Around two months ago, one of my favourite underground film journals, badlit.com, started a handy roundup up notable posts, culled from the corners of the somewhat established underground film loop. If you enjoy underground film, or have interest in discovering something new, subscribe to the badlit RSS feed, or simply check badlit.com every Sunday.

Also, I’m working on expanding the dinca-hosted undergroundfilmloop, which will be a separate micro-site with categorized links by blog/website/journal, filmmakers/artists, writers/poets, and more.

So, in the words of Zira, the companion of Cornelius in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), aka Planet of the Apes 3: “It’s grape juice, plus!” In other words, this will be a undergroundfilmloop, plus (!).

Summer is prime for the exc!amation po!nt. (My rule is keep yourself to 2-3 per summer writing; with this post I’ve already exceeded my limit.) (However, there is no cap on thinking with an exclamation point, for it is a recipe for joy.)

Folks, it’s time to get to work.

BUT IS IT ART? EXIT THROUGHT THE GIFT SHOP:

by Zack Oleson

Art sometimes makes me sick.  Watching Exit Through the Gift Shop, the new digital documentary directed by street artist Bansky from the exorbitant footage shot by Thierry Guetta (aka Mister Brainwash, his street artist persona), I was struck by the subject but not so much the documentary itself.  Through the first hour, I didn’t know what was going on with the delegated narrator’s unqualified and unrelenting hyperbole—another voice-over doc narrator with a mysteriously foreign therefore authoritative accent, without even a hint of irony—or the attention paid to who was behind the camera, this Thierry Guetta character.  A rather fat and unkempt Frenchman, Thierry became obsessed with capturing people and things in his life on his digital camera ostensibly after his mother died when he was very young.  He used to record celebrity sightings, then he started eyeing his cousin’s work creating tile mosaics inspired by the videogame Space Invaders.  Using that name, Thierry’s cousin started pasting his work up all around Paris, thus “street art” was seemingly born.

Street art is for the layman a thinking man’s graffiti.  The work of Banksy is arguably the most well known, considering a book of his work is sold at Urban Outfitters.  There’s also Shepherd Fairey, who was commissioned to design the iconic Obama campaign posters and whose Andre the Giant “OBEY” trademark can be spotted in almost any city.  Thierry comes to know and follow both these two (any surprise in the will-he-meet-the-reclusive-Bansky thread of narrative is undermined by the inclusion of footage of Bansky, though I suppose it is suspenseful to know how they meet), promising that he’s at work on a documentary.  Thierry’s quite a help and a lookout, and he takes hours and hours worth of footage, yet he never watches or does anything with it.  He concerns himself with preservation of change before it itself is wiped out (it is a shame there’s no scene of these posters being taken down or stencils painted over) which is a worthwhile cause, even if it is through 0’s and 1’s.  Thierry manages to get invaluable footage right before street art takes off and into the galleries and auction houses, evolving modern art to a street-aesthetic.

The shit hits the fan once Banksy asks Thierry to put his documentary together. (more…)

… an artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn’t exist, for the artist doesn’t live in a vacuum.

Some sort of pressure must exist: the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony, but would simply live in it.

Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

— Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky

Two days left for the Chicago Underground Film Festival. They have already announced the award-winners. Above is the trailer for the CUFF; I think it’s a darn neat trailer.

IFP Chicago presents:

The 17th Chicago Underground Film Festival
June 24th – July 1st
at the Gene Siskel Film Center
http://www.cuff.org/

Trailer by Jon Satrom

THREE ITALIAN POSTERS FOR ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY’S EL TOPO (1970)

Seven frames from Shrimp Chicken Fish by Deborah Stratman

2010, video, 5:13 minutes

Synopsis: An homage to Chicago’s East 95th Street Bridge, Calumet Fisheries and to a couple of the city’s beloved brothers. The take out restaurant still operates, propped along the edge of a drawbridge, bounded by the infamous Chicago Skyway and the industrial Calumet Harbor.

found via pythagoras film.

jupiter’s eye

duration: 1:25
2010
pair part one with part two.
Watch synchronously; synchronize part one and part two.

Also, try watch the fullsize here: part 1, part 2

Also, try watching fullscreen.

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A film for me begins with something very vague — a chance remark or a bit of conversation, a hazy but agreeable event unrelated to any particular situation. It can be a few bars of music, a shaft of light across the street. Sometimes in my work at the theater I have envisioned actors made up for yet unplayed roles.

These are split-second impressions that disappear as quickly as they come, yet leave behind a mood – like pleasant dreams. It is a mental state, not an actual story, but one abounding in fertile associations and images. Most of all, it is a brightly colored thread sticking out of the dark sack of the unconscious. If I begin to wind up this thread, and do it carefully, a complete film will emerge.

— Ingmar Bergman, 1960

Yep, here I go again, another shameless self promotion post: click this link to watch my 2010 motion design/editing ‘highlight’ reel.

I’ve been editing film/video for seven years now and I’ve been working with motion design for over a year now. For someone in this line of work, who’s looking for work, it’s essential to have a portfolio website, a reel, a business card, and of course, the old fashioned resume. I have three of the four.

My reel is a little over one minute in length; I must warn those with sensitive eyes that there is copious flashing and strobing colours, and rapid image flicker, which might harm the eyes of some, especially those with epilepsy.

Watch a high resolution quicktime of my reel here. Or watch the vimeo upload of this reel here. (The vimeo upload seemingly has issues with playback, at least on my computer.)

I’m always looking for work; please contact me if you or someone else needs any help. Thanks!

a story/1983 film by Chris Marker

print/get .pdf of this text

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.

He wrote: I’m just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep. Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life. He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I’ve tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we’ll be in Tokyo.

He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time. By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?

He wrote me that in the Bijagós Islands it’s the young girls who choose their fiancées.

He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. I wish I could convey to you the simplicity—the lack of affectation—of this couple who had come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery so their cat Tora would be protected. No she wasn’t dead, only run away. But on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name. So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.

He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

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A whooping 56 films by Stan Brakhage in one luxurious box set

Dog Star Man (1964)

Just a friendly reminder that Stan Brakhage is on blu-ray, and standard definition, with The Criterion Collection‘s recent release, by Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two.

The box set contains three discs and compiles the previously released by Brakhage: An Anthology Volume One with the ripe Volume Two. As expected, Criterion dressed it with gorgeous artwork; sheer decadence; mouth watering. The titling on the artwork is a scan-replication of Brakhage’s white paint signature on black-leader, which appeared on the tail end of his films. (It might be a white grease-pen signature, please correct me if I’m wrong.)

Volume One featured 26 Brakhage films; Volume Two features 30 films, from 1950s films to his closing films of the ’00s. Therefore, this release contains a whooping grand total of 56 films by Stan Brakhage; however, Brakhage’s work is 350+ films in breadth. That leaves 294 Brakhage films yet to see a blu-ray release. As expected, Criterion includes copious supplements, including an essay by Brakhage expert, Fred Camper, whose work was recently featured on this site.

View the details on this release, the films included, watch a film clip, or purchase this release by clicking this link. Sidenote: read this brief Brakhage interview where Stan shares his thoughts on video, and how the Sundance Channel aired Dog Star Man (1961–’64), his epic trilogy, in 2001.

Criterion Collection Synopsis:

Working outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century. Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death, and the search for God,” he turned his camera on explicit lovemaking, childbirth, even autopsy. Many of his most famous works pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act of filming. Some, including the legendary Mothlight, were created without using a camera at all, as he pioneered the art of making images directly on film, by drawing, painting, and scratching. With these two volumes, we present the definitive Brakhage collection—fifty-six of his works, from across his career, in high-definition digital transfers.

More:

By Brakhage: The Act of Seeing by Fred Camper
Before the Beginning was the Word: Stan Brakhage’s
Stan Brakhage Filmography (via Fred Camper)

Artist Interview: Ali Hossaini, (interviewed by Andrew Rosinski, April/May 2010)

Ali Hossaini is an American philosopher, a filmmaker, an artist; an innovator, a pacifist, a seer; a visionary. A warm-hearted man with a mystical, ubiquitous vision for progress. Common themes in Ali’s work include, “a commitment to freedom and innovation that breaks disciplinary boundaries.”

Ali serves on the Board of Advisors for Anthology Film Archives and the Water Mill Center for the Arts. He is an Associate of the Liverpool-based FACT, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, where he serves in a development role.

Ali Hossaini (view his IMDB page here) works on the cutting edge of film, television and interactive media, and in addition to his 2010 Ouroboros exhibit, the 6-channel 3D video exhibit collaboration with SWEATSHOPPE, Ali has been involved in the launch of several television channels, including LAB HD, the only TV channel devoted to video art, Equator HD, Gallery HD, Oxygen, TechTV, NOW, and LinkTV. He is currently proprietor of Pantar, a media production company that specializes in talent-driven projects of artistic merit. Much of his work involves organizing international production, financing and exhbition.

Hossaini’s productions include the Voom Portraits, directed by the avant-garde visionary, Robert Wilson, which includes performances by Johnny Depp (one of my favorite actors, who starred in one of my all-time favorite films, Dead Man (1995) — a film by the brilliant Jim Jarmusch), Salma Hayek — Brad Pitt — Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr, Princess Caroline of Monaco, Sean Penn, and other cultural icons. He has produced numerous documentaries and factual television series relating to travel, natural history, culture and sustainable living. In 2009 he produced Self-Portrait, a short film by Dennis Hopper.

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The end to one of the most baffling shows to hit primetime

by Jack Kentala

There’s an old sort of theory. Or just an image, really. It’s a man riding a horse, and rigged to a stick is a carrot dangling just in front of the horse. The horse wants to eat this carrot, so it moves forward, but, alas, so does the carrot. The horse, though, keeps going for that carrot, and the rider of said horse gets where he wants to go. It’s the same sort of logic of a “Free beer tomorrow” sign permanently outside a local dive; an enticing promise that turns out to be empty.

That’s what Lost has been for the duration of its six seasons. Carrot and stick. Since the show thrives on creating mysteries that the hapless viewer think will get resolved, a reasonable person could assume there’d be equal parts carrot and stick. This, unfortunately, has not been the case.

Seasons one through five have concocted riddle after riddle on the enigmatic Island, and many viewers, myself included, finally thought the showrunners would finally give us that fucking carrot at the end of it all. We’ve endured polar bears, dinosaurs, magic children, visions, ghosts, hatches buried in the ground, the Dharma Initiative, a smoke monster, and, shit, wave after wave of plane-crash survivors and island inhabitants materializing each subsequent season just to pad out the cast of castaways.

Consider it a bad case of American television gone amok. If there’s party to finger, I blame ABC, getting the show’s writers to keep the endless, unresolved mystery going season after season because, hell, ratings weren’t that bad. Only once the scribes knew there was one season left to go, they could finally start gift-wrapping all the little oddities of the show and put an end to the shenanigans.

Season six was supposed to be the Rosetta stone for everything that had happened prior. But it wasn’t. It invented more things. Introduced new characters. Had the gall to put a Mayan temple on an island in the South Pacific with, sin of all sins to anyone halfway knowledgeable of civilizations, Egyptian fucking hieroglyphics inside. And it prominently featured a sideways parallel universe of sorts, in which the famed Ocean flight 815 didn’t crash, and all the passengers went on with their magically-intersecting, marginally-happier lives.

For those hoping the grand finale wouldn’t be total bullshit, well, it was a reminder that Lost never really was that great of a show past its first season. Once it gained its cult status, it veered into a really smarmy, smug, pompous, self-important show that had every sort of limp religious allegory thrown at it, along with a long-running debate of free will versus destiny that held about as much water as the shoddy Star Wars prequels. Same with the latter, Lost has always been pulp; one of the most expensive soap operas ever produced, complete with paper-thin characters, black-and-white morality, and oddly-foreseeable twists. All the while being, naturally, a horrid frustration for anyone wanting a legitimate, scientific explanation of What The Fuck Is Going On besides some warble about the Island possessing an enormous volume of electromagnetic energy.

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January 2010: The Film Society of the Lincoln Film Center conducts an avant-garde film and video poll:

FSLFC’s Preface: In the past decade, the making and showing of experimental film worldwide has gone from strength to strength, so much so that it can be categorically said that avant-garde cinema is as vital now as it has ever been. This addendum to our Jan/Feb end-of-decade wrap-up serves to acknowledge just some of the experimental film achievements of the 21st century’s first 10 years. The rankings on the three lists below were obtained through the tabulation of the number of mentions a given film or filmmaker received in poll responses from a 46-strong group of critics, programmers, and teachers.

Poll participants: Acquarello, Steve Anker, Thomas Beard, Ariella Ben-Dov, Amy Beste, Robin Blaetz, Nicole Brenez, Autumn Campbell, Fred Camper, Abigail Child, David Dinnell, Patrick Friel, David Gatten, Jacqueline Goss, Ed Halter, Alexander Horwath, Kristin M. Jones, Chris Kennedy, Nellie Killian, Lewis Klahr, Irina Leimbacher, Scott MacDonald, Matt McCormick, Mark McElhatten, Kevin McGarry, Don McMahon, Olaf Möller, Oona Mosna, Pablo de Ocampo, Susan Oxtoby, Andréa Picard, Tony Pipolo, Steve Polta, J.R. Rigsby, Jeremy Rossen, Lynne Sachs, Keith Sanborn, Michael Sicinski, Josh Siegel, P. Adams Sitney, Gavin Smith, Phil Solomon, Scott Stark, Chris Stults, Jim Supanick, Genevieve Yue

THE RESULTS

At Sea (2007) by Peter Hutton

BEST AVANT-GARDE FILMS & VIDEO 2000-2009

1. At Sea Peter Hutton, U.S., 2007 (18)
2. Pitcher of Colored Light Robert Beavers, U.S./Switz., 2007 (16)
3. ( ) Morgan Fisher, U.S., 2003 (15)
tie Ah Liberty! Ben Rivers, U.K., 2008 (15)
tie Observando el Cielo Jeanne Liotta, U.S., 2007 (15)
tie Star Spangled to Death Ken Jacobs, U.S., 1956-2004 (15)
7. Ten Skies James Benning, U.S., 2004 (14)
8. The Fourth Watch Janie Geiser, U.S., 2000 (13)
tie The Heart of the World Guy Maddin, Canada, 2000 (13)
tie RR James Benning, U.S., 2007 (13)
11. Black and White Trypps Number Three Ben Russell, U.S., 2007 (12)
tie The Decay of Fiction Pat O’Neill, U.S., 2002 (12)
tie The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him Stan Brakhage, U.S., 2002 (12)
tie An Injury to One Travis Wilkerson, U.S., 2002 (12)
tie Kolkata Mark LaPore, US/India, 2005 (12)
tie 13 Lakes James Benning, U.S., 2004 (12)
17. The General Returns from One Place to Another Michael Robinson, U.S., 2006 (11)
tie Song and Solitude Nathaniel Dorsky, U.S., 2006 (11)
19. False Aging Lewis Klahr, U.S., 2008 (10)
tie The Glass System Mark LaPore, U.S., 2000 (10)

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a beach

duration: 2:11
2010
pair part one with part two.
Watch synchronously; synchronize part one and part two.

One of the better superhero franchises returns with the standard baggage of all superhero franchises

by Jack Kentala

It’s easy to bemoan sequels, especially for the so-called “superhero” franchise films. For comic fans, there are innumerable changes to the coveted Lore for the sake of making a compelling hour-and-a-half to two-hour movie, laden with ret-conning and character compositing and various rejiggerings that muddy the pure waters of the diehard. For the adult populace seeking to watch something slightly more entertaining than reality TV, there’s the barrier of the PG-13 rating, which requires all possible grittiness and swearing and sex to getting sanded down to something harmless enough for the 14-year-old boys in attendance, not to mention the latter usually resulting in a lowest-common-denominator, playing-to-the-moronic-masses dumbing-down of most everything. And for anyone just trying to enjoy a damn film, there’s the product placement, the unwieldy comic relief, and the nagging suspicion that they’re watching a two-hour commercial for action figures.

Rather miraculously, Iron Man has proved itself to be one of the more tolerable, watchable franchises, which I’ll just go ahead and say I believe is entirely the result of the inspired choice of casting Robert Downey Jr. and getting micro-indie (circa Swingers) turned big-budget writer-actor-director Jon Favreau to helm the show. Amazing how Favreau went from slumming it with the criminally-underseen, Swingers-spiritual-successor, small-budget mob movie Made to a gargantuan, multi-unit, multi-million moneybag like Iron Man in around fifteen years, which is about the equivalent of fifteen minutes in gated Hollywood.

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