Film

Dark Capital

April 16, 2012 | by Guy Zimmerman | Category: Film | 3 Comments

Notes on Found (2012) Found, featuring the remarkable Peggy Blow and with cinematography by Jeffrey Atherton, completes a triptych that also includes Snout and Djinn. In these hybrid media piece we’re attempting to excavate a liminal, Bardo-type space in digital media to see what can happen there. I like the variety of the three pieces, but also the continuities between them, and how liminality shows up thematically in the texts as well as in the visual treatment. Found, for example, is interested in how permeable we are, how encounters with strangers can haunt and even alter us. Found also shines light on the resilience and forbearance of black Americans in the face of the profound structural racism that continues, demonically, to ... [Read more]

Tagged: Djinn, Guy Zimmerman, Jeffrey Atherton, Peggy Blow, Snout, Trayvon Martin

The Considered Eye

February 13, 2012 | by Patrick Halm | Category: Film | 1 Comment

An Interview with Experimental Filmmaker Ben Russell – I first encountered Ben Russell’s films in Hollywood. He was screening some of his works at the venerable Egyptian Theater. As is often the case, with the long established Los Angeles Filmforum venue, you walk in without expectation and walk out energized, rearranged and reaffirmed. The films screened that evening were exceptional and the ideas and images had remained on my mind for several years. It was this longevity of memory that prompted me to talk with Ben about his work as an artist. His films push forward place and person with a fresh intelligent force. There is a quiet and ultra wide observation at work. Character, landscape, and action are given equal ... [Read more]

Tagged: Ben Russell, experimental films, Patrick Halm, The Red and the Blue Gods, Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai)

Heaven is in Your Eyes

January 9, 2012 | by Rita Valencia | Category: Film | 5 Comments

Thinking about Lars Von Trier's Melancholia – Behold the bride Justine, her name plucked from a novel by de Sade, her body bedecked in crinoline, lace, satin, and bone stiffeners. Her voluptuous skin pillows at the edges of her wedding garment, which squeezes her bosom tightly and blossoms open below the waist. She is a vision in white as she runs across the neatly cropped lawn, dragging ragged rope chains behind her. A cumbersome sort of froth envelopes her, marks her as special and sets her apart from the herd of onlookers, the wedding guests who watch, each regarding her with his/her own form of desire. To shun their desire, one after the other, is the project of Lars Von Trier's "melancholy" bride, played by Kirsten ... [Read more]

Tagged: Charlotte Gainsburg, Keifer Sutherland, Kirsten Dunst, Lars Von Trier, Melancholia, Rita Valencia

Becoming Planet

January 2, 2012 | by Guy Zimmerman | Category: Film | 13 Comments

Melancholia, by Lars Von Trier, 2011 – Far away among the stars a planet holds your image in its heart. You met on a summer night. A single glance was all it took. Later, in your dreams, your heart fatally divided, you beamed out a signal of erotic distress, a covert invitation. And now the planet is on its way, a wanderer, dark and brooding – a Hamlet-planet traveling a winding path toward you. The date has been set. Lying back naked on a bed of moss you wait and hope and pine, as luminous as Ophelia. Wagner, of course, loops in the background – the awe-struck Prelude to Tristan and Isolde. Your first and only embrace will be a Germanic dream - the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk, a final all-totalizing work of art. You will ... [Read more]

Tagged: Charlotte Gainsburg, Charlotte Rampling, Guy Zimmerman, John Hurt, Keifer Sutherland, Kirsten Dunst, Lars Von Trier, Melancholia

Djinn

December 26, 2011 | by Guy Zimmerman | Category: Film | Leave a Comment

About Djinn (2011) Close to a year ago I posted a longer dramatic monologue called Snout. I recall being anxious about deploying creative work in the TQ space, where I had been posting thought pieces on culture, but the experiment seemed interesting to readers, a welcome complication to the line of posts I had made. Djinn, presented below, is a companion piece to Snout and part of a triptych I expect to complete in the next few months. Djinn looks at the reductive power of a name, the trap of a name. The djinn in the piece is a trapped party girl, but also a deity figure - a djinn or genie. The element of nostalgic reflection in Djinn does make it seem like a fitting piece for this time of year, and I think its environmental themes ... [Read more]

Tagged: Brad Cooper, Djinn, Elizabeth Greer, Guy Zimmerman, Jeffrey Atherton, Snout

Homies on the Range

October 31, 2011 | by Rita Valencia | Category: Film | Leave a Comment

Revisiting the World of EASY RIDER – I vividly remember paying not a shred of attention to Easy Rider in 1969. Whatever it was about, it wasn't Ours, but was pretending to be. The idea of re-presenting the present out from under Us was still too new. It was a given that Hollywood wouldn't, couldn't ever "get it", that the portrayals of sixties youth culture would always fall flat. People from the Hollywood establishment were untrustworthy observers: too old, too embedded in cliché and conventionalism for even the best of intentions to salvage them. This went for movie stars too, even "hip" ones like Dennis Hopper, who was, at 34, trying to play a 20-something in this film. Nobody with the wherewithal to mass market, on 35 mm ... [Read more]

Tagged: 1960's Counterculture, counterculture, Easy Rider, Rita Valencia

I Was a Film Mule

October 25, 2011 | by Guy Zimmerman | Category: Film | 1 Comment

Sara Driver’s You Are Not I and a Visit to Paul Bowles – I first saw Sara Driver’s film You Are Not I, which is based on the story by Paul Bowles, over twenty-five years ago now. The film was shot quite beautifully in black and white by Jim Jarmusch and features the actress Suzanne Fletcher (who, as it happens, I work with today in LA). A few months after seeing the film, I made a trip to Tangier to meet Bowles, and packed in my luggage a bulky 16mm print of You Are Not I that Driver asked me to pass along. After Bowles screened it, this print disappeared from sight. It was discovered in 2008 by Francis Poole, head of the Film and Video Collection Department at the University of Delaware Library, on a shelf in a vacant ... [Read more]

Tagged: Guy Zimmerman, Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, Sara Driver, You Are Not I

Hold It Against Me

September 21, 2011 | by Guy Zimmerman | Category: Film | 4 Comments

The United States of Stanley Kubrick – Aspects of ourselves that we don’t know how to care for give rise to the complex patterns of distraction that we call our personalities. This notion came to me courtesy of Brittany Spears in a small burst of insight that happened also to illuminate the closing moments of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, a film that has always haunted me. I was surfing around on Facebook and I happened to catch a clip of some Marines from the 266 Rein Division lip-synching Brittany’s song Hold it Against Me on a supply base “somewhere in Afghanistan.” One of my characteristic distractions is to locate something conservatives (or the military) are doing, and use it to climb up on my tub and start ... [Read more]

Tagged: Charles Koch, David Koch, David Loy, Full Metal Jacket, Guy Zimmerman, Hold It Against Me, Stanley Kubrick, The Shining

Double Indemnity

August 24, 2011 | by Nancy Cantwell | Category: Film | 1 Comment

Another Earth, Directed by Mike Cahill; written by Mr. Cahill and Brit Marling – Couched in a comfy sci-fi genre, Another Earth takes off to explore, not the regions of outer space, but instead turns inward, to examine the intimate nature of redemption. It questions what are the actual possibilites for the reparation of unyielding guilt—explores the avenues, the processes of atonement. Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling), a gifted college student with pure potential, takes one intoxicant too many and becomes distracted by the discovery of an alternate Earth, causing her to crash into an unwitting family who too are on their way to a beautiful future. And there the future ends. Wife, pregnant with the second child, and son die and ... [Read more]

Tagged: Another Earth, Brit Marling, Mike Cahill, Nancy Cantwell, William Mapother

The Dictator with the Most Beautiful Hair

May 10, 2011 | by Rita Valencia | Category: Film | Leave a Comment

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, 2010, a documentary by Andrei Ujica – “We were told to fire 30 rounds each into them. From the hip. As paratroopers. Not as a firing squad, where some of the shooters have real bullets, some blanks, so that no one has to live with the feeling of being an executioner. We fired live… “After shooting seven rounds into Ceausescu, the gun jammed. I changed magazines and shot a full 30 rounds into Elena. She flew backwards with the force of it all. We started at about a metre range and then walked steadily backwards, still firing, so that we wouldn’t be caught by a ricochet.” Elena’s blood splattered on his uniform. The back of her skull had fallen away. “She didn’t die easily. She ... [Read more]

Tagged: Andrei Ujica, Elena Ceausescu, Nicolae Ceausescu, Rita Valencia, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu