromed Bits, another film by Kim, she continues to engage the tension between what is ordinary and what is deeply imbued with meaning. We watch a woman's arms carefully washing dishes, methodically drying them and placing them in a rack. Once again the screen fills with text--'Feeling overwhelmed by the mundane and the profound my brother told me to do the dishes and the rest would follow.' Kim makes the task of doing the dishes dreamlike by slowing down the sound and making the pitch low and echoey. She also plays a bit with color, at one point filling the smaller sink with a red color fill that suggests not so much blood as something magical and magenta. The viewer is transfixed by the spectacle and the whole Obsessive Compulsive ritual of washing dishes does seem to flutter between the mundane and the profound without ever choosing a definite side. Perhaps this is Kim's gift, to take us only so far down the philosophical hedge path and then drop off and let us fend for ourselves.</p><p>--more soon S.S.</p><br /><br /><blockquote><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://directorslounge.net/DL2008/ChasingThePools_birdflock.jpg" />Chasing the Pools 8 min 30s, DV, 2005<br />Chasing the Pools is a single-channel video based on an immersive performance /installation exploring live cameras on dancers seamlessly integrated into the landscape of live-mix video projection. Their lit bodies became one moving image, dematerializing or re-materializing the body, while the background remained another. These channels were projected onto numerous scrims in a large tree grove. The video combines the composite live-feed image with the original source material.</blockquote>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2651009804034745701.post-88631521677549700022008-02-09T10:21:00.000-08:002008-02-24T11:16:06.691-08:00Who watches the Watchmen?<p>(JB) Lets stick to Thursday's surveillance issue with the aptly named <b>Surveillance Camera Players</b> and their piece “1984”. The SCP hail originally from New York, although – according to their <a TITLE="SCP website" HREF="http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html">website</a> – similar groups have been organized in other cities. We have seen a lot of anti-surveillance-art post 9-11, but the SCP have been around since 1996, and draw their inspiration from classical media and performance art (think <a TITLE="CB Videos 71-74" HREF="http://www.ubu.com/film/burden.html">Chris Burden</a>, Bruce Nauman, <a TITLE="VE on Youtube" HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8poj5NXf6c">Vaile Export</a> etc.) rather than the technological or critical-studies-infused takes on surveillance we are used to by now through the Transmediale or Ars Electronica. <a href="http://www.richfilm.de">Klaus W. Eisenlohr</a> had placed their video within a screening named “Psychogeography”, after a term coined by the Lettrist & Situationist movement in the fifties, and I would say that the SCP fits very well into the radical absurdist style of their predecessors.</p><br /><br /><blockquote><a href="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/images/SML/1984.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.richfilm.de/DL2008/images/SML/1984.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>The Surveillance Camera Players both used and protested again CCTV recording with playacts specifically designed for surveillance cameras. <br />Sari Carel photographs abandoned contemporary houses in Israel. She thus reflects on the left behind dreams, promises and plans connected with single-family houses. <br />Thomas Fuerhapter and Ken Paul Rosenthal give a voice to psychological effects of urban experiences, not avoiding the irony of the possibility to overrate such experience. <br />Elke Marhöfer deconstructs the interaction of political talks by young international artists, and confronts those with her own media interaction with young black youths in the streets of New York. She is thus reflecting the mixture of failure and need of such practise.</blockquote><br /><br /><br /><p>Also, the piece we've seen is quite paradigmatic for classical Media Art with its usage of recording & transmission on multiple levels. Basically, the SCP stage drastically abridged versions of popular plays or texts (Jarry's <i>Ubu Roi</i>, Wilhelm Reich's <i>The Mass Psychology of Fascism</i>, Orwell's <i>Animal Farm</i> & <i>1984</i> – well, you might see a common theme emerging ...) which are performed using big cardboard signs with text passages in front of “public” surveillance cameras. The performance “1984” was staged in a subway station in NYC, and recorded from the monitor attached to the surveillance camera; thus, the whole thing retains its performative aspect as we don't see a recording of a theatrical performance itself, but simply the recording of a surveillance screen attached to a camera, currently – and independently of the artists actions – recording a theatrical performance.</p><p>Even without the video-of-a-video-of-a-performance cleverness, I really like the “parasitic” concept of SCP's work. Some of you might have seen a work with a similar concept - “Stealing Beauty” by Israeli Artist <a TITLE="NY Mag review by Jerry Saltz" HREF="http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/43567/">Guy Ben-Ner</a> in Berlin's DAAD Gallery earlier this Winter; Guy Ben-Ner basically staged a short film with his family using the displays in an IKEA store as a setting (obviously, he was kicked out from several IKEAs before he could finally complete the movie).</p><br /><br /><blockquote><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://data.tumblr.com/NLgZrD4Ki5dl4ut2Dtxj9ssd_400.jpg" /> <a href="http://www.kimcollmer.com/">Kim Collmer</a>, curator of Monumental, withSophia New and friend</blockquote><br /><br /><p>The parasitic abuse of “public space” (please note the quotation marks for inherent suspicion and/or paranoia) and its shady equipment is taken to another level in the charmingly nerdy “Palpatine am Platz der Vereinten Nationen” by <a TITLE="Sven Kalden's Website" HREF="http://www.komat.de/sven-kalden/"><b>Sven Kalden</b></a> (2007), shown during the screening of Films selected by <a href="http://www.kimcollmer.com/">Kim Collmer</a>. To a MIDI rendition of appropriate Star Wars tunes, the black-robed demagogue remodels the rather ungainly fountain on the “Platz der Vereinten Nationen” into a bizarre installation, re-routing the water flow to something we might interpret as a symbolic <a TITLE="um, don't try this at home." HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GJOVPjhXMY">light saber</a> replica from the Star Wars canon. Finally, the now water-soaked “Palpatine” takes his very own place as the heroic saber wielder in a monument to, well, himself.</p><p>The comic capers of the Star Wars antagonist reinforce an inherent absurdity of their setting; the “Place of the United Nations”, formerly the site of a <a TITLE="The real Lenin didn't have a piece of brickwork growing from his head, though." HREF="http://www.flickr.com/photos/10766597@N04/983342528/">Lenin monument</a> (and accordingly named Leninplatz until 1992), is indeed a involuntarily ironic comment in itself, on both the failed representative agenda of the GDR and the dubious naming choice of a veritable non-space by its successor (which might lead to some rather serious questions about Germany's commitment to the idea of a international community).</p><p>Check back soon for more on Friday's screenings -</p><p>Best, JB</p>placeboKatzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00112035280486870095noreply@blogger.com0