1859 Fred Worden, USA, 2008; 11m (digital, color/silent) “The political or cultural aspects of history are the mere surface of history; that in preference to, and deeper than these, the reality of history lies in biological power, in pure vitality, in what is in man of cosmic energy, not identical with, but related to, the energy which agitates the sea, fecundates the beast, causes the tree to flower and the star to shine.”—Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, 1930
“Built out of a 30-frame clip of a lens flare. LSD is illegal, 1859 is not.”—F.W.
On the surface: 1859, the year a French amateur astronomer claimed there was a planet closer to the sun than Mercury (this “planet” was later named Vulcan) and a geomagnetic sun-storm of great proportions disabled all telegraphic communications and caused Northern Lights to be visible as far south as Cuba.
1859 marked the inauguration of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse in North Carolina equipped with the special lens design pioneered by French physicist Augustin Jean Fresnel. This lens allowed light to be seen 20 miles away.
Sir David Brewster, inventor of the stereoscope, had advocated for its use in Britain decades earlier. Fresnel lenses are now used for traffic lights, older televisions, solar collectors and in motion pictures. When used as magnifying glasses they can ignite objects on contact. In 1859 Blondin tightrope walks across Niagara…
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Train of Thought Jim Jennings, USA, 2008; 8m (16mm, b&w/silent) Migrants in the silver rush. Elevated, riding the rails caught by a sympathetic but prohibited camera, thrown to together, bouncing from borough to borough taking the curves. – M.M.
"Got bothered by the cops a few times. Tried not to bother anyone. Didn't know where I was going. Had an unlimited metro card." – J.J.
New York Lantern Ernie Gehr, USA, 2008; 15m (digital color & b&w/sound) On Location. A city of transparency and added color. In the shine of the lantern that shines on all. We seem to be there as we watch, the same island the same skyscraper a similar sky. We follow the beams but find you can’t get there from here.—M.M.
"The haunting world of the photographic still. A fraction of a second frozen for eternity. How it pulls and vibrates the imagination with its uncanny magic of a world unavailable to the living (not necessarily that photographic motion pictures are!). A bizarre universe of bits and pieces, ever so shimmering and oscillating with layers of time, allusions, and of course, human projections. Bring them back to mind. A conjuring act sorts. From far away. New York Lantern? - a tour, if you wish, of a shifting landscape, an imagining of a New York as close and as distant from us now as perhaps the Big Bang." – E.G.
After Marks Fern Silva, USA/India, 2008; 7m (16mm to digital, color/sound) "A pursuit for a departed presence within faded memory." – F.S.
Nocturne [Avenue A, no lens] Joel Schlemowitz, USA, 2008; 3m (16mm, color/sound) “A camera roll stroll down Avenue A., New York City, shot without a lens. The specificity of time and place (especially that this is an “East Village film”) a partly ironic directive through which we can lens this little work, that might otherwise be lensed by us as non-representational cinema. A nocturne. Dashed off as a mere unedited camera roll, a filmic “flinging of a pot of paint in the public’s face,” as has been said of some other nocturnes. And lastly, serving as a little saturnine invocation of the filmic flâneur.”—J.S.
Novel City Leslie Thornton, USA, 2008; 8m (digital, color/sound) Flaubert I know what you did last summer. And remember, ticket in hand, J.K. Huysmans stopped just across from the Gare du Nord imbibing England through leather and ale instead of taking the arranged journey. Some travel without setting sail or touching soil. Others have desires that are lifelong but turn back at the threshold at the first sign. Some ‘re-visit’ where they have never been before, holing up next to a window, lost in translation.
Thornton turns the pages of her early film Adynata like a moving billboard, a film about the Other where the differences between the hemispheres meant also the right and left brain, and the projected dynasty of imaginary self rule or subjugation. Looking out the window of the Jin Jiang hotel a favorite stay-over of Mao’s where he met Nixon in 1972. “Why go outside when history lingers inside” asks Thornton.
Forecast: Storm over Asia
Location: Shanghai.
Ruling out a reality of bleakness and the fringe of lushness the moving billboards of this city supply domineering virtual worlds if not the premier world itself. Entered through a looking-glass in free fall, a sign of the times, where time does not stand still but marches to the beat of a different club.—M.M.
A short treatise on the semiotics of capital, happiness, and phenomenology under the flickering neon of global capitalism—B.R.
Flavin and Ruscha meet their match in this land, manufactured from scratch yet conceptually prefab. The glowing candy-colored contradictions of advertising blink by night and by day. Happiness is always, incomplete, and everything is bought and sold.
—M.M.
Today! (excerpts #28, #19) Jessie Stead & David Gatten, USA, 2008; 10m (digital, color/sound) “Today! is a sun-lighted, purposefully unfinished motion picture starring one of the filmmakers as one of the filmmakers. Though contents may have settled during shipping and handling, some highlights from today’s excerpted episodes of Today! may include cameo appearances by the United States Postal Service, quality time in Bangalore with a toilet paper voodoo doll, and a recurring pre-occupation with a useful but problematically self-aggrandizing shopping bag.”—J.S.
Ah Liberty! Ben Rivers, UK, 2008; 19m (16mm widescreen transferred to digital, b&w/sound) “A family’s place in the wilderness, outside of time; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape. The work aims at an idea of freedom, which is reflected in the hand-processed ’scope format, but is undercut with a sense of apocalyptic foreboding. There’s no particular story; beginning, middle or end, just fragments of lives lived, rituals performed.”—B.R.
Dialogue:
- A young world… A world early in the morning of time… A hard, unfriendly world
- On the ball, on the ball, one two, two one day two, two a two two one, one
- Get the fucking dogs out the way will ya, or I’ll kill them, deliberately!
- Okay just tell me when… Liberty is the absence of ideas. That’s what I like best… I’ve fallen back on the things I used to like, which are not ideas. And I cultivate them. They are feelings. Or rather, impressions. Impressions of well-being. Impressions of understanding. That’s the real life. At least, something close to it. You go along with it.
Get off the world… get off the world… get off the world… get off the world…get off the world
