Peter the Pirate Squid

I usually enjoy Roman Dirge 's artistic creation; this work, however, fell below my expectations. The text has a few outright mistakes, the story is nice, but a bit too vague: the comic follows the story of a mini-pirate squid and his crew of sea-creatures in search of treasure and their own tortured pasts. All this in only thirty-two pages!?

The drawings are what I really enjoyed most in this comic book, and they're by Stephen Daily.

Many reviewers tend to judge Peter the Pirate Squid too harshly. If you' re still interested in this comic, get it now. It costs just a few bucks and remember that every artist can go through a negative period.

Webcomicsnation

Are iconic, are underground, are free. What more can you ask for?

I guess they're too do goody for my standard, but I like their storyboards and their use of color. If you want to read them, please visit webcomicnation website

Film spectatorship

Yesterday my copy of Projecting Illusion by Richard Allen arrived at my home. The critic disscusses the concept of "illusion" (obviously!) and the aesthetic experience of visual representation. His books touches on fundamental issues in cinema theory, it borrows many concepts from Husserl and Althusser , and invokes Deridda's theory, while the general tendency of film theory seeks instead to exemplify Lacanian theory and embrace Althusser's ideological pparatus theory. The logical incoherencies of contemporary film theorists clearly emerge frome the pages of this book. Allen concurs with Noel Carrol's conclusion that contemporary film theorists's characterization of the impression of reality in cinema is wrong, but while Noel Carroll rejects the applicability of the concept of illusion to the cinema, Allen, on the other hand, gives the concept of illusion renewed significance through a detailed investigation of the ways in which illusion may be experienced and the kinds of beliefs that illusion entails.

Bits and pieces (2007)

Towards a universal theory of color?

Is it possible to accept a universal theory of color?
In the early 20's some Bauhaus painters faced the following problem: was it possible to generate a value scale of equal perceptual steps between black and white? Itten answered in the affirmative. He proposed a scale of seven steps. In the same period the German theorist Wilhelm Ostwald and the American theorist Albert Munsell proposed their color system, which became the most widely used in twenty century color. I 'd have liked to ask them: what do you think about De diversibus artibus?
De diversibus is a book of twelfth century, in which the German monk Theophilus introduces his scale of color with a discussion on painting the rainbow.
"Neither man nor nature could afford to use a mechanism that would provide a special kind of receptor or generator for each color shade" (Rudolph Arnheim).
"A semiotic theory of color universals must take for significance exactly what colors do mean in humans society. They do not mean Munsell color chips" (Berlin and Kay)

Slapstick comedy

If in early avant-garde cinema, one of the tendencies was abstract film, the other was slapstick comedy. It may seem a bit of strange, but Maya Derenherself admitted that her cinematic style was influenced by the Keystone Cops comedies. The use of slapstick comedy allowed film-makers to use stop-frame motion and opened the route to an irrational comic style.

Is it possible to screen film art today?

Such films have had just one screening. Diagonal Simphony by Viking Eggeling was screened for the first time in 1925 and then more than twenty years went by before anyone could see it again. The same thing happened to Tusalava by Len Lye: it was screened for the first time in 1929 followed by thirty years of silence.
I don't think it's any easier today to watch film art as it was in 20's, unless we illegally download these films by using emule!
I believe in film art. Today journalism must be as energetic as it was in 20's, if we want continue to watch film art. Hence the importance of film clubs and film blogs, too.