Category Archives: cinema

By Hand

A Thousand Hands Ago from S Ensby on Vimeo.

The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.—Stephen

—Trying to refine them also out of existence—said Lynch.

A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into the duke’s lawn to reach the national library before the shower came.

—What do you mean—Lynch asked surlily—by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? JAmes Joyce, Portrait of An Artist As a Young Man

[Wikipedia] Microcosmos (original title Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe — Microcosmos: The grass people) is a 1996 documentary film by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou and produced by Jacques Perrin. Set to the music of Bruno Coulais, this film is primarily a record of detailed interactions between insects and other small invertebrates.

Leave a Comment

Filed under art, artists, cinema, creative captures, nature, philosophy

Situations

Taraka timiram dipo
Maya-avasyaya budbudam
Supinam vidyud abhram ca
Evam drastavyam samskrtam.

As stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp,
A mock show, dew drops, or a bubble,
A dream, a lightning flash, or cloud,
So should one view what is conditioned.
(from The Diamond Sutra)

. . .which reminds me of one of my most favorite, top ten, movies, Werner Herzog’s The White Diamond. “The White Diamond tells the life English engineer Graham Dorrington, who built a small helium powered zeppelin to fly over the jungle of British Guyana and fulfill his desire to soar through the air.”

It’s about the “situations humans get themselves into.”

http://youtu.be/JUDNcm3A1NM

Taste and get the DVD from your library.

Leave a Comment

Filed under cinema, self-knowledge

Mandorla: Trailer

Mandorla – working trailer – CA from Roberto Miller on Vimeo.

Mandorla Movement

>>via Robert Rich Facebook; Robert is doing the music.

comment:

Life is a system of ‘now you see it,’ and ‘now you don’t.” Alan Watts

Leave a Comment

Filed under cinema, creative captures, music

Death To Me

Procession

Morbid Anatomy

Teaser for The Midnight Archive, a New Web Video Series Based Around the Event/Gallery Space Observatory, Brooklyn

Leave a Comment

Filed under cinema

Behind the Scenes

h/t Comic Riffs blog @WAPO

Leave a Comment

Filed under cinema

Stars Raining

The White Diamond by Werner Herzog
The White Diamond is my favorite Herzog movie at the moment. This is not to say it’s his best movie, and certainly I can rattle off a dozen moments from his opus I treasure, yet, this beautifully realized documentary about human aspiration under profoundly human circumstances is it, for me, right now.

Up date on my previous post; Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D! is a somewhat untamed interview and recollection by Chris Heath at GQ.

WH “There is nothing glorious about making a film. It is an endless sequence of banalities.”

CH With a magical goal?

WH “Yes. But shooting a film itself is nothing but banalities. [Then, as though reluctantly, he continues.] However, there’s very rare moments where I get the feeling sometimes I’m like the little girl in the fairy tale who steps out into the night, in the stars, and she holds her apron open, and the stars are raining into her apron. Those moments I have seen and I have had. But they are very rare.”

Leave a Comment

Filed under cinema

District 9


“Sorry, but you’re one too many payments behind.”

District 9 provided the most rewarding movie-going experience of the year. I have to chuckle when I reflect upon how the allegory is worked through in the gritty shoestring indy District 9, versus the hollow treatment a very similar story line receives in the gorgeous Avatar blockbuster. Yup, something about less is more holds, yet, it’s the superiority of the half inversion of the colonialist conceit that helps root District 9 in actual historical similitude. Besides, it seems obvious that Pandora will end up meeting the full brunt of a vindictive mankind in a sequel not to be made.

Leave a Comment

Filed under cinema