Browsing: Short

Subversive Saturday
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The gentle macabre voice of Kenneth Anger ushers in one of the most important and defiantly expressive films in the avant-garde canon, the “homosexual” intonation of his voice offering a beacon of light to the hopelessly lost and subversive confrontation to the unsuspecting reactionary heterosexual soul. Anger’s “pyrotechnics of a dream” presented in his most well-known early work, Fireworks (1947), offer glimpses to frontiers unexplored even on the other side of Jean Cocteau’s mirror, as Anger uses his art to scream in futility for consolation for inconsolable pain in cinematic alleyways and masturbatory daydreams, while offering unseen perspectives in humanity’s newest art-form.

Reviews
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Posited though it might be as a documentary, Lewis Bennett and Calum McLeod’s witty short Asian Gangs doesn’t take long to divorce itself from reality and take a more farcical, frankly more entertaining turn toward deadpan mockumentary style. Rooted in a schoolyard fight the former filmmaker had 17 years prior and a subsequent comment from his principal that future membership in an Asian gang lay ahead of him with behaviour such as this, the ten minute piece humorously attempts to tackle the big questions, not least of all why an Asian gang?

NP Approved
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In keeping with the spirit of this week’s Chiropteramania, I have paused my exploration of Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art in the hopes of joining in on all of this excitement. What better way than with the scientific explorations of Jean Painlevé and his uncanny ability to create a grand narrative for the workings of the physical world through his revolutionary documentaries? With the beautiful marriage of the artistic soul with the scientific mind, we are given a unique look at the world through a lens free of the impositions of our own self-prescribed morality. Through Painlevé’s objective assessment of the natural world, we can see the ways in which evil is the creation of man, and the rest of the natural world is too preoccupied with maintaining the balances developed from eons of trial and error to concern itself with the neurotic absurdities of man and his insatiable hunger to answer the unanswerable questions.

NP Approved
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Roman Polanski’s Two Men and a Wardrobe witnesses the emergence of two young men from the depths of the sea, carrying with them a wardrobe that acts as an albatross of unspoken ideological dissonance from the status quo. The nature of their burden is of little consequence, as young men and women have been carrying their own wardrobes and weighty furniture of newly forged convictions since the beginning of time. The two mysterious men emerge from the sea like borrowed political ideologies washed ashore from distant lands, unprepared for the natural trepidation and violent outbursts from the uninitiated and close-minded. The innocence these unidentified men possess is incorruptible, and they earnestly haul their new toy through the apathetic cobblestone streets of polite society. They are the only ones capable of seeing the value of their impeding and seemingly useless artifact. Due to youthful naïveté, it never occurred to the two that this burden can simply be left at home and that others may be disinterested in this millstone of ideological obligation.

NP Approved
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Age will always seek to suppress youth in varying degrees of severity because of a deep resentment over eroded ideals and waning passions that age and complacency have made the aged forget. The young still live under the (mostly) false assumption that they have the power to change the world to meet their ideals because too much has been lost and forgotten in the required compromises of peaceful societies. It is this natural disconnect between generations that creates a world where nobody gets to be completely satisfied and its citizens are driven by compromised ideals and too blinded by ego to see the merits in the other side’s argument. This creates a perpetual and unavoidable disquietude in the collective human unconscious, and it is this disquietude that paradoxically grants us our most noble and ignoble qualities. Without disquietude there is complacency, and the happy human soul is ineffectual in the unnoticeably transient physical universe. Pain creates passion, and passion is responsible for the genesis of that most important of human creations, art.

NP Approved
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Politics are shaded by a collection of unrighteous rulebooks that we self-impose in the aim of fostering the prehistoric tribal instincts of the human animal. The rules lose their power when humanism is valued over nationalism because one objective path must be laid out for the members of a nation. These paths are created with the intention of defining clear lines of separation between those that think like “us” and those that do not. Humanism accepts the inherent flaws that we all possess and understands the ways in which other ideologies are fostered out of necessity and that all humans evolved from the same primordial stuff but developed different habits and attitudes based on conditions of environmental necessity. Humanism doesn’t judge the perceived moral flaws of other cultures because it knows that any path we take will ultimately be a destructive one. This destruction is inherent in our nature because we are the surviving members of a long line of tribes that persevered by any means necessary.

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Language is one of those necessary evils that results from a need to communicate objectively in a world of strict rationalism. Its syntax and structure invade our thoughts and dreams and our inner stream of consciousness is often reduced to its clumsily confining borders. Some find themselves alienated when art tries to communicate abstract truths that cannot be encapsulated in its inadequate borders. If language was the most important element in communicating an idea, then literature would be the only necessary art for capturing the human experience. Mainstream film is shackled to language as any other forms of expression will often alienate an audience that has spent a lifetime believing in the absolute totality in language’s ability to express ideas. Artists in the avant garde understand language’s limited capacity and choose more abstract methods for the conveyance of ideas. This is not to suggest that language does not serve a critical role in interpersonal communication and in the conveyance of both objective and abstract ideas, but we live in a culture that values language as the de facto standard for achieving this communication, even if more abstract forms of expression are capable of representing the idea more succinctly and completely.

NP Approved
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Few avant garde filmmakers have deconstructed the possibilities of camera movement as succinctly as Michael Snow. The nearly imperceptible movement across the space of Wavelength (1967) illustrated the filmic compromises that are used to condense time and space to create a more digestible cinematic experience, succinctly capturing the universal truth that action is happening all around us despite our limited powers of perception telling us otherwise. The pendulum movements of Snow’s <---> (Back and Forth, 1969) gave us more easily perceived camera motion, but the paralyzed movements were isolated to a singular horizontal plane as it panned back and forth across a finite space, showing the ever shifting context of spaces through the impositions of the people that occupy them. With Breakfast (Table Top Dolly, 1976) Snow illustrates the way in which the artist’s will is imposed upon the subject of their camera, essentially destroying the spaces it tries to passively capture, a phenomenon that scientists commonly refer to as the “observer effect”. Passive exploration of a space is simply not possible, as the mere act of selecting a subject is already limiting the possibilities of what can be captured. The artist carries a lifetime of experiences and collected prejudices that dictate what can be explored and with what tools of exploration, but their limitations are different from our own and we are able to formulate new ideas that may be in diametric opposition of the artist’s original intent.

Subversive Saturday
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Western middle-class thinking is permeated with an arrogance and certainty of an objective linear truth. We want to reduce every decision in to something clearly defined with black and white implications as we carry out what we falsely believe to be a linear progression through our relatively short lives where there are clearly defined cause and effect relationships between what was and what will come to be. It is through these arrogant reductions that we attach moral implications to actions, because there is one clearly defined path and anyone that strays from that path will reap the negative consequences of their betrayal of the uniform narrative of humanity. Perhaps this reductive and reactionary thinking is at the heart of our cultural affinity toward conventional narrative structure.