Without you…
Today is my birthday, and as part of my “do-my-favorite-things” plan, I am going to re-watch my favorite movie– Amelie. Without fail, it always makes my heart almost burst. In the most wonderful way. Even watching the trailer you can feel that the film holds something special…
Above, just one of many wonderful bits of the movie. Above, a line by the writer Hipolito, which she sees written on a wall. Watch the clip below for the translation… “Without you…”
…. “today’s emotions would be the scurf of yesterday’s.”
Soy Cuba – “I am Cuba” – 1964
I just discovered the film Soy Cuba, from 1964… I’m sure any film buff already knows of it, but for me it was such a treasure to find!
The film has a really interesting history. It was filmed in 1964, after the Cuban Revolution, and the resulting US isolation, when Cuban filmmakers had starting reaching out to Soviet companies to help them produce their films. It was directed by a Georgian, Mikhail Kalatozov, and attempts to show Cuba at the time from four different perspectives– luxury, poverty, vagrancy, and revolution.
At the time of its release, it was rejected both by Cubans and Soviets, for different reasons, and went unknown outside of those countries. It wasn’t until 1995, when a Cuban co-director of the Telluride had it screened, that it was re-discovered.
It then garnered the interest of both Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola, who both realized its incredible cinematographic merit and decided to lend their names to its re-release. Beyond its plot (which is not its strong suit or even its main focus), and its propagandistic nature, its hard to deny the amazing visual qualities of the film, which have influenced many famous American movies.
(Most directly, the scene above, which goes from a rooftop beauty pageant down to a hotel pool and then underwater in the pool, was used in Boogie Nights, but many other films have borrowed more loosely from Soy Cuba.)
One of the main things the film is noted for is the use of long tracking shots– which were done with a handheld camera. In the clips at above, the camera goes up or down entire stories of buildings simply by being handed off from one crew member to another– no cranes or anything mechanical involved to create these incredibly long takes. Pretty amazing.
In the shot above, which follows a funeral procession, the camera goes up four stories and then in through the window of a cigar factory and back out again. The effect of leaving behind the coffin as the focal point and smoothly transitioning into a setting so iconically Cuban is pretty awesome. Unfortunately the only clip of it I found doesn’t have the original music, but it’s still pretty amazing visually.
(The scene above isn’t that noteworthy, I just really loved the song, and the panning of all the women at the bar. The second half, with the Russian overdubbing, gets really weird though.)
I was so spellbound by the visuals in this incredible (even if totally biased and/or cliche) look at Cuba, from the very first moments of the clip at top, that I just had to share… check them out when you have a minute to soak it up. I feel like I just time-traveled back to 1960s Cuba.
Buy the re-release of Soy Cuba / I am Cuba here.
Obsession: Theo Jansen.
You MUST watch this video. It’s very short, and it will add a lot of wonderment to your day. I’m enthralled.
Theo Jansen explores the boundaries between art and engineering, creating these “kinetic sculptures.”
These “animals” move. Or I should say, they walk. They’re wind-powered. It’s amazing. They look like a cross between an exoskeleton and an erector set, which is basically what they are, and then they start moving and they become so anthropomorphic, you wonder if they’re alive in some way.
Many of his creatures are so “evolved” that they are now capable of “living” on the beaches on their won– the wind powers their “walking,” and they have sensors that tell them to stop and turn around when they hit either water or dry sand, keeping them permanently on the wet sand.
They even have sensors that tell them when a storm is coming, and their “brain” tells them to start pounding a stake into the ground so they don’t fall over in the storm.
Can you imagine having a brain that dreamed up stuff like this?
In the video above, you see the “rhinoceros”-like sculpture walking.
If you want to learn even more about Jansen and his work, click here for a ten minute video presentation by Jansen that shows more animals walking and an explanation of how they work.
It’s also extremely interesting to hear how he talks about the animals– he doesn’t discuss them as art, or really as machines or product prototypes either– he talks about them as though they are animals that he is looking after, and he doesn’t seem to feel any need to explain the “purpose” of them, which I think is an amazing insight into the brain of someone this creative.
I think that science and art are going to continue to merge in this way, in the minds of people like Jansen who are capable of seeing their relation to each other, and have a desire to explore their intersection without the desire to make a practical product or advancement in technology. While in art, it seems sometimes that “we’ve seen it all,” and there’s nothing new under the sun, science is continually evolving and pushing boundaries in material ways, and through the integration of science and art, art could do the same.
via Uppercase
Grafica Fidalga
The sheer existence of a company like this, still doing things the same way they’ve been doing it for years, and doing it because they love it, makes me feel a little bit better about the world. Oh, and the video is really well done.
“Grafica Fidalga, a printing press in São Paulo, Brazil, makes posters on a 1929 German letterpress using hand-carved wooden letters.”
The Ephemeral Rebellion
This trailer doesn’t give too much away, but I’m still intrigued…
Basquiat: The Radiant Child
Sorry! The trailer didn’t publish the first time for some reason…
