The Seventh Art is an independently produced video magazine about cinema with three sections: a profile on an interesting group/company/organization in the industry, a video essay and a long-form interview with a filmmaker.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy
on Feb 10, 2012 -
0 comments
The Man Who Lived on his Bike is a 3 minute short by Canadian filmmaker Guillaume Blanchet, who spent 382 days riding his bicycle through the streets of Montreal in order to explore what life would be like if he actually lived on a bicycle.
posted by Obscure Reference
on Feb 9, 2012 -
10 comments
In 1962, the Mansfield (Ohio) Police Department stationed officers armed with a movie camera behind a two-way mirror in a public restroom known for its "cruisy" atmosphere. With the help of the footage shot, dozens of men were arrested, prosecuted, and convicted on
sodomy charges, which at the time carried mandatory minimum sentences of a year in prison. In 2007, the original surveillance footage was obtained by filmmaker
William E.
Jones. He's screened the unedited 56 minute film as
Tearoom at festivals and museums the world over, providing a clandestine look at the scrutiny small-town Midwestern gay men faced in the 1960's. [
warning:
explicit,
NSFW material lies beyond most links]
[more inside]
posted by item
on Feb 9, 2012 -
81 comments
Is The Shining really about the gold standard? Using unpublished info from the Stanley Kubrick Archives as a key source,
Kubrick's Gold Story [part 1 of 4] is a film analysis that uncovers economic themes encoded in The Shining with regard to gold vs fiat monetary systems. Written, narrated and edited by
Rob Ager [
Previously].
posted by albrecht
on Feb 8, 2012 -
75 comments
... it’s no exaggeration to say that LIFEFORCE tosses everything in but the kitchen in an attempt to entertain you. Actually, scratch that, it tosses everything including the kitchen sink. By the time the movie is complete, you may have to watch it again just to verify that you actually saw what you just saw. The movie is a mess of enormous proportions which I absolutely loved.* (previously) [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Feb 6, 2012 -
56 comments
"Piss" Sometimes a girl just wants to get peed on. Filmmaker Bette Bentley has written, produced, starred in and co-directed a funny and very sweet short film on the bedroom negotiations of piss play.
[NSFW - also possible trigger]
posted by stray
on Jan 31, 2012 -
88 comments
ALIEN age 11 - an adaptation created by an underage artist based on the Alan Dean Foster novelization and a few stills, without having seen the actual film.
posted by Artw
on Jan 30, 2012 -
19 comments
Archetype is a seven minute sci-fi short by Aaron Sims, which despite being a no-budget project, features amazingly high quality special effects.
[more inside]
posted by quin
on Jan 24, 2012 -
17 comments
"
How to make sense of Conspiracy Theories" [Part 1 of 9 from YouTube] Rob Ager is best known for his very thoughtful analyses of films such as
The Shining [see also this analysis of the
Overlook's geometry,
previously],
A Clockwork Orange [and
supplement],
Psycho,
Pulp Fiction,
Aliens,
Taxi Driver and
others. He has recently completed an analysis of the subject of
conspiracy theories. "All of us, from time to time, will believe that two or more people in a particular context have conspired to achieve a mutual aim – be it cheating in a card game or engineering an international war. It isn’t by definition a lapse in logic to believe that a conspiracy has or is going to occur in a given situation. Conspiracies do happen and it is a natural facet of healthy thinking and self-preservation to seek out awareness of conspiracies that may affect our lives." [
Text version, Ager's
Collative Learning site]
posted by McLir
on Jan 18, 2012 -
53 comments
Julius Neubronner, born in Germany in 1852, was the son of Wilhelm Neubronner. Wilhelm carried on the family-run pharmacy and had
introduced rapid medicine delivery by way of carrier pigeon (Google books). Julius continued the family practice, including pigeon-delivery. As a young boy, Julius was interested in the then-newly invented cameras, and his hobby and his career merged when a once-punctual pigeon took was waylaid a month. Interested to find the source of the delay,
Julius placed a miniature camera on the pigeon to see where it went. The effort was successful, and he improved upon the design,
patenting a panoramic pigeon-carried camera that resulted in
novel photos. Julius is also distinguished as an early German experimenter in amateur silent film.
His recordings, including
daily life,
historic events, and
film magic, were
restored in 1996 (Google Quickview; original PDF).
posted by filthy light thief
on Jan 9, 2012 -
15 comments
WALK
.. is a trippy 1983 journey from one part of Minneapolis to another. It begins with a guy who can hardly move. He slowly gains stuttered motion and utters basic letter sounds, then begins a real and imaginary walk. His journey is from his view - floating. At the end of this walk, he meets a friend. Walk's film surface is hand worked and street noise is composed as music-concrete. 16mm B/W SLYT
posted by louche mustachio
on Jan 7, 2012 -
13 comments
Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet...
Today is the feast of Epiphany, the last day of the traditional Christmas season; the day also when the Misses Morkan held that grand affair, their annual dance, in James Joyce's
"The Dead." [more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Jan 6, 2012 -
71 comments
One of the more famous suppressed films of recent years is Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an early work by writer/director Todd Haynes (Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far from Heaven). Filmed in 1987, the short film -- which relates the rise and fall of Karen Carpenter with a cast of Barbie dolls -- barely got a year's worth of festival time in 1989 before the twin iron boots of A&M Records and Richard Carpenter came down on Haynes.* [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Dec 31, 2011 -
29 comments
We've all seen variations on the personal time-lapse video --
a snapshot every day for six years, or a look at
a young girl's first decade. But nobody's done it quite like
Sam Klemke. For thirty-five years the
itinerant freelance cartoonist has documented his life in short year-end reviews, a funny, weary, eccentric, and hopeful record dating all the way back to 1977. Recently optioned for
documentary treatment by the
government of Australia, you can skim Sam's opus in reverse in the striking video
"35 Years Backwards Thru Time with Sam Klemke," an ever-evolving home movie montage that grows grainier and grainier as it tracks Sam
"from a paunchy middle aged white bearded self deprecating schluby old fart, to a svelt, full haired, clean shaven, self-important but clueless 20 year old."
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 31, 2011 -
7 comments
<<Vertigo is an impossible object: a gimcrack plot studded with strange gaps that nonetheless rides a pulse of peculiar necessity, a field of association that simultaneously expands and contracts like its famous trick shot, a ghost story whose spirits linger even after having been apparently explained away, and a study of obsession that becomes an obsessive object in its own right, situated likewise on the edge of unreality. This video series avoids assigning the film any determinate shape and tries instead to enter it through a number of side doors, each indicative of a way of seeing.
Part 1 (QT dl ~500mb) explored some of the ground-level weirdness of the film’s construction, offers a suggestion that the film may exist in its own unique tense, and examines two iterations of the (Chris) Marker Hypothesis*.
Part 2 (QT dl ~1.5gB) is spooky, reading the film through a phantom appendage then laying down a sort of Vertigo tarot before moving onto slightly more solid ground with a new consideration of Hitchcock’s concept of the MacGuffin.
Part 3 (QT dl ~1.9gB) takes the zoom-in-track-out as an emblem, reconsiders the issue of point of view, then throws all the pieces back up in the air. That’s a thematic rundown, from the position of the narrator. The images have their own agendas, which often coincide but sometimes don’t.
>> [more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Dec 29, 2011 -
13 comments
A decade on, the Coen brothers' woefully underrated
O Brother, Where Art Thou? [alt] is remembered for
a lot of things: its sun-drenched, sepia-rich
cinematography (a pioneer of
digital color grading), its
whimsical humor,
fluid vernacular, and
many subtle references to Homer's
Odyssey. But one part of its legacy truly stands out:
the music.
Assembled by
T-Bone Burnett, the soundtrack is a cornucopia of American folk music, exhibiting everything from
cheery ballads and
angelic hymns to
wistful blues and
chain-gang anthems. Woven into the plot of the film through radio and live performances, the songs lent the story a
heartfelt, homespun feel that echoed its cultural heritage,
a paean and uchronia of the Old South.
Though the multiplatinum album was recently
reissued, the movie's medley is best heard via famed documentarian
D. A. Pennebaker's
Down from the Mountain, an
extraordinary yet
intimate concert film focused on a night of live music by the soundtrack's stars (among them
Gillian Welch,
Emmylou Harris,
Chris Thomas King, bluegrass legend
Dr. Ralph Stanley) and wryly hosted by
John Hartford, an accomplished
fiddler,
riverboat captain, and
raconteur whose struggle with terminal cancer made this his last major performance. The film is free in its entirety on
Hulu and
YouTube -- click inside for individual clips, song links, and breakdowns of
the set list's fascinating history.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 22, 2011 -
107 comments
