Dance Against Deficit Lies – The Video
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/18809989[/vimeo]
14 January 2011, Bank of England
The silence is deceptive: Cage Against the Machine
It’s a very curious moment. The first phase of the new youth rebellion (for there will soon be another) is winding down, the whole country is frozen over, yesterday’s snow lies on the ground, and here in Putney—like the days after the Icelandic volcano—no planes in the sky under the flight path into Heathrow. In short, blissfully quiet. But the silence is deceptive. Read more
New spate of agitational web videos
The last few weeks have seen a new spate of agitational web videos, accompanying the amazing upturn of politicking in Britain in response to the brutal, ill-considered and philistine cuts proposed by the coalition government which took office last May. Read more
Memories of Memories
With Memories of Overdevelopment the young Cuba film-maker Miguel Coyula has made a remarkable sequel to one of the classic films of the Cuban Revolution, Memories of Underdevelopment by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Intriguingly, the new film, like the old, is based on a novel by the Cuban author Edmundo Desnoes—who settled in New York after quitting Cuba in 1979—which itself is a sequel to the first novel. Coyula himself is one of the new wave of independent Cuban film-makers, born in Havana in 1977, graduate of Cuba’s international film school in San Antonio de los Baños, who went to show his highly experimental digital shorts in New York in 1999, where he was offered an acting scholarship and stayed. This would seem to place him closer to Desnoes than Alea, who remained in Cuba where he died in 1996, but it’s still surprising: an avant garde film by a 33-year-old in collaboration with an eminance grise of 80.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Showing at Riverside Studios, Monday 22 Nov 2010
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/11716185[/vimeo]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vertov remade
Michael Nyman’s Palimpsest of Man With A Movie Camera
In a new work called NYman With A Movie Camera, Michael Nyman has conducted a really interesting experiment by taking the music he wrote a few years ago for Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera, and employing it again, this time for his own remake of Vertov’s original using his own visual archive as source material. Nyman’s archive largely consists of footage he has filmed himself since the early 90s in different parts of the world he has visited to give concerts. This produces the first difference between Vertov’s film and his own version. Where Vertov’s film is a utopian pre-Stalinist vision of the Communist city, Nyman’s becomes a dystopian vision of global post-communist capitalism. Read more
Screen Grabs, Fair Use, and the Digital Economy
There is continuing confusion about the use of frame grabs for illustrating books and articles about film. It’s a question I get asked regularly, and yesterday there was a query about it on a discussion list I subscribe to, which prompts this post. My understanding is this. Read more
Election Videos
It’s the first time that a General Election in the UK has seen a televised leaders’ debate, and the unforeseen result has unsettled the political establishment by providing Nick Clegg with a visibility which previously evaded him. The resulting boost for the Liberal Democrats in the opinion polls seems to have sustained itself, and everyone is preparing for a hung parliament. The two big parties are running scared, the hidden establishment are laying in plans to maintain the stability of the pound. The media pundits are enjoying their own bewilderment, outdoing themselves with speculation on what a hung parliament would mean. Read more