Posted at 1:53 pm by Gelene Celis, on December 21, 2018
…is a french fantasy film directed by Leos Carax (Suresnes, Hauts-de-Seine, France)
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A lot of people walked out midway and ridiculed the film. In fairness, I can see why.
It is pretty ridiculous if we’re looking at the standard story arc but, to me, it broke plenty of rules in all the right ways.
The cinematography is amazing. I feel like you can literally take each frame from the movie and slap it on a couture and/or art magazine.
Everything and everyone we encounter in our entire lives become an integral part of who we are. We live different paradigms of life everyday. This was about a man whose job is to literally live different paradigms of life each day (9 in this movie, to be exact)… and given the different kinds of headspaces we all get into in a day, sometimes within an hour, or a minute, even seconds – I’d say there’s nothing out of the ordinary, in terms of the premise, at all.
“This Oscar®-winning animated short from Chris Landreth is based on the life of Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator who produced some of the most influential animated films of his time. Ryan is living every artist’s worst nightmare – succumbing to addiction, panhandling on the streets to make ends meet. Through computer-generated characters, Landreth interviews his friend to shed light on his downward spiral. Some strong language. Viewer discretion is advised.”
Posted at 6:30 pm by Gelene Celis, on May 29, 2016
…pseudonym of Gyula Halász (1899 – 1984, Romanian/French) was a street artist, photographer, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker.
Street Art/Graffiti
courtesy of lemonde.fr
courtesy of unionstreet.fr
courtesy of theredlist.com
courtesy of artnews.org
courtesy of wikiart.org
“Many viewers of Brassaï’s work found it easier to accept his photographs of graffiti as art than to accept the graffiti itself. In this sense, his work encouraged audiences to look at graffiti on the street in a new light: as framing devices for the world, as a parallel voice of the city, and as a modern primitive art that is all around us if we just care to look…”
– Street Art, Cedar Lewisohn
courtesy of imaging-resource.com
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courtesy of americansuburbx.com
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courtesy of transversealchemy.com
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I found a series by him called “Transmutations” that I love, love, love. These days you can probably render a similar/the same kind of effect with Photoshop or Illustrator or AfterEffects, but they didn’t have that back then so they were using photographic glass plates. Very manual, analog type way of doing things. Most avant-garde artists these days still do the analog thing and combine it with digital stuff to enhance their works.
“In 1934, directly inspired by his collaboration with Pablo Picasso who he had been working with for two years, Brassaï decided to experiment with the technique of engraving onto glass photographic plates. He worked on thirty or so negatives of female nudes dated from 1931 to 1935, printing around 150 proofs covering the various states of the photographs at different moments in the process of altering the original material.” – museoreinasofia.es
Posted at 6:02 pm by Gelene Celis, on September 8, 2014
Lars Von Trier is a filmmaker from Kongens, Lyngby, Denmark.
He was one of the founders of Dogme 95 during the 90’s, which was a rebellion movement against ubiquitous use of special effects and frou-frou that doesn’t carry much substance, which abided by this manifesto – The Vow of Chastity:
1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.)
3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted.
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera.)
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
10. The director must not be credited.
Many years later, when I heard he’s coming out with a feature, free of the manifesto, I was like, “Wuuut!?!”
Then I found out that it’s about a couple who lost their child where the wife/mother is intensely grieving. The husband is a therapist who decides to treat her, himself, by taking her out in the middle of nowhere.
Two things you must never do as a therapist: treat someone close to you and isolate them.
It did not disappoint.
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Don’t me wrong, I like my big-budget, substance-less blockbuster films on occasion ’cause it’s fun but these things, to me, are so much more interesting to study.
Montage editing was “radical” or just too “out there” back in the 60s or 70s even though a lot of avant-garde filmmakers were already using it at the time.
Mainstream caught on eventually.
Granted, they didn’t use it quite as much as the avant-garde, or even fairly popular filmmakers. with tendencies towards experimentation, do (ex. Darren Aronofsky or Sofia Coppola). Mainstream media gauges it with the market vs the avant-garde, which has a very no-fucks-given sensibility.
Anyway back to Von Trier: he didn’t use special effects in all the conventional ways at all but IMO it’s really compelling because he used it, strategically, to emphasize human emotion in moments where it’s at its peak. As I’m sure you know, what goes on the inside can be very different, sometimes it looks almost like nothing, on the outside, so what he’s done really puts the audience in a subjective, immersive headspace.
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Posted at 11:36 pm by Gelene Celis, on August 13, 2012
…is an avant-garde filmmaker based in Toronto, ON
Here’s his latest film
“…For me its more like assembling a jigsaw puzzle that hasn’t been made yet. I don’t have all the pieces and I’m trying to build these pieces, and the pieces come out of some interest, or desire, or willingness to explore these particular areas.
Some people would say they never want to make a film like that. It’s like I never have a clear idea what I’m doing until I’m half way through it, and I really don’t know what my films are about until they’re pretty well half done, because they’re just collections of stories or images. It’s probably not the smoothest way to proceed, but I always like the explorative element of that. I always like the discovery element of it, because I feel like I’m not predisposed to writing an idea that I think I can work with throughout. I think I might start writing about red and end up with green, or I might start writing about wood and end up with steel. I’ve always tried to follow that. I’ve always tried to follow certain things that are important and through that I’ve tried to decipher some kind of code…”
– Steve Sanguedolce
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His films talk about really heavy stuff: depression, suicide, addiction, crime, inequality… along with the social and psychological effects and factors that play in the equation. He would interview people, get them to tell their stories and weave them together as if they were related or he would find connections. He already has a ton of footage but he randomly just shoots when it feels right type thing or sometimes he goes out to shoot for specific scenes on purpose but before the video is cut, the audio comes in first: he would weave the story together and form a composition out of it.
The weird-looking footages are processed in a really trippy way: he shoots stuff, takes the negatives, soaks them in toner and then develops it. His works are visually stunning but the way the stories unfold… are not for the faint of heart.
Having said that, he usually reveals redeeming qualities from the anguish.
I guess that quote by Carl Jung really applies to his works, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
Gelene 