Baraka

Language: None
IMDB Rating: 8/ 10

Plot: Without words, cameras show us the world, with an emphasis not on "where," but on "what's there." It begins with morning, natural landscapes and people at prayer: volcanoes, water falls, veldts, and forests; several hundred monks do a monkey chant. Indigenous peoples apply body paint; whole villages dance. The film moves to destruction of nature via logging, blasting, and strip mining. Images of poverty, rapid urban life, and factories give way to war, concentration camps, and mass graves. Ancient ruins come into view, and then a sacred river where pilgrims bathe and funeral pyres burn. Prayer and nature return. A monk rings a huge bell; stars wheel across the sky (IMDB).

One Nation Under CCTV

When talking of politics and art, you cant avoid mentioning Banksy. The self-styled 'street revolutionary' hit the news some days ago with his "One Nation Under CCTV" signature (see above). Where? Right in the centre of London...

"Banksy pulled off an audacious stunt to produce what is believed to be his biggest work yet in central London. The secretive graffiti artist managed to erect three storeys of scaffolding behind a security fence despite being watched by a CCTV camera. Then, during darkness and hidden behind a sheet of polythene, he painted this comment on ‘Big Brother’ society"(Daily News)

This is not of course the first time Banksy's work created public tumult. His legendary Abu-Ghraib entry has even brought reality into Disney's fantasy lands.

Nadia Plesner

Nadia Plesner is a Danish artist, making politically controversial artwork. Her latest line of work, "Simple Living" shows the absurdity of modern life. The ongoing conflict in Sudan plays a central role in her illustrations, in which she depicts how certain segments of society live their lives in a constant stage of denial.

The provocative messages of her pictures have led Louis Vuitton to sue her over copyright issues. Naturally this has only enhanced the message hidden in her work.

At Least I Got To See Vegas

In the neuroverse (William Gibson)
plug in my
brain pan
fried
in a white noise source
with seizure salad
my eyes are flying windows
scream saver
brain waves with both hands
going bye byte
digitally rendered limb from limb
in the neuroverse



All artwork in this post is published with the courtesy of Raymond Pettibon

The Post-Modern through the eyes of Marx

I promised in my previous post to upload another analytical 'post-modern' video clip. This one is a talk by Frederic Jameson at the University of Toronto on the the late capitalist features of what has been labelled as a 'global post-modernity'. Jameson is one of the last great philosophical Marxists, one who proved to be a worthy student in the Frankfurt School tradition. His analysis are said to be as much grounded in contemporary modern culture as they are historically constructed in the social relations of the modes of production.

Enjoy

The post-modern

Don't hate me for freshing up your intellectual skills today! Its time for some post-modernism. I found two movies of two academics that work in this theory/ concept and whose opinions and critiques I hold very high. The first is a real 'postie' and writes on the simulacra and the experience of images and forms, Jean Baudrillard! The second (Frederic Jameson) I will post later today or otherwise tomorrow.

BTW: enjoy watching the American elections today!

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Part 9

Israel-Palestinian Art

I normally refrain from posting messages on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Why? Well, its a bit like putting your heard in a bag of razor-sharp needles. Everybody seems to have a opinion about the conflict, which is exactly one of the obstacles for resolving it in the first place. It is not just an arena of hate (a matter which in many instances, I believe, comes forth from pure ignorance), but also of continuous judgment of what is considered to be 'Good' and what is deemed to be 'Evil'. A lot of Europeans wearing Palestinian scarfs believe that their (fashionable) resistance, which matches the rest of their trendy clothing, can actually be justified on the basis of the knowledge they receive from their televisions or from what their friends say. However, the moment when those same people are confronted with the Other in its direct form, they shiver and are anxious to be robbed from what they define as the "Freedom Expression'.

Yes, I have been to the West Bank, and no, that does not make me more of a specialist (or more knowledgeable) than the people actually living on either side of the borders. Should we remain passive? I don't think so, but blaming the conflict on one side would be downright foolish and ignorant of the historical and social inheritance of the country at hand. What to do then to bring both sides back to the negotiation tables? To make sure that brighter days are coming. I can think of a couple of solutions, a powerful one is bringing the two sides together through a cooperation in the arts.

Progressive poster for the 40th birthday of Israel; morphing Herzl into Arafat

Distance from childhood memories in the form of dust which is to change into a storm.

*Pictures with the courtesy of the Um El fahem Gallery and Liberation Graphics - both of which are well worth a visit and a bit of your time.

Inferno

Dario Argento is a legend, a hero and now also an internationally renowned figure. Doing cult when Tarantino was not even born. Inferno is a must see, cos its a true masterpiece. Screw the plot, lets go postmodern and purify cinema as a proper form of art.

Terror that's hotter than hell!

Plot:Young poetess Rose Elliot buys a book from a local antique dealer, a diary in Latin of an architect, E. Varelli. She learns of the Three Mothers, and believes her apartment building is one of their houses. She pleads her brother Mark, who is studying musicology in Rome, to come, because she is afraid. Mark's friend Sara reads her letter, which he left behind in class, and discovers the school is run by the Mater Lacrimarum, and is kiilled for this knowledge. The house of Mater Suspiriorum has already been destroyed, and by the time Mark arrives in New York City, he is investigating his sister's muerder. (IMDB)

Enjoy

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Part 11

Eisenstein

Today one of the greatest directors in movie history (I think). A great modernist (one of the last and of Kafkian greatness), who's work shared a similar dialectic as that in the works of Marx. Forget about Orson Welles, cause this is Eisenstein! Poetic, political, philosophical and provocative.

Quote: "In painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation."

Bezhin lug (or "Bezhin Meadow")

Plot: A Soviet farmer son, who is working at a Kolchos is killed by his father, who wants to burn the fields of the Kolchos to damage the Soviet Society. (IMDB).



Aleksandr Nevskiy

Plot: It is the 13th century, and Russia is overrun by foreign invaders. A Russian knyaz', or prince, Alexander Nevsky, rallies the people to form a ragtag army to drive back an invasion by the Teutonic knights. This is a true story based on the actual battle at a lake near Novgorod. (IMDB)



Oktyabr

Plot: In documentary style, events in Petrograd are re-enacted from the end of the monarchy in February of 1917 to the end of the provisional government and the decrees of peace and of land in November of that year. Lenin returns in April. In July, counter-revolutionaries put down a spontaneous revolt, and Lenin's arrest is ordered. By late October, the Bolsheviks are ready to strike: ten days will shake the world. While the Mensheviks vacillate, an advance guard infiltrates the palace. Anatov-Oveyenko leads the attack and signs the proclamation dissolving the provisional government (IMDB)

Werner Herzog

One of my favourite directors is definitely Werner Herzog. Herzog made fame with movies such as Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, Fitzcarraldo and later Grizzly Man. The documentary below is an interview with Herzog on art, cinema, postmodernity among other topics. Well, worth a watch.



If you are up for it, below you will find a copy of The White Diamond (2004) - one of Werner's later movies.

Plot: A film about the daring adventure of exploring rainforest canopy with a novel flying device-the Jungle Airship. Airship engineer Dr.Graham Dorrington embarks on a trip to the giant Kaieteur Falls in the heart of Guyana, hoping to fly his helium-filled invention above the tree-tops. But this logistic effort will not be without risk. Twelve years ago, a similar expedition into the unique habitat of the canopy ended in disaster when Dorrington's friend Dieter Plage fell to his daeht. With the expedition is Werner Herzog, setting out now with a new prototype of the airship into the Lost World of the pristine rain forest of this little explored area of the world, to record and tell this unique story in an extraordinary, feature-documentary film (IMDB).

M- Eine Stadt sucht einen Morder

Definitely time for something new on this blog. I have always liked Fritz Lang. An amazing director in a time where modernism was increasingly visualised in the arts. I personally appreciate Lang more than Hitchcock, if only for the fact that the former continued in his obscure film niche, while Hitchcock was much more of a "Hollywood" director. Lang had something Kafkasian over him, something which made his movies more real (albeit more pessimistic, perhaps).

Anyways, "blablablabalabalabalaba", see it for yourself, here is "M"!

Plot: A psychotic child murderer stalks a city, and despite an exhaustive investigation fueled by public hysteria and outcry, the police have been unable to find him. But the police crackdown does have one side-affect, it makes it nearly impossible for the organized criminal underground to operate. So they decide that the only way to get the police off their backs is to catch the murderer themselves. Besides, he is giving them a bad name.

Enjoy

Stalker, the making of

Stalker was made under very harsh conditions. The movie was actually shot twice, as the first tape got, "mysteriously enough", lots... Moreover, the crew was shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Pirita with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant, which poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact the last surviving member of the crew said it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky (the Russian director) died from cancer of the right bronchial tube.

It is suspected that the 1957 accident in the Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, which resulted in a several thousand square kilometer deserted "zone" outside the reactor, may have influenced this film. Seven years after the making of the film, the Chernobyl accident completed the circle. In fact, those employed to take care of the abandoned nuclear power plant refer to themselves as "stalkers", and to the area around the damaged reactor as the "Zone.

Some photos taken during the shootings

The crew and actors
Tarkovsky and one of Kaidanovsky (one of the leading actors)
Tarkovsky giving instructions

Stalker

Staying in tune with post modernist/ structuralist thoughts earlier, I found a movie that quite fits the occasion. I have seen a lot of movies, some meaningless, some interesting, boring, shocking, etc., but this one is very special and definitely in my top 5 list. I am talking about Tarkovsky's Stalker.

Plot in a couple of words (though there is much more...): Near a gray and unnamed Russian city is the Zone, an alien place guarded by barbed wire and soldiers. Over his wife's numerous objections, a man rises in the Tead of night: he's a stalker, one of a handful who have the mental gifts (and who risk imprisonment) to lead people into the Zone to the Room, a place where one's secret hopes come true. That night, he takes two people into the Zone: a popular writer who is burned out, cynical, and questioning his genius; and a quiet scientist more concerned about his knapsack than the journey.

The Room is a place that means different things to the people who journey there, and the stark, ravished landscape they must journey through consists of the phobias and anxieties that they can hardly bear to face. The expedition the men experience is a long and often maddening one, and there are many scenes where the camera lingers on a beautifully composed shot so that the viewer can take time to understand how the characters fit into the settings and how those settings form both natural and supernatural obstacles.

Dont mind the long opening scene, as a true gem is about to be seen

Pasolini

I am a great admirer of Pasolini (poet, director, writer and perhaps a philosopher). He was both feared and loved; he knew fame and notoriety and was controversial for his blasphemy and stance towards Marxism, homosuexuality among many other things. In fact, you might call him a hero.

I chose this documentary (sorry in Italian, but its easy to understand) and this post (together with the previous one) to bring to light how important it is to mentally liberate yourself from all that happens around you. I believe that Pasolini has tried to do this all his life and that, that attributed to his most apparent enlightenment (even now, 32 years after his edath).

Begotten

Ever heard of "Elias Merhige"? If not, then you are in for a ride... Prepare for some controversial art- nouveau images, because I selected one of his flicks... "Begotten".

Before I am going to give you Begotten check out this clip of a more commercial movie he made not so long ago - "Shadow of the Vampire". It looks really nice, is short (about a minute or so), but breathes Nosferatu (I really liked the atmosphere and the expression of the vampire in the fragment, hope you do too!)


Than there is Begotten

Plot: "God disembowels himself with a straight razor. The spirit-like Mother Earth emerges, venturing into a bleak, barren landscape. Twitching and cowering, the Son Of Earth is set upon by faceless cannibals".

Weird? The movie has no traditional storyline and no dialogue; visually, the film looks as though it has been stressed into high contrast; and the characters, such as they are, were credited as “God Killing Himself” and “Mother Earth.”

An acclaimed and controversial film that is a visual poem about metaphysics, Creation, the Teath of God, and the birth of nature. Filmed in deep, rich black and white, this film has continually caused divisions among those that see it.

Enjoy?

Beacons

Rubens, garden of idleness watered by oblivion,
Where quick flesh pillows the impotence of dreams,
Where life's affluence writhes in eddying abandon
Like air in the air, or water in streams.

Leonardo da Vinci, deep mirror of darkness,
Where angels appear, their smiles charged with mystery
And tenderness, within the shadowy enclosures
Of pines and glaciers that shut in their country.

Rembrandt, tragic hospital re-echoing round a sigh;
A tall crucifix for only ornament
Traversed obliquely by a single wintry ray
Through which prayers rise, exhaling from excrement.

Michelangelo, no man's land where Hercules and Christ
Are at one; where powerful phantoms in crowds
Erect themselves deliberately in darkening twilights,
With pressed, rigid fingers ripping open their shrouds.

Rage of the wrestler, impudence of the faun;
Puget the convict's melancholy emperor,
Caging the lion's pride in a weak, jaundiced man,
Deducing beauty from crime, vice and terror.

Watteau, carnival where many a distinguished soul
Flutters like a moth, lost in the brilliance
Of chandeliers shedding frivolity on the cool
Clear decors enclosing the changes of the dance.

Goya, nightmare compact of things incredible:
Foetuses fried for a witch's sabbath feast;
An old woman at a mirror, a little naked girl
Lowering an artful stocking to tempt a devil's lust.

Delacroix, blood lake haunted by evil angels
In the permanent green darkness of a forest of firs,
Where under a stricken sky a muffled sigh fills
The air like a faintly echoed fanfare of Weber's.

Such, O Lord, are the maledictions, the tears,
The ecstasies, the blasphemies, the cries of Te Deum
Re-echoing along labyrinthine corridors:
A dream for mortal hearts distilled from divine opium,

The watchword reiterated by sentinels
A thousand times, the message whispered from post to post,
A beacon burning on a thousand citadels,
A call of all the hunters lost in the great forest.

For is this not indeed, O Lord, the best witness
That our dignity can render to Your pity,
This tide of tears which age after age gathers
To fail and fall on the shore of Your eternity?

- Charles Baudelaire

Godard

After Pink Floyd there is Godard...

This is Godard's documentation of late 1960's western counter-culture, examining the Black Panthers, the role of the media, the mediated image, A growing technocratic society, Womens Liberation, the May revolt in France and the power of language. Cutting between 3 major scenes, including the Rolling Stones in the studio, the film is visually intercut with Eve Democracy (Wiazemsky) using graffiti which amalgamates organisations, corporations and ideologies. Godard also examines the role of the revolutionary within western culture. Although he believes western culture needs to be destroyed, it can only be done so by the rejection of intellectualisation.

"There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary, and that is to give up being an intellectual"

Sympathy for the Devil


More Godard?

Alphaville is an attack on the syndrome of Science Fiction films full of flash and color but devoid of ideas. An excessively weird although constantly engaging futuristic film, there is plenty to enjoy in it, even though might sometimes a bit hard to understand. Godard makes brilliant use of shadows and lighting to set up a scary atmosphere, and negative images are used effectively throughout to create a sense of awe and provide a feeling of a foreign environment. The sets are very creative, taken from existing buildings in France, and the music used throughout the film fits in delightfully.

Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution

I am Cuba

Today a special post. I finally managed to find the movie I have been looking for ages for and I am sharing it with you!

Soy Cuba (I am Cuba) is described by film critics as "a unique, insane, exhilarating spectacle". Filmed in Spanish, dubbed in Russian, and subtitled in English, this unique collaboration between Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov (The Cranes are Flying), the poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko, and writer Enrique Pineda Barnet dramatizes the conditions that led to the 1959 Cuban revolution. Originally made in 1964 (and unpopular both in Russia and Cuba), but only to be introduced to the capaitalist world in the 1960s and 1970s.

Imagine traveling in Cuba, its 1964 and you you are soaken into a world of: luxury, poverty, revolution, and vagrancy. The times are changing, the world around you is changing. However, no matter how much anything changes, the sun-soaked gorgeousness of the land doesn't budge.

This is Cuba, I am Cuba

Part I


Part II

Stonemason

I am a great fan of Stefan Morrell (also known as as Stonemason). Why?

Check his work below:

Piet Mondrian

"Everything was spotless white, like a laboratory. In a light smock, with his clean-shaven face, taciturn, wearing his heavy glasses, Mondrian seemed more a scientist or priest than an artist. The only relief to all the white were large matboards, rectangles in yellow, red and blue, hung in asymmetric arrangements on all the walls. Peering at me through his glasses, he noticed my glance and said: "I've arranged these to make it more cheerful! (Visiting Mondrian)

I like painters that are progressive in their art. Painters that evolve as their life and surroundings change over the years. Painters that are naked and not afraid to show this on canvas.

One such a painter is “Piet Mondrian” (or “Mondriaan”) who changed his style many times as he traveled from the Netherlands over Paris and to New York. Starting as an naturalist or impressionist, he got his artistic inspiration from typical Dutch landscapes (windmills, flowers etc). However his search for simplification, brought him eventually to Paris. Paris at that time (1910) was at the forefront of cubist art. The city has embraced Picasso and Braque and is still considered to be the birthplace of modern abstractism. To emphasize mondriaan’s departure from life in his artistic backwater of the Netherlands, he changed his name (Mondriaan into Mondrian).

During WW Mondrian saw himself forced to go back to the Netherlands, where he founded one of the most influential artistic group in the 20th century – “De stijl”. The movement expressed a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. The movement's members advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour - they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and only used primary colors along with black and white. De Stijl’s influence came from something which Mondrian later described as neoplasticism (i.e. ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in architecture and painting).


After the ending of WWI, Mondrian returned to Paris, where he would remain until 1938. The intellectual freedom and artistic innovation of post-war Paris, led him to flourish and embrace an art of pure abstraction. It was at this time that Mondrian began producing grid-based paintings, the style for which he late came to be renowned.


In September 1938, Mondrian left Paris in the face of advancing fascism and moved to London. After the Netherlands were invaded and Paris fell in 1940, he left London for New York City. Mondrian work had a great impact on his life, some even caught the painter dancing in horizontal and vertical planes, but never in circles.

If you cant be bothered to read the whole text, below you find a 0.52 seconds movie, which explains the mind and vision of Mondrian

To understand more or to simply lay back and enjoy, watch the beautiful 5 minute movie below.