The First Days of Spring: A Requiem on Love and Loss

The First Days Of Spring is a painfully beautiful movie by Charlie Fink, a film that sings to anyone with a broken heart.  It’s a visual-musical reflection on love and loss, originally created to accompany the new album by London’s indie-band Noah and the Whale.  The film can be seen as a companion piece to the album, as a visual version of it, or as a piece of work in its own right.  That decision is very much up to the listener and viewer. The musical journey the film takes you on, from the ominous drum tattoo and string swell on the opening title track, right through to the strummed acoustic guitar, pedal-steel keening and massed voices that bring My Door is Always Open to its devastating close, is an experience quite unlike that offered by most music and musical films being made today.

The First Days of Spring: Reflections on Love and Loss

(The Complete Film: Best Viewed Full-Screen)

The First Days of Spring: A Short Trailer

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An intense and amazing experimental short from Russian animation and experimental motion team Selfburning.

Dreaming of Lucid Living: A Fascinating Performance/Animation Mash-Up

Dreaming of Lucid Living is a short film that’s a remarkable, beautiful performance/animation mash-up by the award-winning animator, designer and multi-media artist Miwa Matreyek. The film is a performance/installation piece constructed like a shadow puppet theater, integrating Matreyek’s solo live performance, nicely composed visuals and animation in a way that is both poetic and quite quirky.  It combines live performance with both pre-made animations  and semi-autonomous, rule based animations that appear to update based upon what a camera is viewing.  The film’s presentation of deceptively simple, deliciously playful illusions, a high-spirited sense of wonder, and creatively unexpected mixtures of live action and animation is just incredible.  I’ve never seen anything quite like this ever before.

Dreaming of Lucid Living: A Fascinating Performance/Animation Mash-Up

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The piece of Pamela Z’s that I know best—Geekspeak—is something that may be loosely called a radio documentary, but actually turns into something more like musique concrete and then back to documentary again, with a moment of crazy glitch in the middle that I still wonder about.  It’s a work that documents tech “geeks” during the 90s, but there are moments that challenge an easy picture;  part William Burroughs, part Glenn Gould, her techniques get at the deeper issues and paradoxes of telling a story of technology with technology.  I’ve also seen her do live performance once in some warehouse in NYC’s Chinatown, using her own voice to instigate a variety of complex effects, gauging minute changes and responding in kind.  Her work tends to defy categories . . . in fact one Seattle blog has her Film Forum appearance tagged as an “opera” event, perhaps because she has some classically trained pipes, or maybe because opera itself is just an older word for “intermedia.”  Much of her work emerges from an extended exploration of the voice and language—which is why she also fits into the curation of Writing for Their Lives, the series where you’ll more likely find contemporary poets.  Because she integrates midi controlled devices that help her extend voice into image, gesture into effect, her media work has close affiliations to that of Seattlite Gary Hill, whose work has explored the way in which language becomes concretized in the image by way of new devices.

Pamela Z will give a FREE talk and demo at the Seattle Campus of the University of Washington for the Writing for their Lives Series on Monday, November 23 at 6:30 in Communications 120.  (Other upcoming Writing for their Lives events of interest include language poet Charles Bernstein in January, and performance-writer and media artist Cris Cheek in February.)

Pamela Z’s performance at the Film Forum will be on Tues., November 24 at 8 PM.  This program will combine short, stand-alone pieces with excerpts from many of Ms. Z’s full-evening intermedia performance works – including segments from her latest work-in-progress “Baggage Allowance” –providing a representative survey of an extensive body of work.

Tahine (Ta’ahine) Tonga by Kalo (Fainu) Foleti 2009

Tahine Tonga is a short ‘experimental film’ by Kalo Foleti.  The film was shot using a 16mm bolex film camera mixed with DV and stills.  The film is the story of a young Tongan girl’s journey back in time, revealing her inner self and a sense of longing she has for her homeland.  I hope you enjoy.

Watch on youtube!

The Grey Dress in New York: Private Longings for Love and Desire

The Grey Dress in New York is an intriguing, captivating short experimental art film by Pierre St-Jacques, which has been screened at art and film festivals around the world. The film is loosely based on Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Project for a Revolution in New York.  Robbe-Grillet’s novel (as well as many of his films) exploits pornographic motifs and the imagery of potential sexual violence.  The Grey Dress in New York focuses on short moments of longing for love and and the need to desire.  A woman in her apartment is getting ready to go out, she is ironing her grey dress.  A man comes up the stairs, presumably to meet her, but this is not certain. The style is similar to that in Robbe-Grillet’s book, one of elipses and repeating patterns, and because of those structures we are never quite certain what the intentions of the characters are.

The central theme of The Grey Dress in New York is one of longings for desire.  Desire for the other and also for the self; each character is very self possessed and in many ways very full of flourish. The film is ultimately a test of desire for the viewer, who sees the story evolve and builds certain expectations that are as much a part of the story as is the main narrative thread. The surreal film The Grey Dress in New York is presented below, as well as the trailer for Alain Robbe-Grillet’s darkly dreamlike film, Last Year at Marienbad (1961).

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The Grey Dress in New York: Private Longings for Love and Desire

Alain Robbe-Grillet: Last Year at Marienbad (1961) Trailer

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There are probably specific expectations some might impose upon a film whose lead is a famous and popular porn star; for example, the promise of erotic visuals, the thrill of the voyeurism inherent to watching porn, and of course, chief of them all, the guarantee of smoldering on-screen sex. Why else would you hire Sasha Grey, an adult film star whose body of work includes 161 titles (none of which I can offer here), as the lead in your film about a woman living her life as a high-class escort in New York? Surely, the reasons for doing so are entirely superficial, and the need for such an actress on set comes back to the need for a very genuine depiction of carnal lust.

So it should be said immediately that watching Steven Soderbergh’s film The Girlfriend Experience with such expectations in mind will inevitably lead to disappointment and frustration; this is a sexless film, though not one that is lacking any form of sensuality. Grey is never shown in any explicit, compromising positions. There is only the suggestion of sex to come, coupled with brief glimpses of full-frontal nudity. This may sound somewhat ridiculous on the surface, but Soderbergh’s interest in Grey as his protagonist has more to do with her mind than with her body: Grey is a successful young woman who owns her own agency through which she manages other actresses, and she considers who she is separate from what she does for a living. She approaches sex, and her willingness to exhibit her sexuality for money, with intelligence and business savvy.

So in other words, she’s just like Christine/Chelsea, the young lady who the film focuses on. Chelsea, we learn, also works in the business of selling sex, yes, but as the title infers she provides so much more than just the chance for a physical connection. She gives her clients the illusion of being in a relationship, the opportunity to live out the fantasy of being one half of a complete, functioning couple; it’s as much about the experience of having a girlfriend as it is about feeling like a boyfriend. The clients talk with her; she kids back with them and teases them, and listens to their stories and their advice on who to vote for or how to invest her money. She smiles at their jokes and nods understandingly at their worldly observations. Chelsea does not peddle cheap pleasures, but instead allows her clients to feign something more substantial. Indeed, the thrill of sex appears to be sort of icing on the cake, or at least something like a cover-up that allows her clients to keep from having to state that really, they’re just isolated or lonely and simply want someone to talk to. 

If the men she sees mask their real intentions for hiring her, then so too does Chelsea put up her own guards throughout the film. Even when she’s alone with her boyfriend, Chris, a personal trainer who wants to market himself as much as Chelsea does, we’re never given much indication that we’re seeing the real Chelsea. (It’s easy to wonder if Chris is a very drawn-out boyfriend experience; they don’t have chemistry together that is any more meaningful than that which she shares with her clients.) When Chelsea is interviewed by real-life journalist Mark Jacobson, he wonders the same thing: Who is Chelsea, honestly? He’s not even sure if he’s seeing the real Chelsea as he sits across a table from her in one of Tom Colicchio’s swank Craft brand restaurants. And of course, Chelsea isn’t cluing him in on whether he’s seeing her real self or the version of herself that she markets– she sidesteps his questions with grace and ease, always answering them without actually having to do so.

At one point in the film, Chelsea is contacted by a new client visiting the city for the weekend. There is almost an instant connection between the two as they talk over the phone. It’s the first time that we actually get a chance to see the truth of this young woman, and the transformation between the Chelsea we’ve seen previously and the Chelsea that surfaces around this particular client is rather remarkable. Here Grey makes Chelsea vulnerable and human; when she laughs at an anecdote that the man relates to her, she is not feigning emotion for her company’s benefit. When she receives an intentionally negative review of her services on an Internet message board (whose author does not engage her services), she all but breaks down in front of him. Her mask finally slips. 

Grey is not be ready for the broader world of acting yet, but describing her performance as unrefined would belie just how perfect she is for the role. She strikes a balance between her persona as a self-made business woman and entrepreneur and someone who, like her clients, wants to have a genuine girlfriend experience of her own. Grey projects confidence and self-assuredness combined with emotional appeal and plays the character so captivatingly well that it’s natural to suppose that she’s self-allegorizing. 

This is a challenging and urgent, immediate movie. This is not so much due to how Chelsea treats sexuality as a commodity, and more because of how the film speaks to how we all sell ourselves no matter who we are. At the end of the day, Chelsea, her boyfriend, and even her clients are trying to project an image; the moments where Chelsea wears her emotions openly are not just her only genuine moments, they’re the film’s only genuine moments. Taking place in the midst of one of the worst economic crises of America’s history, The Girlfriend Experience isn’t just about the lengths we go to to fend off our own loneliness, it’s also about the defenses we harness to protect ourselves from outside harm. 

Kicks 4 Cranes: The Lost Language of Cranes

Kicks 4 Cranes is a hauntingly lovely short film by Seattle-based filmmaker Matt Cibelli, a film that’s sure to please both crane lovers and shoe fetishists.  Cibelli’s work shifts between narrative and experimental styles with a beguiling sense of simplicity, contrasting beautiful scenes of construction cranes with a bemused audio track of women talking about their collections of shoes. Kicks 4 Cranes is a hypnotic piece of work, and like all good experimental films, in the end its subjects are even more mysterious than before.  However, it also evokes considerable attention to the way in which beauty often needs to be constructed and maintained, not unlike a giant office building.  And it does the obverse as well, showing us that a giant, gleaming construction crane against a sky can, in its own way, be as enticing as a pair of fashionable pumps.

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Kicks 4 Cranes: The Lost Language of Cranes

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Synopsis
A lonely unlikely prisoner imagines released from prison, reuniting with younger sister, only to find he is unfit for the outside world.
Directed By Aadhi Vive
Written By Aaraniyan Vive
Produced By Aaran Vive
Cinematography Mark Bulow, Jorge Valdes Ruiz
Sound & Music Lamy Nagata
Make Up Jalil Majul, Lamy Nagata
Title Design E-Liu

Actors
Jonathan Stuppin
Katlyn Hicks
Zico Abdel-Jabbar
Talha Abosafi
Andrew Yo
Made association with Vancouver Film School

Vals con Bashir, Vals Im Bashir, Ari Folman, 2008

¿De qué trata?: Documental animado sobre la matanza de refugiados palestinos en Sabra y Chatila (Líbano) en 1982. Una noche, en un bar, un viejo amigo cuenta al director Ari Folman que tiene una pesadilla recurrente en la que le persiguen 26 perros. Cada noche, el mismo número de animales. Los dos hombres llegan a la conclusión de que tiene que ver con una misión que realizaron para el ejército israelí durante la primera guerra con el Líbano a principios de los años ochenta. Ari se sorprende ante el hecho de que no recuerde nada de ese periodo de su vida. Intrigado, decide ver y hablar con viejos amigos y antiguos compañeros dispersados por el mundo entero. Necesita saber la verdad acerca de ese periodo y de sí mismo. Ari escarba cada vez más y sus recuerdos empiezan a reaparecer mediante imágenes surrealistas…

Lo onírico da frescura y virtualidad al realto

“Vals con Bashir” es un film comprometido, arriesgado, profundamente emocional, que lleva al espectador a su terreno de manera ejemplar. Con un portentoso acabado técnico, se nos educa sobre un hecho histórico que muchos ignorarán, como es la matanza de refugiados en Líbano sucedida en 1982. Mediante un personaje principal, vamos descubriendo su vida, su historia, fundiendo imágenes oníricas con secuencias duras por su intensidad, por su realismo y su veraz forma de mostrar las secuencias. Es un film de animación que trasciende de su “género”: consigue emocionar, es informativo y lo hace de forma neutral, sin intentar modificar la opinión del espectador. No plantea dudas, no las resuelve: sólo muestra las cosas como fueron y es el espectador quien debe decidir.

El complejo de culpa, tema judaico donde los haya, es el punto de partida de una búsqueda del personaje principal, que combatió en la guerra del Líbano allá por el 82. El hombre tiene remordimientos, y trata de comprender por qué, puesto que su memoria parece haber borrado lo acontecido en aquel conflicto. Así, vamos pasando de una dimensión puramente individual de motivaciones y fantasmas del pasado, hacia diversos testimonios de otros ex-combatientes en aquellos mismos acontecimientos. El enemigo musulmán es tratado como una fuerza invisible y amorfa. Disparan, pero apenas esbozamos algún retrato facial del contricante. Son solo una amenaza latente, de la que ignoramos causas o consecuencias.

Otro cartel promocional.

Y todas estas experiencias individuales que el protagonista va recolectando, se convierten en una tragedia colectiva, la de los masacrados palestinos tras el asesinato de Bashir. Y en todo esto, los israelíes son simplemente testigos que no toman parte. Si esto es éticamente reprobable, puesto que aparecen como unos pobres desgraciados que solo cumplen con su cometido mientras que en la realidad son el demiurgo de toda la espiral de violencia acontecida en la zona desde el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Si esto, como digo, es peligrosamente partidista, lo verdaderamente malo del film es comprobar que toda esa visión individual se va diluyendo en un magma colectivo que ni resuelve, ni aclara, ni cicatriza traumas, ni nada de nada.

Los recuerdos cohibidos, por muy escondidos que estén, siempre nos estarán alimentando, siempre seguirán rondando en nuestra vida, y basta un pequeño incidente, un inoportuno trampolín, para que salten de nuevo a escena y nos llenen el cuerpo de cicatrices. Y esto es lo que Ari Forman nos ha contado. De una manera conmovedora, en una de las interesantes animaciones del 2008.

Al grano: Interesante propuesta, sin embargo su talón de Aquiles es mostrarte sólo una capa de un hecho tan complejo. Sin embargo, es recomendable.

* * * 1/2   / 5