More information is available at the BLDGBlog — how cool is that? A film festival that focuses on the architecture?
All posts tagged film
La Mer de Pianos from Films & Things on Vimeo.
As usual Kottke comes up with some of the most amazing finds. Not the best documentary work in the world, though I do appreciate the good short, but, ahhhhh … Paris. (See also his link to a rant by a piano repairman about the decline in quality of pianos.)
Texas Farm, 1952. This stuff is just amazing. The glimpse it gives you into the past. This is a collection of color film reels, without sound, taken by an amateur filmmaker — it appears to be the farmer himself.
Henry Browne, Farmer (1942). More great stuff from the Prelinger Archives on Archive.org. Amazing document of farming of the era. Farmer Browne is African American, but that is not the focus of the film.
Bookbinding Circa 1961. 12 minutes long. Black and white footage. Factory tour. Part of the “Americans at Work” series.
Tag this with: “kind of cool, kind of creepy.” I had to study the diagram for a while to make sure my first impression was correct: this is simply a revision of the teleprompter allowing the interviewer to ask questions but making it possible for the person being interviewed to look directly into the camera. It used to be that directors or interviewers sat right next to the camera lens, but this still led the subjects of an interview to look slightly off camera. I guess this works on the direct eye contact level but I wonder if it doesn’t drain a bit of the human warmth out of the interview process.
That is, this may lead to better television but poorer documentation. Individual filmmakers, and audiences, will have to decide which they prefer — and the usual caveat should be added here that this has to be on a project by project basis or otherwise it becomes yet another technology in the long string of technologies that amount to “realistic” within a given era.
Image from White Rabbit Design.
Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir has a terrific review of Errol Morris’ latest film “Tabloid.” It does what good, no great, reviews do: it addresses directly the larger issues as the context in which to understand the work being reviewed. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Morris has frequently, and accurately, been described as a filmmaker who is fascinated with epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and limits of human knowledge. He’s also sometimes been called a postmodernist who denies or elides the distinction between truth and fiction, and that’s a charge he has always forcefully rejected. (From a recent Morris tweet: “Compare. Hamlet kills Claudius v. I kill you.”) After all, his most famous film, “The Thin Blue Line,” clearly articulated the thesis that a Texas Death Row inmate named Randall Dale Adams was innocent of the murder for which he had been convicted, and indirectly resulted in Adams’ exoneration and release. Morris sees truth as maddeningly difficult to find or to recognize, and believes that human stupidity and vanity and self-deception often prevent us from seeing it. He even suggests that at certain moments truth may be situationally unknowable, as in the lessons on America’s failure in Vietnam delivered by the war’s chief architect, Robert S. McNamara, in Morris’ Oscar-winning “The Fog of War.” But that’s quite a different matter from claiming that truth does not exist or is entirely relative.
I have always had a soft spot for the film Zardoz, which, to be honest, is simply a mess. It’s like watching the early television versions of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service when they had gotten the reels out of order. Or maybe it’s like watching the second Planet of the Apes movie: you keep waiting for it to make sense, but then the ending comes and … nothing.
Still, the idea of a future world drawn out of The Wizard of Oz always gets me. Apparently I am not alone in my weakness for the film: Ryan Britt has a lovely piece on Tor’s website that reveals his own fascination.
The usual arguments about lowered costs of production and distribution. All valid. What’s nice is the number and variety of examples collected on one page.
This link is for my wife who has a deep and abiding interest in the fashion world for reasons she cannot explain. I do not, but I think I would watch this film with her.
If you are at all a fan of science fiction, especially scifi films, then you owe it to yourself to set aside ten minutes to visit Douglas Trumbull’s home page to watch the video that compiles his lifetime of amazing cinematic feats and accomplishments. He narrates it and, given what he’s done, his use of the first person — e.g., “And then I invented this.” — is rather interesting.
More than anything, this is for my friend Marcus:
The maker of Helvetica has a new film out — apparently he’s at work on a trilogy. This one is focused on the role of industrial design in our lives: Objectified.
Mark Coleran designs UIs (user interfaces) for the movies. You’ve seen his work in the various Bourne movies, in the Lara Craft movie, and in a number of other places.
He has collected the various UIs on a single page on his website, and it’s a great place to go for inspiration both when you are trying to design an interface but also when you are just trying to sketch out the structure of a problem. (Sometimes how you look at data helps you to imagine what your data is.)
There’s a lovely post up at Den of Geek about the role of corridors in science fiction films. I wish there was more discussion, or at least I didn’t feel like there was much of an argument or analysis really offered. It’s more of a breezy tour. Still, it’s a great idea and I hope others take Anderson up on his suggestion and we see more pieces like this looking at texts from seemingly oddball perspectives. (If any of my intro to film students are reading this: here’s your chance.)
