WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS, 4/10/11

By Scott Macaulay

Here are a few articles of interest I’ve stored in my Instapaper.

There’s a new website for Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and it takes something of a transmedia approach. Chuck Tryon explains:

As you enter the website, it invites you to follow one of two forking paths, the father’s way or the mother’s way, while a haunting, almost mournful score plays in the background. Once you choose, you encounter a split screen with half the screen filled by a semi-circle of video clips and the other a white space with some cryptic text that evokes a moral parable. Below that are some of the social media responses to the website, and although many of them are direct expressions of fandom, others emphasize the aesthetics of the website, Malick’s characteristic use of slow pans and subtle camera movements. None of the video clips offer any dialogue (unless I missed something), meaning that the images and score tell us the entire story. Contemplation prevails over plot summary.

Do you feel alone on the internet? Blogger Freddie7 considers Duchamp, D. Boon, and the nature of online discourse:

Paradoxically, what I find more and more is that the Internet is a place for people to affirm and support each other. It’s as if the understanding of the fundamental weakness of these electronic proxies to represent human connection causes people to push for it more and more. And this could be beautiful. But it can also be dangerous. Because of the depth of the loneliness, I blame no one for how they interact and connect with others online. I just worry. I worry about the urge towards conformity. I worry about Twitter. I worry that all of those retweets and all of those “right on”s contribute to a kind of coarse postmodernism, where what the truth becomes what is most agreed on. I worry that dissent is confused with a lack of etiquette. And I particularly worry about the echo chamber effect, and the way that small groups of people who are just like each other can come to think of themselves

… Read the rest

BLANK CITY, BLANK GENERATION

By Scott Macaulay

Here’s a brand new clip from Celine Danhier’s essential documentary on the wildly creative New York No Wave film scene of the early 1980s, Blank City. Appearing here are Steve Buscemi, Amos Poe, Vivienne Dick, and others, and clips feature the Talking Heads, Eric Mitchell’s The Way it Is, and more. The movie opens April 6; for more visit the website. And watch this space for an interview with Danhier.

And here’s the trailer, which features shots from my favorite movie of this era, Underground USA

Blank City Official Trailer from Celine Danhier on Vimeo.

.… Read the rest

THE SWEET NEW STYLE (THE CINEMA, THE FOSSIL FUEL ECONOMY AND ENTROPY) |
By Amos Poe

By Admin

What the heck is going on in the world? Where’s Andy Rooney when we need him? Where’s Marvin Gaye for that matter? Where’s the independent spirit — are thems creative passions gone? Will Video-On-Demand be the next big thing? Is it becoming a DIY world? Is Lena Dunham the new Spike Lee? What’s going to happen to the Gulf Coast when the next hurricane hits and all that muck and stew gushing out of the ocean floor starts covering humans like they were freaking pelicans, and poisoning the farmlands, shopping malls and Beale Street like it’s doing to the Gulf waters? Does Eisenhower seem like the only American president of the last 50 years who had the balls to tell the truth? I’m just asking, because I don’t know the answers. I have no clue.

Not to worry. At least the film business is booming. Right? James Cameron’s dystopic hero saga Avatar earns three billion dollars for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp. Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, Blackwater, Goldman Sachs, and The Carlyle Group are making dough hand-over-fist (see Carol Reed’s The Third Man). The Gulf of Mexico looks like an endless Morris Louis painting. Does the European Union look like a Monopoly game where the bank prints new money every turn, every roll of the dice, before the board tips over? General Motors, not too long ago, America’s biggest Hummer building company is in receivership. There are wars on terror, border wars, drug wars, oil wars, religious wars, ethnic cleansing wars everywhere you look. The President of the United States goes on TV and says lets pray this madness stops. Pray is right. The Prime Minister of Italy, and its biggest media owner, says he can’t do his job if there’s a constitution, so the Italian Parliament basically agrees to get rid of it. The wealthiest man in the world is a former KGB agent turned Stalinist-capitalist. I mean, where the heck are we? We’re certainly not in Harvey Weinstein’s Kansas anymore.

And by “we,” I mean us, ‘independent’ filmmakers.

At the turn of the last century a bunch of great ideas … Read the rest

AMOS POE’S WHITE ALBUM

By Scott Macaulay

I thought I knew Amos Poe’s first film, but after reading his account of the early days of his career as well as Lower East Side film in general, it turns out that I didn’t. From his piece at Truly Free Film:

My first Super 8 film, was a series of shorts made to the Beatles “White” album. I loved that record and came up with short stories or ideas for each song. My friends helped and “acted” in these films. With ”Rocky Racoon” I did single-frame animation, for “Dear Prudence”, I managed to convince the most beautiful girl in Buffalo – who wouldn’t otherwise have given me the time of day, let alone come out to play – to jump naked out of an abandoned hay-loft on a deserted farm and run through an oat field in slow-motion. I then spliced all these bits together onto a 400 foot reel – there were two, because it’s a double-album – and had a premiere at a bar across the street from my house on Main and Ferry. For sound, my Nizo Super 8 was silent, I had to time the drop of the needle on the record at exactly the right moment as I hit the switch on the projector – otherwise I’d lose “synch”! Ha ! We passed the hat around, and as I recall, I came away with $47.50, not bad. Paid for a third of the film’s cost in one night.

Check out the rest — it’s a good read, encapsulating not only a tale of early film entrepreneurship in Flatbush but also notes on Poe’s latest, La Commedia, for which he recently launched a successful Kickstarter campaign, and a call to arms for us to reinvent our cinema with the new tools we now have.

… Read the rest