Tag Archives: Avant-garde

Director Retrospective

RUSTAM KHAMDAMOV: IMPOSSIBLE TO BE GREAT – POSTSCRIPT – DIAMONDS AND ANNA KARAMAZOFF

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Four years has passed since we published “Rustam Khamdamov: Impossible to Be Great…” What has happened to  since then? A new short film has appeared, Brilianty (Diamonds) [AKA Diamonds. Theft], the first film in a proposed “Jewelry” trilogy. It was presented at the 67th Venice International Film Festival in September 2010. The festival program describes the movie:

“This is a poetic film set in the times of Lenin’s NEP. A ballet dancer steals a brooch and gives it as a present to another dancer. This is a crime of passion. A mysterious black ball is after the heroine. She runs away from it and manages to give the brooch in an exquisite pirouette movement, as shiny as diamond facets. What gives a stone its dazzling luster are its polished facets. But the real gem is love, and it’s much harder to get than any diamond in the world.” ((http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/archive/67th-festival/lineup/off-sel/orizzonti/brilianty.html))

The Russian premiere of Diamonds was held on 15 July 2011 at the International Film Festival in St. Petersburg.

Still from Diamonds. Theft. (2010)The film is inspired by the ballet La Bayadère by Marius Petipa. This picture is intended as part of a series of three shorts with the common title “The Jewels,” which the director wants to shoot with Anna Mikhalkov (“Emeralds. Murder”) and Tatiana Doronina (“Rubies. No Price”) ((http://renatalitvinova.ru/%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%82%D1%8B-2011/ [in Russian])).

In one of his interviews, Khamdamov said that the third movie will be dedicated to Russian piano genius Maria Yudina: “There was a woman named Yudina, a completely crazy woman, a great pianist who did not have either a piano or an apartment. She lived with cats and dogs on the street. She was homeless, a clochard.” Tatiana Doronina is to play the  role. The action takes place in Tashkent, the director’s native city.

Here are Diamonds’ art director Dmitri Alekseev thoughts on the movie: “In general, the film consists of the personal experiences of Rustam about all that he has ever seen in his life. In the episode with Renata Litvinova, which opens the film, the decoration consists entirely of angles: a rectangular table covered with a white cloth, and on it the radio set, resembling the Empire State Building. Renata makes a nose out of a paper cup, it pierces the radio set, and ‘La Bayadere’ plays. Litvinova is immersed in the music, and the story with [actress Diana] Vishnevaya, the ballet dancer, begins. Renata brings together the entire movie, but she will have her own story. Hers we will also shoot in St. Petersburg, but it’s unclear when.”

Ballet critic Julia Yakovleva points out numerous ballet references ((http://seance.ru/blog/dance/ [in Russian])): for example, the name “Diamonds” is also the name of George Balanchine’s homage to Tchaikovsky, the third part of his triptych “Jewels,” and Vishnevaya’s character is reminiscent of Olga Spesivtseva – “a hungry diva of Petrograd, dilapidated, dangerous city of the 1920s, from which Balanchine fled to Europe.”

Lidia Maslova (from the journal “Kommersant”) described the film as “very mannered and drenched with symbolism,” in which “all members of the Continue reading RUSTAM KHAMDAMOV: IMPOSSIBLE TO BE GREAT – POSTSCRIPT – DIAMONDS AND ANNA KARAMAZOFF →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

BILL MORRISON’S SPARK OF BEING (2010)

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Spark of Being can be watched in its entirety for free on IMDB.

Spark of Being (2010) is an example of an artist resisting an aesthetic anchor. ‘s films are often categorized as non-narrative and experimental, so the idea of this artist tackling such a perennial chestnut such as “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus” leads us to wonder exactly how he is going to deconstruct such a familiar narrative. Throwing out all preconceived assumptions, Morrison pays homage to Mary Shelly and makes her Gothic creation fresh again with a startlingly literal interpretation. Indeed, Spark of Being may be one of the most faithful cinematic adaptations of the book to date.

Using found footage, Morrison teams with jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas and his electric sextet, Keystone, to illustrate Shelly’s tale. Douglas is an eclectic trumpeter who once worked as a sideman with the John Zorn ensemble Masada. With an original score that is simultaneously mercurial and animated, it is hard to imagine a more perfect composer for Spark of Being. 

Still from Spark of Being (2010)A frequent (and sometimes justifiable) criticism in films this textured is that the style becomes so all-important the end result is a viewer deprived of a heart to identify with. In short, often, a human element is missing. Morrison has referred to this film itself as “the Creature,” and given the agonized condition of footage chosen, Morrison’s creature may be the most pathos-laden performance of the character since . One can only imagine the painstaking process it took in assembling Morrison’s creation into a cogent psyche, imbued with personality as predominant “presence.” A popular comparison might be the collaboration between  and Claude Rains in producing a personality-driven Invisible Man (1933), but Morrison’s approach is more innovative, while still being true to the author’s tenets. Douglas’ music provides an informative touch of flesh stretched over the cranium supplied by archival footage from Ernest Shackleton’s film of an Antarctic expedition. As in the novel, the film opens here in the segment titled “The Captain’s Story.” The viewer steps with the Captain in his interaction with creator and created and the unfolding tragic drama.

Through laboratory footage we meet “A Promising Student” and adopt his sense of ambition and wonder. Educational footage and decayed nitrate, which looks hauntingly like an intensely animated closeup of an Emilio Vedova canvas, bring “The Doctor’s Creation” to violent life.

In “The Creature Watches” antiquarian city crowds, desolate landscapes and achingly lonely images of a child endow the creature with a Chaplinesque essence. The psychedelic beauty of “The Creature’s Education” is extended and sublime. The heartbreaking “Observations Of Romantic Love” segues into the bitter sting of ‘The Doctor’s Wedding” and the inevitable dejection of “The Creature in Society.” In “The Creature Confronts His Creator,” the new Adam dares to accuse a negligent father, and in “The Creature’s Pursuit” it is God who is tried and condemned. A justifiable patricide is, perhaps, the greatest burden of all. It is the stuff of horror, even nearly 200 year old horror served up in our own mythological consciousness.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema, Shorts

BILL MORRISON’S LIGHT IS CALLING (2004) AND JUST ANCIENT LOOPS (2012)

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’s Light Is Calling (2004) opens the prestigious 2013 Orphans Midwest Film Symposium at Indiana University, setting an avant-garde tone for the event.

Morrison’s credentials as a experimental filmmaker are considerable, having received widespread critical recognition for the feature Decasia (2002). Morrison’s collages are composed and juxtaposed to music, often by his frequent collaborator composer, Michael Gordon. This technique, combined with Morrison’s obsessive use of decaying silent film and newsreel footage, makes him one of the most startling, original homegrown artists since New Englander Charles “take your dissonance like a man” Ives. Comparing this twenty first century filmmaker to an early twentieth century composer is not as fanciful as might be first imagined, since inherent musicality abides in both, as does a shared aesthetic of deconstructionist Americana.

Light Is Calling will be shown Thursday night at 830 pm. It is part of an evening of film and music, which will include Just Ancient Loops (2012) and the world premiere of Morrison’s All Vows (2013). Israeli American cellist and Bang On A Can founding member Maya Beiser will supply live musical accompaniment. (Beiser’s reputation for collaborating with composers such as Louis Andriessen, Steve Reich, and Brian Eno may prove to be refreshing in a city whose symphony rarely defines progressive art-music beyond the nineteenth century).

Light is Calling, like many of Morrison’s films, follows an existential arc witnessed through layer after layer of resplendently cruel textures produced by severely decomposing nitrate film stock. Here, Morrison uses footage from The Bells (1926), focusing on stars Lola Todd and Edward Phillips. Slithering through the visceral sepia gangrene is the haunting fragility of love, life and, ultimately, meaning. Once fully fleshed, figures become as fragmented and as meaningful as the simple images of riders we find in a late Gauguin canvas. Through the cinematic milieu, accompanied by Gordon’s shimmering, haunted music, Morrison demands more than the lack of attention one might succumb to while whisking through an art gallery; he takes us deeper than the surface paint, to the very texture of the burlap canvas.

Just Ancient Loops breaks down into three sequences: Genesis, Chorale, and Ascension. It is a collaborative work between composer Michael Harrison, soloist Beiser, and Morrison. Nineteenth century symphonist Anton Bruckner described Harrison’s work as “boundlessly expansive.” The Harrison/Beiser opus, “Time Loops,” constructs a homogenous, Brucknerian cathedral. The artists’ refreshing consistency of purpose embraces the transient station of a paradisaical hour. From a solar eclipse to consummating cells, and the expulsion from paradise, the three artists dance with their putrefied avatars: hand tinted witnesses to the resurrection and ascension.

Shorts

SHORT: THEODORE OF THE ABSURD (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Brad Glanden

FEATURING: Brad Glanden

PLOT: Told almost entirely through stills, this is the story of a struggling filmmaker who tries to get a musical romance made in an alternate world where movie producers are only interested in 7-hour-long abstract films about feet.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Too short and light, but it’s a promising debut film.

COMMENTS: Theodore of the Absurd takes its inspiration from .’s Chafed Elbows, both in form (a narrated series of black and white stills) and tone (comedy as done by the Marx Brothers, if they’d been beatniks). Even the title of a story-within-the-story (“Clammy Ankles”) alludes to this influence. Fortunately, the majority of the jokes seem like the could have come out of one of Downey’s early scripts, too, although they do tend more towards literary puns (“I’m sorry I let my avant-garde down”) than Sr.-style non-sequiturs. The movie’s central gag is a world where experimental and mainstream tastes have been inverted, so director protagonist Theodore can’t get anyone to back his romantic musical because they are confounded by the concept that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Theodore eventually falls in with underground Bohemians who dabble in representationalism, but he boots his big chance to impress the hipsters when he includes a Stan Brakhage scratch-on-the-film montage in his narrative film, leading to charges of conformism. Theodore follows its own artistic path, lobbing satirical bombs at both popular art and the avant-garde. The movie argues that the artist who deliberately tailors his work to fit the expectations of edgy elitists isn’t any more genuine than the sell-out who panders to popular tastes. There are also several songs, which aren’t exactly showtune quality but are amusing. A ditty about two sickly lovers who find each other contains the lyric, “She was a girl with acute sinusitis/He was a boy who had chronic fatigue/He wasn’t bothered by her gingivitis/She didn’t mind his venereal disease.” We think Theodore is a worthy tribute to Downey Sr.’s legacy; you can judge for yourself, as we’ve embedded the film on the page above (it’s only thirty minutes long).

Theodore of the Absurd is Glanden’s MFA Thesis Project. The movie has its own website that includes commercial parodies that didn’t make it into the film and a couple of well-thought-out academic essays about the avant-garde.

Capsules

CAPSULE: A NOISY DELIVERY (2013)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: GX Jupitter-Larsen

FEATURING: Jessica King, Dave Phillips

PLOT: A woman goes to the post office to mail a package, but the clerk is unresponsive.

Still from A Noisy Delivery

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Weird? Yes. Unfortunately, that’s all that can be said in this failed experiment’s favor.

COMMENTS: Your movie is in trouble when after watching it for five minutes, the reviewer’s primary thought is “how in the world am I going to review this honestly without sounding insulting?” Although A Noisy Delivery is not a bad movie, in the sense that I don’t believe it actively sets out to hurt the viewer, I can’t imagine anyone I know who would want to watch it. I even have to stretch my powers of imagination to come up with a hypothetical viewer who might enjoy it. Essentially, the movie is a series of very long takes of people sitting around, not moving, usually with no expression. Occasionally the onscreen actors check their watches (never a good sign). The next-to-last shot is about eight minutes long and completely static; long-take specialist would have walked out on it. Very rarely, the characters will speak: one gives a discourse on ZIP codes, one speaks in untranslated German, and a third is vaguely threatening, in a disturbed-loner-ranting-about-government-implanted-computer-chips sort of way (in between obscenities he drops lines like “the truth comes out as the truth, but, you never know”). Much of the infrequent dialogue is directed at the postal clerk who sits behind bars and blinks, I think, once. Forty-five minutes into the movie a woman silently eats a piece of notebook paper in real time, tearing off strips and chewing it to a pulp, which is a welcome change of pace from nothing at all happening. I suppose the main appeal is meant to be the industrial noise soundtrack; it’s an hour of someone randomly plunking away on a toy piano, mixed with a coarse background drone (the “noisy” part of A Noisy Delivery). Maybe noise music aficionados will dig it, but the score is even more minimalist than the visuals, which at least change every couples of minutes. The soundscape never varies much or shows musical development except for adjustments to the volume levels between the piano and the industrial hum. It’s definitely an acquired taste. A Noisy Delivery looks like a labor of love that got a little carried away and bloated: the entire package could have easily been compressed into fifteen minutes. Chances of any readers out there actually seeing this are, of course, very slim; but you should realize that this kind of thing is out there, playing at small experimental film festivals and screening in arty bars in college towns.

Speaking of college towns, A Noisy Delivery is screening tomorrow (Wednesday, June 12, 2013) at House of Caca in Austin, Texas, (some time between 6 and 10 P.M.) along with noise acts and art displays. The IMDB lists A Noisy Delivery as GX Jupitter-Larsen’s first movie, but his Wikipedia article lists two prior shorts: one called “Black Banner” and a lesbian vampire movie set at a garlic farm entitled “Holes in the Neck.”

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this movie was provided by the producer for review.