They're pretty, Nothern European, Black and White...

Slow moving, subtitled, impassive - Award winning. "Art house cinema" always has a certain flair. Perhaps the flair is having none to speak of. Characters are rarely developed - at least not with their voices raised too much. Austerity and the chill of what Baltic winters must feel like define these movies. Also, they attract all kind of pretentious intellectual ass-holes.

Typical foreign art-film goer

There's something engrossing about films that never cease to be phenomenally beautiful though. Brilliant cinematography, gorgeous, unparalleled mise-en-scene, and density of symbolism combine and are what make these movies win awards. They may not make you feel anything, but they will make you remember them.

My recommendations for a cold day:

Ingmar Bergman - Wild Strawberries
A stuck up aging man reminisces on his life and reconnects with the world through a series of surreal, bizarre encounters. He is provoked to think by a young, vivacious hitch-hiker. Very much a film on the road with lots of beautiful countryside.

Trailer




Knife in the Water - Roman Polanski


Polanski of recent sexual-abuse fame's first feature film. A couple picks up a hitch hiker and take him out on their boat. A, for a very long time non physical, battle over the woman ensues, until an unexpected climax. Gorgeous shots of the sea, fog, reeds and jazz music interspersed with playing on the sail boat make you want to have a friend in the Polish boat owning bourgeoisie.

Get a feeling for the film


The Seventh Seal - Ingmar Bergman
The movie that I, and many others, consider Bergman's best. The Seventh Seal is the story of a medieval knight who encounters death, and gives him chase. Most famous for the chess scene (the knight plays death in a game of chess - and wins by tricking him), this film is choc full of stoic and christian religious imagery from a time when christianity was all grim. The knight encounters a parade of flagellants and the burning of a woman. All extremely well shot. The whole thing is very dramatic and full of (mostly religious) symbolism.

Trailer



Ivan's Childhood - Andrei Tarkovsky
My favorite of this genre isn't even Northern European. Tarkovsky is Russian...
The only movie I've seen that deserves the platitude "every shot could be photograph." Every shot could be a photograph.
Ivan is a child spy in World War II, and no one knows exactly how he became a spy. Somehow he keeps himself on the frontlines and sneaks around during the night a lot. On to the visuals...
Gorgeous actors. So much well placed shadow and inventive cinematography. Extensive shooting of characters slowly wading through water accompanied by very very smooth camera motion makes this film magic. A healthy dose of surrealism as well.

Telling on war, childhood, obsession and hate.

Also a birch forest with all its leaves shed makes for an odd forced love scene.

It is impossible to describe Ivan's Childhood.
Opening Scene



Many of these films are available legally for free online. Because they are so visual though high quality is important. Get all your Northern European cinema, and support independent film. Go to Videotheque! http://www.vidtheque.com/

Ron Mueck

Whether extremely over-sized or extremely under-sized, Ron Mueck’s disturbingly realistic sculptures make you stare for hours.

First beginning with puppet work on an Australian children’s television show, the hyperrealist sculptor eventually transitioned over to art after working with his mother-in-law, Paula Rego, on a piece she planned on showing at the Hayward Gallery. Rego’s connections led Mueck to meeting Charles Saatchi, co-founder of a large advertising agency, who was very impressed with Mueck’s work. With Saatchi’s support, Mueck was able to make a name for himself and begin his career in mixed media hyperrealist sculptures.

Ron Mueck made a couple pieces before creating the sculpture that helped put him on the map. In 1997, Mueck completed a two-thirds-life-sized sculpture of his naked father lying on his back, which he named Dead Dad. Mueck says, "I never made life-size figures because it never seemed to be interesting. We meet life-size people every day."Along with the silicone and acrylic paint used to recreate the corpse of his father, Mueck also added his own hair to the sculpture, making this the only piece he has created using his own human hair and giving the artist a stronger connection to his work.

Dead Dad

I had the pleasure of seeing one of his incredible pieces at ARoS Museum in Aarhus, Denmark this past summer. His 16 foot tall crouching Boy, made out of resin, silicone and fiberglass, is a force to be reckoned with. What amazed me most was not the unbelievable size of the sculpture, but the uncanny realistic details Mueck had carefully calculated and captured: the perfectly executed mini-wrinkles on the ankles, elbows and soles, the faint thin green veins throughout the body, the chipped fingernails with those odd little white dots that we sometimes get, the wary and haunting expression of the crouching boy. I was surprised that the most unrealistic part of the sculpture was the face; something about it just did not reach the same level of realism and detail that was present throughout the rest of the piece.

Boy

There aren't any local exhibitions featuring Mueck's work at the moment, but do keep an eye out for his name; he's an artist you won't want to miss.

Young Jean Lee's The Shipment

Any writer can tell you the most daunting element of a new project is the selection of subject matter. Deciding what to write terrifies many into never writing at all. But 35-year-old Korean-American playwright Young Jean Lee plunges into sticky topics headlong. After deciding on the least comfortable topic to tackle, Lee charges it full-force.

So it comes as no big surprise that this relatively new but increasingly famous playwright's most acclaimed works wrestle with the ever-present issue of race. She first subjected modern Christianity to her fearless and highly theatrical style in her play Church, and then turned her attention to the Asian-American population in Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven.

Her most acclaimed work, on tour in the United States right now after a successful run on Off-Broadway, is The Shipment, a darkly humorous look at black identity politics. Nearly every night of the show's New York run, Young Jean Lee sat in the back of the theatre, listening closely for the audience's reaction to her self-directed show. The starkly offensive script and hand-picked cast nearly always evoke reactions along racial lines, offending different ethnicities in turn. Lee remains undecided about her desired reactions to the explosive material.

Unique in design, The Shipment was cast by Lee, who also directed the show, and her creative team before it was written, and essentially designed around the actors. Initially, Lee forces the viewer to confront stereotypes of black performers, especially singing and dancing, originating from minstrel shows. After a brief dance number to throbbing music, a man saunters onstage and speaks in exaggerated "black" dialect in the style of stand-up comedy, detailing what the races think of each other with a bluntness teetering on taboo. After his frank speech, the actors sing the Modest Mouse song "Dark Center of the Universe" in all seriousness to the audience with the house lights up as well as the stage lights. The audience is exposed to the actors, creating a sense of connection for the viewer intended to breed discomfort.

A series of impossibly exaggerated scenes in the life of Omar, a young black boy that dreams of being a rapper, drive the audience to examine further biases. Omar's escapades lead him to powerful drug dealers, drive-by shootings, a "video ho" that asks Omar to "do stuff" to her "booty," and other exceedingly extreme situations. Immediately following Omar's story, the cast is transported to a cocktail party where their stilted speech and catty mannerisms immediately spell white society. This strong juxtaposition forces audiences to examine exactly what white and black sound and look like. The highly stylized acting tempts viewers into the trap of denying those caricatures as valid depictions of ethnic groups, then compelling that same viewer to ask his or herself how the races act in reality, once again testing their views .

Though her writing and direction in and of themselves are very fine work, the greatest feat of The Shipment is the way Young Jean Lee leads audiences to examine their own biases and bigotry. This especially rings true in the supposed "post-racial" America of today. Lee realizes in a truly post-racial America, The Shipment would not be a comedy, but a tragedy. She hopes her show affects people as she originally intended, and in that she says," I know that’s unfair of me because I wrote it to be funny, and the performers are funny, but I feel there is so much in there that people should not laugh at. Part of me would rather have them sit there in silent uneasiness.”

A Movie

By L. Criley

Three: The number of chords in a rock song, also the number of visual motifs in Bruce Conner’s 1958 film, A Movie. Two: the number of swimsuit models inter-cut with incredible catastrophes in A Movie. One: The number of minutes that elapse in A Movie before “THE END” appears on screen.

A Movie, the collage artist Bruce Conner’s first foray into filmmaking, exaggerates commercial cinema style into a grotesque caricature of itself. From the dyslexic countdown (3-2-1-9-8-7) that succeeds the film’s opening title card to “The End”, which first appears on screen one minute into the film and reappears approximately every minute for the rest of the film’s twelve minutes, A Movie takes elements of Hollywood blockbusters out of context to make a whimsical, tragic, progressive work of art.

The first minutes of the film introduce the three chords of Conner’s visual rock song, three repeated elements. Following the title and countdown, a sequence full of damaged frames, upside down text, and patterns that jump and vibrate like a kangaroo full of espresso, the film proceeds with cuts between a favorite Hollywood coupling: young women and massive explosions. Respighi’s Pines of Rome, an upbeat classical piece, plays over the fast cut montage of race cars flying off tracks, Apaches attacking pioneers, and a woman in a black garter belt slowly undressing. The combination of collaged text, voyeuristic clips of women, and stock footage of catastrophes thrown together is illogical in terms of narrative and story but is crystal clear in terms of aesthetic. The images contrast and compliment each other in a sequence devoid of plot that still manages to surprise and amuse the viewer.

A pause in the chaos and a refrain in the intensity of the score gives the film some breathing space, but after just a moment of serenity on screen, the film jumps back to life. A U-boat captain peers through his periscope. Cut to a blond haired maiden rolling sleepily on a bed. An enormous phallic torpedo bursts out of the submarine in a cloud of bubbles, and the film cuts back to the oblivious blond smiling, still lying in bed. A gigantic mushroom cloud exploding into the sky concludes the scene, a terrific testimony to the power of editing. Bruce Conner’s collage experience is obvious throughout the film and reaches full stride in the submarine scene. Conner’s seemingly effortless quick-cut editing of stock footage, reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s montage technique, creates this moment of underwater cinematic mirth that rivals and harshly contrasts the carefully orchestrated, lingering mise-en-scene takes of Charley Chaplin, the other master of dialogue-free comedy. The submarine scene, and the entirety of A Movie, testifies to the power of loud, fast, editing. The remainder of the film is spent on a blooper real of humanity (the Hindenburg explosion, slapstick water skiing accidents, and a suspension bridge wiggling apart in heavy wind) juxtaposed against a contrapuntal score that would be at home in Phantom of the Opera.

A Movie remains effective and relevant over fifty years after it was made, both as an independent piece of art and as an influence on other films. MTV style music videos take many cues from Conner’s vibrant, jittery, editing and nano-takes, as do the very Hollywood blockbusters that Conner poked fun at in A Movie. Mimicry of Bruce Conner’s innovative techniques used in A Movie is ubiquitous in contemporary cinema, demonstrating the raw power, originality, and accessibility of A Movie.

Album Review; Bon Iver - For Emma Forever Ago

By J. Chaidez

Inspiring visions of a long, retrospective winter spent in the snowy landscape of the Midwest, Justin Vernon’s album For Emma, Forever Ago is nothing short of a progressive folk masterpiece. Made under the pseudonym of Bon Iver, the record has won critical praise and caused considerable commotion in the indie-folk community. Vernon has been compared to such modern folk idols as Iron and Whine and called the contemporary to the folk-rock group Grizzly Bear. Bon Iver himself has simply said, “I just knew that what I was doing was extremely honest. It was all the things I wanted my music to be.”
And that’s certainly what the project began as. In 2005, after a band break up, the end of a relationship, and a bout with a liver illness, Vernon found himself in Raleigh, North Carolina without direction in his art or his life. DeYarmond Edison, his old group, had been together for nearly a decade, and had been the driving force for his move from his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to Raleigh. One night, while watching an episode of the television program “Northern Exposure” in which the cast welcomed new snowfall as the coming of a “Bon Hiver” (French for “Good Winter”), Vernon was inspired to return to his birthplace. Retreating to a remote cabin with little more than his thoughts and a Silvertone guitar, he proceeded to record what would later become For Emma in the winter of 2006 and 2007.
The album itself is a new artistic frontier for Vernon. In DeYarmond, he sung in his speaking voice, a richly textured baritone. However, in 2005 he began experimenting with falsetto and multi-track, which became the distinguishing aspects of his music. The tracks on the album range from touching ballads such as “Re: Stacks” and “Skinny Love”, to those which produce distinctive textures through the use of resonator guitar and vocal overdubbing like “Lump Sum” and “Flume”, to those which display Vernon’s poetic skills such as “The Wolves (Act I and II)” and “Creature Fear”.
When considered in its entirety, the album is not a concept album, but rather a compilation of Vernon’s most recent work. Like many debuts, it represents the spring of his career, a time after which many artists fall flat. But Bon Iver’s Blood Bank EP, which is largely an addendum to the album, shows that he is capable of producing more than just a first round of great material. With a unique sound, and a much-needed new approach to being a singer-songwriter, Justin Vernon is poised to become a pivotal force in folk rock. As a friend of mine so eloquently put it, “ No one doesn’t like Bon Iver; they just haven’t heard him yet.”

film review: The Trial

Intermission Productions LTD

One hour and fifty eight minutes struggle desperately to hold in the gargantuan volume of jaw dropping imagery that Orson Welles pumped into his 1962 masterpiece “The Trial.” The screenplay is based on Franz Kafka's highly regarded novel of the same name.

The story on its own is the fabulously original and compelling chronicle of Joseph K (Anthony Perkins), a man accused of an unknown crime in a world where everything has been decided. His heated and utterly inconsequential struggle is the locomotion which Welles uses to lead his viewers through some of the most breathtaking ocular sequences in 20th century film.

Everything associated with Orson Welles was huge and almost incomprehensibly dramatic; laced from head to toe with superlatives. His contracts were the largest, his films the best, his confidence unrivaled and his fall unprecedented. Orson's sudden exile from Hollywood in the 40's put a large damper getting funding for his post “Citizen Kane” work. It is for just this reason that “The Trial” was filmed and produced entirely in Europe.

Shot in the style of great epics, the film is instantly recognizable as a Welles production. Fantastically theatrical spotlighting is unrelentingly coupled with enormous sets to emphasize the solitude that is paramount within the story. Indoor vanishing points and monumental crowds are more frequent than dialogue. It is, in fact, nearly impossible not to laugh at the magnitude and near perfect orchestration of every shot. It is as if each frame was fished out of a bottomless sea of museum quality photography. Visually, “The Trial” is nothing less than an improvement on “Citizen Kane.”

A critic might point out the weakness and repeating nature in some of the spoken lines, particularly those of Joseph K., but this would be argument for the sake of argument only. The mood is never touched by any inconsistencies on the actors' parts. “The Trial” is a superb rendition of the kind of genius Welles was capable of. It is, in his words, “The best film I ever made."