Penumbra Carter's 'Nihilist'

Penumbra Carter's Nihilist

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to try to use the same aesthetics as painting which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing, and most important, insisted on attention to metaphor. Since film is not painting–and not simply because one moves and the other doesn't–I wanted to explore their connections and differences–stretching the formal interests to questions of editing, pacing, studying the formal properties of time intervals, repetitions, variations on a theme, and so on.


-- Peter Greenaway, quoted in Peter Greenaway's Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi

It is one of the most important formal qualities of film that every object that is reproduced appears simultaneously in two entirely different frames of reference, namely the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, and that as one identical object it fulfills two different functions in the two contexts.


-- Rudolf Arnheim Film as Art

Field Trip: Michael Snow

Michael Snow Place des peaux 1998, 34 wood frames with gelatin, lighting, 15,45 x 5,75 cm, Biennale de Montréal, 1998; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Photo: Guy L’Heureux (source)


Michael Snow Wavelength 1967, Ontario, 45 min.

The zoom is punctuated by what Snow laconically called "4 human events": a woman directs two men who carry in a bookcase and place it against the left wall of the room; two women come in and listen to the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields" on the radio; a man briefly appears after protracted crashing and glass-breaking noises, wheels around, and drops dead; a young woman comes into the room and makes a frightened telephone call reporting the dead man ("And he doesn't look drunk, he looks dead."). (read more)

On the soundtrack we hear (among many other things) an aural equivalent to the zoom lens shot(s), a sine wave which goes from its lowest note (50 cycles per second) to its highest note (12000 cycles per second). (read more)

Michael Snow (link)

The Yes Men Fix the World

SurvivaBall! (shown at Warhol Museum 2007) image by 2Things@Once on Flickr (link)

Man Michinaga of Lovers Lane Studios and Second Front (Patrick Lichty) has work in the well-received (Sundance, Berlin) 2009 gadfly activist film The Yes Men Fix the World as animator. The Yes Men are Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno.

“What we do is pass ourselves off as representatives of big corporations we don’t like,” Mr. Bonanno cheerfully explains at the beginning of the film. “We make fake Web sites, then wait for people to accidentally invite us to conferences.”

Read more at NYTimes.com (link)


The Yes Men Fix The World (2009) official trailer

The Yes Men Fix the World (link)

The film on IMDB (link)

SurvivaBall (link)

Yes Men Videos on Babelgum (link)

Field Trip: Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman's Doll Clothes 1975

One of the First Cindy Sherman's super-8 film,"Doll Clothes" has not been viewed since 1975, the year it was made. It comically crosses Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase with animated paper dolls in a sly, funny and clever precursor to the concerns that became signature elements in Sherman's remarkable body of photographic work.

More at UbuWeb (link)