For Love of Spinal Tap and Disdain for Coldplay
Here is a little continuation of my previous blog.
Tap2 from Hillman Curtis on Vimeo.
Hillman Curtis
David Hillman Curtis is a filmmaker, designer and author.
He generally goes by his middle name, Hillman.
I first encountered Hillman Curtis’s work back in 2003 when I was given an excerpt from his MTIV as a reading assignment in art school. It was a great artist book on inspiration, creation, and process. In later years he came to speak at my campus and I had the privilege of filming an hour long interview with him (which sadly I lost the footage to the annals of the art school). I was impressed buy his presentation and his candidness in the interview and began to follow his work and he quickly became one of my favorite designers.
He has since moved into web film and this is when he stole my lil’ filmmaker heart.
His shorts are simple and elegant, focusing on the delicate and seemingly mundane interchanges between everyday people about everyday happenings. His shots are raw and intimate (get your mind out of the gutter) and in less than 10 minutes you get to know his characters quite well. The films are heavily based on dialogue typically, but the dialogue is well timed and revealing.
SHORT FILM: table from Hillman Curtis on Vimeo.
SHORT FILM: soldiers from Hillman Curtis on Vimeo.
He has also done a well received artist series featuring such design legends as Paula Scher, Stefan Sagmeister, and Milton Glaser.
ARTIST SERIES: Stefan Sagmeister 08 from Hillman Curtis on Vimeo.
But some of my favorite works and what grabbed my attention in the first place, are his beautiful video portraits that he began using in his web design.
PORTRAITS: Moving Portraits from Hillman Curtis on Vimeo.
and this
The Future Comes Today.
Today is the DVD release of Miranda July’s newest film, The Future. I thought, what better way to get back into the blog I have been neglecting the past 7 months, than to discuss Ms. July.
Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Her videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in two Whitney Biennials. July wrote, directed and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know(2005), which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Camera d’Or. Miranda July’s most recent film is The Future (2011), which she wrote and directed and stars in.
Here is the trailer for The Future.
Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker; her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner, 2007), won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty countries. Her latest book is It Chooses You (McSweeney’s, 2011).
July created the participatory website, learningtoloveyoumore, with artist Harrell Fletcher and a companion book was published in 2007 (Prestel); the work is now in collection of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Eleven Heavy Things, an interactive sculpture garden she designed for the 2009 Venice Biennale, was on view in Union Square in New York in the summer of 2010 and is currently being presented by MOCA in Los Angeles. Raised in Berkeley, California, she currently lives in Los Angeles.
and because this is just awesome
Piotr Kamler
Piotr Kamler - Une Mission Ephemere 1993 from Rafael de Alday on Vimeo.
Zbigniew Rybczynski
Zbigniew Rybczynski (Rib-chin-ski) was born on January 27, 1949 in Lodz, Poland, but was raised in Warsaw, where he attended an arts high school and was trained as a painter. He went on to study cinematography at the world-renowned Lodz Film School where he began experimenting with the film medium. In 1983, Zbig and his family emigrated to the USA and settled in New York City. At his Manhattan and Hoboken studios, equipped with state-of-the-art High Definition Video, Rybczynski conceived and produced - as one of the first filmmaker - pioneer video films using HD technology. In the Zbig Vision Studios Rybczynski produced his most important and acclaimed works: Steps 1987; The Fourth Dimension 1988 (produced by Robin O’Hara); The Orchestra 1990; and his favorite film Kafka in 1992.
The Steps
In a television studio, everything is ready for the filming of a new version of the famous Odessa Steps sequence, from Eisensteinês Battleship Potemkin. A computer has selected a sampling of Americans to participate in the experiment, organized by a delegate of the Soviet government. The group of people (in color) finds itself interacting with the characters in the film (in black and white), who are trampled by the boots of the Cossacks and knocked down by the crowd fleeing down the steps. –Live” witnesses to the event, the American tourists calmly continue taking pictures or munching on hamburgers in front of the soldiers slaughtering innocent civilians. The only one to escape the massacre is the newborn in the baby carriage, over whose smiling (and color) face roll the end credits.
- Excerpt from: Zbig Rybczynski - the Retrospective: Film & Video by Bruno Di Marino, September 2003
(Source: zbigvision.com)
I stumbled across this today and though it was too cool not to repost. There is also a really nice little write up included. Ready made blog.
Ken Brown’s psychedelic Light Show Films (1967-69) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris
‘I hope you all remembered to bring your bongs,’ wise words from the American filmmaker Ken Brown as he introduced his psychedelic Light Show Films (1967-69) at the Centre Pompidou. As part of the International Documentary Film Festival 2011, Cinéma du Réel presented a special screening of the light shows Brown produced over a period of two and a half years for the legendary Boston Tea Party. These Super-8mm films were part of the large tapestry of light used as a backdrop to all the music that came through the Boston area in the late 1960’s. The projections enhanced live performances by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zepplin, The Who, and The Velvet Underground, who were all regulars at the Boston Tea Party. Using the same effect as the original shows, synthesizing two senses into one, the silent Light Show Films projected at the Centre Pompidou were given a live soundtrack by Le Réveil des Tropiques featuring Uspudo. Breathing new life into the films the soundtrack was an unrestrained jam thrown together with psychedelic undertones to suit Brown’s vision. True to their time, the films possess an unruly energy with hallucinatory superimpositions, pulsing lights, animations, and comic vignettes. With its abundance of graphic referencing, Ken Brown’s films are true pop culture artifacts and a testament to a time of cultural, political and artistic revolutions. Text and Video Annabel Fernandes
(Source: purple-diary)
Lotte Reiniger
Lotte Reiniger made some of the most impressive animations, like, ever. I’m standing by that.
Lotte was a German animator active from the early 20’s through the 50’s. She was married to Carl Koch, a famous avant-garde artist of the time, and together they created some incredible films.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed is 65 minutes of laboriously and meticulously hand cut silhouette animation. At 24 frames (pictures) per second, that’s over 90,000 different pictures that had to be cut and animated.
Completed in 1926 Prince Achmed is one of the industry’s first animated features and its oldest surviving.
Still not impressed? Watch this.
Gesichtsmusik, 2004 by Ben Kinsley
Ben Kinsley received a BFA in T.I.M.E. - Digital Arts in 2005 and then went to Carnegie Mellon University where he received his MFA in 2008. Ben is a very active artist who lives in Pittsburgh and is currently teaching at CMU.
Sarah Lipstate - Noveller
I open with an apology for flaking out on the blog post yesterday, I plum forgot \*O*/
I spent half the day geeking out over this girls work.
Noveller is the solo project of Brooklyn based guitarist and film artist, Sarah Lipstate. Lipstate received a BS in Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin back in 06’. She works with 16mm film stock, draws, paints, scratches and sews them into mesmerizing film works ala Stan Brakhage style, and uses found footage to tie the abstract flickering to. She speaks of her work as collage, and applies the same concept to her audial works.
Here is a video interview where she speaks about her installation work, Artifact.
Here is one of Sarah’s films Radiation in Moderation.
Here is another AEAEAE.
Her awesome music
NOVELLER @ ART DAMAGE LODGE - 8.18.10 from Jon Lorenz on Vimeo.
