Just waves in space

7 September 2010 • out of context
tags: cinema, quotes, space, television, waves

“The strange thing about television is that it doesn’t tell you everything. It shows you everything about life on Earth, but the true mysteries remain. Perhaps it’s in the nature of television. Just waves in space.”

The Man Who Fell to Earth by Nicolas Roeg

Pirotecnia para los tímpanos y la corteza cerebral

25 July 2010 • out of context
tags: articles, books, brain, cinema, dreams, quotes, senses, sound, texts, walking, waves

“El aire que vibra, la membrana que palpita, el hueso que se mueve, el líquido que oscila y los impulsos electroquímicos que se precipitan como fuentes sobre el cerebro expectante.
(…)
Los sonidos tienen un acceso más directo al Subconsciente que la información visual.
(…)
Más allá de los efectos dramáticos o psicoacústicos, los ruidos y sonidos pueden generar un espacio de experiencia perfectamente físico.
(…)
Según su propia etimología (sensatio), las sensaciones hacen referencia a sentir (sentire), es decir, al tacto, por lo tanto también a la relación mecánica del cuerpo con su entorno mediante la tracción y la resistencia.
(…)
El sonido es parte del cuerpo, penetra en él con sus ondas sonoras y nos afecta físicamente. Creo que este es uno de los motivos por los que puede emocionarnos tanto.
(…)
Siempre me ha encantado evadirme, ya fuera mediante un paseo, un libro, películas o sueños; y es ahora cuando me doy cuenta de lo que he hecho estos últimos años. He practicado agujeros que daban a mis otros mundos.”

Pirotecnia para los tímpanos y la corteza cerebral by Ralf Beil

Watchings

24 July 2010 • watchings
tags: animation, books, cinema, conscience, documentaries, fantasy, music, painting, patterns, religion, zen

• Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
Wes Anderson

• … ere erera baleibu izik subua aruaren… (1968-70)
José Antonio Sistiaga

• I’m Not There (2007)
Todd Haynes

• Le chant du dragon [watch]
Joel Daguerre & Maître Kosen

I accept chaos [as my personal savior]

22 May 2010 • out of context
tags: chaos, cinema, quotes

I’m Not There by Todd Haynes

No such thing as human nature

20 May 2010 • out of context
tags: books, cinema, mankind, nature, quotes, science, texts, water

“Science has proven that there’s no such thing as “human nature”. Just as water takes the shape of its container, so human nature is relative to its past and present conditioning.”

Expended Cinema by Gene Youngblood

Fragmentation, meta-narrative, liquidity and blood

6 May 2010 • watchings
tags: analysis, cinema, comedy, fantasy, fiction, humour, television, tv series

When I was a little girl, I was already fascinated by the moving image, but I loved films and TV series than were not exactly for kids, I don’t mean ‘adult films’, but I was more interested in Gene Kelly and Moonlighting than in the typical films for children. Some years later, I had a flatmate who one day told me that my ‘problem’ is that I’m a post-modernist. I’ve never seen myself as a post-modernist, or as anything else, but the truth is that some of my personal obsessions are very related to post-modernism: fragmentation, codes, meta-narratives, the absence of an objective truth, etc. And in a way I think that the films and TV series that fascinated me as a kid were quite post-modern.

Musical films as Singing in the Rain (1952) or Les Girls (1957) and TV series as Moonlighting (1985-89) play with concepts, gags and narratives which in the visual context of a child living in the Eighties were quite absurd and strange. Obviously, in the Eighties existed films much more ‘post-modern’ than that, but I didn’t know about its existence until years later, and we should remember that Singing in the Rain, Les Girls and Moonlighting were mainstream/commercial products, not experimental pieces. The thing is that now I realized that I liked those audiovisual products because of its fragmentation and its meta-cinematographic aura.

Nowadays, I don’t think there’s anything in the TV comparable to Moonlighting, but we have Lost, maybe the paradigm of fragmentation, or I should say better the paradigm of liquidity —if, as Zygmunt Bauman states, we live in a ‘liquid time’, I guess that we need some liquid audiovisual products. Lost could be described as a quantum soap opera: first it was the flashback, then it was the flashforward, after it was the time travelling and now we have the parallel realities. Even if in some moments the script is really mushy and touchy-feely, it’s also fragmented, ambiguous and remarkably liquid —fortunately, I think that we are getting over those classical flat narratives in which good is good, bad is bad and there’s nothing more in between; real life is much more complicated than that.

The truth is that although I don’t see Lost as a masterpiece, right now mainstream TV (is there a non-mainstream TV?) is much more interesting than mainstream cinema. A film from the Fifties like Singing in the Rain is much more ‘iconoclast’ that any of the blockbusters of the recent years, but in the television we are watching some interesting changes.

My favourite TV series right now is True Blood. I know, I know… It’s kitsch and excessive, but it’s also a surrealistic mix of everything you can imagine, name any genre! Drama, comedy, action, adventure, crime, horror, science-fiction, romance, eroticism… It can jump from the most tacky to the most gory in a second with an astounding audacity and self-confidence. Have you ever watched before a bloody Viking vampire murdering in jogging suit, flip flops and with tinfoil in the hair because he was having some highlights done? It’s quite hilarious. And even everything is extravagant and way-out, at the same time it has an astonishing natural/realistic quality. Thanks to True Blood, TV vampires (really lame until now) are not just post-mortem, are also post-modern.

Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924)

21 April 2010 • watchings
tags: cinema, civilization, comedy, documentaries, fantasy, fiction, found footage, humour, imagination, mankind, nature

Adrian Brunel
Original: 35mm, black and white, silent.

Crossing the Great Sagrada is a strange film with an odd sense of humour and a slightly postmodern feeling. It’s not a masterpiece, but in a sense it’s decades ahead of its time.

“(…) this journey is portrayed in an absurd manner, drawing attention to the artificial nature of the film. (…) Titles, intended to provide narrative orientation, constantly give conflicting information, producing a confused, comic effect. (…) Crossing the Great Sagrada satirises the colonial stereotype of ‘native’ people. It also places doubt upon the authenticity of many of these travel films (…) The film’s surreal humour prefigures that of later innovative British comedy, such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

Jamie Sexton

Watchings

16 April 2010 • watchings
tags: animals, capitalism, cinema, consumism, documentaries, economy, found footage, humour, nature, politics, television, tv series, vampires, video

• Simplicité volontaire et décroissance (2007) [watch]
Jean-Claude Decourt

• The IT Crowd. Series 1-3 (2006-2008)

• Full Frontal (2002)
Steven Soderbergh

• Innocent Blood (1992)
John Landis

• Footprints (1992)
Bill Morrison

• The Bats (1998)
Jim Trainor

• C’mon Babe (1988)
Sharon Sandusky

• Swamp (1971)
Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson

• Hyas et sténorinques (1927)
Jean Painlevé

• Science Friction (1959)
Stan Vanderbeek

• Historia Naturae (Suita) (1967)
Jan Svankmajer

• Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924)
Adrian Brunel

• Supermâché, aire de pique-nique (2008)
Laurent Sfar & Jean Guillaud

Peace On Earth To Men of Good Will

23 March 2010 • out of context
tags: cinema, religion, war

Broken Lullaby by Ernst Lubitsch