Enter the Void: Cannes Press Conference

See Gaspar and gang explain the movie Gram hated oh so much; Features slight annoying Iron Chef-esque translater. But apart from that its as illuminating as DMT trip.

Link Update: May

Here is a list of the sites to be added to our links list (found to your right):

The film company that produced the brilliant Synecdoche (2009) {link}

Media artist, Jeff Scher’s site ‘fez films’ has lots of insightful commentary and great shorts {link}

The pretty Chauvel cinema in Sydney, named after the controversial director of Jedda(1955). {link}

Canadian distributor, Mongrel Media, fantastic list of films {link}

Brad Nguyen, Film reviewr from RRR breakfasters, has a film blog over here: {link}

For wordier diegesis on an eclectic range of films: catabloguing. {link}

Our regular reviewer and poet laureate, Anna Sutton, has a new (non film) blog. Its lovely: {link}

LittleWhiteLies is great film review website, with a spunky design. That’s right spunky: {link}

Film Production company, Killer Films. {link}

Synapse films distributes some pretty bizarre titles, including Executive Koala. {link}

Good resource of images from MGM films. {link}

Applause Pictures, Asian film producers with a handsome website: {link}

Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Film and Television, (EOFFTV), is home to a huge range of articles and production details on genre films and various froms of ‘ploitation flicks {link}

Film distributor, Kino {link}

That’s all for this month.

Weekend Reading #2

1. Making a film involves dealing with a large group of people with different controlling interests. It can all go terribly wrong. The recent case of Margaret (Keith Lonergan‘s follow up to his art-house hit You Can Count on Me) shows what happens when you finish a film, those people start bickering, and you can’t release the film. 3 years hardwork down the gurgler, career effectively on hold. Pretty tragic. {link}

2. Enfant terrible, Russell Brand is set to do a remakes of Drop Dead Fred and Arthur. He sparked controversy recently on his radio show when he rang up Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel in Faulty Towers, and described sex acts he had done with his grand daughter. Brand and co host Jonathan Ross were fired and banned from the BBC, while Sachs has recently stated the stunt has been good profile raising publicity for him. {link}

3. 20th Century Fox and Oliver Stone to make a Wall Street. The inestimably bland Shia Lebouf (Transformers, Indy 4) to star as Gordon Gecko’s apprentice. I hope they do something interesting in light of the BFC (Big Friendly Crisis) {link}

4. Speaking of sequels, here is the Stupid Idea of the Week – Hansel and Gretel: Witch hunters {link}

5. Christian Bale explains his crazed rant from the set of Terminator 4, he feels trust has been violated by sound guys. I like him {link}.

6. Two sisters, daughters of English gangster Les Falco, have just released a documentary about London’s east end criminals called The End. While mostly talking heads with their dad and his mates, this looks like it might offer fascinating access to a world popularised recently by Guy Ritchie’s Snatch and Lockstock and Two Smoking Barrels. {Guardian interview} {Variety review}.

7. Here is an article that argues we should teach the ‘seventh art’ (Cinema) in schools. {link}

8. And finally, here are Professor Walton’s Boxing Cats:

Wednesday AFR Link update #1: Video/Media artists

Firstly, thanks to Emma McRae, ex experimenta curator now at ACMI, for selecting this list. Bloody made me write it up though, that was the hard bit. Oops, sounding ungrateful again.

Isaac Julien {link}

Of his video installations, I have only seen 3 screen work Baltimore, but i grew quite close to it after monitoring it in a gallery for about 3 months. A Beautiful and mysterious trip through three interesting buildings (the Walters Art Museum, the Contemporary Museum and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum) in John Waters’s home city of Baltimore.

Arlo Mountford {link}

A local (Melbourne) artist. From his website: “Arlo works primarily with large-scale interactive installations paired with sound, video and animation. His humorous and often sardonic approach explores art history and the contextual relationship between contemporary art practice and its perceived past.” He has a new show coming up at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, which i find quite inconvienient. Good one Arlo!

“Long Film for Four Projectors” (1974, 16mm film). Photograph © Henry Graber, 2003, courtesy the New Art Trust, San Francisco.

Anthony McCall {link}

Using light as a form of fluid sculpture, McCall is one of those rare artists who is both conceptually interesting and just nice on a simple level. At ACMI, we featured one of his works in the 2006 show Eyes, Lies and Illusions and it was a big hit. I liked to go in there and lie down. 

Ryoji Ikeda {link}

A Japanese sound artist who lives and works in New York City. Sometimes harsh, sometimes remarkably gentle, Ikeda’s music is concerned primarily with sound in a variety of “raw” states, such as sine tones and noise, often using frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing. The conclusion of his album +/-features just such a tone; of it, Ikeda says “a high frequency sound is used that the listener becomes aware of only upon its disappearance” (from the CD booklet and Wikipedia). Also from Emma in a facebook conversation: “while he made a name for himself as the composer/sound artist working with Dumb Type (a Japanese performance group), Ikeda is now also well known for his minimal installations that explore the extremes of sensory perception through the simplicity of light, sound and data”

Craig Walsh {link}

Australian. From his website. “Primarily interested in hybrid / site-specific projects and the exploration of alternative contexts for contemporary art, his work often utilizes projection in response to existing environments and contexts. He has been working across a range of artforms including theatre, architecture, public works, gallery exhibitions and festivals.” That means he likes doing things outside and mixes different sorts of artforms and disciplines together. He works on a lot music festival art programs, which would be fun I think.

Granular Synthesis {link}

Immersive video installations that explore sight and sound in ways that would be good to look at, and maybe one day i’ll get to. If you look at the image below (‘Pol’) and move your monitor screen it has a strange reveal/disappear effect on the red heads. Or maybe its just my computer needs fixing. Can someone confirm this please. Poll at the end.

POL was commissioned by: Hull Time Based Arts, Hull GB.

Cao Fei {link} {blog}

Sort of hyperreal and ‘flat’ art, Cao Fei does a lot of work in Second life under the psuedonym China Tracy. Here is a pretty magical and odd video of some fictitious architecture (Is it fictitious if it has been virtually created, is it now an actualised reality? hmm a can of worms). 

That’s all for now.