AUDITOIRE

Cinema is X, X is Cinema

2013-06-09T22:29:00.000+08:00

...

Like Some In Love (Abbas Kiarostami / Japan / 2012)

Rodowick's book The Virtual Life of Film is perhaps the last film book I'll be reading for this year before turning to the books of Deleuze particularly his "Guide to Non-fascist Way of Life" Anti-Oedipus (forgive me Mark Seem, but it is a Marx-Nietzsche-Freud synthesis leaning towards Marx --- everything that I ever wanted to read) and the sequel, A Thousand Plateaus. My goal is to get through these books before I can jump into his Cinema 1 and 2 series. Along with these readings, I'm also in the process of back reading Adrian Martin's sources of his newly published book on figural analysis, Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez. My initial readings include the essays of Auerbach, Figura and Mimesis.

Going back to Rodowick's The Virtual Life of Film, after following Rodowick's enunciation of the concept 'medium' thru his analysis of Carroll's essay "Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self-Consciously Invented Arts", it felt almost discomforting when he mentioned Carroll's five conditions or criteria for an object to be a moving picture:

"...something (x) is a moving picture:

Only if x is a detached display, that is, a visual array presenting an image whose space is discontinuous with the spectator's bodily orientation.

Only if x belongs to a class of things from which the impression of movement is technically possible,

Only if performance tokens of x are generated by a template that is a token; that is, the individual projection of a given 'movie' is inseparable from its presentation template (celluloid strip, videotape, MPEG-2 file). Nonetheless, the movie will also continue to exist as long as some token of it does, regardless of the physical basis of the template.

Only if performance tokens of x are not artworks in their own right. The performance of a play is an autonomous and unique interpretation that may be judged as an artwork in its own right. But a movie 'performance' is only the repeatable display of a record (film projection , playing a videotape), which is why Carroll insists "that motion picture are not object of artistic evaluation, whereas theatrical performances are... [motion] pictures are not a performing art --- i.e., they are not something whose performance is itself an art" ("Defining the Moving Image" 69). Another way of saying this is that for Carroll all aspects of movie creation (scenario writing, acting, direction, editing, etc.) are integrated into a final record from which they are not detachable. And we evaluate not the recording, but rather the artistic activities embodied and fixed within it.

Only if x is two-dimensional."

It seems complete yet there is something limiting in the way Carroll put it. I also wonder if there are other similar definitions of 'film' or 'cinema' (I can think of Thompson's definition in Breaking the Glass Armour) wherein the theorist or critic works on very specific a priori accounts to circumspect an object. Would it be too essentialist to do so? I wonder.

------------

Foucault on Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life

2013-06-04T16:40:00.001+08:00

...

Boy with Machine (Richard Linders, 1954)

I will quote from the Preface of Felix Guttari and Gilles Deleuze's first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus. Foucault wrote:

"...one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.

This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:

Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.

Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchiza-tion.

Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary or nomadic.

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.

Do not use thought to ground a political practice of Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.

Do not become enamored of power."

----

Notes and Scribbles on Cinema: Film Log Feb 2013

2013-01-30T18:07:00.004+08:00

February is the month to be...

...just because Julie Delpy is the girl for ya!

from Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986)

I don't know what I'm getting at, but right now, my other film log has gone awry. And I'm practically pissed off every time I write on it for a day and a half just because it has some invisible bug hiding inside its HTML code. I've tried several xHTML mark up validators online to fix the code but all I got was an error message: "An error occurred while trying to save or publish your post. Please try again." I cannot even save or preview the darn blog post. So shit.

Good thing, the month is ending. I have been planning to cut the previous film log into smaller segments. Instead of having one log for one whole year, I will cut it to one log per month because the previous one has gotten pretty long, which is great anyway. I still have that itchy writing bug somewhere inside me to continue this masturbatory activity. I've also been planning to write a set of articles for submission to different journals (in print and online) for the rest of the quarter. So let us see where that will take us. I still don't have a decent job though so that pretty much limits me to do extra shit around the metro. I stay home most of the time and wait for plants to grow between my armpits and crutch. I've been reading a lot though. I just finished the first part of Rodowick's Reading the Figural last night so expect some notes here in the next few days.

For the meantime folks, let's stop the Cybercrime law from happening. You don't want bugs and viruses floating around when you open Google or Facebook or even this blog. So let's be vigilant, shall we?

Jan 27:

The Fluffer (Wash West and Richard Glatzer / U.S./ 2001) - 3/5 - Wash West's depiction of the gay identity in The Fluffer is fractured by commodified fetishistic elements. The visionary, the omnipresent character Sean, is the body closest to the human artifice. His body double, a complete inversion of him, is a girl named Babylon, achieves the human artifice model. They are both channels of human emotions. The fetishistic body belongs to Johnny Rebel: the porn star, the hedonist, and the Antoine Dionel who will look into the camera at the end of the film. In a way, there is an observable dialectics between the commodified body and pure body in the film. We see it through Sean as he extends his affection to the object of his erotic desire, Johnny Rebel. But they are infusable bodies, impenetrable and unalike. Johnny's commodified body sits in an nonnegotiable narcissistic void which Sean and Babylon cannot enter. The visuality of this void is discursive somehow because it reflects the architecture of power in the porn industry and fractures the gay identity. The void, as the film would visualize, is mutually inclusive with capitalistic structure. Their only relationship is to benefit from each other. Sean suffers from this mutuality and began to question the validity of his feelings for Johnny. Babylon also suffers from Johnny's ultimate descent into the void. In the film, she became the element of social tragedy making her the most socially embedded character embodying motherhood, life, and the hope for change. The movement of bodies in the film resembles a ménage à trois: three bodies intertwined and restricted by their own virtuality. Their only synthesis in film can be found in the last montage wherein the finality of their own virtual existence is arranged in an intercut of shots. The film ends this way: dispersive and ambiguous, with ties broken.

Jan 29:

Near Death (Frederick Wiseman / U.S. / 1989) - 5/5 - Frederick Wiseman's heartbreaking documentary forces one to endure and mutate into the frames. It inhabits multitudes of reality and engages the audience in a dialectical exchange about ethics and physicality of death. Wiseman is so keen with human subjects that his film became an orchestra of human voices and figures in different emotional states. His camera is invisible, roaming through the complex interstices of Beth Israel Hospital, clothed from the frailties of its human inhabitants. The result is an astounding 6-hour plunge into the complexity of the human body on the verge of extinction. Like many of Wiseman's films, Near Death explores the body in relation to space. In Welfare (1975), Wiseman observes the architectural power design of a welfare institution in New York. In La Danse - Le Ballet de L'Opera de Paris (2009), Wiseman documents the perpetual cadence of the ballet dancer's mechanize body in a dance institution. In Blind (1987), Wiseman presents to us the struggle of blind people in a school for the blind. In Near Death, Wiseman audaciously commands the camera to capture the human drama behind the walls of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) --- a hospital space that can only be accessed mostly by doctors and relatives of patients. Wiseman unveils the architecture of this intense space and shows us a slice of the human condition in that particular environment. This particular space gravitates towards the human body in its generic form. This body holds the vessel of information that gives an ethnographic standpoint and aids the film to form nested causality about the human body as it reverberates within the principal notion of life and death.

||||||| THE HIGHLIGHT OF MY DAY: D.N. Rodowick summarizing Foucault's "postmodern" theory of power in a few sentences:

"Architecture itself tells us more about the potentiality of the body, the forces it affects and that affect it, than any other enterprise. It is the design of spaces to live and work in, to travel across, and to communicate through, in ways that limit certain movements and enable others, and, as such, is an exemplary expression of power. Foucault’s definition of how power encounters the body makes the point succinctly: divide in space; order in time; compose in space-time. An ‘‘architectural’’ theory of power thus diagrams forms of collectivity—distinct in their spatial and temporal organization—and demonstrates how movements of bodies and flows of information are both enabled and constrained." (Reading the Figural 42)

Jan 30:

||||||| Three videos: A Triptych

Jan 31:

Winnie The Pooh (Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall / U.S. / 2011) - 4/5 - Deep into the hand-drawn frames of Winnie The Pooh, a liminal space exist where linguistic and visual elements collide in a figural interstice. In obvious instances, this "betweeness" becomes contingent to the storyline via audio narrator's perpetual manipulation of the visual and expressible elements of the film. The audio narrator takes the form of an omnipotent, omnipresent body visually "unseen" yet heard, an 'aural' godlike figure that deliberately tosses the textual elements into its visual counterparts. This conscious effort to devise such a play of visual and linguistic elements is well beyond what current Hollywood films are doing. Surely, there is some pedagogical vibe emancipated from those play of words and figures: jumbled letters falling in the virtual field of the story, Pooh hopping in paragraphs and sentences, and the letter-ladder used by the characters to climb out of the hole. It has some likeness with Broken Down Film (1985) and many Polish animators in terms of its manipulative plasticity of the animation frame, a method subversive enough to make the audience rethink of language itself. In the film, the "Back Soon" monster and its imaginary contours prompts the failure of words for self-identity --- meaning, words and phrases are highly contingent to context-based reasoning. It is not simply misinterpretation per se, but the natural characteristic of words to fail to achieve an identity independent of 'context' ---- self-identity. The visual look of the "Back Soon" soon never metastasized into a fully formed body. It remained a lingering by-product of delusion, anxiety, worry that haunts the characters until the end. It's figuration is a ghost, a chimera but only without a form, a body: an object of reification. The monster is magnified and feared in a collective sense --- an element of mass hysteria ordering and re-ordering narrative circumstances and displacing psychological states of the film. It only disappeared when Christopher Robin, the source of the ambiguous message, clarified the context of "Back Soon".

Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax / France / 1986) - 4/5 - Mauvais Sang has a lot to say about the French New Wave and the French film aesthetics of the 1980s. Its sinewy, colorful images and audacious spirit in film making --- at one point, Carax has to shoot in high altitudes using a plane --- shows the genius of Carax. Its ambitiousness and inventiveness in aesthetics is unique given the milieu of French filmmaking in the 1980s. Most of the French arthouse filmmakers at time: Agnes Varda, Maurice Pialat, Andre Techine, the older Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet have focused on banalities of French life. Some of them have engaged in minimalism and only a few, like Carax, had the balls to re-orient their aesthetics in new ways. Carax consciously attenuates his shots by putting them in different temporal modalities: fast-paced versus slow-pace, one-take versus multiple-angle takes. This made Mauvais Sang an intertextual film highly conscious of its temporal design. It provides layering and stiching of visual and expressible elements made possible by the improvement of the film technology in the 1980s. The camera has become more complex, more sensitive to time-rendered motion, and handy, which explains the freedom Carax in filming at high altitudes. A similar temporal modality has been explored in Jean-Luc Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979). Carax has fully realized its function in Mauvais Sang. The architecture of space in Mauvais Sang is futuristic plagued with a pseudo-scientific anxiety: STBO epidemic --- a sexually transmitted disease among young people. Carax work around this main arch and inserted digressions with particular proximity to Nouvelle Vague especially Godard and his films A Bout de Souffle (1960), Bande A Part (1964), and Contempt (1963). Juliette Binoche and Michel Picoli are two obvious transgressive bodies cut-out from the Nouvelle Vague movement: the former resembling Anna Karina with the hair and the latter as 'Michel Picoli' himself in Contempt. The visuality of the film tells a lot also about Carax particularity in color homage. There were great and, at some point, overwhelming tinges of red, yellow, and blue splashed across the frames, similar to what Godard did in Pierrot La Fou (1965) and La Chinoise (1967).

Feb 2:

Re-watch of three films for a sleepover with friends: Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki / Japan / 1997), Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell / U.S. / 2006) and Zombadings I: Patayin sa Shokot Si Remington (Jade Castro / Philippines / 2010).

Feb 4:

Pusong Bato (Pam Miras / Philippines / 2012) - 3/5 - Pusong Bato comes from the visual tradition of recent crop of Filipino experimental filmmakers: digitized hand-processed films. This kind of film processing signals the two events in the history of film: the death of the photographic roots film and the digitization of the medium. Hand-processed films like Pusong Bato, Anak Araw (Gym Lumbera, 2012), Class Picture (Timmy Harn and Gym Lumbera, 2012), Ars Colonia (Raya Martin, 2011) and digitized films shot in analog camera like Colossal (Whammy Alcazaren, 2012), Big Boy (Shireen Seno, 2011), and its early example A Short Film About Indio Nacional (Martin, 2005) have successfully attempted to emulate the photographic image --- the purest expression of cinema --- and brought the medium closest to the photographic truth. Their digitization as a post-production practice sutured a new visuality in cinema, the figural (a topic I will elaborate here in a few days), and also revealed the impossibility of today's film making to do everything in analogical terms. Economic limitations in analog film making in the Philippines have rendered that particular film technology obsolescent or as good as dead. Today's interface technology or the ones used to project films requires films in digital format complicating the return of the practice to its analogical temperament. Films like Pusong Bato commands the movement of the analog-sculpted images to the simulated and computer-aided virtual world of digital filmmaking. Its hybridized aesthetics dissolves the borders between the visual practices inherent in the analog practice and the digital manipulations applied during the post-production processing. Philippine's increasing output of hand-processed films for the past two to three years must be assessed as a unique and distinguishing visual trend --- probably the result of overriding influence of several key figures in local and international cinema: Ben Rivers and Raya Martin. Raya Martin's persistent exploration of the stylistics of the past open the doors for this tradition of shooting in 16mm, 8mm, and several other obsolescent formats. This aesthetic principle will continue to strengthen the identity of local experimental films in the years to come. Pam Miras's Pusong Bato is carved out from this tradition and the old tradition of Jean Epstein. Its images displays an uncanny silent film treatment with rhythmic editing with a romantic story arc overlay. Ethereal black-and-white images draws out an alternate world, far from the glossy aesthetics of other local independent films. Films like Pusong Bato reinforces the artistic sensibilities of the local independent films which eroded for the past few years. With the arrival of the hand-processed films from filmmakers (Lumbera, Miras, and Harn) and the analog-digital hybrids (Seno and Alcazaren) the separation of truly alternative films from independent films with commercial sensibilities has finally come.

Pascalina (Pam Miras / Philippines / 2012) - 3.5/5 - Pascalina's dark and dissolving images, a product of lo-fi digitization from a Harinezumi camera, can be retraced back to Raya Martin's digital pursuits in Now Showing (2008) and John Torres' Ang Ninanais (2010). However, the function of lo-fi digital register in Pam Miras' Pascalina has more sensorial, more visual-layering appeal than Martin's historical take on it and Torres' use for subversive political imagery. The resulting cinematographic effect is phenomenal, it unifies the incommensurable strangeness of its narrative. On top of this visual and narrative construction principles, it is interesting to ask the nature of the figural at work. Pascalina is a completely digitize character, a product of several technological ramifications dictated by the architectural space of the Harinezumi camera and other post-production computer programs. Unlike Pusong Bato, which is a hybrid between analog and digital, Pascalina is fully realized digital film that underwent numerous digital transformations before achieving its visuality. Hence, Pascalina's transfiguration into an aswang, a lower mythological creature in Philippine folklore, is mechanistic in all its contextual ambiguities. Pascalina is an object of reification, an incomplete image, with visual edges dissolving in the dark 'lo-finess' of its frames.

Feb 5:

Notes

I've been exhausted lately because of many things. I did a lot of stuff last week and I'm expecting a large workload in the next few weeks. I'm not keeping up with my pace. I don't know if I'll be writing on this notes but I feel a bit sick for some reason. I might need to take up a few food supplements.

Feb 15:

|||||||||||||||| Finished reading this:

Writers' Bodies. Writers' bodies are involved in their writing. Writing invites sexuality. Like kings and other people in power. As regards to men, it's as if they'd slept with our minds, penetrated our minds at the same time our bodies. There haven't been exception as far as I'm concerned. The same kind of fascination operated even with lovers who weren't intellectuals. As for a worker a woman who writes books ---- that's something he'll never had. It's like that all over the world, for all writers, men and women alike. They're sex objects par excellence. When I was still very young I was attracted to elderly men because they were writers. I've never been able to imagine sex without intelligence, or intelligence without a kind of absence from oneself. Lots of intellectuals are clumsy lovers - unadventurous, apprehensive, and absent-minded. It was all the same to me as long as when they weren't with me they were, as writers, just as absent from their own bodies. I've noticed that writers who are superb at making love are much more rarely great writers than those who are scared and not so good at it. Talent and genius evoke rape, just as they evoke death. Sham writers don't have these problems. They're sound and healthy and you can go with them quite safely. When both members of a couple are writers the wife says: 'My husband's a writer.' The husband says: 'My wife writes too.' The children says: 'My father writes books, and so does my mother, sometimes.'

------- an excerpt from MARGUERITE DURAS' PRACTICALITIES.

Feb 24:

||||||| Notes from an Ideological Insanity

I.

A few weeks ago, I finished reading an important chunk of D. N. Rodowick's Reading the Figural. It was astutely entitled Paradoxes of the Visual, or Philosophy after the New Media. I continued reading through Rodowick's book on Part II. Reading the Figural and got off before the section on The Figure and the Text. I realized that I am reading one of the most difficult books I have read in my entire life. I shut the door right then and there and started reading Rodowick's book, The Virtual Life of Film. I figure that, if I continue reading Rodowick's philosophical book Reading the Figural, i'll waste my time figuring its difficult philosophical reverberations. I wanted to focus more on film: its oddities, visualities, and historical determinants. It suddenly occurred to me that Rodowick has something great to say about film. He opens a lot of questions more than answers. Questions like: can film really be an artform? Why is film a very difficult medium? What happened when everyone turned digital? What is the future of film? Those questions have answers in the first few pages of Rodowick's The Virtual Life of Film. The first part of the book fleshes out a lot of important (and neglected) fundamental visualities/textualities of the film form.

II.

But in just two weeks ago, I stopped reading film books. It's because I finally accepted a job offer I've been looking for more than a month now. It's a Chemical Engineering related job. A day job, from 9AM to 6PM with a lunchbreak between 1230ish to 130ish. All my office-mates and bosses are Chemical Engineering graduates, and some of them are licensed. I very much enjoy my job. I just sit and write reports, which is what I wanted. And the best thing about it actually is that we get to travel once a week to visit clients, have meetings, do seminars. The company is an environmental consultancy firm so it's very close to Chemical Engineering and maybe my springboard to an Environmental Engineering career in the future. I wish to go to Canada in the near future and continue my studies there. Hopefully, at U of T.

III.

I devised a new method on choosing my weekly line-up of movies. I have around 73 to-watch films (see list here) in my hard drive from KG and SMZ. I can't watch them all at once so I used random.org to produce a random number from 1 to 73. The first 10 random.org number will determine which film I will watch for the week. I already watch the first one, a short film by Karpo Godina. Here is the rest of my list.

DOC'S KINGDOM (Robert Kramer / Portugal / 1987) - 90 mins
HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (John Cameron Mitchell / U.S. / 2001) - 95 mins
THE UNSCRUPULOUS ONES (Ruy Guerra / Brazil / 1962) - 100 mins
JULY RAIN (Marlen Khutsiyev / USSR / 1966) - 107 Mins
OXHIDE (Liu Jiayin / China / 2005) - 110 mins
THE LAST BOLSHEVIK (Chris Marker / Finland-France / 1993) - 121 mins
BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (Shohei Imamura / Japan / 1983) - 130 mins
THE HUNTERS (Theo Angelopoulos / Greece / 1977) - 168 mins
PROFOUND DESIRES OF THE GODS (Shohei Imamura / Japan / 1968) - 172 mins

Anyway, I have to sleep. I have work tomorrow.

Feb 27:

The Oscar Anti-Appreciation Post

Feb 28:

Backlog and Film logging

It's end of the month and I hate to say goodbye to February. Feb is a good month for me: new job and a revived habit of reading --- thanks the to long traffic jam at Nepa QMart, Cubao and EDSA Santolan, I finished three books. Though I wish I have more time to write for each of the film I saw. Don't have time for a round-up write-up either, I have a deadline tomorrow. Here's a summary of ratings for the films I've watched at latter part of the month

Watership Down (Martin Rosen / U.K. / 1978) - 4/5
The Way of the Dragon (Bruce Lee / H.K. / 1972) - 3/5
Pieta (Kim Ki-Duk / South Korea / 2012) - 3/5
Angel's Egg (Mamoru Oshii / Japan / 1985) - 4/5
Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos / Greece / 1988) - 5/5
The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel / Mexico / 1962) - 5/5
A Grin Without A Cat (Chris Marker / France / 1977) - 5/5
The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-Liang / Taiwan / 2005) - 4.5/5
Illumination (Krzysztof Zanussi / Poland / 1973) - 5/5
New York City Inferno (Jacque Scandelari / U.S. / 1978) - 3/5
The Corridor (Sharunas Bartas / Lithuania / 1994) - 5/5
Healthy People For Pastime (Karpo Ačimović-Godina / Yugoslavia / 1971) - 4/5
Doc's Kingdom (Robert Kramer / Portugal-France-U.S. / 1987) - 4/5
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell / U.S. / 2001) - 4/5

See you on March!

[more to come]
****

Notes and Scribbles on Cinema - Film Log January 2013

2013-01-07T15:19:00.001+08:00

...

from The Story of Temple Drake (1933)

End-of-the-year Hullabaloo

The last thing I did last year 2012 was perfecting the subtitles of a pre-code Hollywood film The Story of Temple Drake (1933). I was trying to be a good site member of this exclusive film forum which offers credits to members who can do subtitling for films especially those in language other than English. So that was it, just like that. I transcribed the audio, and with the help of my friend VisualSubSync, I produced the subtitle for just a day and a half. VSS is really wonderful. It is not as complex as Aegisub but it saves a lot of memory. Plus, you get to playback portions of the film in slow motion for hard-to-catch words. As with The Story of Temple Drake (1933), the film is a bomb! Well, it's not really the best film of all time, but I just love its humorous dialogues which made it fun to transcribe and Jack La Rue! Oh Jack La Rue, marry me, you sexy beast!

Now, with the project, I've thinking about doing a long film log (one blogpost can suffice for this one) where I can place some of the screenshots (maximum of three) of the films I will be watching for this year. Maybe I'll place short masturbatory reviews below each post. Nothing fancy or academic, nothing grand, just some blabber about the film. I successfully made a lighter one for 2012 --- just a list, nothing more --- at Mubi.com. So this is my second attempt, and an upgrade of the original plan I have in mind. I can't update this regularly, but I'll make sure I'll make it until the end of the year.

January 2013

Jan 1:

Je T'aime, Je T'aime (Alain Resnais/ France / 1968) - 4/5 - This film is the closest film to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2000). Strangely,they have a similar structure. Both are nonlinear, cognitive-based, and follows a romantic story arc of a man remembering his past love. In the film, Resnais explores the temporal element of memory: its vastness, its scope, its repetitive design, its density. Je T'aime, Je T'aime's shot-to-shot structure is like a hopscotch game, going forward and backward, with time. I had fun watching this maybe because it feels like an intermediate film between the Soviet Montage experiments of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov of the 1920s and Michel Gondry's film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind of the 2000s. The stylistic tradition in editing, from its formation to its transformation(s), is clearly manifested along this line of movement: from its ideological origins to its permeation in art cinema to its entry in conventional and Hollywood filmmaking. Clearly, the structure of Cloud Atlas (2012) is near to this stylistic tradition.

Jan 2:

Massillon (William E. Jones / U.S. / 1991) - 5/5 - A completely forgotten film from the Queer New Wave, neglected and unknown, Massillon is William E. Jones' experimental and autobiographical film. The first half recounts his childhood days in a very conservative city of Massillon, Ohio. The second half examines the institutional oppression of several dominant Judeo-Christian communities in different states in the U.S. to homosexuals. The film has no pictorial aggrandizement of the male body, or even convolutions of it, unlike other Queer New Wave films which gave the male body image a sexopolitical layer. Its images are all external shots of spaces in rural and industrial Ohio. The film's narrative unfolds through the careful and vivid audio narration of William E. Jones himself. There maybe times that his images (see above) can be associated to the phallic figure, in all its diminutive forms. But the film's pictorial value manifested simply as it is: a record of places, an illustration of terrains, a geography of the self. This adds to the sincerity and simplicity of the film. It's quite a unique and relaxing experience.

Jan 6:

El Presidente (Mark Meily / Philippines / 2012) - 2/5 - A pseudo-historical farce, a parasitic revisionist film that tricks and misleads the audience, a propaganda disguised as a popular film. Those are some of the few descriptions that I can write about this film. And I can continue writing more and more. It was dull and aimless; full of artificiality and gimmicks; full of unnecessary digressions. It is devoid of emotional complexity with cardboard characters cut out from some alternate universe. The film has no sense of purpose except maybe to chronologically arrange the events surrounding Emilio Aguinaldo from Day 1. It appears like textbook lacking a soul. It turns itself page-by-page, lining up events that do not even seem to paint a rational picture of Aguinaldo. What the film does to Aguinaldo is to paint his skeletal system, a rotting portrait, a dead man. I can not even start talking about its sub-characters. It manages to demonize Antonio Luna, hell even Andres Bonifacio, to achieve a diametrical heroic image of Aguinaldo. This questionable subject positioning adds to the muddled historiography of El Presidente.

Jan 7:

Caravaggio (Derek Jarman / U.K. / 1986) - 4/5 - A film of textural depth, it approaches Caravaggio in dialectical terms: the object and its representation, the sacrilegious and the religious, the gaze and the eye, from past to present. Its figural images traverse between these binary poles creating an intertextual structure, a postmodern posturing. Jarman's use of poetic language in overtures completes the film's artistic vision. It deepens its taut exterior design, extends its dimensions, and replenishes its rather trite narrative. When I was watching it, it felt as if I was watching a costume drama in theater. The frames are immovable and pasted, as if they continuously imitate Caravaggio's paintings. The score in the ending credits, which he also used in the last memorable lines of Blue (1993), hints the melancholy of Jarman who was suffering the symptoms of HIV at that time (he was diagnosed with HIV December 1986).

Jan 8:

(nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton / U.S. / 1971) - 3.5/5 - Not all avant-garde films work for me. Some of them have hits and misses. I have an ingrained prejudice towards avant-garde films. I see them as the key style towards unlocking cinema's power of subverting the hegemonic presence of pictorial and narrative conventions. It is a classic theory---very Amos Vogel--- and I work always within that framework. However, just last night, I was struck by a numbing feeling. This film, (nostalgia) by famous avant-gardist Hollis Frampton, came out rather a miss than a hit, at least, based on my initial gut feeling. I haven't read his biography online before I watched it, but it came to me void of other filmic elements. The film was lacking something else to achieve a totality, a completeness in filmic experience, which I find in most films by Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas. Maybe it lacks some emotional chord, some sincerity, some truth, some grand connection to cinema or to life. (nostalgia)'s anachronistic style is very constricting for its simplicity: you have an audio narration and its pictorial equivalence. They are arranged in (nostalgia) in such a way that the audio narration precedes the picture it describes. There are twelve pictures (and twelve narrations) burnt using a hot pad. On each picture, Frampton builds its genealogy, its anecdotal founding, its significance or insignificance to his life. The film is a distillation of photographic memories without the sentimentality that usually goes with it. This is my first Hollis Frampton film. I do not know that, after reading a couple of write-ups about him, he's engaged in 'structural filmmaking', an avant-garde style that uses concepts from mathematics and science in making films. This is different from the cinema of Brakhage-Mekas-Hutton which derives subjects from concrete or automated experiential sources. The use of 'concept' in most of his write-ups interests me because this may have been the first time that a filmmaker was driven to do 'conceptual films'. Although some might say that Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov were the ones who pioneered 'conceptual filmmaking', this one has no ideological component. Frampton uses concepts from the constrictive halls of the scientific academia and fits it to filmmaking. That is perhaps the most interesting thing I've learned from him. I am interested in watching some of his other films: his most famouse Zorn's Lemma (1970), Maxwell's Demons (1968), and his longest film Hapax Legomena (1971 - 1872) which spans 3 hours and 22 minutes.

Jan 9:

NEW BOOKS:

1. Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin) - P75.00 ~ $1.50

2. F.F. Script of Reservoir Dogs (1992) - P115.00 ~ $2.10

I just had a lucky day. I found these two darlings in Booksale near my place here in Manila. I just passed by to run through their re-stocked shelves and, to my surprise, a Rosenbaum-Martin just popped out on one of the corners of the shop. Nobody's looking at it so I grabbed it and dashed to the counter and head back home to catch an article or two. I bought the Reservoir Dogs script for the screening of my film club on Saturday. I will be giving it out for raffle.

Senses of Cinema World Poll 2012 is out! Here's my entry [link]:

Colossal (Whammy Alcazaren, 2012)

Jungle Love (Sherad Anthony Sanchez, 2012)

Nang Gabing Maging Sinlaki ng Puso ang Bato (Darna: A Stone is a Heart You Can't Swallow, Jon Lazam, 2012)

Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, 2012)

Da-reun na-ra-e-suh (In Another Country, Hong Sang-soo, 2012)

Amour (Love, Michael Haneke, 2012)

Mamay Umeng (Dwein Baltazar, 2012)

Ang Prinsesa, Ang Prinsipe at si Marlborita (The Princess, the Prince and Marlborita, Carl Joseph Papa, 2012)

Kung Ano Ang Alam ng Manok (What the Chicken Knows (Or, The Eight Stages of Grief), Ramon Raquid, 2012)

Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (Lav Diaz, 2012)

Diablo (Mes De Guzman, 2012)

Ang Paglalakbay ng mga Bituin sa Gabing Madilim (A Star's Journey into the Dark Night, Arnel M Mardoquio, 2012)

Anak Araw (Gym Lumbera, 2012)

The Great Cinema Party (Raya Martin, 2012)

Mater Dolorosa (Adolfo Alix Jr., 2012)

Hooray! I'll be writing about some of them soon --- in long form. A great year in Philippine cinema, I must say.

from An Inn at Osaka (1954)

RE-POSTED:

Chris' "Year-End List: Best Films I've Seen This 2012"

"I didn't see that many films, compared to last year. I've only seen a handful of 2012 films too. None made the list, and I have no year-end list of favorite films released this year either. The films are listed in a somewhat preferential order. In any other day, I'd probably consider a different order, but it's the first two films that really, really astonished me.'

Batang West Side (Lav Diaz, 2001)
L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Hong Sang-Soo, 2000)
Where the Chimneys are Seen (Heinosuke Gosho, 1953)
What Happened Was... (Tom Noonan, 1994)
Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)
The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo, 2011)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker, 2004)
Intentions of Murder (Shōhei Imamura, 1964)
On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (Hong Sang-soo, 2002)
An Inn at Osaka (Heinosuke Gosho, 1954)
Route One/USA (Robert Kramer, 1989)
Elsewhere (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2001)
The Long Darkness (Kei Kumai, 1972)
Ice (Robert Kramer, 1970)
Oxhide II (Liu Jiayin, 2009)
Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)
Goodbye, South, Goodbye (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1996)
Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

Jan 10:

from Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain (2007)

Currently Reading: Jean-Michel Fordon's Evenement: Abdel's Language and French Reality [Cahiers du Cinema, No. 629, Dec. 2012, link]

Jan 12:

La Vie Nouvelle (Philippe Grandrieux / France / 2002) - 4.5/5 - Philippe Grandrieux's nightmarish film touches the linguistic soul of cinema, or particularly an age-old problem in appropriation. The film has several layers of linguistic interstices: the aural (or auditory), the figural, and the temporal. Each of these linguistic interstices vibrates within its own autonomous space, but also, with some emulsified force, these interstices transmits significations from its interiors to its exteriors and vice-versa in a dialectical flow. It was as though the inversions I initially have: the visible and the invisible, the point object and the non-point object, the audible and the inaudible, transmogrified into a multi-armed beast of sensations and psychical transformations. This is one of the films that resurrects the form and replenishes the figural void of contemporary cinema.

Notes: Looking Further into La Vie Nouvelle

"[...]Grandrieux’s reflection belongs to the body’s modernity – the modernity of Sigmund Freud, Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, to name only a few – and thus returns the anthropological need for representation to a state of immanence. The image is no longer given as a reflection, discourse, or the currency of whatever absolute value; it works to invest immanence, using every type of sensation, drive and affect. To make a film means descending, via the intermittent pathways of neuronal connection, down into the most shadowy depths of our sensory experiences, to the point of confronting the sheer terror of the death drive (Sombre), or the still more immense and bottomless terror of the unconscious, of total opacity (La Vie nouvelle)[...]"

---- The Body's Night: An Interview with Philippe Grandrieux by Nicole Breneze.

---- o o o ----

Tabu (Miguel Gomes / Portugal / 2012) - 4/5 - Tabu is simply likable because it rehashes the age-old theme of forbidden love in the most idiosyncratic way. A paradise and a paradise lost: Tabu's two-part description invokes Milton's works and the temporal binary of the founding and the fall of worlds. Tabu retraces character histories, relationships, and memories within this temporal binary in a new form with elements traversing between poles. Gomes' reinvention of the prosaic connection between the image and the sound, especially the pseudo-silent half of the film, presents to us the stylistic game (Gomes likes games apparently) he wants his audiences to play. He controls two layers of sound: non-diegetic and diegetic, often silencing the diegetic sound of the characters and allows the plasticity of the image to follow through. Gomes asks his audience to "fill-in-the-blanks", to invent, to suffice the void in diegesis. This is a good example of the application of constructive reification in cinema. In some ways La Vie Nouvelle (2002) involves also a process of reification, a matter of forming a complete picture with the help of other details. But what makes La Vie Nouvelle's reification different from Tabu is that in Tabu the reification completes easily. In La Vie Nouvelle, the reification renders somewhat incomplete, or even lost. This makes Tabu a more graspable film in terms of establishing narrative connections in a perceptual sense.

Jan 13:

CURRENTLY READING THIS: Reading the Figural, Or, Philosophy After the New Media by D.N. Rodowick. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. A book review by Warwick Mules.

||| SHORT FILMS FOR SUNDAY:

from Once Upon a Time (Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica / Poland / 1957) - 3/5

[link]

and:

from Broken Down Film (Osamu Tezuka / Japan / 1985) - 4/5 - [link]

I have seen two animated films today over my stay at a friend's house: Once Upon a Time by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica and Broken Down Film Osamu Tezuka. These two films have different types of animation and came from two different eras. Once Upon a Time is a cut-out animation and a fusion of the genius of Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica, two Polish animators from the Easter European animation scene. Borowczyk and Marker's animated film, Les Astronautes (1959), also a cut-out gem, is one of my favorite animated films ever. It's bizarre but humorous, a slapstick film but only animated. I have not seen any animation by Jan Lenica which makes this film a first time. In Once Upon a Time, Brorowczyk and Lenica achieves a different type cut-out animation: minimalist but self-conscious. We see a dark colored object (possibly as black potato) with arms and legs of the same shape and size detached from its body: an object of reification. The film follows this figure in its adventure to find its true form. The self-consciousness of the object as an abstraction is itself the comical subject of the film. It isn't only aware of its form, but also conscious of the immediate space in the animation canvass. The film felt like a parody of non-representational art during the 1950s fashioned as a game of figures.

On the other spectrum of animation, the plastic representational one, Broken Down Film remains to me one of the funniest ones I've seen. It also works as a paradoy of silent cinema. The film is created by Osamu Tezuka, a Japanese animator who created the famous animated film Astro Boy (1966). Tezuka's genius and mastery of the animated frames can be seen in Broken Down Film. The film is a series orchestrated gags on the limits of the cinematic frame. It consciously plays with the spatial limit of the frame and it comes from the traditional slapstick animated films of early Walt Disneys like Steamboat Willie (1928). Tezuka invents a new world within the interstices of cinematic frame. He fulfills the possibility of situating the body between borders. This play with abstraction of the frame is a bold and unique take of animation, an eye opener for me as to what type of construction principles Japanese animators have. During the era it was made, Studio Ghibli and other animation studios in Japan were producing essential animated films by Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki.

Jan 14:

Arena (João Salaviza / Portugal / 2009) - 3.5/5 - Arena is a film about the space perceived through the eyes Mauro played by Carloto Cotta, the Gian Luca of Tabu (2012). His body is withheld physically within the confines of his apartment: arrested in its interstices. He is under house arrest, apparently. He wears this alarm-triggering device around his ankle. The film has no grand conflict other than a bunch of kids bullying him and stealing his money. He then faced the leader of the kids at the latter part of the film claiming for retribution. Instead of plummeting into a fit of rage, Mauro laid down his body under the sun on the roof-deck of the building. But why? It seemed to me that the film has some political agenda. The spatial design hints that this is a portrait of a lower class urban neighborhood in Portugal. A societal space restricted by class conflicts. But it doesn't explicitly address that issue. It doesn't provide a clear-cut political message. It lingers in the elaborate moment of a body moving in deep space, in a field of reality. It may have been contemplative in a sense that the sparse dialogue and the ambiguous motivation of the character imbibe a sense of existential ennui. Or even perhaps the body being free, or its movement from its captured state to its free state: a Sartrian sense of freedom. There can be multitudes of significations that a reviewer or scholar might look into. I initially took it as a gay film to my mistake. The film won the Short Palme d'Or at Cannes 2009.

!!! AN OBLIGATORY PICTURE OF João Salaviza

João Salaviza winning the Golden Bear for Short Film last 62nd Berlin International Film Festival

Jan 15:

R.I.P. Nagisa Ôshima (1932 - 2013)

Jan 16:

Where Chimneys Are Seen (Heinosuke Gosho / Japan / 1953) - 5/5 - The film is, by narrative structure, a mapping of post-war Japan's economic milieu. It is a film about the working class. The film is so conscious of its sociopolitical dimension it creates a nested commercial environment touching different booming industries in Japan during the 1950s. The four chimneys of Tokyo, a gravitating element in the film, draws the attention of each character. It is the image that opens the film and closes the film, serving as a Foucauldian panopticon tower that observes its surrounding landscape. It seems to overpower each character's motivations, suggesting perhaps that their action must always be re-evaluated according to what they do, what they own, what they value, and what they remember. They are social figures moving within the most desolate working class neighborhood in Tokyo. The main conflict in the film, which came out gradually in the middle, is how two couples living in one roof (maybe a duplex) will deal with an abandoned baby. This subject positioning, of two couples subjected with societal problem of rearing a child that is not theirs, is fairly a different take on Japanese culture compared to what Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi conjured. Ozu's vision is ascetic and sparse with characters coming from the middle class; while Mizoguchi's vision is compassionate and refined with characters' psychology well-explored. Of the three, Gosho is the most lighthearted, most humorous. His characters have fairly simple and basic desires and street-smart philosophies. But they embody typical working class values: strong-willed, impenetrable, and self-sufficient. The three directors paint the spirit of postwar Japan with Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi), Tokyo Story (Ozu), and Where Chimneys are Seen (Gosho) mirroring a spirit of a nation rebuilding itself.

Life of Pi (Ang Lee / U.S. / 2012) - 3/5 - If there is one thing that I have learned from Life of Pi, it is that there are other better, more convincing films whose main agenda is to re-insinuates the presence of God or any higher power. The film's premise, its guiding principle, is to prove the idea of God to this Caucasian writer by listening to Pi's idiosyncratic story of survival. The members of the audience are immediately positioned in his place functioning as the listener and the doubter. There is no dialectical resonance developed between me and the film. Everything, like most Hollywood films --- except maybe for the one film that I admire, A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, 2001) ----is one way. Its significations are direct. Perhaps its artificiality, which has something to do with its visual design, hinders it to form connections with me. Its images seem to appear picture-perfect, wondrous, and expansive; but all of it felt machine-invented: less organic and less personal, that at one point it seemed manipulative, generating a less sincere spiritual message.

Jan 17:

Nobody said it was easy.
Writing tips by Max Sebald.
Just another light missing.

Jan 18:

CURRENTLY READING: T.w. Adorno: Cinema in Spite of Itself --- but Cinema All the Same by Nicole Brenez. [here]

(suggested by Paul Grant, USC M.A. Film Studies Head, in addition to Rodowick's book on Figural Analysis I mentioned above)

Also:

I was part of the judging committee (jury) for U.P. Cinemas' Piling Obrang Video (POV) 9 in the Documentary and Experimental Category together with hardworking Human Rights worker, Kristine Kintana, and independent filmmaker and director of Ex Press (2011), Jet Leyco. I also guested in DZUP CineChichiriya hosted Joni Gutierrez and Cenon Palomares. The topic was about CINEPHILES!. Thank you so much everyone! Hooray for a day filled with cinema!

Jan 20:

from Beau Travail (Claire Denis / France / 1999)

||| Of Bodies and the Fuzzy Figural Analysis

On page 6 of Rodowick's book, Reading the Figural, I felt a sense of security. It's one of the feelings when one encounters a difficult text that gives a great sense of trajectory that one will reach a great conclusion at the end of one's reading. Rodowick's confidence in writing is enlivening enough that it made me refill my coffee cup twice yesterday. So there I was on page 6, and I suddenly encountered the word indexicality, which Rodowick describes to as: "Every discourse is haunted by perspective in that in order to mean, it must refer." Rodowick continues through the bloody paragraph refining the term:

"Indexicality means that discourse is shot through the visible: the énoncé [def] must point beyond its borders to objects positioned in space with respect to it. It is plunged into a gestural space that surrounds it, and it is riddles from within by deictic [def] holes whose functions is to indicated positionality in space (here/there) and in time (now/then)."

Now, this set of sentences builds upon many concepts that play with each other. We have indexicality redefined by Rodowick, which, according to him, is different from the indexicality of Charles Sanders Peirce, a semiotic idea coming from different functionality. Rodowick gives indexicality a sense of space by proclaiming that it must be "shot through the visible". To my mind, upon re-reading online definitions of it, it came to me a very basic concept. Examples of indexicality are 'I' which refers to the speaker now, 'here' which refers to a certain space, 'now' which refers to a certain time. It seems reasonable enough that Rodowick associates it with the visible as some sort of a 'pointing' process to space. Rodowick identifies this space as 'gestural' which lead me to Catherine Grant's list of articles about figural analysis. I am particularly interested in Benjamin Noys' article Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film [link]. But instead of reading Noys article, I venture first into other articles. I read first William Routt's take on figural analysis, a two-part article For Criticism [part 1 and part 2] published in the journal Screening the Past. Reading through it, I encounter a surprising observation that shattered me. This one concerns about Brenez' omission of Rodowick's book Reading the Figural. Routt observes (and sorry for quoting a humongous paragraph):

"It may be that D. N. Rodowick's "Reading the figural" (1991) has also been omitted in Brenez's bibliography because, like Andrew's "Figuration", it is less interested in the manifold possibilities of the idea of the figural (in this case derived from certain writings of Foucault and Deleuze) than in its strategic deployment (in this case, as a tool for good, old-fashioned ideological analysis). By contrast, the absence of Jean-François Lyotard's Discours, figure (1971) may perhaps be accounted for by the crazy things perpetrated in its wake, difficult for any responsible person to condone. If Andrew's and Rodowick's varying applications of ideas of figuration prove a bit retro in practice, those who are sometimes nominated as Lyotard's disciples (Claudia Eizykman, Tom Conley, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumeir in a late incarnation) are the tropprovo close ups of these mean streets. They have found an impossible Situation for figural analysis at the crossroads of Desire Avenue and Délire Street, next to Heartbreak Hotel." [link]

I began to wonder late last night that maybe there are two or more paths to Figural analysis. Perhaps that of Nicole Brenez and Adrian Martin, a pathway of ideas seamlessly narrated in Martin's new book Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez [link]; and that of Lyotard and Rodowick which seems to me a way of making philosophy adapt to the new media. So with this in mind, I was suddenly ripped apart, thinking maybe I should focus more on Brenez and follow Martin's pathway in his new book. Is this the right decision? To abandon Rodowick and focus on Brenez? I was almost suddenly put to a stop after reading another article in Catherine Grant's list by Karl Hansson, Screening the Figural and the New Art Media [link], which attempts to trace the two strands of figural analysis together in one text. It conjures Lyotard's book, Discours, figure, and also Brenez notion of the figural. It's a funny experience reading through it and encountering this line of thought:

"Nicole Brenez starts her discussion of the figural by saying that there is no method for figural analysis. In a strict sense she is of course right, these aspects are perhaps too vague and too ambiguous to be called a method, but that I would say, is a methodical standpoint, and I think she in her text, by establishing some principles of thinking for analysis is creating a method for figural analysis. Maybe it's more appropriate to call it simply a figural approach." [link]

The word 'approach' reminded me of my early affair with Kristin Thompson's Neoformalism, which also denies itself as a method, but considers itself as an approach. Neoformalism is of course very far from figural analysis because its origins and style of analysis do not follow the interpretative route most film theorists use today. Figural analysis, though still vague to me, has something to do with 'interpretation' or specifically the relationship of the text to the image beyond the current linguistic theories that we have. Hansson assimilates his thoughts on the figural as:

"The figural is perhaps something you primarily describe in terms of a process (not an object). It has to do with something that happens to the image as the image. This is linked to the focus on the image as presence, and not a form of representation, and as I see it this presence is nothing else that the presence of the material and different effects due to the plasticity and materiality of moving images." [link]

But waking up today, the whole idea of the figural suddenly erupted in a different way. I woke up remembering the set of links Ira Lastrilla sent me over Facebook about Brenez' idea of the body. I was also reading last night Adrian Martin's article/analysis on Claire Denis, which was also about bodies.

Lining up the set of texts here, I felt new surge of coming back, of re-orientation towards this difficult but promising idea of the figural. I will start with Benjamin Noys' article Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film [link] to maybe flesh out the link I had yesterday with indexicality and gestural space. Then move towards Brenez' two articles: Incomparable Bodies [Screening the Past, 2011, link] and For an Insubordinate (or Rebellious) History of Cinema [Framework, Issue 502, link]. I'll be finishing off this textual adventure with Martin's article Ticket to Ride: Claire Denis and the Cinema of the Body [Screening the Past, Issue 20: 2000, link]. And after that, maybe arrive at some conclusion about figural analysis and how it is done. Of course, on the side, I'll be reading Rodowick's book as supplementary to these texts. Wish me luck guys!

Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien / U.S.A. / 1988) - 4/5 - Isaac Julien's film is a cinema of the libidinal body, a figural manifestation that morphs across many disciplines from the gender psychology to the socio-political issue of the racial discrimination. In the film, this libidinal body has a repetitive and omnipresent nature. It has a string of temporal functions that traverses through the manifold of history. It often encounters visual entities from the past and from an imagined present. The film moves around this body conjuring up approaches, re-imaginations, and associations to other visual elements without really appropriating a direct signification to it. There was never a moment in the film that the characters developed their own narrative functions. They were instead multitudes of significations embedded in small situations with incomplete consequences, intertwined with poetic overtures of James Baldwin. There was this sequence that looked like a reference from Jean Cocteau's Orpheus (1950) adding perhaps to its sculptural quality. The film is sculptural in a sense that it rebuilds the visual foundations of gay films: from Genet's Un Chant d'Amour (1950) to Frank Ripploh's Taxi Zum Klo (1980), and figurally mold a nonlinear effigy for the black American identity.

Jan 21:

The Troll Hunter (André Øvredal / Norway / 2010) - 3.5/5 - I would say I had fun. It was a different experience to the way a Hollywood film would feel. But I don't want to talk about Troll Hunter in terms of Hollywood versus non-Hollywood films. It would diminish its disposition as part of a burgeoning group of cult films in Scandinavian Cinema --- with a recent addition Thale (Aleksander Nordaas, 2012). I want to talk about the types of bodies developed within the temporal and visual design of the film. The bodies in The Troll Hunter have both morphological and plastic obscurities. They seemingly are on the verge of disappearance. The film functions as some proof of their existence. They are figural bodies exhumed from the void, from nothingness --- a basic premise of every found footage film in recent cinema history. Of course, without the textual disclosure in the beginning of the film about the found-footage, the mode of viewing might assume a neorealist take that might lead to a political subtext. But it is the textual introduction that establishes and emphasizes its 'founding'. This 'founding' is after all a for-cinema-only phenomenon, a similar feel perhaps to an archivist finding a lost film. But in Troll Hunter, the visual contours of the found-footage are a product of modern digital cameras and not an archival footage from the 1920s or 30s. Not only that this found-footage is a videography of a mundane world, it is also a found-footage of three students and their encounter with trolls in Norwegian wilderness. Their existence in the virtual world assumes some sort of realism; a 'virtual realism' created by a regime of figurations from both from the source of the image and the one the edits it. Hence, this 'virtual realism' is both the product of textual and image construction. The bodies formed in the visual membrane of film mutates as it progresses. They undergo either morphological transformation (as with the troll) or intensive transformation (as with the group of students). Interestingly, the figures of the students do not resemble as what Brenez would call a 'critical body': a figural element of documentary films which has ethnographic qualities, a reminder of our human complexity. They instead resemble the Other. Their realism is incomplete, a textual illusion, since they appeared in the film without an origin, without an ethnographic standpoint. They were instead mobilized in gestural space without key information of who they are. They are encrypted figures with unknown pasts (except perhaps of what we know about them: students of a certain university in Norway). This is also true to the troll hunter himself, whose figure is most elusive, most encrypted. As with the troll, it has a vegetal body, a morphological transformation of their human counterparts, and they were extinguished the fastest. Their appearances are only brief and they are the source of fear elicited by their gigantism and unpredictability. They are also the most plastic: they would zap into another form at a virtual instant. Their final morphological transformation is to become a stone or a pile of rubble, from vegetal to rigid material by breaking the bonds that form it: a figural process of death in the film.

Finished (William E. Jones / U.S.A. / 1997) - 5/5 - The most powerful aspect of the film is its immense distance to its subject that it provided no resignation in the end. It closes abruptly, leaving an empty bowl, devoid of continuity. Like Massillon (see above), Jones' perpetuation of the body is jagged and detached. He cannibalizes the figures and removes any signification from it. There were, in the process, two interweaving figural spaces: the one located in the regime of auditory space (narration of Jones), and the one in the regime of the visual field (pictorial arrangement). The auditory space pervades the whole film. It gives the film a structuring body. It is a body itself: only invisible, nonvisual, existing in the interstice of nonrepresentational and representational cinema. It follows a narrative of information and other expressible elements about a gay pornography actor, Adam Lambert. Adam Lambert's figural body is dismembered, transformed into an object of reification: we see his eyes, his hand, his head, his torso, his biceps, his legs, his half-body but never a whole. His image is incomplete: a mechanical body, Brenez would say. His body will appear and disappear, but often in stills, moving slowly. During its disappeared state another body will permeate the visual design. It is an absent-body: a spatial continuum with a pictorial grace. It can be shots of the highway in L.A., the valley, Montreal resembling the shots he did with Massillon. The two films are stylistically linked. But in Finished, Jones does not only narrate and criticize, he also exercise his mastery in detaching from the subject, in elucidating a subject by chopping its body thereby achieving a perfect tragic reified image of a young prolific male model who destroyed himself.

Jan 23:

Landed on this book via Brenez to Mubarak Ali

And oh:

Serge Daney (Editor-in-Chief of Cahiers du Cinema) in English

|||| 42nd International Film Festival Rotterdam (2013)

Filipino Films to Catch at the Festival

How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from the Age of Zero to Five (Khavn de la Cruz / Philippines / 2013) - 5' [link]

Lukas the Strange (John Torres / Philippines / 2013) - 83' [link] [support]

Misericordia: The Last Mystery of Kristo Vampiro (Khavn de la Cruz / Philippines / 2013) - 70' [link]

Big Boy (Shireen Seno / Philippines / 2012/2013) - 89' [link][site]

Mater Dolorosa (Adolf Alix Jr. / Philippines / 2012) - 86' [link]

Kalayaan (Adolf Alix Jr. / Philippines / 2012) - 115' [link]

Not a Soul (Jet Leyco / Philippines / 2013) - 13' [link]

Steel is the Earth (Mes de Guzman / Philippines / 2013) - 114' [link]

Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul / Thailand / 2012)

Other Highly Recommended Films

11.25 The Day Mishima Chose His Own Fate (Koji Wakamatsu / Japan / 2012) - 119' [link]

36 (Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit / Thailand / 2012) - 68' [link]

Karaoke Girl (Visra Vichit Vadakan / Thailand / 2013) - 77' [link][site]

Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul / Thailand / 2012) - 57' [link]

Overseas (Wichanon Somumjarn and Anocha Suwichakornpong / Thailand / 2012) - 16' [link]

When Night Falls (Ying Liang / China / 2012) - 70' [link]

Acrophobia 0.1. (Anahita Hekmat / Iran / 2013) - 9' [link]

Alone (Wang Bing / France-H.K. / 2012) - 89' [link]

The Complex (Hideo Nakata / Japan / 2013) - 106' [link]

Disappearing Landscape (Vladimir Todorovic / Serbia-Singapore / 2013) - 70' [link]

Going Home (Part 1-5) (Hirokazu Kore-eda / Japan / 2012) - 225' [link]

Going Home (Part 6-11) (Hirokazu Kore-eda / Japan / 2012) - 270' [link]

Inori (Pedro González-Rubio / Belgium-Japan / 2012) - 72' [link]

The Sky Turns (Mercedes Álvarez / Spain / 2004) - 5/5 - Álvarez' film is a contemplation on natural forms: a sky, a hill, a rock, a tree, a line of sight. It is also a contemplation of time: the past, the present, the future. In the film, each of these figural forms is all in process of decaying, disappearing, and undergoing metamorphosis. The images seemed to flow out from a regime of the natural order of things. They stately move in the ebb of real time. The bodies are wedged between realism and fiction, real and virtual. They embody a certain plasticity in the way Álvarez arranged them in the temporal design of the film. The absence of the auteur gave each character a fictional vibe. Their dialogues seemed to be created by some cinematic process. Nonetheless, this film is not about the characters in the village. It is about their impending disappearance in this world. They are almost ghost-like figures, critical bodies that carry some truth in them --- some truth like what Kiarostami conjured in Close-Up (1991) or The Wind will Carry Us (1999). It is in essence a personal map of Álvarez' birthplace, a documentary of a disappearing village in the face of modernity, of globalization.

Jan 24:

I attended this talk on Comedy given by film historian Nick Deocampo as UP Cinema's Alternative Classroom Learning Experience (ACLE). ACLE is a once-in-a-semester event at University of the Philippines-Diliman when classes are suspended and students are encouraged to join fun sessions hosted by organizations as an alternative to the usual classroom set-up. During my undergraduate days (yes, I just graduated two years ago), I rarely attended some of these ACLE sessions, but I remember, maybe during my first year in college, I attended one session where I splurged over chocolates and pastries. It was hosted by a certain organization from College of Home Economics. Such fun days at the university!

Nick Deocampo's talk is one of the funniest ACLE I've ever attended; and probably one of the most unforgettable lecture sessions I've attended all my life since my experience with Melania Abad's intense and transformative PI 100 class. Nick Deocampo is, in every way, a fabulous and flamboyant character. He wore this violet-colored pair of shoes that popped out to my eyes as soon as he entered the room. I bet he wore those shoes for the occasion. His spoken vocabulary is a mix of sward speak and sophisticated terms like 'historicity' and 'codify'. He's a natural comedian and a very effective teacher too. He showed us the richness of the Filipino Comedy genre: its origins from theater (vaudeville) and from Hollywood; its embedding in Philippine cinema after the WWII; its visual codes like sight gags. It is refreshing to re-learn these conventions again; most of these you can get from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art book. Kristin Thompson also discussed comedy in her essay on Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) from her book Breaking the Glass Armour. Some good old poetics. The talk ended well with Nick Deocampo problematizing the depiction of gay characters in Filipino comedy films. He admired Lino Brocka's take on the gay identity in Ang Tatay kong Nanay (1978) and proclaimed it as a meeting of two geniuses: Dolphy and Lino. He disliked the depiction in Jade Castro's Zombadings: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington (2011) and Wenn Deramas' Praybeyt Benjamin (2011) mainly for its subject positioning of the gay identity. But that is of course another serious topic to dig through.

Jan 26:

||||| The Fuzzy Figural - Part 2

from Ivan Zulueta's Rapture (Spain / 1980)

I had a headache reading some of the pages from Rodowick's book Reading the Figural, specifically the section Lyotard's Leap into the Void: The Aesthetic before the New Media where he discusses Lyotard's ideas in his book Discours, figure (1974). I was floating in numerous philosophical terms and relationships. As Rodowick progresses from what I discussed last Jan 20, 2013, the concepts like indexicality, which is an easy concept; I encountered more bizarre concepts like the term 'discourse' itself. Lyotard redefines discourse as:

'Discourse has this space along its edges, a space that gives its object an image; it also has this space at its heart, which governs its form. But do not be mistaken: the 'interiority' of figural space to discourse is not dialectical.' (Discours 52)

It is a bizarre definition. Or maybe the definition I have in mind of discourse is pretty much the false one: discourse being a 'verbal or textual interchange of ideas' or 'a formal and orderly and usually an extended expression of thought on a subject.' [def]. I don't know but maybe what Rodowick did was to locate it in the aesthetic field, to spatialize by looking at it in terms of its visuality and form. Lyotard continues:

'[...] visuality invades discourse as "a distance to be crossed that indicates the location where what I say is place as a horizon that opens ahead of words and pulls them to, the negativity that is the foundation of our spatial existence" (Discours 56)' (Reading the Figural 8)

Rodowick is in a way fleshing out the figural and its relationship with the discourse. Rodowick describes this relationship as such:

'The figural is the avatar of another order whose relation to space, no less than discourse, is vexed. The figural is unrepresentable, beneath or behind representation, because it operates in another space "that does not give itself to be seen or thought; it indicated in a lateral fashion, fugitive at the heart of discourse and perception, as that which troubles them. It is the proper space of desire, the stakes in the struggle that painters and poets have ceaselessly launched against the return of the Ego and the text." (135) ... The scandal of the figure is that it is both inside and outside discourse' (Reading the Figural 8-9)

This is a pretty hard text to digest. Figural is an 'avatar','unrepresentable', 'operates in another space', 'inside and outside discourse', 'a proper space of desire'. These terms are hard to take in. It comes from a highly theoretical space. There is no grounding in the text except maybe for the last part 'the stakes in the struggle that painters and poets have ceaseless launched against the return of the Ego and the text.' The text goes on and on wrestling with Lyotard's Discours, figurs. You'll start getting dizzy when you reached a certain topic called death drive.

Though I pretty much love how Rodowick differentiates "sense" and signification. He wrote:

"Every 'discourse,' whether linguistic or plastic, has both textual and figurative aspects that operates as two dimensions of meaning: signification and 'sense'... Where meaning is reduced in signification to a grid of differences systematically articulated as binary pairs, sense opens meaning to both spatiality and affect: direction, sensation, intuition."

Reading this passage from Rodowick's book made me to rethink the nature of avant-garde or experimental films where the image is the only thing that perpetuates the form like the works of Peter Hutton and Stan Brakhage. Pictorial films are rich in 'sense' than in 'significations', whereas narrative films achieve a strong regime of 'signification' more than 'sense'. Some films too are so masterly that they combine both 'sense' and signification like Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Yasujiro Ozu's films to form a visually and textually rich art object. Finally, and here is where I stopped reading the section, Rodowick expands the relation by quoting from Lyotard's book:

"[...]'sense is always presence as the absence of signification... Here is the death drive, which is always scheming with Eros-Logos. Constructing sense is nothing other than deconstructing signification. There is no model for this evasive figuration.' (19)" (Reading the Figural 11)

The section is indeed a wrestle with Lyotard's ideas. Reading the section felt as if I have to do preliminary readings of Freud and Deleuze, to go back to their battles with the idea of language. The section runs from page 4 to page 30. I skipped most part of it and focused more on a section grounded in history: Paradoxes of the Visual, or Philosophy after the New Media which focuses on the 'necessity of figural in the recent history of philosophy'. Browsing through it, I saw numerous references to film and several known theorists like Foucault and Derrida. It feels at home. I am now reading through page 32 of the section.

|||| Recent Readings

I finished reading Brenez' two articles: Incomparable Bodies [Screening the Past, 2011, link] and For an Insubordinate (or Rebellious) History of Cinema [Framework, Issue 502, link]. The former is a gem. I helped me rethink cinema in terms of bodies. But I have to reread it in paper to clarify other concepts. The latter is a defence of the current critical output of critics and filmmakers in the internet era. It lauded Alexis Tioseco's Critcine as a notable corpus of the new cinema from the Southeast Asia. She then listed a crop of filmmakers, most of them French and unknown to me, the best represent the subversive front of current history of cinema.

I recently acquired this film criticism book by Alex Clayton and Andrew Clevan with a title "Language and Style of Film Criticism" published last 2011. Reading through the introduction, it surely is an easy read --- not as difficult as Rodowick. I love how it encourages readers to think of the best film criticism as the one which 'deepens our interest in individual films, reveals new meanings and perspectives, expands our sense of the medium, confronts our assumptions about value, and sharpens our capacity to discriminate.' (Language 1). It advocates creative approaches to film criticisms mentioning examples like George Toles, Manny Farber, and Raymond Durgnat as film critics who explore film art leisurely without diminishing one's writing into journalistic means. I suggest you give this book a look.

Jan 27:

The Fluffer (Richard Glatzer and Wash West / U.S./ 2001) - 3/5

[more to come...]

****

Help me find these Books.

2013-01-02T15:28:00.001+08:00

...

from The Terrorizers (Edward Yang / Taiwan / 1986)

I've been reading a lot lately. I am currently reading three books: Selected Stories by Jose Dalisay Jr., Beautiful Accidents by Ian Rosales Casocot, and Almanak ng Isang Aktibista by Roland Tolentino. I am also reading slowly and carefully two difficult texts: Deleuze's Wake: Tributes and Tributaries by Ronald Bogue and Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM (the U.P. Centennial edition) by J. Neil Garcia. Both of them are theory-based so it is best if one reads and re-reads each of their sections thoroughly. Nothing is worse than misinterpreting concepts, arguments, and notions. But they say that difficult works have innate multiplicities --- meaning, what you've understand now maybe different entirely from what you will understand from it in your future re-readings --- so fuck it.

Anyway, I just want to list the books I've been dying to have. If you know where I can find these books in Metro Manila, or if someone has a copy, please let me know:

Philosophy and Critical Theory Books

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement (1983). Trans. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986).
--------. Cinéma II: L'image-temps (1985). Trans. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989).
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (1991). Trans. What Is Philosophy? (1994).
Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Trans. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (1975)
--------. L'archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. Archaeology of Knowledge. (London: Routledge, 2002)
--------. Les mots et les choses - une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Trans. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966)
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. (Schocken; first Schocken paperback edition edition (January 13, 1969))
Brenez, Nicole. Abel Ferrera (Contemporary Film Directors) (2006). Trans. Adrian Martin.
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. (1984) Trans. Christian Lenhardt. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay (1975).
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (original - 1904 to 1905, translation - 1930)
Debord, Guy. La société du spectacle (1967) In English: The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books (1995).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. L'étre et le néant (1943). In English: Being and Nothingness. [I saw two copies at Fullybooked]
----------. Critique de la raison dialectique (1960). In English: Critique of Dialectical Reason. (1985)
----------. L'existentialisme est un humanisme (1946). In English: Existentialism and Humanism.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. (1887)
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. (1927)
Marcuse, Herman. One-Dimensional Man. (1964)
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. (1910)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. (1953)
[more to come...]

Novels, Short Stories, and Poems

Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart. (1946)
Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. (1959)
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. (1939)
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. (1973)
Calvino, Italo. Cosmicomics. (1965) Trans. William Weaver. (1968)
----------. If on a winter's night a traveler. (1979) Trans. William Weaver. (1981)
Wright, Ernest Vincent. Gadsby: Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter "E". (1939)
Queneau, Raymond. Exercise in Style. (1947) Trans. Barbara Wright. (1958)
Mathews, Harry. The New Tourism. (2010)
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. (1941-42)
-----------. The Aleph. (1949)
Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country. (1948)
--------. The Dancing Girl of Izu. (1926)
--------. The House of the Sleeping Beauties. (1961)
Mishima, Yukio. The Sound of the Waves. (1954)
-------. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. (1959)
Sōseki, Natsume. I Am a Cat. (1905)
Casocot, Ian. Sugar Land. (2008)
Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. (1958)
Lovecraft, H.P. At the Mountains of Madness. (1936)
------. The Shadow Out of Time. (1936)
Lertwiwatwongsa, Wiwat. A Damaged Utopia. (2012)
----------. Alphaville Hotel. (2010)
Serafini, Luigi. Codex Seraphinianus. 1981 [wishful thinking]
Hedayat, Sadegh. The Blind Owl. (1937. trans. 2010)
Casares, Adolfo Bioy. The Invention of Morel. (1940)
[more to come...]

A note on the list above:

I've been nursing this list for years now. It started six years ago when I was first year college. I took two philosophy subjects side-by-side and took another one the following semester. So most of the books from the philosophy section are personal recommendations from my teachers and classmates. My Philosophy major dormmate, Marvin Tamayao, also suggested some of the books here. I got some of the other recommendations from fellow cinephiles, artists, and literary friends. If you have anything to add to this list, let me know.

Ciao!

****

Some Notes and Writings

2012-08-19T00:52:00.002+08:00

for Amos, Alexis, and you.

Articles

2012

MUBI: Raya Martin and His Visions of Post Colonial Realities [nov]

Thoughts

2012

Oms and other Fantastic Creatures in René Laloux's Fantastic Planet (1973) [mar]
Volumes of Light and Darkness: My Year with Cinema (2011 round-up) [jan]

2011

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978) [dec]
La Libertad (Lisandro Alonso, 2001) [nov]
My Bande Apart TOP 100 Poll Submission [nov]
The Truth Now Above All Else - a short reflection on Jonas Mekas' As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001) [oct]
I Can't Sleep (J'ai pas sommeil,1994): Network Lives and Non-Sensationalism [sept]
The Green Ray (1986): Conversations, Alienation and Love [sept]
Watch Films You Do Not Know Online [july]
Notes on Counter-Cinema Movement, Tree of Life and Taxi Zum Klo [july]
Top 100 Films 2010 - Bottom 50 [feb]
Wasak 1: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives [jan]

2010

Film Deconstructed: Noob's Guide to Film Analysis (an abandoned project) [dec]
Anatomy of And I Love You So (2009) [nov]
Frame by Frame: Playtime (1967) [oct]
Manila by Night (1980): Interior and Exterior Aesthetics [july]
Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000) [may]
My Top Films of the Year: Counting Down 2009 [jan]

2009

La Grande Illusion: A Note on Deep-Focus Cinematography [july]

Notes

Glauber Rocha and the Aesthetics of Hunger
Silence of the Frames
My Night at Maud's (1969)

In the Mood for Love (2000)

Tarkovsky on Art
Au Revoir!
Pierrot Le Fou in stills...
The Consequence of Being Bela Tarr
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
Philippine New Wave: This is Not A Film Movement
Socialisme (2010) by JLG
La Chinoise (1967) | Life in a Pause
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quia du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Confirmations
M. C. Escher and David Lynch
My Film Book Collection
Robin Wood. 1931 - 2009
Top Films of [a] Decade: None from Philippine Cinema
Mean Streets (1973)
Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000)
"But...
Socialisme, Godard and Victor Scklovsky
Five Images for Rossellini...
120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Facets!
Engkwentro, District 9, Bertolucci and One Year of Cinephilia
Alexis Tioseco (1981 - 2009)
Happy Together (1997)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
Casablanca (1942)

Film Reviews

Taxicab (2011)
Busong (2011)
Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song (2010)
Now Showing (2008)
The King's Speech (2010)
Ars Colonia (2011)
Never Let Me Go (2010)
Honey (2010)

Support: Pasona: A Seven Day Countdown To The State of the Nation Address

2012-07-17T09:08:00.000+08:00

Maki-isa!

....

2012-06-21T01:49:00.000+08:00

Labyrinth of Dreams
Sogo Ishii

Japan
1997
90 minutes
Black and White
Japanese

...

The Project: Clocks [2007]

2012-05-12T05:30:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

CLOCKS

(John Philippe Carpio, Philippines, 2007) - 11'07''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"
* 2007
* Color
* Dance
* Mini DV
* TRT: 11:06 minutes

The film was edited from a documentation of a dance performance collaboration between Donna Miranda, Dancing Wounded Contemporary Dance Commune and other independent artists entitled "PROMISES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN", it was performed on two separate evenings in 2006 (November 9 and 11) at the Lumiere Café and Gallery along Makati Avenue. The long dance piece involved rehearsed and improvised sections as well as unrehearsed collaborations with the different audience members on each night.

"CLOCKS' is one portion of the entire piece.

CHOREOGRAPHY: Donna Miranda, Red Lasam, Dancing Wounded, Tess Jamias, Diego Maranan *PERFORMERS: Donna Miranda and Red Lasam *ALSO FEATURING: May Bayot, Jose Jay B. Cruz, Tess Jamias and Diego Maranan *PRODUCER, EDITOR, CAMERA OPERATOR: JP V. Carpio *PRODUCTION AND STAGE MANAGER: Issa Lopez *STILLS: Jed Escueta

a linao films and dancing wounded production

The film is part of an ongoing series of documentation work involving the Dancing Wounded Contemporary Dance Commune.

For screening and DVD copy requests please e-mail linaofilms@gmail.com

Festival Screenings:

Uncensored Bodies Film Program, Wi_fi Body 2: 2nd Independent Contemporary Dance Festival, July 2007

Indiemand V Film Festival, UP Pi Omicron Fraternity, University of the Philippines Diliman, 5 December 2008"

*****

The Project: Dung-Aw [1990]

2012-04-28T09:00:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Dung-Aw

(Mario Guzman, Philippines, 1990) - 4'13''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his yt]

"Dung-aw (Lament), 16mm. experimental short film on children of war produced by Goethe Institut was awarded Best Experimental Film, 1990 Gawad Urian (Filipino Film Critics Award) and 1st Place Experimental Film Category, 1990 CCP Gawad Para sa Alternatibong Pelikula at Video (Cultural Center of the Philippines' Award for Alternative Film and Video)."

*****

The Project: Zero [2011]

2012-04-23T12:53:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Zero

(Dodo Dayao, Philippines, 2011) - 4'42''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"Notes from the New Jersey screening of Zero: "Before embarking on a European tour, the Manila-based chamber pop supergroup Vigo, named after and subsequently haunted by the filmmaker, recorded three songs and issued an onus to all independent and underground filmmakers inclined to make music videos from them, as opposed to for them. The idea was for each piece to exist independently from the song as a singular work, the only caveat being that the song should its grist and be part of it. Fair enough. Roughly about a dozen videos were made. The elements that make up Zero were shot during the same two-day period of shooting the video I made. Of the three songs, I picked the ballad The Last Commandment, but rather than use it here as well, I used one specific element of it, making it in effect like a shadow of the original work, but one meant to have autonomy from it. Whenever I’m asked what Zero is exactly, I tell them it’s a ghost story. Also, a love story. And how they really are the same thing." with Carmina Cruz and Ligaya Leccio

music by Khavn de la Cruz and Vigo; director of photography Allan C. Balberona; produced and written and edited by Dodo Dayao"

*****

The Project: A White Balloon [2011]

2012-04-18T11:40:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

A White Balloon

(Nick Block, USA, 2011) - 5'52''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"For Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof

Credits: Actress: Nicole Cano

Editing: Darius Darque

Grip: Juan Flores"

*****

The Project: A Man With A Cheap Camera (2010)

2012-04-13T13:12:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

A Man With A Cheap Camera

(Epoy Deyto, Philippines, 2010) - 7'45''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"I liked the poetic sensibility of Man with a Cheap Camera, a movie really about nothing
- Jonas Mekas (Filmmaker; Jury: dotfest online short film festival)

My very first work. Shot entirely using a china-made mp4 player with a 3gp camera, explains the quality of the picture, it's from a months load of footages. I made the music with a guitar that is one string short and recorded with a headset microphone. Really crappy film-making, but it's one of my most acclaimed work so far. And I think it's just ok to say that I'm really proud of this work.

everything by me.

selected at the dotfest Online Film Festival - Experimental Category (dotfest.net/film_list?cat_id=29)"

*****

The Project: Estratto Matrimonio [2011]

2012-04-08T14:46:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Estratto Matrimonio

(Ilaria Pezone, Italy, 2011) - 12'30''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from her vimeo]

"Shooting and editing."

*****

The Project: Homo Sapiens Project (I) [2011]

2012-04-03T14:41:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Homo Sapiens Project (I)

(Rouzbeh Rashidi, Ireland, 2011) - 7'43''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"Homo Sapiens Project is an ongoing series of personal video works by Rouzbeh Rashidi initiated in August 2011 for both online and screen context. They are highly experimental, part cryptic film diaries and part impressionistic portraits of places and people, and often suffused with an eerie sense of mystery reminiscent of horror cinema. From highly composed and distantly framed meditations to frenetically flickering plunges into the textural substance of moving images, the restless creativity of this vision of life as a cinematic laboratory is never short of surprising. Encompassing everything from documentary monologues to found footage, Rashidi constantly strives to expand his filmmaking palette while putting his unmistakeable stamp on whatever footage passes through his hands." [for more info]

*****

The Project: Desinence II [2012]

2012-03-29T14:28:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Desinence II

(Carlo Labrador-Pangalangan, USA/Philippines, 2012) - 15'00''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"No description."

*****

The Project: Declarations 1 [2008]

2012-03-24T14:17:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Declarations 1

(Donal Foreman, Ireland/Paris, 2008-2009) - 2'55''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his site]

"(2008 - 2009, miniDV / digital camera)

A series of twenty-five short personal documentaries, created every two weeks over a period of one year."

*****

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]: FILMS

2012-03-22T14:41:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

Menilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, France, 1926)

****

Lesser#3 Meditation No. 3 (T.C. Chew, US, 2011) - 5'17''

The Island (Fred. L'Epee, Switzerland/Greece, 2011) - 4'50''

Declarations 1 (Donal Foreman, Ireland/Paris, 2008-2009) - 2'55''

Desinence II (Carlo Labrador-Pangalangan, USA/Philippines, 2012) - 15'00''

****

.

The Project: The Island [2011]

2012-03-19T13:43:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

The Island
(Fred. L'Epee, Switzerland/Greece, 2011) - 5'00''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"Form:

A - Distance
B - Memory
C - Exile

The distance is a perpetual geometry wich controlling our way of life and perception of our cogitation. In response, we create the movement.

Through this movement, we use the memory into our psycho- affective system in the purpose to imagine our freedom, our cries, our drifts, our social struggles, our exile. In exile, all we are.

We belong to this path. And we use it as an ultimate form of being. The Ideal is definitely established.

The waves always emerges in us..."

*****

The Project: Lesser#3 Meditation No. 3 [2011]

2012-03-14T13:21:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Lesser#3 Meditation No. 3

(T.C. Chew, US, 2011) - 5'17''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"this is another page in my research journal for project title: Lesser#3.

it does not contain conventional artistic and commercial distribution value.

it is produced merely for the expression & eventual annihilation of the self.

please forgive our trespassing of the worldly dogmas & possessions which, with all respect, some of us hold onto so dearly.

the montage engineers wish to thank all the brothers & sisters of humanity who have contributed directly and/or indirectly to the evolution of the images and sounds in this video.

borrowing the ideas from 1000 plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari), we like to say that in lesser#3 meditations, there is no beginning and ending, just becoming...

omg, i'm sounding so seriously already. where's the joker when u need one? my thoughts are flowing again, meditation number four coming soon. hehe.."

*****

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]

2012-03-11T13:19:00.000+08:00

Les Astronautes (Chris Marker and Walerian Borowczyk, 1959)

****
The Avant-Garde

Within a set of historical circumstances, cinema, an ever-capital-intensive, production-dependent art form, has been continually evolving ever since. Commercial cinema has taken a Taylor-Fordist route in producing films whereby films as mass produced following a standardized code of instructions. Like an industrial factory, each role in the process of film making is bounded tightly by his functions. This mode of production brought the exapansion of Hollywood cinema in the 30s and 40s. This also provided the stability of many Asian cinemas like Japan, India and Philippines in the 50s and 60s. This rigidity in structure has standardized the aesthetics of commercial cinema to be mass-oriented and perceptually easy to understand. This has become the norm of cinema since its inception.

Avant-garde cinema works opposite to the 'Taylor-Fordist model of rationalized production'. In avant-garde, the route of production comes from the framework that cinema is an art form and therefore follows the mutability of art to produce contiguous, non-normative forms. There is less alienation in the mode of productions, often leading to less defined roles and functions. Avant-garde should not be confused with the general independently produced films, but it is a sub-class of independently produced films without funding and financing from the commercial studios. Whereas most independently produced films may have commercial appeal as most American independents today appears have, avant-garde films have no commercial qualities. They are devoid of lavishness, grandiosity and dependency to the star system of the commercial cinema. They are anti-thesis of commercial films in terms of economic power.

Avant-garde films centers on experimentation and creation of new form and styles. Avant-garde films non-conformity to the commercial cinema aesthetics aid them to explore the possibilities of film language continuum making them innovators of expression and approaches to film making. This tradition pushes the envelop of film making which precipitates to the normative language of commercial cinema. Perhaps this transfer and influence of ideas to commercial cinema and other areas of cinema makes avant-garde cinema an indispensable part of cinema.

Without the avant-garde, cinema will not push forward.

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The Project

from Diary of a Pregnant Woman

(L'opéra-mouffe, Agnes Varda, 1958)

The project focuses on the exhibition of lesser known works of a new type of avant-garde: the avant-garde based on the current technology we have - the internet. Distribution of avant-garde has become easy with today's technology. With more and more works produced every year uploaded in VIMEO and YouTube, a new revolution is taking place. What strikes this new phase in avant-garde cinema is that most of its filmmakers are not institutionally recognized nor their works were mostly publicly exhibited in film festival. This new voices produce extremely personal films chronicling mostly their lives and the everyday. This path to cinema can be traced to the grass-roots of cinema. It was 1895 when Lumiere brothers started capturing the everyday and branded these recordings as movies. Devoid of automatize and invented movement, the Lumiere captured the look of the everyday: an arrival of a train, workers walking out of a factory and occasional banters of a gardener with a garden hose. Opposite to this was the wonders of George Melies in his experiments with the 'magic' of images. Melies created his own images and modified this images to create an illusion. Like Lumiere brothers and Melies, avant-garde filmmakers today are immersed in documenting the mundane aura of the everyday (Lumiere) but are drawn to experimentation (Melies).

For the next few months, AUDITOIRE will be exhibiting a series of films by avant-garde filmmakers. I hope you get to see them one by one and experience each.

Ciao!
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Film of the Day: Drux Flux [2008]

2012-03-09T14:23:00.000+08:00

[photo credits to NFB site]
[video credits to NFB youtube channel]

DRUX FLUX [2008]
Theodore Ushev

animation
Avant-garde/Abstraction
4 min 47 sec

Is there such a word to describe Drux Flux? I'll say this firmly: unfortunately, there is none.

Such animations like this almost attempt to discredit the definition of animation language: that the language assumes a representation of something. It seeks to break away from this definition and isolate itself from the wholeness of animation theory, into a fractured depiction of a new universe. If animation theory might help us with other types of animation such as cell animation, an approximate to live-action features, and marionette animation, a close to theatre art, there is a possibility that Drux Flux does need its brevity and thoroughness to exist.

Drux Flux resists this genre-enclosed categorical limitations and forms a new language, a new visual semiotic in serious fashion. To answer the question, why is Drux Flux so different from Spirited Away (2001) and Tardi drawing entails a careful remark of what form it assumes. This inquiry is filled with bearings: As to what style it is accustomed? How much accountable images can we draw? Is it still a form of animation or documentary?

After watching Drux Flux the second time around, i formed some intense thoughts:

Post-Modernism and Avant-Gardism

Two compatible fields of thought, two modern trends in art which can elucidate and decipher the richness of the animation in Drux Flux. Post-modernism is such a high word to describe a piece of art, and it must entail a certain care and vigilance when using it One thing about post-modernism that strives to be defined: 'intertexuality'. Intertexuality it can be seen as a thought that rejects the existence of a 'grand all-encompassing idea' (technically called meta-narratives) to explain truths, to acknowledge a point and to support reason. Jean-Francois Lyotard propose intertexuality and recognize the importance of local narratives. This local narratives are not only broken down but significantly dependent on each other.

This skepticism on the 'universalised' ideals is connected to the rise of the Avant-Garde movement in cinema some decades ago. Avant-Garde is a group skeptical with the mainstream culture and arts. They form new types of art through experimentation and usually innovative efforts. They are the 'extremists' of arts that denies the norms and pushes the limits of their creativity to new heights. Postmodernism may have fueled this sudden rise in avant-garde films.

Drux Flux works this way. It is an animation of a postmodern thought. Notice how equivalent the drawings of the 'mechanical man', which will comprise a part of our discussion on the later part of the text, to the anatomy drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci. It exists with reference to other 'texts.' The usage of photographed buildings and other derivative works such as cardboard arts and grafitti denotes DRUX FLUX's supreme dependence on them. If the animator takes away the photographs, the Da Vinci-like drawings, the cardboard images, Drux Flux cannot function as a whole. It needs the presence of these elements, hence it defineds its 'truthfulness' as text through the use of other texts. It carries a title, therfore, a Postmodern animation.

Aside from its usage of other texts to define its exclusivity as an art form, it attempts to dislodge itself from the current trends using a bizarre visual and graphic almost a structureless expositions. it molds a peculiar style of animation, highly contestable and rarely manifested in mainstream domains. It is the product of series of experimentation with photography and cell animation, hence a form of Avant-Garde animation. But this is clearly not the first one to attempt such style. The overlapping of images, and eccentric graphic approach rather than filmic has been a standard for avant-garde animation artists since the 1920s.

Ciao!
*****

Oms and other Fantastic Creatures in René Laloux's Fantastic Planet (1973)

2012-03-05T05:23:00.000+08:00

I have this strange attraction to weird cinema.

René Laloux's Fantastic Planet (1973) is a different kind of experience. It feels like cut-out from H.P. Lovecraft's stories. It treats absurdity as the new norm. Perhaps, strangely, the gravity of art in René Laloux's film may be too demanding for ordinary cinephiles, but its use of anthropomorphic imagery to represent different creatures makes it a familiar film. One can compare it to several post-apocalyptic films where worlds are invaded by aliens of higher intelligence. The Oms (the humans) were treated as slaves and pets by Draags (the aliens) which set them to become rebels --- a racial issue.

Laloux's world is filled with magical and uncanny elements. Draags are giants and are attune to meditation by achieving a spiritual connection with the cosmos. Oms are much smaller, about the size of the thumb of Draags but are irritable and biting. The Draag communities are, of course, real world counterparts of the evolved communities which has level of intelligence (let us say scientific intelligence) far superior than less developed communities.

In a Draag's world, there is no snow but there are crystal storms which can turn any living non-Draag creature into crystals unless the creature knows how to whistle.

Ohm's mass extermination via a heavy, toxic gas is largely due to Draag's immediate response to the Ohm's extremely large and increasing population. Ohm's ratio to the population versus a Draag is that of the ants' population to the humans. The gas can kill Ohms instantly like how insect spray can kill thousands of ants.

Ohms are used as hunting 'dogs' chained by their master Draags to look for other Ohms.

Laloux's creatures are filled with uncanny spirit. This one looks like an elephant with nine protruding nostrils.

This elephant creatures eat a "fly"-looking creature with certain mimicry to Frill-necked lizards in Australia but fatter.

Gigantic creatures, relative to the Ohms, have at least four legs and an elongated body. But this one, it has more than five eyes on top. Its morphology is quite unique.

Other than gigantic creatures, Ohms too have creature the size of their body. This creature on top are used for Ohm to Ohm battle.

As with this one above, they are used to create Ohm's clothes. They are perhaps the most harmless of all fantastic creatures in Fantastic Planet.

Creatures can also fill large voids of land as with this long and winding worm-like creature.

Ohm's most notorious antagonist is a creature with wings that of a bat. It has four legs and long tongue to suck Ohms our of their borrows. Though their viciousness can be equal to that of the Draags, its aim is only predatory and not exploitative. Hence, this creature is innocent.

Laloux's creatures shows us another version of human life, and that is by using uncanny figures to elicit unworldliness. This uncanny mechanism has long been used in experimental and animated films. It shows us strangely familiar figures functioning differently, absurdly.

Ciao!
*****

Faces No. 1

2012-03-01T20:34:00.000+08:00

Breaktime (Abbas Kiarostami, 1972)

Ciao!
*****

Film of the Day: Inhabitants [1970]; John Torres' Lukas Nino

2012-02-28T05:32:00.000+08:00

Inhabitants (Artavazd Peleshian, 1970)

*****

H.E.L.P

follow here

A repost from John:

Hi guys! I’m working on the DVD release of my Otros Trilogy shorts, and a boxed set of my three features: Todo Todo Teros, Years, and Ang Ninanais, as part of my effort to raise funds for my next film, tentatively titled, Lukas nino.

Lukas nino got a Digital Production grant from the Hubert Bals Fund, but since part of the film will be shot on 35mm film, I need funds to cover film stock, processing, and transfer.

Starting Thursday, March 1, you can pre-order signed copies of my DVDs and boxed sets, posters, tickets to the premiere of Lukas nino, and a book I'm releasing later this year.

But by coming on Thursday, you are already helping out.

LUKAS NINO: A fundraiser for John Torres' next film.

Freedom Bar, Anonas Thursday,

March 1, 730pm

With guest performances by Itchyworms, Boldstar, Caliph8, Moki McFly, Discoball, Wilderness, The Strangeness.

Also screening 'Synthetic Substitution', a selection of short films curated by Merv Espina

Gate: P100, comes with a free drink;

Ciao!

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