My Architect (2003)

In A Son's Journey, Nathaniel Kahn examines the life and career of his father, Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974), whose work included the Salk Institute and the Parliament and Capitol Buildings in Dhaka, Bangladesh, before dying of a heart attack in a Penn Station bathroom in 1974, unidentified (it took three days before someone claimed his body) and broke despite having been one of the century's most influential architects.
Louis I. Kahn's obituary listed his survivors as a wife and daughter. But the list was incomplete because Louis I. Kahn also led three different personal lives, with three different families, fathering a daughter with his wife, and a child each by two other lovers.

The film was made by Louis Kahn's illegitimate son Nathaniel Kahn and features interviews with many giants of modern architecture.Throughout the film, Kahn visits all of his father's buildings. Thus, he pursues the object he wanted: by describing the obstacles and influences that shaped his father, he gains knowledge of a lost father.
Why should people watch this documentary? Because My Architect offers a fascinating insight into Kahn’s architecture and then into him as a man. Louis I. Kahn was a man obsessed by his work. His life was neither private nor public, but transcendent. He was a visionary man, whose aesthetics forced him beyond the dichotomy of public and private. And although Louis I. Kahn was already dead at the time of making the film, he is very much a presence in the film because his son was able to use documentary footage of his father from a series of films from the Museum of Modern Art. It’s a very satisfying, very informative documentary experience.
My Architect was nominated for the 2003 Academy Award for Documentary Feature.
You can buy My Architect: A Son's Journey.

Scrap Metal

by Chris Jordan.
His books: In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster; Intolerable Beauty catalog (self-published).

Awards
2007 Green Leaf Award, Natural World Museum and United Nations Environment Programme; awarded at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway.
2006 Lannan Foundation Grant to support production of In Katrina's Wake, Portraits of Loss From An Unnatural Disaster
2006 Fellowship Award recipient, Society For Contemporary Photography, Kansas City MO; juried by Lesley A. Martin (Aperture Books)
2006 Best of Show award, "Artists Responding to Violence Against the Earth," Museum of Cultural Arts, Houston
2005 Finalist, Santa Fe Prize for Photography
2004 First Place Winner, Gary Horowitz Award, 2004 Allegany Arts Council Wills Creek Survey, juried by Elizabeth Thomas, Carnegie Museum of Art
2004 Photo Espana Descubrimientos 04, Honorable Mention runner up to festival prize, Madrid, Spain
2004 Finalist, Honickman First Book Prize in Photography, Center for Documentary Studies, juried by Maria Morris Hambourg

Gopher Broke (2004)

Jeff Fowler shows us how important it is to keep simplicity in mind. This 3d animation reminds me of the old Warner Bros cartoon. The animation is well done and the gags come rapidly throughout the film's 4 min. running time. Gopher Broke is a very entertaining 'toon!
I enjoy this film’s visual style: everything has a dusty, worn down and weathered feeling. Even the vegetables have been handled in a way that makes them almost unnaturally colorful and appealing because they must have a hypnotic effect on the Gopher.


The entire story is built around one particular gopher’s scheme to rob the passing farm traffic of their vegetable harvests, hoping to get a free lunch. He finds himself on a road where trucks are hauling produce to market. He hits on the idea of shaking some of the produce loose for himself but other animals always beat him to the booty. Thus, the action continues to build as the Gopher’s frustration intensifies, leading to a climatic ending and surprise confrontation.
Gopher Broke was playing as part of the Sundance Film Festival 2006 and was also nominated for the 2004 animated short film Academy Award.

Exit Interviews

Chip Zdarsky has illustrated for Popimage.com, Eye Magazine, Law of Inertia and All-Star Magazine while producing his ongoing comic-book, Prison Funnies.

Un Homme de tetes (1898)

The earliest of Melies's early films were only one to three minutes long each & made every effort to make their entire point in the shortest amount of time possible.
Widely regarded as a miniature masterpiece of the silent era, Un homme de têtes is a short comic film which bubbles with wit and energy; this short demonstrats already Georges Méliès’ extraordinary talent as both a performer and filmmaker.
The skill of Méliès’ performance and technical wizardry are pure cinematic magic.

Less than two minutes long, in Un Homme de tetes Georges Melies appears before the audience, with his head in its proper place. He then removes his head and throwing it in the air, it appears on the table opposite another head and both detached heads sing in unison. The conjurer then removes it a third time. You then see all three of his heads, which are exact duplicates, upon the table at one time, while the conjurer again stands before the audience with his head perfectly intact, singing in unison with the three heads upon the table. He closes the picture by bowing himself from the stage.
You can buy the dvds Georges Melies: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) and Melies the Magician and the book Georges Melies.

Jamon

by Luis Belmonte Diaz

Drink (2001)

made his directorial debut in the stylistic MTV animated series “Down-town”. He went on to direct several seasons of the popular series “Daria”. Currently, Smith is working full time on independent films. In 2000, the New York-based Smith made his filmmaking debut with the animated short, Drink, which drew worldwide acclaim and was subsequently featured in more than 70 international film festivals.




You might be interested in Patrick Smith's Small Configuration 2 .
You can buy: Liquid Tales, Avoid Eye Contact, Vol. I, Avoid Eye Contact, Vol. II, Spike and Mike's Cutting Edge Classics.

Pulci 2

Pulci is by Claudio Cardinali. If you want to read Pulci 1, click here.

Cassette Memories (2003)

Aki Onda has performed with multiple cassette walkmans and electronics, using field-recording sounds that he has recorded himself as a diary for more than a decade. He released the first album of the series, Cassette Memories in 2003, under the title Ancient & Modern, followed by the second album, Bon Voyage!
Cassette Memories is a music performance, or a ritual, that conjures up the general essence of memory as Onda playes his own personal memories. He uses old tube guitar and bass amps to deliver the desired warmness and depth of cassettes.
These cassette diaries are only memories of sound, dreamscapes, freed from all meaning and even from Onda's own subjectivity. The artist conducts his attention to the origin of the sounds. It is an event that is partly visible but seen mostly in one's imagination. I think Onda openly acknowledges his debt to visionaries of the medium such as Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas.

Cassette Memories has been realized as a site-specific performance because Aki Onda found that his music is stronger when he performs in a space which has its own memories: memories awake memories. Inside this memorial space, he burns candlelight as a symbol of reminiscence.
This project began with Aki Onda's travel: he got into the habit of making cassette recordings of sounds and ambiences he heard wherever he went. He used a little hand-held device to do it. It became so important that he turned it into a project and gave it a name: Cassette Memories.
Thus, Onda, who forged the music from the sounds of everyday life, began to record those sounds around him that caught his attention. He captured all those songs that contained an eerily familiar quality, altough they're divorced from any specific moment in time. Onda mixed the etereal element to obtain an eternal deja-vu; a moment in which all sound seems to flash back in a single spectacle. And naturally, one day, he noticed his collection of cassettes was beginning to take up too much shelf space!

The Labours of Hercules

Leonie Purchas.

Selected by the Magenta Foundation 2007
Winner of the Arts Foundation Fellowship for photography
Selected for the Joop Swart World Press Masterclass 2006
Awarded 15 month scholarship from Fabrica, Italy, to collaborate on the ‘Les Yeux Ouvert’ exhibition at The Pompidou Centre, Paris.
Winner of the Jerwood Photography Award Selected as one of the Photo District News 30 emerging photographers
Winner of the Tom Webster Award
Winner of the Ian Parry Memorial Scholarship
Winner of the Metro Bursary Award

A Colour Box (1935)

A dizzying parade of dancing lines, squiggles, dots and arabesques is set to a joyful Cuban soundtrack. A Colour Box is probably one of the most innovative uses of film in the history of advertising and a tribute to the instincts of the GPO Film Unit under John Grierson. In order to turn an abstract film into a GPO advertisement, Grierson came up with the idea of inscribing a few words at the end of the film to promote the use of the postal service.
Len Lye originally planned a self-sufficient abstract film. When John Grierson watched A Colour Box, he was so impressed by it that he suggested adding some words extolling the value of the parcel post which are incorporated into the final minutes of the film. These words are somewhat incongruous in the context of the film but they are incorporated appropriately.

A Colour Box was created by the application of paint directly onto film stock itself, dispensing with the need for a camera. This was the first time Lye had painted directly onto film. He then used tools such as a camel-hair brush and a fine-toothed comb to build up colour textures upon the filmstrip. He presented a mass of complex and jumbled movements by painting directly onto celluloid, creating a sense of off-screen space. Lye used the soundtrack as a creative base by associating particular shapes with certain sounds, so that there is a loose relationship between sound and image.
This short film was also notable for being a colour film. Lye used the process of Dufaycolor at a time when colour film was still in an experimental phase.
A Colour Box so impressed the judges at the International Cinema Festival in Brussels that they invented a category for it and awarded it a medal of honour.

You can buy the books Len Lye and Len Lye and the problem of popular films.

Paris

You can watch the artwork of architect and artist Hartwig Braun on Artyglobe.

Blueberry (2004)

Blueberry (Blueberry: L'expérience secrète) is a French movie adaptation of the popular Franco-Belgian comic book series Blueberry, illustrated by Jean Giraud (better known as Moebius) and scripted by Jean-Michel Charlier. This adptation is very loosely based on the comic and adds mystical and shamanic elements not present in the source material of interest to the movie's director, Jan Kounen.
In the 1870's, U.S Marshal Mike S. Blueberry tries to stop Wally Blount, the man who killed his girlfriend from getting to a stockpile of gold hidden in Indian territory. On his way, he meets Prosit, a German villain on a persistent mission to find gold in the Superstition Mountains.
The film combines some action-packed western sequences with lots of druggy references as Blueberry follows his Indian brother Runi (Temuera Morrison) into the depths of his own unconscious while battling a hardened killer (Michael Madsen) and trying to woo love interest Juliette Lewis.

The movie features several elaborate psychedelic 3D computer graphics sequences as a means of portraying Blueberry's shamanic experiences from his point of view. Jan Kounen, the director of the film, drew upon his extensive first hand knowledge of ayahuasca rituals in order to design the visuals for these sequences, Kounen having undergone the ceremony at least a hundred times with a Shipibo native speaker in Peru. An authentic Shipibo ayahuasca guide appears in the film and performs a sacred chant. In the film, the exact nature of the entheogenic sacramental liquid which Blueberry (and his enemy, Blount) drink remains undisclosed. During the final visionary scene, however, a bowl of leaves is shown accompanied by a twisting vine which closely resembles the shape of Banisteriopsis caapi.
You can buy Blueberry, l'expérience secrète.

Senza Titolo (Without Title)

"Senza Titolo" (Without Title, 2008, 21 cm x 30 cm).

Claudio Parentela is an illustrator, painter, photographer, mail artist, cartoonist, collagist, free lance journalist... Active for many years in the international underground scene. He has collaborated & he collaborates with many, many zines, magazines of contemporary art, literary and of comics in Italy and in the world...& on paper and on the web...
He has also worked with many bands of industrial, noise, experimental & electronic music. He has produced some booklets of illustrations and comics, too.

Dog Interface (2000)

The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time (TMGLMOAT) is a Radiohead DVD released on December 1, 2004. It is directed and edited by Chris Bran. The film contains all four episodes of TMGLMOAT and features new songs with numerous live videos. It also has animations and interviews with the band.
One of the episodes is The Dog Interface, a short film directed by the acclaimed Juan Pablo Etcheverry. It's pure poetry!

In a futuristic world, human society has been annihilated. People continue to live but they have mutated and even if their knowledge of science and techology continues to grow, they no longer comunicate with each other.
Their life is impersonal, without a soul. Everything, every human life can be "rehealed" artificiously. People don't need anything, they no longer need to be human.
Dog Interface is the most poetic cyberpunk tale I've ever watched!

Contraband Chapter 1

A near-future tale revealing an all-too-possibly-real world of underground video, violence and crime on cell phone networks, Contraband follows a young man's journey into a new "voyeur underground", where profit-hungry youths prowl streets secretly filming radical events with mobile devices to satisfy society's demand for sensational on-the-go content.
It's an Orwellian Graphic Novel: the use/misuse of camera phones, loss of privacy and the boom in the spy cam industry that this generates. It reveals how our life going to be in the next few years!

Contraband is a 144 page graphic novel written by Thomas Behe and illustrated by Phil Elliott. Published by SLG Publishing.

Canadian writer TJ Behe has twelve years experience developing wireless content for global entertainment companies including BBC, Playboy, MTV and T-Mobile.

UK Artist Phil Elliott ’s graphic novels include Illegal Alien (Dark Horse) and Tupelo (Slave Labor) and he has over 20 years experience working with publishers including Marvel, DC, Image and Fantagraphics.

Inker & Toner Ian Sharman and Cherie Donovan are active professionals in the UK comic scene currently developing sequential titles at Orangutan Comics.

Filmstudie (1926)

Hans Richter’s pioneering Dada work Filmstudie was an early attempt to combine Dadaist aesthetics and abstraction. Made in 1926 Richter’s film presents the viewer with a disorientating collage of uncanny false eyeballs, distorted faces and abstract forms (none of these themes is treated constantly). It's similar to Man Ray's work in its ballet of motion which combines a playful tension between figurative and abstract forms, both in negative and positive exposure.
Filmstudie is essentialy a transitional work of mixed styles. A number of devices drawing attention to the technical specificity of photography (multiple exposures and negative images) are also included and enter into a successful fusion with the remaining elements.


Dreamlike motifs of magical realisms correspond to the style of surrealist movement (especially in the use of surrealist motifs such as glass eyes, birds, and mask-like faces) which had recently achieved its breakthrough in France. But you can also find animated geometric surfaces and lines from Richter's first films and there are also signs of influence from Cinéma pur and reminiscences of Léger's Ballet Mechanique (1924). Photographs of light and shadow, circular motifs of varied shadings, point-style shapes, light reflections and photographs of a girl's head multiplied through prisms occur in a series in which the abstract forms seem in large part to be blurred and foggy.
Although Richter does not reach the formal subtlety of Eggeling or Ruttmann, his work still contributes substantially to the Absolute Film. He isolated certain parameters and he contributed to construct a basis for a cinematic art independent of the realism and concrete nature of the photographic image. This film also wellded the aesthetic thresholds between photography and animation, erasing some differences and accentuating others.

Nude A Poppin Horizon

by Brad Troemel

Hokusai - An Animated Sketchbook (1978)

This award winning short film was written, directed and animated by Tony White who is known for his versatility and range of styles, way back in 1978. His career includes twenty years at Animus Productions/Entertainments as president and founder, seven years at Richard Williams Animation Limited as personal assistant to Richard Williams on A Christmas Carol (Academy Award), five years at Halas and Batchelor as Head of Design, Director, Designer, Animator of numerous projects such as the animated tv series Jackson Five and Tomfoolery, various commercials and short films.

The film brings to life the worlds of Japanese ukiyo master, Katsushika Hokusai (best known for his iconic The Great Wave). Hokusai's work is so pervasive in Japanese culture that you can still see it influencing today's artists.
This short British film is a wonderful overview of the artist's life and work and also his philosophy about art. White has used 60 Hokusai prints to animate this wonderful tribute to the artist who called himself the old man mad about drawing.
It deservedly won the BAFTA award in 1979 in the Best Short Factual Film category.

Amsterdam

You can watch the artwork of architect and artist Hartwig Braun on Artyglobe.

The Blood of Yingzhou District (潁州的孩子), 2006

Ruby Yang is a noted Chinese-American filmmaker whose work in documentary and dramatic film has earned her an Academy Award and numerous international awards. She lives and works in Beijing, directing documentaries and public service announcements for the China AIDS Media Project.
The Blood of Yingzhou District, which Yang directed as part of the project, won an Academy Award in February 2007.
The subject is AIDS in China, specifically in the province of Anhui. The victims are poor families. The adults donated blood in evidently unsanitary conditions: one individual, apparently connected to the blood drawing procedure, describes combining the donated blood of fifty individuals and then re-injecting a little bit of the mixture into the veins of the donors.

Yang enters the Yingzhou region and follows the plight of a number of these orphans, including a particularly unfortunate one, Gau Jun. The suffering of these orphans is all the more devastating for being largely unnecessary: the results of misinformation about the nature of the disease. Abandoned by his family, Gau Jun hasn't uttered a word since then and is now treated as a pariah by surrounding communities. The film reveals how the little boy is taken in by a loving, accepting family and given a second chance.
No-one knows how old Gao Jun is. Four? Older? Younger? Whatever his biological age, he has none of the verbal babble, or ready tears of a child his age. The film tracks this orphan for a year as his closest surviving kin -- his uncles -- weigh what to do with him. The older uncle’s dilemma: if he allows his children to play with Gao Jun, who is HIV-positive, they will be ostracized by terrified neighbors. The younger uncle’s dilemma: so long as Gao Jun remains in the house, the young man may not be able to find a wife.
Though the film is primarily concerned about the social conditions of these children, political issues are indirectly raised. One can't help but dismayed by China's social services. It is hard to believe that China's health system could be so primitive!
Yang reminds us that because of governmental irresponsibility, many other less fortunate children are left to fend for themselves. These children may never find adoptive parents and social acceptance.

Brace 3

Barbara Caveng. Since 1991, she participated as a free-lance artist in numerous art projects, concentrating on sculpture, installation and object art. Her installations have been recently shown in projects in the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, in Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, the Gaus der Kunst in Munich, the Art Museum of Akurery, Iceland, the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Heidelberger Kunstverein.

In 2003, she was awarded the H. W. & J.Hector Award by Kunsthalle Mannheim for installation and in 2002 the Award of the city of Limburg for her work U MENJA EST METSCHTA – I HAVE A DREAM. In 2001, she was also awarded the cultural exchange scholarship for Moscow by the Senate of Berlin.

Tusalava (1928)

Tusalava (The Samoan word Tusalava means 'In the end, everything is just the same'), is a 9 minute black and white animation on the origin of life, based on Polinesian art. Len Lye had recently arrived in London from the South Pacific when he began this film in which he merges elements of European modern art with the primitive art which he had experienced in the South Sea Islands.
It was particulary influenced by the witchetty grub (Baldwin Spencer's and F.J. Gillen's The Native Tribes of Central Australia has been the main source for Lye's ideas on witchetty grubs), a source of food for the Aboriginal people. The shapes inherent to much of Lye’s direct animation and paintings are derived from dots and indigenous tapa patterns. His enduring fascination for and extensive studies of Pacific imagery, rhythms, myths and legends was translated into many of his paintings, films and theories of art.
This short film was funded in part by the London Film Society and Lye laboured over it for two years. The Society couldn't afford an optical sound print so it showed the film in 1929 with live piano music written by the Australian Jack Ellitt.


Tusalava is now a silent film as its score has been lost, maybe forever, since Ellitt recently died in N.S.W. Tusalava had an almost minimal slowness, quite different from the pace of Lye's following films. There is a slow development and interaction of forms. Len Lye thought not of forms in themselves but of them as movements in time. He needed a new kind of imagination to seize this idea fully but the public regrets that the film was not amusing.
With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positives, the other negatives, the film evolves primaeval single-celled nuclear forms into living, rhythmic chains of existence and then, beyond, into creatures of tribal consciousness, both ancient and utterly contemporary. The images react, interpenetrate, perhaps attack, absorb and separate, until a final symbiosis is achieved. This film captures the mutability of existence, the ambiguity between fertile penetration and aggression, absorption and synthesis.
It represents a self-shape annihilating an agonistic element. lt should be the first part of a trilogy, with the beginnings of organic life. The second part would have shown geology and the sea and the third would have dealt with humanised forms. For financial reasons, he was unable to process the second and third parts and it was not until six years later that he had the opportunity to launch another film. In the meantime, he pursued activities as a designer and painter.
You can buy the books Len Lye and Len Lye and the problem of popular films.

The Persepolis Mission Statement

by Mike Russell

Emak-Bakia (1926)

Emak-Bakia, ( the title comes from an old Basque expression that means don't bother me), subtitled a cinépoéme, features many filming techniques used by Man Ray, including rayographs, double exposures, soft focus and ambiguous features. The film features sculptures by Pablo Picasso and some of Man Ray's mathematical objects both still and animated using a stop motion technique.
It was, originally, a silent film (note: the first screening was with a phonograph recording of a popular jazz tune, along with a live pianist and violinist who took over with tangos when the records were changed) but recent copies have been dubbed using music taken from Man Ray's personal record collection of the time. The musical reconstruction was by Jacques Guillot.

This short film involves a series of illusive, unrecognizable monochrome images juxtaposed with more naturalistic scenes. A light board appears from time to time carrying the news of the day. Then, an eye. A woman in a car drives along country roads. Farm animals. She descends from the car, again and again (the shot is repeated three times, the fourth time it fades and is replaced by a stepped superimposition of all four shots and as the film progresses the car theme becomes dominant). Images: dancing legs, seashore, swimming fish, geometric shapes, cut glass. A man removes his starched collar. It rotates. A girl has garishly painted eyes. No, she's only fooling. Those were her eyelids.
Individual images are striking for their humor and originality but Ray still apparently felt it necessary to impose a conventionally readable theme -the car ride -to hold the film together.
Some consider this a much less concise version of Le Retour de la raison. But here Ray is going for a surrealist approach, which doesn't work in a few important ways because this short film isn't abstract. Man Ray uses more concrete parts that fit with the more abstract things. There's also a huge disjunct between the fractured narrative and the exploration of spinning, warped lights and patterns.

I agree that this short film is in part a continuation of the technique introduced in Le Retour à la raison in that it, too, includes a series of rayographs. But this film, however, is more sophisticated in a technical sense than the first, employing rapid cutting, superimposition and slow motion to create a far more complex, though equally abstract film. In addition, Ray also incorporates a great deal more play with light in the film, even inserting non-objective reflections into the body of the film. In addition to these purely abstract images, Ray interposes realistic images of daily objects, people and landscapes.
The motion graphics elements of the film were achieved with Man Ray’s cadre of filming accessories: deforming mirrors, an electric turntable, an assortment of crystals and some special lamps (Self Portrait, 1963). These optical moments are interwoven with live action fragments that are both dreamy and graphic. The result is a highly visual study of motion, shape and light, that reveals a methodical experimentation with the possibilities of representing such phenomena.
The relationship between dreams and desire is also very interesting. Emak-Bakia has been interpreted, by the cinematography critic, as a woman dreaming about her own intimate desires, transposing her conscious sensual experiences into a chaotic, revolving morass of abstract thoughts. We see both of her worlds in this film: the physical world of corporeal pleasures and the inner world of her mind, which no man can ever hope to interpret.
You can buy Photographs by Man Ray: 105 Works, 1920-1934 and Man Ray (Artists of the 20th Century).

Company of American Girls

Melissa Ann Pinney.

Grants and Awards

2007 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award
2006 Photography Now: One Hundred Portfolios
1999 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
1997 LaSalle National Bank, Chicago Marathon Project Commission
1992 Chicago Women in Philanthropy, Mac Arthur Foundation
1989 Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award
1987 National Endowment for the Arts, Midwest Regional Fellowship Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award
Community Arts Assistance Program, Chicago
Changing Chicago Documentary Project, Chicago
1981 Illinois Arts Council Project Completion Grant
1980 Illinois Arts Council Project Completion Grant
1977 Artist in Residence, Evanston Arts Center, Evanston

L'Enfant de la haute (2001)

La storia di Mara (Mara's story )

Paolo Cossi. He has worked as a teacher in a comics school since 1997. He won the Jacovitti contest in 2002 and the Albertarelli Prize in 2004.

His works: Corona. l'uomo del bosco di Erto (Biblioteca dell'immagine), Tina modotti (Biblioteca dell'immagine), Mauro Corona. la montagna come la vita (Biblioteca dell'immagine), Il terremoto del Friuli (Becco giallo), Unabomber (Becco Giallo), La storia di Mara (Lavieri), 1918: DESTINI d'OTTOBRE. Britannici oltre il Piave (Dario De Bastiani Editore), Medz Yeghern, Il grande male (Hazard edizioni).

Terminus (2007)

Trevor Cawood was born in Regina. He began his career working as a visual-effects supervisor and commercial director. Terminus (2007) is his first film. This short is a dark comedy about the self-destructive nature of the human mind and the dangers of urban isolation. It employs a sharp deadpan sensibility and a stylized dystopic world to evoke our universal anxieties.
Soaked in Seventies concrete modernism and making brilliant use of computer generated graphics, Terminus brings urban angst vividly to life.

After inadvertently offending a strange entity that accosts him on his way to work, a 1970's businessman quickly finds himself in the midst of a bizarre predicament. A colossus made of concrete pilings follows a lonely man throughout the city tormenting him as he goes about his daily life on the subway, at the doctor's office and elsewhere. What follows is a rapid descent into madness, a journey both eerie and darkly humorous. All the while, a strong, foreboding sense of mental anxiety builds as the man is ultimately driven to extreme ends.
The exact nature of the businessman's tormentor is purposefully ambiguous, lending itself to a variety of interpretations. Is "Terminus" a surreal critique of human alienation in the modern urban environment or is the protagonist's struggle an internal one, his mysterious stalker a manifestation of his repressed subconscious mind? Either way, it's a deceptively simple story but the thought behind this short is very complex on every level.

Landscape 02

Rebekka Ehlers. In 2003 she received a scholarship from Fabrica, The Benetton Research and Communications Center, where she worked until starting out as a freelance photographer in 2005.

Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926)

The Adventures of Prince Achmed was the first full-length animated film and despite being 75 years old, the silhouette animation looks clean, fresh and technically adroit.
Lotte Reiniger spent three years making this silent animated film based on the Arabian Nights legends. She worked with animator Bertold Bartosch and background artist Walter Ruttman for three years on the film.
A wicked sorcerer tricks Prince Achmed into riding a magical flying horse. The heroic prince is able to subdue the magical horse, which he uses to fly off to many adventures. While travelling, he falls in love with the beautiful Princess Peri Banu and must defeat an army of demons to win her heart.
Reiniger made the entire film frame-by-frame with elaborate paper cutouts under a camera. The paper cutouts were jointed using wires and delicately arranged on top of a lightbox, where it was photographed frame by frame. A modern, existential condition is visible in the construction of her silhouettes: fragmented pieces of paper bolted together at various joints, moving mechanically from frame to frame.

A study of natural movement is very important, so that the little figures appear to move just as men and women and animals do. The backgrounds for the characters are cut out with scissors as well and designed to give a unified style to the whole picture. They are cut from layers of transparent paper.
The color-tinted film uses a diverse cast of characters, animals and elaborate backgrounds that make an otherwise limited monochromatic experience come alive.
And the music adds narrative to the piece, with each character having their own theme.
Human gestures, in particular, are wonderfully underplayed, helping the film throughout, as well as rendering several scenes with an ethereal, erotic quality.
Lotte Reiniger brings a unique perspective to the look of traditional characters, as she uses intricate Eastern details to show off astoundingly delicate filigree cutting work and an amazing grasp of the way in which shapes work together and of optical illusions.
You can buy The Adventures of Prince Achmed dvd and the essay The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

E.S.U. 8

If you want to read E.S.U. 7, click here.

Le Retour à la raison (1923)

Emmanuel Radnitsky (in art Man Ray) taught himself photography in order to reproduce his own works of art, which included paintings and mixed media. In 1921 he began to make photograms, which he called "Rayographs" (an object is placed between a light source and photo-sensitive film, in contrast to traditional photography where photographic film captures light reflected off an object). In the 1920s, he also began making moving pictures. He was disappointed that he was recognized only for his photography and not for the filmmaking, painting, sculpture and other media in which he worked.

Le Retour à la raison (Return to Reason, 1923) is one of the first Dada movies: it consists of various animated textures, Rayographs and the torso of Kiki of Montparnasse (Alice Prin), illuminated in striped light. For Le Retour à la raison, Man Ray sought to extend the rayograph technique to a moving image. He sprinkled salt and pepper on one piece of film, pins on another, illuminated the film for a few seconds, then developed the film. Man Ray added additional sequences to make the film of sufficient length to have an impact.
It also features a small segment of his work Danger.
This short film is a highly creative, non-narrative exploration of the possibilities of the cinema medium: the emphasis is, in fact, on playing with the possibility of representing light, shape and movement on film.
You can buy Photographs by Man Ray: 105 Works, 1920-1934, Man Ray (Artists of the 20th Century) and Unseen Cinema - Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941.

Salaryman Project

by Bruno Quinquet.

AM Syndicate - To the Peasants of the Emperor (2005)

In many ways, this film is experimental as it makes you dance around the line between reality and fiction through the use of animation and meta-narration. The final effect is awesome. You become a child once more as you watch it.

The music is by AM Syndicate, a band formed in the Spring of 2004 by Omar Chavez of Rhythm of Black Lines, Danny Wood of The Rise and later.
The animation is by Eric Power. He created Clear Productions, an independent production company spanning multiple styles of cinematic expression. Apart from creating films, he works freelance in the fields of photography, art and videography.

Maicol and Mirco

You can read Maicol and Mirco's works on Gli scarabocchi, Grasso, Petrolio, Schizzo, Kerosene, Motorino, Stripburger and many other magazines.

Recycled Life, 2006

Leslie Iwerks, documentarist granddaughter of famed animator and Disney collaborator U.B. Iwerks, helms the 38-minute muckraking nonfiction film Recycled Life.
She was shooting a project on the Mayas and traveling throughout all the country of Guatemala with a small crew. When they drove into the Antigua dump to unload some trash, they noticed two children, a brother and a sister living in a large cardboard box inside the dump. This was their home and they didn’t have any parents. And there are other people who lived like this.

If you watch this short film, you will encounter energetic and courageous people, surreal images: through these the filmaker traces the effects of a devastating cataclysm.
The generosity and spirit of so many people living in the most extreme poverty touched me beyond words.
It received a nomination at the 79th Academy Awards and it won prizes in various festivals.

Octopus

by Jesse Chehak.

Distinctions

2007 Magenta Foundation Emerging Photographer
2005 Print Magazine New Visual Artist Review: 20 Breakthrough Talents
2005 PDN 30

Le Songe d'un garcon de cafe (1910)

The Hasher's Dream in less than a minute & a half shows the surrealistic visions of a man under the influence of alcohol. Hasher, in his delirium, watches beautiful strange events and demons in an enormous moon.

The Hasher's Delirium (Le Songe d'un garcon de cafe, 1910) lends a hint of narrative structure rather than just showing transformations like in his previous shorts.

This short film is influenced by the prevailing art movements of the time. Emile Cohl's works had been associated with a group obsessed with insanity as an aesthetic subject, the Incoherents and with the pre-symbolist newsletter L'Hydropathe. Despite their stick-figure drawings, The Hasher's Delirium shows fluidity of motion, startling perspective animation and strange transformations of objects into one another.
You can buy Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film and Saved From The Flames - 54 Rare and Restored Films 1896 - 1944.

E.S.U. 7

If you want to read E.S.U. 6, click here.

Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927)

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt), is a 1927 German silent film directed by Walter Ruttmann, in collaboration with Carl Mayer (a screen writer who had co-written the script for Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari), Karl Freund (the director of Fox-Europe Production), and Lore Leudesdorff who had already assisted Ruttmann with Opus III and IV. It took over a year to photograph the film and they used movie cameras concealed in vans and suitcases to get realistic effects.
The music that accompanies the film was written by Edmund Meisel who also directed the orchestra at the film’s public opening at the Tauentzien-Palast in Berlin.

The film displays the filmmaker's knowledge of Soviet montage theory. It portrays the life of a city, mainly through visual impressions in a semi-documentary style, without a narrative content. Shots and scenes are cut together based on relationships of image, motion, point of view and thematic content. It's interesting to note that there many parallels exist between this film and Vertov's 1929 Man with a Movie Camera.

The events of the film are arranged to simulate the passage of a single day. The film is divided into five acts and each act is announced through a title card at the beginning and end. Much of the motion in the film and many of the scene transitions are built around the motion of trains and streetcars.
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City could seem superficial because of its interest in the aesthetics of the city at the expense of its human element and because it doesn't show a more detailed portrait of Berlin. Ruttmann was interested in the dynamism of movement and shapes and he aimed at making the viewer experience Berlin phenomenologically. He relies on editing, on a montage based on analogy and contrast to infuse the film with dynamism.
You can buy Berlin: Symphony of a Great City.

Abtu

Jaime Zollars. Her narrative images are a combination of collage and acrylic paint and often tell stories of people and places far away.

Cyclone Took My Baby (2002)

Paper Rad is a three collective artist group, comprised of Jessica Ciocci, Jacob Ciocci and Ben Jones. The group's name come from an extension of a weekly alternative comics paper that Jones self-published, Paper Radio.
The song is from Mixel Pixel's first album, Mappyland
Paper Rad has performed at the Whitney Biennial, at the Liverpool Biennial, at the New York City Gallery Deitch Projects, as well as the Tate Britain. Their works include videogames remixes, Flash animation, and open source Web projects.

This artistic group narrates story of our times in a way that isn't filtered through big-media spin or the historical revisionism of academic pundits. Their works are constantly infused with rebellious attitudes and iconoclastic positions. They are part of an art establishment that seems distant to many young people who should be getting inspired by art. Their caleidoscopic imagery is the result of mixing psychedelic images with Op Art and the pop culture with humor!
You can buy Taking out the Trash/Faces in the Trash.

Faccia (Face)

Giacomo Nanni's works are issued on Mano, Frame, Lo straniero, Hamelin, Inguine Mahgazine, Nonzi, Glomp, Sai Comics and Internazionale. He was the winner of Best Short Novel at Lucca Comics 2005, and he has received the award Nuove strade at the Napoli Comicon 2006. His books: Clara (Canicola, 2004), ZZZZ (Canicola, 2005), Storia di uno che andò` in cerca della paura (Coconino Press, 2006) and Cronachette (Coconino Press, 2007).

Ah Ma (2007)

Ah Ma is lying in the hospital, her life hanging by a thread. Her family gathers by her deathbed to send her off. Overwhelmed by sadness, they struggle to find their own way of coming to terms with the impending end.

This short film is inspired by the passing of Anthony Chen's grandmother in 2005. It's a sensitive observation of the ways people react and deal with death and seeks to be an honest exploration of the human condition.

It has received a Special Mention Award at the 60th Cannes Film Festival.

Nocturne

by Noel Rodo Vankeulen



AWARDS & DISTINCTIONS

Sheridan Scholar
Member of Dean's Honour Roll 2005 - 2007

Fantasmagorie (1908)

Fantasmagorie is the first all-animated film in history. An American named J. Stuart Blackton got there first with his films such as “The Enchanted Drawing” (1900) and “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” (1906); but Blackton’s films were a mix of live action and animation.
Fantasmagorie is a surreal story: a series of scenes without much narrative structure, but morphing into each other. Emile Cohl creates a visual spectacle and orchestrates the action as he moves along.

He placed each drawing on an illuminated glass plate and then traced the next drawing-with variations-on top of it until he had some 700 drawings. The white line effect was the result of using a "negative reverse" changing the black line on paper to white on black.
Despite the fact that it has no plot or real point except to show off what animation can do and despite the relative crudeness of the drawings, Cohl’s wild and wacky imagination was daring, vibrant and wickedly funny and its short running time make it a joy to watch.

You can buy Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film and Saved From The Flames - 54 Rare and Restored Films 1896 - 1944.

E.S.U. 6

If you want to read E.S.U. 5, click here.

An Inconvenient Truth, 2006

From director Davis Guggenheim comes the Sundance Film Festival hit, An Inconvenient Truth, which offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. A catastrophe we have helped create. Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb!

Davis Guggenheim's documentary is based mostly on Gore's multimedia presentation on climate change, a lecture he has delivered hundreds of times in recent months. While Gore is managing the show with powerful efficiency, there is nothing dry or tired about it. The former Vice President Al Gore re-set the course of his life to focus on a last-ditch, all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. With wit, intelligence and hope, An Inconvenient Truth ultimately brings home Gore's persuasive argument that we can no longer afford to view global warming as a political issue - rather, it is the biggest moral challenge facing our global civilization.

I did not find a single negative review based solely on the film’s art. But I found so many errors in this movie!
If the movie will help you judge for yourself which direction we should take, then Gore should dig deeper into the material. If you want to read a full report, you can download this pdf file.
However, this is on the whole a good film. It explains the facts very well, explains away the objections that people have been hearing about from the media and is also pretty funny at times.
You can buy An Inconvenient Truth and An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It.

Small Configuration 2

Patrick Smith has written, produced, animated, and directed five award winning films from 2000-2006. Smith made his directorial debut for the Emmy nominated MTV series "Down-Town", continuing on to direct the popular animated series "Daria." His bizarre, morphing style tells symbolic stories of identity and emotion, and have extended beyond film. His Public Art Installations have earned the artist a multitude of accolades outside the world of animation, his fine art is currently represented internationally by CVZ Contemporary Gallery in New York.. You can buy: Liquid Tales, Avoid Eye Contact, Vol. I, Avoid Eye Contact, Vol. II, Spike and Mike's Cutting Edge Classics.

Sukkis' Story (2005)

Sukki's Story reflects on Thomas Leung's changing relationship with his mother when he leaves Hong Kong to start his new life in a new country. The narration is often non-linear as we are unsure of where Sukki's new life will take him or what obstacles lie ahead in the future which could lead to an inner and/or imaginative journey.

This short film has won the Victorian Student Animation Festival 2005 for Best Sound Design. It has also been selected as part of the Australian Digital Shorts Program at the Sydney Film Festival 2006.
You can feel the sorrow and the joy the scenes bring. It is a simple and yet powerful film with a soul. It's not just a story. It's an incredible animation for its magical atmosphere and tenderness!

La Scala di Schild (Schild's Staircase)

by Franco Brambilla. He has created the cat and dog character Full & Berto. He collaborates weekly with the economic supplement of the Corriere della Sera. He also founded AIRSTUDIO, together with Pierluigi Longo and Giacomo Spazio.

He has worked for some of the biggest italian publishing houses creating the covers for various sci-fi books and novels.

Rhythmus 21 (1921)

Richter's earliest experiments were hardly more than tests, Rhythmus 21 is a serious abstract animation composed solely of squares and rectangles that change shape. Artists like Luis Bunuel & Fritz Lang were influenced by him.
Hans Richter was a painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, film-experimenter and producer. He was influenced by Cubism and Expressionism and joined in the Dadaist movemet in the 1916. Richter’s collaboration with Viking Eggeling on drawings, abstract sketches, and most importantly on ‘scroll paintings’, provided the inspiration for Rhythmus 21.

The original film was roughly two minutes long. Over the next two years Richter worked on the film and extended it to almost seven minutes. Before October 16th, 1927 when the film was screened at the Film Society in London, Richter divided the film in two parts and later on called it Rhythmus 21 and Rhythmus 23. In the following year Richter created another chapter, Rhytmus 25, which didn't survive.
These forms appear in very simple to very complex compositions-from the beginning shots where the squares appear with the frame. In Rhythmus 23 there are more angle and line overlays rather than adherence to the squares as in Rhytmus 21.
It's very interesting how these short films resemble some aspects of 1950's beatnik art & 1960's op art. The final effect is a subversion of the cinematic illusion of depth. Richter creates a precise rhythm with the movement of these shapes and suggests connections through opposites: black/white, left/right, top/bottom and creates visual associations with geometric patterns.

Greenland

Olaf Otto Becker


Exhibitions

2008 Gallery Cohen Amador New York, Broken line, January - March 2008
2008 Gallery Stephen Cohen, Los Angeles, Broken line, 20th of March 2008
2008 Gallery f.5.6, Munich, Broken line, 3rd.of April. 2008
2008 Powerhouse New York, Shifting Landscapes, April 2008
2008 New York Photofestival, Mai 2008

Le Coeur Est un Metronome (2007)

Father and son. The relationship between children and their parents is always problematic. A father is proud of his new baby son, takes photographs of him and throws the child into the air for sheer joy. What happens when both adults throw a tantrum and storm out of the house? Will the son be proud of the father?

In this short film, dancing is the high point of the exchanges between the two characters: it is their only means of communication.
Le Coeur Est un Metronome is Jean-Charles Mbotti-Malolo's graduation movie and was awarded the "Recommendation Prize".

E.S.U. 5

If you want to read E.S.U. 4, click here.

Rabbit Stories (2006)

Sean Conway has directed Rocco Paris, A Place that Glows, Rabbit Stories and Son of Steve.

Rabbit Stories is a study of mental illness; a portrait of a young schizophrenic man called Fenton Fuller. The film doesn't really have a start, middle and ending narrative because Fenton himself jumps all over the place. We learn things about him but we cannot be sure if they are true or just in his head as many of the scenes (if not all) exist within his head rather than in the reality of the film. Life is an exploration made more manageable by like associations, similar philosophies, and a belief in liberation as both a blessing and a curse .It’s a movie that sticks with you long after the final image has faded away.

Behind the scenes

Aaron Hobson has created a series of images that are quickly gaining international attention with their unique approach to the traditional genre of panoramic photography.

Exhibitions:

Tenderpixel Gallery, 2008
Drkrm. Gallery, Fall 2008
Ivy Brown's Go Fish Gallery, December 2007
7444° Gallery, Septermber 2007

Persepolis (2007)

Marianne Satrapi believes that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. But Perspolis isn't a politically oriented film with a message to sell. It is first and foremost a film about Satrapi's love for her family. This animated film is the poignant story of a young girl in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.
Unlike the comics book series, the film is a long flashback. Marianne Satrapi and Vincent Parronaud create something altogether different but with the same material. It's a one-of-a-kind piece. There was no point filming a sequence of panels. People generally assume that a graphic novel is like a movie storyboard, which of course is not the case.

They started with 2D images on pen tablets but they were not totally happy with the result. The lines lacked definition. It was therefore clear that a traditional animation technique was perfectly suited to Marjane's and Vincent's idea of the film. Satrapi drew all the characters: over 600 model sheets!

In addition to animation director Christian Desmares, other twenty animators worked on the movie. Each sequence (1,200 shots) was given to an animator. Satrapi insisted on being filmed playing out all the scenes.

Using only black and white, they were closer to Japanese animation because of the story’s realism, but they couldn't apply the techniques used in manga. As a result, they had to develop a specific style, both realistic and mature. The film is a combination of German expressionism and Italian neo-realism. It features very down-to-earth, realistic scenes and a highly design-oriented approach, with images sometimes bordering on the abstract. It could be defined as "stylized realism. Satrapi and Parronaud realized that the usual codes in animation didn't seem to fit, so they used movie-style editing, with a great many jump-cuts; even from an aesthetic viewpoint, they drew their sources from cinematic techniques.
Persepolis has been nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 80th Academy Awards, tonight we'll know if it has won an Oscar!
You can buy Persepolis (French edition) and Persepolis (English edition).

Porto Marghera

Claudio Calia. His works are: I Baccanti, Nuvole and Porto Marghera, la legge non è uguale per tutti (BeccoGiallo, 2007). He collaborates with Nonzi and Self Comics, and he illustrated the musical album Senza sicura's Quattro città and Il potere del nulla, and Alberto Cantone's Angeli e Ribelli. He's the curator of the anthology Lucio Fulci, poeta del macabro (Nicola Pesce, 2006); he's also the curator, together with Emiliano Rabuiti, of Radio Sherwood Comix against Global War, Vite Precarie, Fortezza Europa (Coniglio Editore, 2006) and Resistenze - Cronache di ribellione quotidiana (Becco Giallo, 2007).

Deliver Us From Evil, 2006

When Amy Berg decided to hang out a shingle and produce feature documentaries two years ago, she wasn't quite sure what subject might both consume her interest and hit a nerve with audiences. When "Deliver Us From Evil" debuted at the Los Angeles Film Festival, it immediately won the Target Documentary Award and a $50,000 cash prize; the film was subsequently acquired by Lionsgate for theatrical release.

Moving from one parish to another in Northern California during the 1970s, Father Oliver O'Grady quickly won each congregation's trust and respect. Unbeknownst to them, O'Grady was a dangerously active pedophile that Church hierarchy, although aware of his predilection, had harbored for over 30 years, allowing him to abuse countless children. Juxtaposing an extended, deeply unsettling interview with O'Grady himself with the tragic stories of his victims, filmmaker Amy Berg bravely exposes the deep corruption of the Catholic Church and the troubled mind of the man it had sheltered.
Ms. Berg's film exposes the truth about sexual abuse in a compassionate and sensitive way. This film will make no one feel indifferent about what has been going on in the Catholic church for centuries.
You can buy Deliver Us from Evil.

Bulbs

by Kate Peters


Awards

Creative Futures 2005
Metro Imaging Student Bursary, Winner 2002

The Mermaid (Rusalka, 1997)

This story is about an old monk living with his apprentice near a river. The old man recalls from time to time the old days; how he betrayed his true love and therefore she drowned herself. It's said that a woman, who drowns herself because of lovesickness, will become a mermaid. Her only goal will be to trick young men with her charms and drag them down to the deeps.

The Mermaid is here identified with the mythological Slavic creature the Rusalka, which seeks vengence upon life by tempting and drowning the living.
Russian director Aleksandr Petrov has been nominated for several Oscars for Best Animated Short Film-- for The Cow and The Old Man and The Sea. Each features a style totally unlike any other studio, as Petrov's shorts are like little epic movies and moving tapestries combined. This short movie was painted on glass by using fingers and brushes. The artwork is like a painting that moves in a very fluid style.
You might be interested in Petrov's My Love.

E.S.U. 4

If you want to read E.S.U. 3, click here.

Ballet mécanique (1924)

Leger was the first of the Cubists to experiment with non-figurative abstraction, contrasting curvilinear forms against a rectilinear grid. In 1924 he made a 'film without scenario', Ballet Mecanique, in which he contrasted machines and inanimate objects with humans and their body parts. The film was premiered by Frederick Kiesler in Vienna on September 24 1924. The original version of Antheil's music ran almost 30 minutes, and a married print of film and music was not made until 2000 by sound engineer and composer Paul Lehrman.
This masterpiece is a landmark film in the development of montage, a cinematic tool that juxtiposes two or more images to infer related ideas or events. The film also explores many Cubist themes, among which the concept that all machines were taking human nature out of humanity.

Vienna Cityscapes

Daniel M. Kanemoto is an award-winning director based in New York City (or wherever else his projects happen to take him). His 1999 debut, A LETTER FROM THE WESTERN FRONT, won the Gold Medal for Best Animated Short at the Student Academy Awards. For the past decade, Dan’s diverse body of work (from national commercial campaigns to feature films) has been featured on Nickelodeon, MTV, the Discovery Channel, and film festivals around the world.

Finding Madame Tutli Putli (2007)

Glitterbead

Michael Mouris is an incredible artist, who made this pixilation featuring a glittery piece of art. The music “Spider Hangout” is by Dominic Bisignano.
I find it so mesmerizing.

The Beholder

by Jose A. Mercado

Exhibitions:

2008 Minna Gallery, 20×20 January group show

2008 Space Gallery SF, My Vice Group Show

2007 Versus Gallery, Revenge of the Empire group art show

2007 Foundation One Gallery GA, The Grind group art show

2007 Las Vegas NV, GM/Jada Toys Kulture Klash Custom art show

2007 Crewest Gallery, Top Of the Dome 4 group show

2007 Minna Gallery S.F., Fighting for dreams group show

2007 Agesong Gallery S.F., Heavy Hitters group show

2007 Los Angeles Crash Mansion, Panthaland group show

2007 Thinkspace Gallery, ISM Untitled Love Project

2007 OCCCA GALLERY, ISM Untitled Love Project

2007 MF Gallery NYC, Zombies Attack

2007 URB Gallery, Represent,Represent! Tempt One Art Benefit

2007 Crewest Gallery, Canceptual Art show V.2

2007 Lost Souls Cafe, Make Believe group art show

2007 Las Vegas NV, Hit The Deck skateboard show

2006 Crewest Gallery, Top of the dome 2 group show

2006 ISM White Elephant Show

2006 Orange County County Museum of Art, Little Squares Project

2006 Las Vegas Arts Factory, Malicious Vinyl Group Show

2006 Crux Gallery, The Red Show

2005 Fulcrum Records Gallery, Vinyl Show

2005 Crux Gallery, Door Show

2005 Crux Gallery, Group Show

2004 Self Help Graphics, Day of the Dead Celebration Group Show

2004 Coba, Mini Board Group Show

2003 Artistic Insomniacs, Group Show

Jesus Camp, 2006

“Jesus Camp” is the second film by the documentary team of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady to explore the molding of young minds. The majority of the children in “Jesus Camp” are home-schooled by evangelical parents who teach them creationism and dismiss science.

It is a straightforward documentary, with no narrator or fancy cutting to present an opinion. The footage really does speak for itself. The film follows Becky Fischer, a Pentecostal children’s minister who runs the “Kids on Fire” summer camp in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. Becky’s methods of reaching the children are powerful and at times, thought-provoking. But, some of her methods are a bit more radical.

The film also follows three children, Levi, Rachel, and Tory.

It is rather disturbing to see the children in this movie being instilled with thoughts and ideas that they do not have the full capacity to understand.
The film is being marketed as an even-handed, unbiased look at the Evangelical movement, but it lacks any obvious focus.
You can buy Jesus Camp.

New York 2007

by Christian Reister.
Publications:

Berlin Art Info // Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung // Berliner Morgenpost // Bunte // design report // Die Welt // HörZu // Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung // Kreiszeitung Syke // Kunstzeitung // Prinz Berlin // Rheinische Merkur // scheinschlag // Tagesspiegel // taz // Tip // Vorwärts Magazin Zeitblende // Welt am Sonntag // Zitty.

The Danish Poet (2006)

Produced by Lise Fearnley and Marcy Page for Norway’s Mikrofilm and the National Film Board of Canada, The Danish Poet is the story of Kasper, a poet whose creative well has run dry, on a holiday to Norway to meet the famous writer, Sigrid Undset. As Kasper's quest for inspiration unfolds, it appears that a spell of bad weather, an angry dog, slippery barn planks, a careless postman, hungry goats and other seemingly unrelated factors might play important roles in the big scheme of things after all. Can we trace the chain of events that leads to our own birth? Is our existence just coincidence? Do little things matter?
Attached to the National Film Board of Canada, Kove also works as a designer, illustrator, animator and scriptwriter. Her previous film, Min bestemor strøk kongens skjorter (My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts), was also nominated for an Oscar in 2006. Kove works in an old-fashioned animation style, drawing the original figures and backgrounds in pencil and scanning in the images and adding colour using digital technology.

E.S.U. 3

If you want to read E.S.U. 2, click here.

Schwarzfahrer (1993)

Pepe Danquart's short film captures the dignity of a man confronted with a problem many of us may have faced in a foreign culture. A young black man is verbally harassed by an older woman on a streetcar, while the other passengers remain silent. He finally exacts his revenge.

Its beautiful cinematography, good subject matter, great characters, totally surprise and not only has it won the Academy Award (1993) for best live action short film, but it has also won more than 30 awards and screened at more than 60 film festivals including Berlin, Cannes, and Sundance!
When dealing with ignorance and intolerance, nothing makes more of a statement than the power of humor.

Megan Brain's Paper Sculpture

by Megan Brain

Memory (1964)

Osamu Tezuka was heavily involved with experimental animation and had won several international animation awards, including the Grand Prix for Jumping at the 1984 Zagreb International Festival, the Grand Prix for Broken Down Film at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival, and the CIFEJ award for Legend of the Forest at the 1988 Zagreb International Film Festival.

This short film is a privately produced animated film. It does not look like an anime, using photographs and cut-outs as well as hand-drawn animation. The story develops into a tale of destruction of human beings, turning the existence of the earth into a memory of the universe. It's an insightful look at the psychology of memory in the life of an individual and a culture. How will the initial reality change in the end?

Radio Science Funnies Inc.

Ryan Heshka has painted for BLAB!, Vanity Fair, Playboy, Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Popular Science, Dreamworks SKG, Fast Company, PC World, Smart Money, Esquire, Harper Collins, and Newsweek.

My Country, My Country (2006)

My Country, My Country was motivated by a sense of despair. Laura Poitras was determined to see the contradictions of the war in Iran from the perspective of the people living there. Filmmaker and crew are invited into the home and personal lives of Riyadh and his family. Poitras and her crew are granted behind-the-scenes access to the election preparations, too.

Working alone in Iraq over eight months, Poitras creates an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. Her principal focus is Dr. Riyadh, an Iraqi medical doctor, father of six and Sunni political candidate. My Country, My Country is, in fact, an impartial documentary depicting the controversial 2005 Iraqi national elections. The documentary follows the agonizing predicament of one man caught in the tragic contradictions of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its effort to spread democracy in the Middle East.
Still the tale told here is not so much a political one as it is a human one, which is why this film rates a wide audience.
You can buy My Country, My Country.

Hommage

by Heidi Spicker.

You can buy her books: BANGKOK, Im Garten, Concrete. She's also coauthor of Asia City Strangers.

Dog (2002)

A moving tale from Suzie Templeton about a young boy who, grieving for his dead mother, seeks reassurance from his father.
This film is about a relationship between a father and son. To protect each other they bravely hold their agony inside, where it festers.

Suzie will intrigue you with this darkly comic film. Dog captures frail, complex emotions that teeter on the edge of darkness, like when the father rubs his temples or like the lifeless swing of his arm after he flicks off the bedroom light.
Everything about this animation is wonderfully subtle and delicate. The puppets are beautifully crafted and the music is just right!
Winner of the 2002 BAFTA for best short animation and of the Grand Prix at the Ottawa Student Animation Festival

Esu 2

If you want to read the previous E.S.U. strip, click here.

Censored (2005)

Censored is a Video Performance by Gruppo Sinestetico.

The distinction between a government censor and a private one is not always clear. Many private entities receive governmental support through funding and other means. With such support often comes some degree of governmental oversight or control.

Art is supposed to be the expression of feelings, the visual representation of what the artist is feeling or trying to show. All people need to have the freedom to express opinions and feelings to the extent that is acceptable, but who is to say what is acceptable? The public should have a choice in deciding whether to view the resulting content. Censorship is always a very blunt tool.
Today, some artists can only choose to censor themselves if they really want to be free.
Art represents a person’s identity. In such cases self-censure is the only identity left to artists.

William Wegman's photography

William Wegman has created a series of compositions involving dogs, primarily his own Weimaraners in various costumes and poses.
Wegman's photos are well-respected in the art world, they are kept in permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His photos and videos have also been a popular success and have appeared in books, advertisements, films, as well as on television programs like Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live. In 2006, Wegman's work was featured in a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Norton Museum of Art, and the Addison Gallery. The 2007 solo exhibition Funny/ Strange runs at the Wexner Center for the Arts from September 28 through December 10.
His books: Cinderella (Fay's Fairy Tales), Dress Up Batty, Everyday Problems, Farm Days, Mother Goose, Polaroids.
His dvds: William Wegman's Alphabet Soup, Fay's Twelve Days of Christmas, ARTPIX Notebooks: William Wegman Video Works 1970-1999, The Hardly Boys in Hardly Gold, Selected Video Works 1970-78, Dog Baseball 1986

Man and Whale (校長先生とクジラ, 2007)

Greenpeace commissioned Yamamura to make Man and Whale (校長先生とクジラ) as a part of their campaign to end Japanese whaling. Koji Yamamura has only 2 minutes to get his message across and he does so with great subtlety and his usual attention to detail.
Today, only one country in the world continues to conduct whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary: Japan.There was a time in Japan during the food shortage hardships of the postwar period when whale meat was taken as a valuable source of protein. We are alive today thanks in a very real sense to this gift, so should we not reach out in gratitude to whales now and seek a path of peaceful coexistence?
You can buy Koji Yamamura dvd.

Chiron

This is a page from Chiron, a self-published comic by Filippo Messina.

Sicko (2006)

Michael Moore interviews medics and investigators from private health insurance companies who admit denying legitimate claims for the most spurious technical reasons. According to Moore, it’s a scandal that can be traced back to Richard Nixon.
Health care isn't healthcare; bureaucracy, the labyrinth of paperwork and all legal language about pre-existing conditions and denial of service make having coverage as much of a challenge as lacking it.

To prepare for the film, Moore used the Internet to solicit health-care horror stories, not just from the 47 million Americans who don’t have insurance but from those who do. So he travels around to a bunch of countries that already have socialized medicine to see how they work and shows us how France, England, Canada and Cuba actually help sick people instead of letting them wither and die for lack of health insurance.

I don't know if we can accept Michael Moore's selected anecdotes as "proof", but the movie is very funny: only Moore can talk about political issues and make you laugh until you cry !
You can buy Sicko.

Tapeworks

by MARK KHAISMAN


AWARDS

International Animation Festival, Best Art Director Prize, Paris, 1988

OISTT competition "The Tour Theatre", Second Prize, Stockholm, 1986
UNESCO "Rehabilitation of a Decayed Urban Environment", Third Prize, Warsaw, 1982
World Architectural Biennale "The New Urban Space", Second Prize, Sofia, 1981

Vache Folle (1997)

Vache Folle is the first of Samuel Toruneux's short films. It won the Grand Prix IMAGINA 1997.
The picture quality is nice and bright. The sound is well done and uses the stereo mix very well.
A mad cow takes off from the prairie and flies away into a foolish trip. This is a very fun piece that takes you by surprise. I actually laughed a bit while I watched it.
You can also watch Meme le Pigeons vont au paradise.
You can buy Computer Animation Marvels.

E.S.U.

E.S.U. is a comic strip created by Carlo Coratelli and Davide Zamberlan. They began to issue E.S.U. on Il giornale dei fumetti (Free Comics Club) in October 2000. In June 2001, Cronaca di Topolinia issued new comic strips of E.S.U.; while the old stories are reprinted on the website ComicUs (where Coratelli is also editor and writes the column Movie Comics) and on the web-zine Cartaigienica. After five years of publications, Zamberlan retired, and Coratelli continued to issue E.S.U. with Eros Righetti, who is the author of 20, a comic series issued on Antani Comics.
Carlo Coratelli issued other webcomics: Distretto 41 (with Raffaele Aversa) and John Sanders: Reporter (with Andrea Briganti).

Berlin Film Festival 2008 - main prizes

The Golden Bear: "Tropa de Elite," directed by Jose Padilha

Silver Bear - The Jury Grand Prix: "Standard Operating Procedure," directed by Errol Morris

Silver Bear - Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, "There Will Be Blood"

Silver Bear - Best Actress:: Sally Hawkins in "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Silver Bear - Best Actor: Reja Nazi for "Song of Sparrows"

Silver Bear - Best Screenplay: Wang Ziaoshuai for "In Love We Trust" (Zuo You)

Silver Bear - Artistic Contribution: Jonny Greenwood for the score from "There Will Be Blood"

Best First Feature Award: "Asyl -- Park and Love Hotel," directed by Kumasaka Izuru

Alfred Bauer Prize: "Lake Tahoe," directed by Fernando Eimbcke

If you want to know who won the other prize, please click here.

Altavista (2006)

My dreams are of my dad, alive doing mundane things

Tealia Ellis Ritter

Selected Awards:

First Place Award at the Photographic Center Northwest Juried Member's Exhibition 2008,Awarded by Juror Marisa Sanchez, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seattle Art Museum
Awarded By The School of Art and Art History, The University of Iowa, the MFA Degree with the Schools Highest Honors of Commendation, May 2004
Awarded the Virgin M. Beall Fellowship for the 2003-2004 academic year, University of Iowa, School of Art and Art History
Recipient of Outstanding Columbia College Student Award May 24, 2000
First Place Award/Scholarship, Columbia College Chicago, 2000 Annual Hokin Honors Exhibit
Academic Excellence in Photography Scholarship, Columbia College Chicago, 1999

Kogepan

Kogepan (こげぱん, Kogepan) is a Japanese character from the company San-X. Kogepan, who lives in a panya (Japanese bakery), is a red bean bread who was accidentally burnt by a careless baker. No one would buy burnt bread or be nice to him, so Kogepan became an outcast with no emotion for others. He runs away from home, gets drunk off milk, smokes, and always says negative things about himself. Disillusioned with life, he roams the bakery making friends and being jealous of other bread items.

The anime series, animated by Studio Pierrot and produced by Pony Canyon, consisted of ten 4-minute shorts, the majority of which introduces simple aspects of the character.
The name comes from kogeru, meaning to burn or char, and pan, a word taken from the Portuguese and meaning bread.
You can download the other episodes, by clicking here.
You can buy Kogepan doll.

New Haircut

by Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva. She works as an illustrator for many magazines. She took part in more than 20 different exhibitions around the world.

No End in Sight (2007)

No End in Sight, which won the 2007 Special Jury Prize at Sundance (although it was released practically in secrecy), examines the failures of America’s ongoing occupation of Iraq. Narrated by actor Campbell Scott, this film retraces the U.S. government’s steps after the "fall" of Baghdad in April 2003.
Charles Ferguson utilizes on-camera interviews with key personnel intimately involved with the rebuilding of Iraq, including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, and General Jay Garner , as well as Iraqi civilians, American soldiers and prominent analysts.

Emphasizing analysis over manipulation, the film details mistakes of the Bush administration. With a journalistic tone, Scott mostly recounts the facts of the occupation: one of the reasons for the postwar reconstruction’s collapse seems to be the administration’s lack of experience.
This documentary confirms what we thought we knew: American policy in Iraq was flawed from the start.
You can buy No End in Sight.

Three Portrait , Study 6

by Michael Kenna

AWARDS:
2003
Honorary Master of Arts, Brooks Institute, Santa Barbara, California, USA
2000
Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, Ministry of Culture, France
1996
Golden Saffron Award, Consuegra, Spain
1989
Institute for Aesthetic Development Award, Pasadena, California, USA
1987
Art in Public Buildings Award, California Arts Council Commission, Sacramento, California, USA
1981
Imogen Cunningham Award, San Francisco, California, USA

BOOKS AND CATALOGS

2006 Hokkaido. Publishers: Nazraeli Press, USA. (English edition) and Shuppan Kyodosha (Japan edition). Text by Daido Moriyama. 84 photographs.
2006 In Japan . Publisher: RAM, Japan. Text by Ryuichi Kaneko. 53 photographs.
2004Retrospective Two. Publisher: Nazraeli Press, USA. Text by Anne W. Tucker. 130 photographs
2004 Ratcliffe Power Station. Publisher: Nazraeli Press, USA. Introduction by Jeremy Reed. 49 Photographs
2003 Boarding School. Publisher: Nazraeli Press, USA. Text by Michael Kenna. Limited edition. 8 Photographs.
2003 En Quete d’Horizon. Publisher: Chateau d’Eau Museum, France. Text by Jerome Bel. 18 Photographs
2003Et la Dentelle? Publishers: Marval, France (French edition) and Calais Lace, Nazraeli Press, USA (English edition). Preface by Frederic Mathieu. Text by Noel Jouenne. 50 Photographs
2002 Japan. Publishers: Nazraeli Press, USA (English edition) and Editions Treville, Japan (Japanese edition). Introduction by Kohtaro Iizawa. 95 Photographs
2002 A Twenty Year Retrospective. Publishers: Nazraeli Press, USA (English edition) and Editions Treville, Japan (Japanese edition). Reprint of 1994 Treville book. Essay by Ruth Bernhard. Introduction by Peter C. Bunnell. 130 photographs
2001 Easter Island. Publisher: Nazraeli Press, USA. Text by Michael Kenna. 44 Photographs
2001 L'impossible oubli. Publishers: Marval, France (French edition) and Impossible to Forget. Nazraeli Press, USA (English edition).Texts by Pierre Borhan and Clement Cheroux. 110 Photographs
2000 Night Work. Publisher: Nazraeli Press, USA. Preface by Debra Klochko. Text by Bill Jay, Tim Baskerville and Michael Kenna. 80 photographs
1999 Le Notre's Gardens. Publishers: The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Library, USA and Ram, USA. Text by Eric T. Haskell. Reprint with 60 photographs
1997 Monique's Kindergarten. Publisher: Nazraeli Press, USA. Text by John Bloom and Monique Grund. 63 photographs.
1997 The Rouge. Publishers: The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Library, USA and Ram, USA. Text by Eric T. Haskell. 40 photographs
1996 The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson. Publisher: Arion Press, USA. Limited Edition. Illustrated with 16 photographs.
1995 The Rouge. Publisher: Ram, USA. Preface by Ellen Sharp. Text by Lee R. Kollins.
50 photographs
1994 Michael Kenna: A 20 Year Retrospective. Publisher: Treville, Japan. Preface by Ruth Bernhard. Introduction by Peter C. Bunnell. 130 photographs.
1991 The Elkhorn Slough and Moss Landing. Publisher: The Elkhorn Slough Foundation, USA. Introduction by Mark Silberstein. 30 photographs.
1990 Le Desert de Retz. Publisher: Arion Press, USA. Preface by Olivier Choppin de Janvry. Introduction by Diana Ketcham. Limited edition. 37 photographs.
1990 Michael Kenna. Publisher: Min Gallery, Japan. Preface by Mayumi Shinohara. Introduction by Kohtaro Iizawa. 37 photographs.
1989 The Hound of the Baskervilles. by Arthur Conan Doyle. Publisher: Northpoint Press, USA. Reprint of 1985 Arion Press book. Illustrated with 53 photographs
1988 Night Walk. Publisher: Friends of Photography, USA. Preface by David Featherstone. Introduction by Jerome Tarshis. 44 photographs.
1987 MICHAEL KENNA 1977-1987. Publisher: Min Gallery, Japan. Preface by Robert Lassam. Introduction by Mark Johnstone. 37 photographs.
1985 The Hound of the Baskervilles. by Arthur Conan Doyle. Publisher: Arion Press, USA. Limited edition. Illustrated with 53 photographs.
1984 Michael Kenna: Photographs. Publisher: Stephen Wirtz Gallery and Weston Gallery, USA. Introduction by Jean Francois Chevrier. 18 photographs.

Peter and the Wolf (1946)

Before Suzie Templeton, Walt Disney produced an animated version of Peter and the Wolf .
Featuring narration by Sterling Holloway, Peter & the Wolf adds Walt Disney's touch to Prokofiev's masterpiece, telling the story of the brave young boy who takes it upon himself to go out hunting for a dangerous wolf, while accompanied by a bird, a duck, and a cat. Rather than featuring dialogue, each character is voiced by a different musical instrument.
The design of Peter is particularly generic, kind of a mix between Pinocchio and Wendy's brother in Peter Pan. But this 1946 version of Prokofiev's "Musical Fairy-Tale" is probably my favourite of Disney's adaptations, but it isn't my favourite Peter and the Wolf adpatation: I prefer the Suzie Templeton adaptation.
It was released theatrically as a segment in Make Mine Music, then re-issued the following year accompanying a re-issue of Fantasia (as a short subject before the film), then separately on home video in the 1990s.
You can buy Peter & the Wolf.

Virus 2

You can read other stories about Agent Rocco on the Agente Rocco website.

Chimps

Beagles & Ramsay have worked collaboratively since 1997. Their works have been exhibited internationally.
The anxieties, both cultural and social, that run through the work of Beagles and Ramsay read like a contemporary chronology of perceived malaise. They create a body of work capable of articulating the absurd, disturbing and humorous character of contemporary culture. Ultra-violence and other forms of poor taste in our culture signal the end of that patronizing and paternalistic cultural leadership which had hoped to use the technologies of mass culture to improve the impoverished and raise the moral standards of the nation.

Hotel Room

by Jennifer Loeber

AWARDS
2007, Honorable Mention, PX3 Prix De La Photographie Paris, Paris, France

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Group-show.com, Glamour Magazine, File Magazine, F-Stop Magazine

FILMOGRAPHY
2007, Fish Kill Flea, feature-length documentary (Co-Director)

Kumo to churippu (1943)

Kenzo Masaoka's The Spider and the Tulip (Kumo to churippu, 1943) is a legendary title which would influence Isao Takahato's works in the future.
This short film reminds one of the style of a "Silly Symphony" and it isn't very original: it doesn't seem Japanese, it's too "American". However, it deserves attention because the animation is particularly brilliant in technique.

Virus 1

You can read other stories about Agent Rocco on the Agente Rocco website. The drawings and the story are by Federico Rettondini. He took a degree at the European Institute of Design. He works for Area Grafica of Match Music Satellite, where he produces tv post productions.

Operation Homecoming (2005)

Structured around the poetic, the comic and chilling writings of men and women posted in Iraq, this documentary explores firsthand accounts of American soldiers through their own words. The film is built upon a project created by the National Endowment for the Arts to gather the writing of soldiers and their families who have participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Through interviews and dramatic readings by such actors, the film transforms selections from this collection of writing into a deep examination of the experiences of the men and women who are serving in America's armed forces. Robbins is trying to present the soldiers' point-of-view without mixing it with politics. He offers a humanizing study of the soldiers who have suffered through the dehumanization of war.

At the core of the writing in Operation Homecoming is a deep desire by all those who have served in war to come to terms with their experiences. Through an extraordinary group of men and women it presents a profound window into the human side of America’s current conflicts.

Robbins steers clear of making judgments about the war itself; Operation Homecoming's message, on the other hand, seems to be simply that war is bad and that it kills people. The stories recounted here are sad, funny, violent and uplifting. Yet each one displays an honesty and intensity that is rarely seen in explorations of the war.
You can buy Operation Homecoming.

Bump

by Milton Knight

He writes and draws comic books and comic strips for magazines and small newspapers, illustrates and designs record covers, posters, candy and T-shirts, and exhibits paintings. He spent the 1980's on the outskirts of the "radical art scene" of the East Village.

Le Cadeau du Temps (2007)

Zune Arts has released a new video by Corey Godbey, a visual sculptor for Portland Studios. Le Cadeau du Temps explores the power of sharing and personal connection through the eyes of a man given the gift of eternal life. The use of texture and color in the animation blends seamlessly with the musical backdrop to create a deeply emotional connection with the viewer.
In his blog, Godbey describes the entire filmmaking process, along with visual references for each step of the procedure.

Holiday Happiness

by Joel Trussel

Catwoman Resolution (2006)

Everyone feels the pressure to improve their lifestyle for New Year's Eve, including Catwoman's alter ego, Seline Kyle. Reflecting on her existence leads her to give up her life of crime, but not before 'borrowing' a designer necklace for her New Year's Eve party. When a crime lord orders the return of the jewelry, can she keep her resolution while fighting for her life?

Colin Bankeston makes documentaries, promos and music videos. He's a skilled cameraman and editor, with work shown on many UK TV channels including the BBC and ITV.

Sex sells 04/09

by Klaus Muenzner, founder member of Neunplus.

UGOKIE-KO-RI-NO-TATEHIKI (動絵狐狸達引, 1933)

Repo man is back!

Do you remember the 1980's cult film “Repo Man”? Now it has an official sequel "Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday" - in graphic novel form... with a script by original writer/director Alex Cox. It issued by Gestalt Comics.

You can buy Repo Man, Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday.

Ulisse 3

by Gioma.
If you want to read the former strip, click here.

Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)

Taxi to the Dark Side is a serious film about the future of America. It may be shocking and disturbing as its title implies, because the subject matter is torture as a weapon of choice in the War Against Terror, but it has great visual grace and assurance: Gibney edits the material for maximum clarity and impact. His shots are beautiful and unexpectedly tranquil.

The case of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver, beaten to death in 2002 while in U.S. military custody forms the heart of this examination of the abuses committed during the detainment and interrogation of political prisoners. The film uncovers an inescapable link between the tragic incidents that unfolded in Bagram and the policies made at the very highest level of the United States government in Washington, D.C. Combining the cool detachment of a forensic expert with the heated indignation of a proud American who holds his country to a high standard, Gibney’s film reveals how the Bush administration has systematically betrayed the very ideals it professes to uphold.
From Dilawar's sad and purposeless death Gibney spirals his story outward to encompass the whole of the Bush administration's post-9/11 attitude toward torture, detention, and the rules of war. Far from being a leftist cry of hysteria, it deliberately and devastatingly lays out its case through interviews with and news footage about a wide range of subjects: fellow prisoners at Bagram; Carlotta Gall and Tim Golden, who reported on Dilawar’s story for The New York Times; etc.
You can buy Taxi to the Dark Side.

Phone Conversation

by Douglas Stockdale

The Pearce Sisters (2007)

The Pearce Sisters, directed by Aardman director Luis Cook, tells the black-hearted tale of two weather-beaten old spinsters who live on a remote strip of coast and eke out a rather dismal existence from catching and smoking fish. One day they heave a half-drowned sailor out of the sea and set about reviving him – but when he fails to appreciate their efforts, a dark and grim aspect of the sister’s way of life is revealed…

Luis Cook wanted somehow to mix 3d cgi with 2d. So he animated everything in the computer with cg models and then printed the frames out and worked them over in 2d. He then filled in the details and expressions and scanned it all over again in 3d. The 3d gives the characters a sense of reality, weight and volume which is important to the narrative. To hold it all together aesthetically Cook produced a fully rendered design for all 180 of the shots. The backgrounds were taken from the Photoshop layers as were all the textures placed on the models.
Dialogue-free and chock-full of animation, the characters are harsh and unpleasant in appearance. Every detail is visible, from the strands in a bundle of fish nets to the rain beating on their weathered faces.

BAFTA awards 2008

BEST FILM

AMERICAN GANGSTER – Brian Grazer/Ridley Scott
ATONEMENT – Tim Bevan/Eric Fellner/Paul Webster
THE LIVES OF OTHERS – Quirin Berg/Max Wiedemann
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN – Scott Rudin/Joel Coen/Ethan Coen
THERE WILL BE BLOOD – JoAnne Sellar/Paul Thomas Anderson/Daniel Lupi

BEST BRITISH FILM

ATONEMENT – Tim Bevan/Eric Fellner/Paul Webster/Joe Wright/Christopher Hampton
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM – Frank Marshall/Patrick Crowley/Paul L Sandberg/Paul Greengrass/Tony Gilroy/Scott Z Burns/George Nolfi
CONTROL – Orian Williams/ Todd Eckert/Anton Corbijn/Matt Greenhalgh
EASTERN PROMISES – Paul Webster/Robert Lantos/David Cronenberg/Steve Knight
THIS IS ENGLAND – Mark Herbert/Shane Meadows

THE CARL FOREMAN AWARD for Special Achievement by a British Director, Writer or Producer in their First Feature Film

CHRIS ATKINS (Director/Writer) – Taking Liberties
MIA BAYS (Producer) – Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
SARAH GAVRON (Director) – Brick Lane
MATT GREENHALGH (Writer) – Control
ANDREW PIDDINGTON (Director/Writer) – The Killing of John Lennon

DIRECTOR

ATONEMENT – Joe Wright
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM – Paul Greengrass
THE LIVES OF OTHERS – Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN – Joel Coen/Ethan Coen
THERE WILL BE BLOOD – Paul Thomas Anderson

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

AMERICAN GANGSTER – Steven Zaillian
JUNO – Diablo Cody
THE LIVES OF OTHERS – Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
MICHAEL CLAYTON – Tony Gilroy
THIS IS ENGLAND – Shane Meadows

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

ATONEMENT – Christopher Hampton
THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY – Ronald Harwood
THE KITE RUNNER – David Benioff
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN – Joel Coen/Ethan Coen
THERE WILL BE BLOOD – Paul Thomas Anderson

FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

nominations announced on Friday 4 January

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY – Kathleen Kennedy/Jon Kilik/Julian Schnabel
THE KITE RUNNER – William Horberg/Walter Parkes/Rebecca Yeldham/Marc Foster
THE LIVES OF OTHERS – Quirin Berg/Max Wiedemann/Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
LUST, CAUTION – Bill Kong/James Schamus/Ang Lee
LA VIE EN ROSE – Alain Goldman/Olivier Dahan

ANIMATED FILM

RATATOUILLE – Brad Bird
SHREK THE THIRD – Chris Miller
THE SIMPSONS MOVIE – David Silverman

LEADING ACTOR

GEORGE CLOONEY – Michael Clayton
DANIEL DAY-LEWIS – There Will Be Blood
JAMES McAVOY – Atonement
VIGGO MORTENSEN – Eastern Promises
ULRICH MÜHE – The Lives of Others

LEADING ACTRESS

CATE BLANCHETT – Elizabeth: The Golden Age
JULIE CHRISTIE – Away From Her
MARION COTILLARD – La Vie en Rose
KEIRA KNIGHTLEY – Atonement
ELLEN PAGE – Juno

SUPPORTING ACTOR

JAVIER BARDEM – No Country for Old Men
PAUL DANO – There Will Be Blood
TOMMY LEE JONES – No Country for Old Men
PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN – Charlie Wilson’s War
TOM WILKINSON – Michael Clayton

SUPPORTING ACTRESS

CATE BLANCHETT – I’m Not There
KELLY MACDONALD – No Country for Old Men
SAMANTHA MORTON – Control
SAOIRSE RONAN – Atonement
TILDA SWINTON – Michael Clayton

MUSIC

AMERICAN GANGSTER – Marc Streitenfeld
ATONEMENT – Dario Marianelli
THE KITE RUNNER – Alberto Iglesias
THERE WILL BE BLOOD – Jonny Greenwood
LA VIE EN ROSE – Christopher Gunning

CINEMATOGRAPHY

AMERICAN GANGSTER – Harris Savides
ATONEMENT – Seamus McGarvey
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM – Oliver Wood
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN – Roger Deakins
THERE WILL BE BLOOD – Robert Elswit

EDITING

AMERICAN GANGSTER – Pietro Scalia
ATONEMENT – Paul Tothill
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM – Christopher Rouse
MICHAEL CLAYTON – John Gilroy
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN – Roderick Jaynes

PRODUCTION DESIGN

ATONEMENT – Sarah Greenwood/Katie Spencer
ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE – Guy Hendrix Dyas/Richard Roberts
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX – Stuart Craig/Stephenie McMillan
THERE WILL BE BLOOD – Jack Fisk/Jim Erickson
LA VIE EN ROSE – Olivier Raoux/Stanislas Reydellet

COSTUME DESIGN

ATONEMENT – Jacqueline Durran
ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE – Alexandra Byrne
LUST, CAUTION – Pan Lai
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET – Colleen Atwood
LA VIE EN ROSE – Marit Allen

SOUND

ATONEMENT – Danny Hambrook/Paul Hamblin/Catherine Hodgson/Becki Ponting
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM – Kirk Francis/Scott Millan/David Parker/Karen Baker Landers/Per Hallberg
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN – Peter Kurland/Skip Lievsay/Craig Berkey/Greg Orloff
THERE WILL BE BLOOD – Christopher Scarabosio/Matthew Wood/John Pritchett/Michael Semanick/Tom Johnson
LA VIE EN ROSE – Laurent Zeilig/Pascal Villard/Jean-Paul Hurier/Marc Doisne

SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS

THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM – Peter Chiang/Charlie Noble/Mattias Lindahl/Joss Williams
THE GOLDEN COMPASS – Michael Fink/Bill Westenhofer/Ben Morris/Trevor Wood
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX – Tim Burke/John Richardson/Emma Norton/Chris Shaw
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END – John Knoll/Charles Gibson/Hal Hickel/John Frazier
SPIDER-MAN 3 – Scott Stokdyk/Peter Nofz/John Frazier/Spencer Cook

MAKE UP & HAIR

ATONEMENT – Ivana Primorac
ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE – Jenny Shircore
HAIRSPRAY – Judi Cooper Sealy/Jordan Samuel
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET – Ivana Primorac/Peter Owen
LA VIE EN ROSE – Jan Archibald/Didier Lavergne

SHORT ANIMATION

THE PEARCE SISTERS – Jo Allen/Luis Cook
HEAD OVER HEELS – Osbert Parker/Fiona Pitkin/Ian Gouldstone
THE CRUMBLEGIANT – Pearse Moore/John McCloskey

SHORT FILM

DOG ALTOGETHER – Diarmid Scrimshaw/Paddy Considine
HESITATION – Julien Berlan/Michelle Eastwood/Virginia Gilbert
THE ONE AND ONLY HERB MCGWYER PLAYS WALLIS ISLAND – Charlie Henderson/James Griffiths/Tim Key/Tom Basden
SOFT – Jane Hooks/Simon Ellis
THE STRONGER – Dan McCulloch/Lia Williams/Frank McGuinness

THE ORANGE RISING STAR AWARD

(voted for by the public) – nominees announced on Tuesday 8 January

SHIA LABEOUF
SIENNA MILLER
ELLEN PAGE
SAM RILEY
TANG WEI

In The Bathroom (Al Bagno)

Studies by Tolin.

He's the creator of Al Bagno, Galassie Perdute, Maya and Le ultime dieci. He's also the screenwriter of Un giorno da eroe. His works are issued on Mono and Be Side.

He's one of the charter members of Edizioni Bertuccia, where he also makes lettering and paging.

He's also an actor, a co-producer and a coplot-writer for apollo54.

War/Dance (2007)

War/Dance narrates the story of Dominic, Rose and Nancy, three children whose families have been torn apart, their homes destroyed, and who currently reside in a displaced persons camp in Patongo. They're preparing to enter a music competition that offers them a lifeline of hope.
The war stole everything from them, except their music. These children and their families rose above the atrocities of war to achieve greatness within their community and their country. The music made feel them good and helped them to wipe away their pain.

Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine received a call from a non profit organization, Shine Global, about making a film to raise awareness about one of the world's worst child soldier situations in northern Uganda. They accepted to shoot the Uganda children's pain. They blended the history, facts and background as much as they could so they could focus on telling a truly human story in the kids' own voices. "War/Dance" earned the couple the Directing Award at Sundance in January as well as the audience prize for best doc at the Wisconsin Film Festival. And now War/Dance has a nomination at the 80th Academy Award.
This upbeat documentary shows the healing powers of music, song, and dance on these brutalized and traumatized youth. It's astounding how the film showed the resilience of the human spirit in the worst of circumstances. In War/Dance we rediscover the power of traditional art, dance and music.
You can buy War Dance.

The Road

by Joakim Eskildsen. His publications include Nordic Signs (1995), Bluetide (1997), iChickenMoon (1999), which was awarded Best Foreign Title of 2000 in the Photo-Eye Books & Prints Annual Awards, the portfolio al-Madina (2002), which was made in collaboration with Kristoffer Albrecht and Pentti Sammallahti, and the book The Roma Journeys (2007, Steidl).

Exhibitions:

Le romané phirmimàta, Robert Morat, Hamburg 2008

Le romané phirmimàta, Städtische Galerie, Iserlohn 2008

Roma rejserne, Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center 2007

Romska resor, Kulturhuset, Stockholm 2007

Le romané phirimàta, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki 2007

Nordic Signs, Synart Art Gallery, Frankfurt/Main 2006

iChickenMoon, Synart Art Gallery, Frankfurt/Main 2005

iChickenMoon, Galleri Image, Århus 2003

Nordic Signs & iChickenMoon, Galerie Albrecht, Munich 2002 & 2003

Orientation, Städtische Galerie Iserlohn 2003

iChickenMoon, Galerie Pernkopf, Berlin 2002

Requiem & Nordic Signs, Galerie Fotohof, Salzburg 2001

Segni del Nord, ACTA Internazionale, Rome 1999

Bluetide, Galleri INTO, Helsinki 1997

Bluetide, Billedhuset, Copenhagen 1997

Nordic Signs, Center of Photography, Jyväskylä 1997

Nordic Signs, Fotografisk Galleri, Copenhagen 1996

Nordic Signs, Galleri UP, Stockholm 1996 & 1998

Nordic Signs, Laterna Magica, Helsinki 1996

Nordtegn, Galleri Image, Århus 1995

Nordtegn, Museet for Fotokunst, Platformen, Odense 1994

Everything Will Be Ok (2008)

For the past 12 years, Indie animator Don Hertzfeldt has created a series of inspiring, quirky, hand-drawn shorts which have delighted festival goers all over the world. He was also curator of the popular and influential semi-annual shorts showcase The Animation Show with Mike Judge.

Everything Will Be Ok and all of its special effects were photographed and carefully composited "in camera" - no CG was used in the production. Hertzfeldt generally uses 12 images per second, so a single minute of screen time requires him to draw 720 individual frames. He continues to use the old-fashioned pen-and-paper camera animation he learned in the mid-90s as a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

His most recent films, with their elaborate optical effects, have required even more painstaking effort. But the result is dark and hilarious, and it's increasingly expressive!
Herzfeldt will drive you wild with his last short film! You think you're watching a gag, but instead you're watching a careful consideration about the banality of our lives.
The banal life of a young man is represented by stick figures and described by a monotonous narrator. It's the first time Herzfeldt uses an omniscient narrator to carry the story: a series of dark and troubling events forces Bill to reckon with the meaning of his life - or lack thereof.
The stick figures and the narration make the banality of his life funny.

Ulisse 2

by Gioma.
If you want to read the former strip, click here.