by ·Comments Off on Cauleen Smith volcano shorts

Cauleen Smith came to town to open an art exhibit and screen two nights of shorts programs – I made it to one of those.

Songs for Earth and Folk (2013)

Subtitle conversation between EARTH and FOLK
Soundtrack by The Eternals, aka Damon Locks

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Sine at the Canyon, Sine at the Sea (2016)

Racism and outer space
Seems tragic that letterboxd just lists “Cast: Richard Spencer”
Learned: Kelly Gabron = Cauleen Smith.

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Triangle Trade (2017)

Volcano and puppets
Collaborators include Jérôme Havre, a Toronto sculptor, and Camille Turner.
Music by Justin Hicks.

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My Caldera (2022)

Part one of The Volcano Manifesto (this + Mines + Deep West). Volcano Manifesto is also the title of an actual manifesto, released as a chapbook at an art exhibit, which was also titled My Caldera, and featured the handmade banners people were holding in Deep West. Metal soundtrack by Salvadore & Diego Rafael Rivera. “Cameraless print” process, awesome. Per the notes: “The scratchy, chaotic aesthetic is created through Smith’s proprietary process of placing TikTok video stills onto 35mm film then rendering it in 4k as an artifact of the original footage.”

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Mines to Caves (2023)

Geology / wild animals
This one’s also an installation.

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All The Money (2024)

Photographs / fire
Music video for a Moor Mother song from her insane album The Great Bailout.

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The Deep West Assembly (2024)

“to understand the world through extraction”
populations irrupt / volcanoes erupt
Closes with a sign-language interpretation of a Nina Simone song.

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see also:
Last Things (Deborah Stratman, rocks)
Rock Bottom Riser (Fern Silva, volcanoes)

from Cauleen’s essay “The Association for the Advancement of Cinematic Creative Maladjustment”:

The Maladjusteds liberate image from narrative. Narrative is the oppressor of the Moving-Image … the Moving-Image can and must do more than slave for narrative. The Moving-Image must rise up and reclaim the power it has for so long surrendered to story.
…
The Maladjusteds project their love of the Spectator onto the screens. The Maladjusteds resist corporate pressure to fuel the desires of the Spectator. Rather they seek to excavate her needs.
…
The Maladjusted Spectator does not expect to be pleased. She expects to be respected … When she watches a Moving-Image, she revels in the freedom of being responsible for her heart and mind, while trusting the filmmaker to expand and enliven both.

by ·Comments Off on Drug War (2012, Johnnie To)

It’s only been half a year since I’ve watched a Johnnie To movie, but Throw Down left a lasting impression and this one flipped a switch and set me frantically into Johnnie To Mode. About 25 lead actors here, 19 of whom I’ve never seen before, in a complex duplicitous undercover plot, and it’s all still thrilling and comprehensible.

Police Captain Honglei Sun (star of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop) and undercover cop Yi Huang bust a busload of drug mules, and while they’re dropping their loads, injured methmaster Louis Koo is fleeing the warehouse explosion that killed his family. Koo is busted, and facing the death penalty he cooperates. Most of the movie is their duplicitous dealings, intercepting meetings between drug traffickers who’d never met in person, pretending to be the one guy, then the other guy, the highlight of this being a laughing dealer named Haha. After the offscreen deaths in the prologue explosions, no shots are fired in the first hour of a movie called Drug War… then all of a sudden, very many shots are fired, as docile collaborator Koo violently switches sides. Raid on a drug factory run by deaf-mutes goes bad, Suet “Fatso” Lam turns out to be the mastermind. Don’t think I’ve quite seen an undercover cop movie with this trajectory before.

Koo:

Cops:

Fatso:

by ·Comments Off on Wonderstruck (2017, Todd Haynes)

Better than Hugo from the same author, which was also a Christmas-release historical city-roaming kids’ adventure by a sometimes-favorite filmmaker. Ben, a 1970’s boy suffering recent hearing loss, runs away to New York, meeting a friend named Jamie and hiding out in museums. This is cut with scenes of 1920’s Rose (the magnificent Millicent Simmonds) in a similar situation, visiting some of the same spots. As soon as Ben meets up with grown Rose (Julianne Moore) the fun back-and-forth editing games end, and we’re caught up on the fifty intervening years through long exposition scenes, a shame. I also thought Personal Shopper did a better job dramatizing onscreen text (Ben and Grown Rose have to speak via notepad), but overall this was charming.