by ·Comments Off on Where the Chocolate Mountains (2016, Pat O’Neill)

One digital motion image after another, feels like installation art. Lot of scrolling or rotating wood textures. Other recurring things: a woman’s face, a man’s hairy body, a laser light show.

Leviathan over Arizona:

Preening seagull in flames before a MST3K planet floating over a mirrored river and floating heads staring back at us: it all feels vaguely satanic

Soundtrack by George Lockwood, that’s half the movie. I was already appreciating the sound effects, then after twenty minutes someone says the movie title out of the blue, sparking a series of dialogue clips from some noirish film(s). The credits list a ton of audio sources (the Prelinger archives of course, and some MST movies to match the spinning planet).

Sicinski

Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope:

The Chocolate Mountains stretch in a southeast direction across the Colorado Desert … this 60-mile region, almost totally closed off to the public, is home to the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range … utilized by the US Navy and Marines to test aerial bombing and weapons technology. So it goes that Where the Chocolate Mountains, O’Neill’s first feature in over a decade, is not a film about its eponymous locale, per se, but a film about the idea of the Chocolate Mountains; most viewers are likely unaware that these particular mountains even exist. It therefore matters little that at no point in O’Neill’s film do the Chocolate Mountains actually appear.

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Horizontal Boundaries (1997)

Each segment takes three or four strips of natural scenes or human activity and overlays them as they cut and move and slide over each other in a v-hold loop. After a few of these he breaks the pattern, an animation cross fading into an opening curtain, using a cloudy sky as image matte, stutter-loops from stock films on the soundtrack. Then a blaring siren loop and fast white pulses between a carousel of helicopter shots. Footage will loop around horizontally or vertically, the sense of time all manipulated and broken. Voices heard on the soundtrack were mostly from Dragnet.

by ·Comments Off on Two Cabins (2011, James Benning)

Benning constructs his own versions of Thoreau’s and Kaczynski’s cabins and films the trees through their windows (on his property in California) synced with audio recorded in Massachusetts and Montana. Part of a larger art/cabin/unabomber project for Benning.

Each cabin gets one 15-minute shot, so there’s not much to look at, just sounds. Odd to hear a big-ass truck drive past Thoreau’s place, distant clanking and traffic near Ted’s. I took the opportunity to listen for birds. Merlin mostly refused to cooperate, finally IDing a nuthatch. Birdnet picked up a house wren, but I had to hand-select its call, couldn’t just leave the app running, and bringing the birdnet-pi downstairs would’ve messed with my backyard stats. So, the movie didn’t work to get me in the mood for our own trip to the cabin, where Merlin always hears plenty of birds, including actual merlins.

by ·Comments Off on The Second Game (2014, Corneliu Porumboiu)

The one where the director watches a scoreless soccer game on TV with his dad, a soccer game his dad coached, and they discuss the game, players, era, and political context… difference in rules and tactics between then (1988) and now, the political implications of this army-vs-police game and the risks of being its referee. It’s movie-as-audio-commentary, and I was on board for the first half, until it runs out of interest and energy, just like most audio commenataries. Dad complains about the picture quality (“it’s from the stone age”) and he also takes a phone call which causes digital interference in the sound recording, so both layers have their tech problems.

Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope: “It quickly becomes clear that the least interesting thing occurring on screen is the game. Rather, interpersonal rivalries, intimidation tactics, convenient editing, and extracurricular ploys provide the drama in a parallel conflict taking place just beneath the surface.”

Dad: “You couldn’t make a film out of this. Nobody would watch it, it’s all in the past. Football is like everything else, like cinema and art: they all have their moment, you consume it, and it’s over.”

Porumboiu, arguing that the game is like his films:

by ·Comments Off on 2 + 2 = 22 (2017, Heinz Emigholz)

Mostly a rock doc of some guys recording motorik music.

The title is probably a Godard reference, but I’m still in the mid-1960s on my rock doc playlist, that one’s a couple years away.

by ·Comments Off on Happy as Lazzaro (2018, Alice Rohrwacher)

Innocent Lazzaro works on an illegal tobacco farm slave plantation, and while his young master is enlisting him in a kidnapping extortion scheme, the others are being discovered by authorities and freed into the real world. Laz falls down a mountain and wakes up years later (unaged and part-wolf) to find his old friends.

by ·Comments Off on I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016, Feng Xiaogang)

Watched this for its circular frames and I had an enjoyable time. The title is a translation quirk, the English-language equivalent of a notorious cheater, but movie is based on the novel I Did Not Kill My Husband which would’ve been catchier.

Mike D’Angelo compares it to the Zhang Yimou movies, and that checks out. Bingbing Fan (best known as a tax criminal, also 17th-billed in an X-Men movie) fake-divorces her husband as a real-estate scheme, and when he goes off with another woman instead of remarrying her, she pesters the government for decades (until his death) trying to get the fake-divorce reversed. By the end all the government officials are new people because she got their predecessors fired, and nobody knows how to stop this woman from causing a scene every year.

Beijing:

The Mayor was in Touch of Sin, her “cousin” Wang in Hidden Blade, seducer/traitor/rapist Datou was Andy’s rival cop in Blind Detective, and the court guy who hired the seducer starred in Cliff Walkers.

by ·Comments Off on 4:44 Last Day On Earth (2011, Abel Ferrara)

Another good downbeat movie about the last day on earth. Willem Dafoe very relatable on his last day: he complains about being allowed to sleep, he skypes some friends and when they start playing blues guitar he mutes them. Excellent scene with a delivery driver. Dafoe lives across from the old Essex Market location, over a Popeyes Chicken on Delancey Street. He fights with his ex, and his current girl (of Go Go Tales) freaks out. He sees his buddy Paul Hipp (Bad Channels) at a drug dealer’s apartment – there’s some last-minute grappling with drugs and sex and religion (all Ferrara hallmarks). I’m way behind on my Ferrara films – this came between some late-2000s documentaries and the 2014 Pasolini and Welcome to New York, none of which I’ve seen.

Al Gore whining about climate change, Willem Dafoe singing the blues:

When the world is ending and also your laptop battery is dying:

Before the world ends you should always check in with Natasha Lyonne:

by ·Comments Off on Season of the Devil (2018, Lav Diaz)

Trancefilm, eases you into slow rhythms so you get alternately fascinated and bored. On one hand it’s a musical and I love it, on the other it’s about paramilitary violence and I was sick of that subject before pressing play. I had a few small beers, spaced out a little, and how’d we start hanging out with this drunk poet? Watched this movie featuring a Janus-headed military leader in anticipation of seeing Lav’s Magellan in theaters (a Janus Films release).

by ·Comments Off on Alexandre Larose shorts

930 (2006)

Rorschach black/white blobs in a slow reversal strobe, shifting to other things but always returning to what looks like a graveyard image morphing into the back of a person’s head. The sound turns from circus music at 10% volume (to trick you into cranking up your speakers) to nightmare industrial grinding at 100% to bubbly noise-reduction artifacts at 25% to a piano tune recorded in a room with terrible acoustics. Actually filmed inside a train tunnel, so that headstone image was the tunnel entrance. Larose is Canadian, roughly my age, and supposedly did more interesting work later, so let’s go.

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Artifices #1 (2007)

Ordinary traffic/street lights streaked into timelapse lines with ambient-doom music. It shows you the dot form and the line form, so know what you’re looking at, then a mirror view of the camera’s rotation apparatus at the end, so you know how they made it. Under/overscanned with visible sprocket holes, an impressive condensation of technique and imagery in three minutes.

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Ville Marie (2009)

Shapes and forms, sometimes human, in reverse-image flicker motion. Green person next to towering inferno. Unexpected face kaleidoscope. Trance-pulse, rainbow blotch, lot of different things visually as the soundtrack moves from haunted-house ambient to light piano to projector noise.

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La Grande Dame (2011)

Changing perspectives on building window grids, silent

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Brouillard #14 (2014)

Holy cow, what is this? Could be someone walking the same grassy path towards (and into) the water sixteen times, the images overlaid and masked so they bob and weave into each other, but I’m not sure if that would account for the trees being blown apart into pointillist abstractions. It adds up to a very cool trance effect, made even better by the song “Aghora” by Bill Laswell, which I added since it’s the right length.

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Saint Bathans Repetitions (2016)

1. Grainy indoor low-light scenes with a window in the background and a low hum on the soundtrack, not as cool as the bass parts in the Bill Laswell song, but the image is unstable, subtly changing into different scenes without you realizing how.
2. Similar fragmentary image instability but in nice clear color. A guy and his sixteen trailing shadow-images travel easily through the house, his actions causing exponentially-layered creaking-wood sounds.
3. Vague b/w dream of the previous segment.
4. b/w mountain textures
5. b/w but less vague, the guy and his shadows sit on a couch, the soundtrack clattering echoes in response.
Ohhhh, the layering was done in-camera, Larose must be a mad genius.