Παρασκευή 31 Ιουλίου 2009
STORY OF A PROSTITUTE (1965, SEIJUN SUZUKI)
LESSONS OF DARKNESS (1992, WERNER HERZOG)
Some eastern sea that lay heavily in the dawn, attended in its far horizon by titanic walls of smoke and crowned by spires of fire and hot gouts of burning oil arching in the air. This deceptive sea reflecting the sky above is made of crude oil. Notable enfant terrible of New German Cinema and devoted documentarian of man's quixotic struggles against a world that bears them false witness, Werner Herzog mounts his camera on a helicopter and takes us through the war-ravaged desolate landscapes of Kuwait's oil fields. Yet oddly enough and perhaps contrary to what anyone would assume, there's no politics involved, no topical Gulf War content through which to see the destruction. This is pure Apocalypse stripped of all context and left to sear its awe-inspiring images into the viewer's memory. These oil fires the result of the scorched earth policy of Iraqi military forces retreating from Kuwait in 1991 after conquering the country but being driven out by Coalition military forces. In a truly apocalyptic manner, Herzog simply invites us to "come and see" the works of man. Reciting short passages from the book of the Apocalypse as sweeping aerial shot after sweeping aerial shot expose a land ravaged by war, the earth tarred far as the eye can see, a vast steppe of black tending to the rim of the world, the skies charred by enormous fires and billows of smoke. This is really a documentary on the apocalypse, on some end to the world, the Gulf War a paradigm of all wars to end it with. A truly awe-inspiring spectacle of destruction and abandonment that mirrors man's insubstantiality when measured up against nature in his own power to destroy it. Not a documentary in the traditional sense but mostly a plot less 60 minute expedition in the deep recesses of a wartorn desert that lets the grandeur of its visuals see it through with Kubrickian aplomb. In the end the workers reignite some of the oil wells they previously extinguished. Herzog muses in his voice-over: "Now they are content. Now they have something to extinguish again".
CINEMASCOPE TRILOGY (1998-2005, PETER TSCHERKASSKY)
A fragmented glimpse of images pulsating with chaotic rhythm out of all control and reasoning as they fight white margins for room in Tscherkassky's palette, LE ARRIVEE if nothing else at least it can be safely called unique. Mirrored frames being split by white margin and trying to reassemble again like the poles of a magnet, a train approaching station and colliding with itself in white-hot blistering chaos. There's not much else that can be said for the 2 minute short film other than it definitely shows an artist pursuing his unique vision. As a prelimary of things to come, I'd say Le Arrivee is an alluring watch, rough yet oddly compelling.
His second entry in his Cinemascope trilogy plays and feels like a longer version of the previous entry, LE ARRIVEE, except with all the skullfuckery and aural destruction amplified tenfold. It starts off with a mystifying shot of a house bathed in stark noirish atmosphere pulsating and trembling as though with energy of its own, like something culled from a Robbe-Grillet film and pushed through a meat-grinder. A woman enters the house. The house soon transforms into a swirling hell, as though pulled and stretched into another dimension with time and space ripping apart in the seams. At some point we're looking at formless chaos, wave after wave of white noise washing over the screen, rolls of film tortured, an epileptic symphony of power electronics conjuring sheer cacodemony. It is a strange thing to behold, this nine minute short, definitely harsh and uninviting but worth a watch for the adventurous viewer.
Available on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unw8YYKYZPQ
This is the third short film in his Cinemascope trilogy and is in many ways similar to the previous entry, OUTER SPACE. A woman walking across a carpet, combing her hair, a man enters, grimacing faces superimposed, a woman smiling. At some point Tscherkassky's hands appear cutting up the film in the optical printer. A monochromatic canvas where images with their sense of equilibrium damaged and beyond repair attempt to re-align with their other selves. The closest comparison capturing the same sense of disjointed, jarring mayhem are glitch artist Kid606 with his cutups and sampling (minus the pop sensibilities), the noise of Merzbow or the hydraulic electronic grind of James Plotkin's Atomsmasher.
Available on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pUBm-bMRcw
INSTRUCTIONS FOR A LIGHT AND SOUND MACHINE (2005, PETER TSCHERKASSKY)
Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky inserts Sergio Leone's iconic spaghetti western The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in the meat grinder of his optical printer and proceeds to rip it to shreds and rearrange it back into a tangled network woven with walls of white noise, epileptic negative images coalescing with their positive selves and tiny particles of movement broken out of their proper place and stripped of all direction: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, shards of image flying directionless, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production. Tuco being hanged a thousand times. Angeleyes' telescope burning holes of image in a black frame, out of these holes a face emerging, voyeurism invoking the object of its desire. Like other Tscherkassky works, Instructions is a painful watch that is guaranteed to make your eyes bleed. It will be of interest to those searching for new ways to dissect cinematic form but I'm not sure about the rest.
Available on YouTube in two parts. Start here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AbyrGAPMHs
ANDY WARHOL: RE-REPRODUCTION (1974, TOSHIO MATSUMOTO)
ANDY WARHOL: RE-REPRODUCTION
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1096849/
http://rapidshare.com/files/159214533/Andy_Warhol_Re-Reproduction.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/159238806/Andy_Warhol_Re-Reproduction.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/159270665/Andy_Warhol_Re-Reproduction.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/159309592/Andy_Warhol_Re-Reproduction.part4.rar
Rar Password: www.surrealmoviez.info
Τετάρτη 29 Ιουλίου 2009
GLI SPECIALISTI (1969, SERGIO CORBUCCI)
You gotta love the spaghetti western multiverse. The iconoclastic vision of a west where good guys get shot point blank with no warning and little reason, where cartoonish villains chew the scenery (usually exteriors shot around Rome) and sweat profusely in extreme close-ups, and the laconic anti-hero walks away from the girl robbing us of the romantic conclusion for the sake of cynicism alone. A lot of people call Sergio Corbucci's films 'depressing'. I find that a bit dodgy as far as descriptions go. I think bleak and unforgiving are more apt mostly because 'depressing' suggests a level of sentimentality almost every Eurowestern director ignored in favour of painting characters in broad strokes. It makes sense that Corbucci wanted to blow off some steam with COMPANEROS after the unremitting one-two sucker punch of bitter nihilism he served us with THE GREAT SILENCE and this (although he would later revert back to his usual tricks with the gritty and vulgar SONNY AND JED). There's still a certain amount of caricature that detracts from the overall grim tone of the movie, in this writer's opinion it hurts more than does any good to have a needless inclusion of three kids dressed like hippies skulking around town in search of gold and trouble. And it hurts to have Mario Adorf playing Mexican one-handed bandit El Diablo as over the top as he always plays his characters.Those minor gripes aside there's more than enough here to wet the palate of the spaghetti aficionado. Shootouts galore, the population of an entire town reduced to crawling naked in the dirt, the typical iconic badassitude of the laconic antihero (played by Johnny Halliday), the moral bankruptcy of almost every character in the movie. Corbucci might never receive the acclaim of the more famous Sergio or the American patriarchs of the genre but you and I know that's a gross injustice for a very talented director. His dynamic shot selection, in depth staging with objects sticking close to the camera and receding in the background, his flair for quick pacing and feverish energy in moving a story that wasn't always all that along, the way he photographs open spaces, everything in his work makes me believe that if Corbucci was American and had emerged 15 years earlier along with Mann and Hawks, the Cahiers du Cinema critics would have lauded him as an auteur worthy of serious critical consideration instead of ignoring him as one more bread-and-butter genre director for hire from their neighbor country.
FOR MY CRUSHED RIGHT EYE (1969, TOSHIO MATSUMOTO)
The same year he formally debuted with FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES (the film that inspired the visual palette of a certain CLOCKWORK ORANGE), Matsumoto made plain and obvious with this 12 minute short film that not only had he mastered the experimental short format in ways other Japanese experimentalists of the time like Shuji Terayama couldn't even dream, but was further able to do so with nothing of the haughty distanced (let's face it, often pretentious) attitude of an experimental intelligentzia that often strives to elevate itself above the very audience it purports to address. No this is visceral filmmaking. A helter skelter of late 60's counter-culture psychedelia played in two separate screens, images of student riots, drag queens getting ready for a night in town, fires, juxtaposed against swinging hippies, Japanese women casually arranging their wardrobe, people commuting to work, and various cartoon strips, all this played over a collage of news report snippets telling about the Communist threat, radio recordings, Rolling Stones, Japanese pop tunes, and Hitler speeches, while flickering images of fires and difigured babies flash over the screen now and again. It's all pretty anarchic and adds up to no concrete narrative but it all makes sense in a purely audiovisual way (hence cinematic, oddly enough for a film made up mostly of found footage), the overarching feeling and atmosphere Matsumoto is trying to communicate emerging from the patchwork of cut-up images and sound crystal clear.As further testament to the cultural embargo of sorts that makes even high profile Japanese directors like Shinoda, Suzuki, Gosha, and Kobayashi still relatively unknown in the west, this ought by all means to be as much a cult item representative of its time, almost audaciously ahead of it and fresh and modern, as anything Kenneth Anger ever did. I suspect the day Japanese cinema receives its proper due is the day many the cinematic status quo and history as we know it will need to be thoroughly devised.
FOR MY CRUSHED RIGHT EYE
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1056442/
http://rapidshare.com/files/249665824/T.M-For_the_damaged_right_eye__1968_.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/249482921/T.M-For_the_damaged_right_eye__1968_.part2.rar
Rar Password: None
Τρίτη 28 Ιουλίου 2009
THE DRIVER (1978, WALTER HILL)
THE DRIVER
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077474/
http://rapidshare.com/files/72811106/Driver__1978_.bibescu.part01.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/72813504/Driver__1978_.bibescu.part02.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/72818961/Driver__1978_.bibescu.part03.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/72820528/Driver__1978_.bibescu.part04.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/72875636/Driver__1978_.bibescu.part05.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/72875692/Driver__1978_.bibescu.part06.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/72875766/Driver__1978_.bibescu.part07.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/72880569/Driver__1978_.bibescu.part08.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/72891888/Driver__1978_.bibescu.part09.rar
Rar Password: bibescu