Lately I've been totally obsessed with film & cinema.
I've got a few shows coming up this year (predominantly installation) and I started checking out a lot of sci-fi as part of research for the work. Slowly it bled over to just more film-watching in general. Along the trails I've discovered a lot of cool cinema sites, and a bunch things about film-making too.
I think one of my next major projects will be something of a larger scale film production. Or at least, on an indie level. I started watching David Lynch's stuff again and it just blew me out how much there is to do with cinema.
I got the idea for a film that had no real plot. Which I feel is a bit of the essence of Mullholland Drive, tho it does have a plot in many ways,
in some ways it's just that really interesting mix of plot devices all interacting in their own way that make it work as a cohesive whole. Like a kind of puzzle, or a game of memory that had matching pieces but the pieces were all different colours.
I like the term 'abstract narrative' to describe it. You can probably get it from Tool's clips, or the Brothers Quay stuff. But also from a recent online film, The Return of John Frum:
It kinda reminds me of Aeon Flux, and Tekkonkinkreet stylistically. But it's even more subconscious than Aeon Flux. It's the coolest little animation I've seen in ages.
But getting back to plotlessness.
In my Google searching I stumbled upon Harry Tuttle's website 'Contemplative Cinema'... which also has a counterpart - Unspoken Journal.
There's a huge amount of stuff on both sites. And they put me on to a whole bunch of filmmakers and types of film-making I never knew existed. I checked out 'Limits of Control' by Jim Jarmusch. It really is an amazing film in this way of being a kind of plotless, contemplative, abstract narrative film. Although we don't have to call or label any of these films anything. Its just fascinating to see this form emerging. Which is really an exciting area of film-making, I think.
I also found The Auteurs, an online Web2.0 style social-networking site dedicated to arthouse, independent, and rare cinema. It's partnered with Criterion Collection and is backed by Martin Scorsese - definitely one of the better film sites online and at a very reasonable price.
I've been checking out Cinema5d.com, Cinematography.com and nofilmschool, a blog by film buff Ryan Koo out of NY/USA> But they all have really great info on the burgeoning scene of DSLR film-making, and offer stacks of advice on where to start and what you need.
I found an awesome short, Pivot, via Ryan's blog:
Since Youtube we really saw the explosion of online Video content. But in 2009, and into this year, we'll really see the explosion of online cinema. With huge screens as standard on home computers now, faster internet speeds, HD everything, and the coalescence of amazing cameras at super-cheap prices, we're now seeing a lot of high quality projects being released online. It was a bit of a weird period there, video had to go through a small-frame-jagedy-pixel look for quite a few years. It really is an exciting time for film, both online and offline.
So, Cinema has come to mean a lot more to me lately. I've realized it's a central part of the way I think about art, and informing a lot about what I do whether it's art or music or film-making. And I kinda realized I am a filmmaker. I guess just growing up in the video age you get used to calling yourself a video artist.
LT.
