Health insurance rip off lying FDA big bankers buying Fake computer crashes dining Cloning while they're multiplying Fashion shoots with Beck and Hanson Courtney Love, and Marilyn Manson You're all fakes Run to your mansions Come around We'll kick your ass in
Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine in Daehakroh (Nam, 2000) the visuals are pretty much unlike anything else i know of (stom sogo is the only thing i can think of thats at all comparable), with a pretty radical/punishing use of what was new digital technology at the time yielding truly wild light and texture. super concise too at 60 mins flat.
The Tall T (Boetticher, 1957) the second western ive seen from boetticher (not super versed in the genre really). really good. tight, no frills script, good performances, and as always charles lawton jr's photography is lovely.
Luce (Onah, 2019) thinking this might be my favorite american studio/feature drama of 2019? so naturally its a film that no one really talked about... watts/spencer give incredible dramatic performances and the film feels like its constantly redefining its scope while remaining lean and what you expect from the best play adaptations.
yeaaaaaaaaaaaa american nostalgia love it suburban living civilized families this could be my life
wrote:Luce (Onah, 2019) thinking this might be my favorite american studio/feature drama of 2019? so naturally its a film that no one really talked about... watts/spencer give incredible dramatic performances and the film feels like its constantly redefining its scope while remaining lean and what you expect from the best play adaptations.
bongo you weren't the only one who loved this movie
paused anime, good list! you seem to like formalistic, technically innovative filmmaking & austrian stuff. that's neat.
since KevMac asked, here's my aaf highlights -
1. GOODBYE FANTASY - Amber Bemak and Nadia Granados Awarded best of the fest. unsentimental lesbian experimental filmmaking. loved it
2. QUEERING DI TEKNOLOJIK - Timothy Smith
a film-letter from an advanced organism many years in the future, begging the audience to draw on histories of civil rights struggle and queer women of color activism to continue fighting capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy. i loved the confusion of past-present-future temporalities. and the way that the film collective constructed a novel, mutant "voice-over" composed from the voices of the 5-6 collaborators who worked on it, formally articulating the multicultural-multigender hybridity being championed in the film. a nice tonic to the overwhelming nihilism i'm feeling these days
3.BLUE - Laura Magnusson
Blue (2019) is a moving image work by Laura Magnusson, shot entirely underwater, 70 feet beneath the surface of Cozumel, Mexico. Alone on an endless ocean “tundra,” wearing a clamshell-like parka and winter boots, a woman moves, exhales, and burrows through the afterlife of sexual violence. The medium of water, with its destructive potential and capacity to heal, hold the fullness of traumatic experience. In this silent, psychic landscape, she bears witness to the complex nature of trauma and the ongoing process of healing.
4. UMBILICAL - Danski Tang
Through striking visuals, a Chinese mother and daughter reassess their lives, uncovering in a beautifully candid conversation what obstacles they have overcome.
5. THE GOLDEN LEGEND - Chema García Ibarra and Ion de Sosa a slice-of-life film, set in spain. low-key surrealism. beautifully shot and perfect pacing with strange vignettes of characters at the pool.
6. EMOTIONS IN METAL - Tommy Becker I wish there was more bizarre-comedic work like this at the fest. tommy becker is a modern kuchar. exploring on americans' attachment to automobiles, his film takes the form of music videos and jokes based on chris burden and stephen king's christine. idunno. hard to describe but now i want to see all of his stuff.
7. BLUE HONDA CIVIC - Jussi Eerola
Refusing all narrative information, Eerola lures the viewer to let his mind wander inside the image (landscapes framed by a car window), rather than to follow strictly laid out footsteps. The film is not a riddle or a puzzle to be solved; it is a composition of elements, very much like instrumental music or a painting.
8. TAKE IT DOWN - Sabine Gruffat
In 2015, Governor Nikki Haley took down the Confederate flag from the state capitol in South Carolina as a response to the Charleston church shooting. In retaliation, certain Southern states such as North Carolina passed bills to prevent Confederate memorials from being "relocated, removed, concealed, obscured, or altered in any fashion." This film looks to North Carolina to describe the cultural fissure that runs through the South, a legacy of the Civil War. In the context of the divisive Trump presidency and the increasing visibility of white supremacist activism, these Confederate memorials have become sites of conflicting politics and historical narratives.
9. MUYBRIDGE'S DISOBEDIENT HORSES - Anna Vasof
Muybridge's Disobedient Horses is a series of four episodes in which the artist Anna Vasof investigates where she can find the essence of cinematic illusion when she looks into everyday life and what happens when she uses everyday objects and movements as cinematographic mechanisms.
10. GOODBYE MOMMY - Jack Wedge extremely my shit. this animated noir film looks like a mashup of Twinsen's Odyssey and blade runner. im obsessed with this kid's punk-artschool style
“Short film, Long film, It’s ALL film!” - Walt Whitman
watched the outkast film idlewild. it makes complete sense that nobody remembers this film. not a single person on my letterboxd friends list has it marked.
it's remarkably like, prosaic for a film that's billed as a musical. just kinda dull all around. mostly notable for inventing the aesthetic blueprint for . it reminded me of the 1979 caligula lol in terms of mostly seeming like an excuse for a bunch of rich people to dress up in 'sexy' period costumes. that and 'cats'.
i'm surprised janelle monae had no part in it given that she was on the soundtrack and she always aimed toward the more theatrical parts of that sound/would've almost assuredly made a better film than this one.
The Driller Killer - my first Abel Ferrara movie! It was OK! I guess i liked it more as a snapshot of 70s NYC! Crazy kids. Going to be watching more of his films in the coming days/weeks tho. Don't rly know what to expect x
wimbledon, strawberries, bubbles, please protect me. happy midsumma, hope you spend it in your heart, everyone is there. bitch.
Haven't been in the headspace to watch this kind of work, but tuned into the first two of the Ann Arbor winners programs and it mostly confirmed my sense that the festival has been third rate at best since they fired David Dinnell. Just all so intensely derivative of better work by their contemporaries; like, at least go find something interesting from sixty years ago that no one has thought to rip off yet.
But I felt the same way about the competition at Rotterdam, so maybe I just need to take a timeout.
Phil: was there any work, or trends in particular from aaf that you found third rate/intensely derivative?
i had a great time with what they showed, though i definitely wasn't a fan of everything. a majority of work seemed to come from art/film school students, and in that group i sometimes find (understandably) recycling of things we've seen before.
could it also be that the single channel format is a bit constrictive for tracking new forms of experimental media? film has kind of become painting at this point. perhaps the weight of its own history is becoming burdensome...
“Short film, Long film, It’s ALL film!” - Walt Whitman
Phil wrote:Haven't been in the headspace to watch this kind of work, but tuned into the first two of the Ann Arbor winners programs and it mostly confirmed my sense that the festival has been third rate at best since they fired David Dinnell. Just all so intensely derivative of better work by their contemporaries; like, at least go find something interesting from sixty years ago that no one has thought to rip off yet.
But I felt the same way about the competition at Rotterdam, so maybe I just need to take a timeout.
I feel this way about so many experimental programs tbh.
i wouldn't say single channel is constrictive, there's tons of great work being done in single channel now!
i really could not hang with much of the AAFF offerings, though emotional and dispositional factors are at play. i do agree with phil that the festival has decidedly taken a turn for the worse after david was fired. it's not just the quality of the work--i could not make heads or tails of the curatorial logic behind any of these programs (besides, like, the queer or kid's programs). a lot of it is just a dumping ground for thesis films and artsy state-sponsored euro tech demos, good things emerge but entirely in spite of the way they're programmed. it's like their platform is entirely dedicated to promoting the curatorial vacuum david left as if it were a virtue
chad wrote:"How can I make this about me and also congratulate myself in some way" - basically every hipinion bro
walt whitman wrote:could it also be that the single channel format is a bit constrictive for tracking new forms of experimental media? film has kind of become painting at this point. perhaps the weight of its own history is becoming burdensome...
I don't buy this. Cinema is still a baby, but exp filmmakers really need to start embracing digital and finding ways to experiment with digital technology. The derivative stuff I see is usually on actual celluloid. Sure, digital has a type of rigidity to it but films like 88:88 and 24.24.24. and Indefinite Pitch have shown that you don't need to keep on fucking with light leaks and drone soundtracks.
There's a certain tendency toward work that's obviously the product of shooting a bunch of material and pasting language—whether spoken voiceover or on-screen text—over it to give the appearance of coherence without any satisfying sense that one shot has any reason to be next to the one beside it. But on the other hand, these films don't have satisfying rhythms to redeem that immediacy. I'm not sure I think it has to do with the single channel format itself, so much as the fact of how people end up engaging with this material: the overwhelming majority of gallery video I see—and I think the environment of academic film and video art at the moment points things in that direction, regardless of where it ultimately ends up showing—is basically a constellation of detachable parts, because there's a presupposition that no one is going to stand there and watch the whole damn thing anyway, so why bother giving it an overall shape.
And also yeah, the 16mm stuff here was all the most tedious Make Film Celluloid Again strain of artisanal fetish object production. Shoot it into the fucking sun.
You're exactly right. Film / video work in a gallery setting is inherently problematic. You, as the filmmaker, are admitting that the work is unimportant because people will not experience the whole thing. The film doesn't matter. You can, theoretically, experience a painting in a few moments -- but the looped video in a gallery is rarely given the full attention of the spectator. The cinema is the only place to experience "cinema" because viewers are forced to watch the work from start to finish (not actually forced but there's a much higher chance they will stick through it.)
The Driller Killer - my first Abel Ferrara movie! It was OK! I guess i liked it more as a snapshot of 70s NYC! Crazy kids. Going to be watching more of his films in the coming days/weeks tho. Don't rly know what to expect x
Excited to hear what you think of his other films. I’m a big Abel Ferrara fan but I wouldn’t rank The Driller Killer particularly high on my list. Ms. 45 is my favorite. The Addiction is really good too.
Celiac Cruz wrote:This one has no real explanation: Image
walt whitman wrote:10. GOODBYE MOMMY - Jack Wedge extremely my shit. this animated noir film looks like a mashup of Twinsen's Odyssey and blade runner. im obsessed with this kid's punk-artschool style
I saw this at the London Animation Festival last year and also loved it. Hadn't noticed the Little Big Adventure vibe but that was probably a big part of it for me unconsciously
ms 45 is such an amazing and economical film. if you're working through his films chronologically you're in for a treat. also, yeah, svankmajer's alice had a big impact on my continued love of animation as a format when i first watched it on netflix in 2010. i miss netflix in 2010.
Yeah that’s what I’m doing! I have like no understanding of him/his movies. Never been exposed to him at all and it’s such a weird gap in my brain so rly excited
wimbledon, strawberries, bubbles, please protect me. happy midsumma, hope you spend it in your heart, everyone is there. bitch.
pirates of silicon valley is an objectively dumb and soap opera-y film but honestly i'll take any film that depicts steve jobs and bill gates as asshole horny nerds that got lucky instead of Tech Geniuses. gotta say i enjoyed it more this go around than i expected to.
steve jobs is sortof played like randal from clerks in this film and i dunno. i watched this film the very first time it aired. i wouldve been like 8. gotta say i feel blessed that's been the lasting impression of steve jobs i've had in my head throughout my life.
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