‘Bande sonore : Improvisation collective avec un groupe de camarades’

Disponible ici sur Ubuweb (pour le moment) :

Voyez / téléchargez ‘Autour de la perception/Around Perception‘ (1968) de Pierre Hébert.

‘Canadian animation genius Pierre Hébert started his career with studies on pure shape-driven abstraction and the limits of human perception. Around Perception is a groundbreaking experiment on computer-based animation, consisting of 11 audiovisual events designed to baffle cognition and unrest comfortable notions of reality. Unlike most of his later films, Hébert chose not to collaborate with top-notch experimental musicians and created the soundtrack himself. In this, he followed a method also used by Norman McLaren: to scratch sound directly onto the film itself. The relation between sound and picture, however, is not as symbiotic as in McLaren’s Synchromy: although there are organic reactions between the two domains, one is not a direct translation of the other. This, of course, need not be seen as a weakness.

Indeed, with its fast-paced changes of color and geometrical patterns, and the employment of Columbia-like richly crafted electronic tones, Around Perception works as a tremendously hallucinatory exercise in trompe l’oeil (and l’oreille) techniques. Or, as stated by Hébert himself at the beginning of the film, an exercise “for the mind and against the mind”.

Missoni F/W 10-11
Missoni’s new ad campaign is a short film by Kenneth Anger.

From Vogue Italy:

“I’m fascinated by Kenneth Anger’s use of color and his ability to transform a film into a three-dimensional texture, a fabric of images in movement,” explained Angela Missoni. This is how she introduced her decision to entrust the Missoni F/W 2011 campaign to one of America’s most famous authors and directors of avant-garde cinema.

Anger — a hyperactive octogenarian who loves working in the wee hours of the night and at dawn using sophisticated instruments such as the RED digital camera that has the characteristics of a classic 35 mm camera – flew in from Los Angeles to film the campaign in Sumirago that involved all the members of the great Missoni family. They are the stars of this campaign that was conceived as a series of superimposed and overlapping portraits. Vogue.it presents a preview of this film: a vibrant and impalpable evocation of unique patterns, patchwork motifs, stitches, knits, and styles, it is a symbolic weave as ephemeral as a dream.

“The images of Juergen Teller for the S/S 2010 campaign reflected and portrayed our everyday family life,” said Angela. “Kenneth Anger’s experimental approach and his narrative style, on the other hand, transformed the new campaign into a sublimation of our world.” The style of this ad campaign that verges on art clearly reveals the taste of this Californian filmmaker, who directed the films “Fireworks” (1947), “Puce Moment” (1949) and “Scorpio Rising” (1963), wrote successful books such as “Hollywood Babylon” (1959) dedicated to the secrets, manias, perversions and scandals of early Hollywood film stars, and is a favorite of young fans. Included in the 2006 edition of the Whitney Biennial of New York, he currently works with some of the most important international galleries of contemporary art and enjoys much popularity today.

A man of few words, this fascinating former actor who still takes care of his appearance first filmed the settings for his film “Missoni”: mostly locations near bodies of water in the Sumirago countryside and part of Rosita and Ottavio’s garden. For the indoor sequences, he built a set in the Council Room of the Sumirago Town Hall, a basement room with a vaulted ceiling. The mood of the film and the poses and movements of Margherita, Jennifer, Angela, Rosita, Ottavio, Ottavio Jr. and all other family members are reminiscent of Sergei Parajanov’s “The Color of Pomegranates”, a 1968 film that inspired Anger to create his Chinese box-style storyboard.

The intertwining and blending of moods, micro-plots, and situations make his “Missoni” a dream of a film within a film, a surreal dreamy interaction of spaces, faces, gestures, clothes, and costumes with different ages and narrative tempos. “Before he left,” said Angela, “he gave my mother, with whom he became fast friends, a film award he recently received.” To the question, “What did he leave you?” she answered with her usual humor, “Twenty-five wigs!” In Anger’s film, the wigs appear in a minimum part and are worn by Margherita, the protagonist with Jennifer of a project that will enchant, document, but not illustrate fashion.

The film expresses Missoni’s sophisticated choice and desire to amplify the role of images, making them a communication means and not an end, instruments for personal forms of appropriation and interpretation.

Mariuccia Casadio

WINNER: Best Director, Venice International Film Festival 1971.

Présenté hier soir dans le cadre des ‘Évènements Spéciaux / Longs métrages : Entre la mort et le diable‘ du festival Fantasia (détails du film ici).

‘Le turbulent contexte social actuel a entraîné une montée de désenchantement vis-à-vis les institutions religieuses, en particulier l’Église catholique. Le cinéma de genre reflète cette désillusion avec force, ce qui nous a inspiré une section dédiée à l’abus de foi, l’horreur des idéologies et la corruption de la piété. Certains de ces films vont littéralement vous stupéfier’.

Guy L. Coté, 1972, 148 min 11 s

Long métrage documentaire en deux parties sur l’évolution de la religion au début des années 1970, Tranquillement, pas vite (1re partie) – Que s’est-il donc passé? retrace la désagrégation et la mutation rapides de la religion catholique au Québec. Des paroissiens se réunissent et discutent de l’avenir de leur église, de sa chapelle et de ses services. Le manque de financement est au centre de la discussion, de même que la place accordée aux rassemblements communautaires payants, telles les parties de bingo, et le nombre croissant de prêtres se retrouvant sans emploi.

Tranquillement, pas vite (2e partie) – Communauté de base présente huit mois d’une expérience originale de reconstruction religieuse : celle de la communauté chrétienne de base, sise à Montréal.

Roger Blais, 1951, 19 min 47 s

Documentaire filmé à l’abbaye de Saint-Benoît-du-Lac et illustrant comment, tout en vivant du travail de leurs mains, des moines cherchent, dans le silence et la méditation, à atteindre l’humilité et la perfection selon la règle de saint Benoît.

Puisqu’on parle de Brion Gysin :

The Beat Hotel, a new film by Documentary Arts, goes deep into the legacy of the American Beats in Paris during the heady years between 1957 and 1963, when Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso fled the obscenity trials in the United States surrounding the publication of Ginsbergs poem Howl. They took refuge in a cheap no-name hotel they had heard about at 9, Rue Git le Coeur and were soon joined by William Burroughs, Ian Somerville, Brion Gysin, and others from England and elsewhere in Europe, seeking out the freedom that the Latin Quarter of Paris might provide.

The Beat Hotel, as it came to be called, was a sanctuary of creativity, but was also, as British photographer Harold Chapman recalls, an entire community of complete oddballs, bizarre, strange people, poets, writers, artists, musicians, pimps, prostitutes, policemen, and everybody you could imagine. And in this environment, Burroughs finished his controversial book Naked Lunch; Ian Somerville and Brion Gysin invented the Dream Machine; Corso wrote some of his greatest poems; and Harold Norse, in his own cut-up experiments, wrote the novella, aptly called The Beat Hotel.

The film tracks down Harold Chapman in the small seaside town of Deal in Kent England. Chapmans photographs are iconic of a time and place when Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, Burroughs, Gysin, Somerville and Norse were just beginning to establish themselves on the international scene. Chapman lived in the attic of the hotel, and according to Ginsberg didnt say a word for two years because he wanted to be invisible and to document the scene as it actually happened.

In the film, Chapmans photographs and stylized dramatic recreations of his stories meld with the recollections of Elliot Rudie, a Scottish artist, whose drawings of his time in the hotel offer a poignant and sometimes humorous counterpoint. The memories of Chapman and Rudie interweave with the insights of French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, author Barry Miles, Danish filmmaker Lars Movin, and the first hand accounts of Oliver Harris, Regina Weinrich, Patrick Amie, Eddie Woods, and 95 year old George Whitman, among others, to evoke a portrait of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso and the oddities of the Beat Hotel that is at once unexpected and revealing.

The Beat Hotel is currently in production and is scheduled to be released in the Fall of 2009 (?).

thebeathotelmovie.com

‘Nobel Prize-winning philosopher/mathematician, Bertrand Russell, explains why he does not believe in God’.