BEFORE AND AFTER
http://strelka.com/en/press/books/before-and-after-documenting-the-architecture-of-disaster
INSPIRATION
IAN CHENG. ARTIST
http://iancheng.com/
THE HANDS OF ROBERT BRESSON
Stanislaw sent me this beautifull video about the mutual atracction I share with Robert Bresson.
Days after, in Urszula Antoniak Lecture, She quoted Robert Bresson “Working with real people, as actors, is working with what they hide instead of what they show”.
Now, I´m sure that the interest behind this attraction for hands in Bresson is the same as me: Hands are the part of our body which reveals the most about what we hidde. But also I know that in the future I would like to work more with hands and with this «Bresson´s working method».
Here bellow you can find an interesting article that explain some reserach about hand´s movement:
«Research demonstrates that the movements we make with our hands when we talk constitute a kind of second language, adding information that’s absent from our words. It’s learning’s secret code: Gesture reveals what we know. It reveals what we don’t know. And it reveals (as Donald Rumsfeld might put it) what we know, but don’t yet know we know. What’s more, the congruence—or lack of congruence—between what our voices say and how our hands move offers a clue to our readiness to learn…»
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/hand-gestures-reveal-complex-thoughts-2013-6#ixzz3LVxSQ1nq
VAL DEL OMAR
Inventor, filmmaker, artist, poet, visionary… none of these titles are enough to define José Val del Omar. A man who was partly a crazy genius, a mystical shaman or a Dr Frankenstein, he died, forgotten by all and surrounded by his creations, his cameras, his machines and his cans full of rare, and mysterious films.
Bellow you can see an image of his laboratory, known as PLAT, a piece of art in itself. But what did this man do in this laboratory? Val de Omar was a man that created his own tools to express himself. He was a pioneer of the concept of video artists. He had a whole series of instruments, of inventions created to expand the screen, to break the limits of the screen, of the rectangle that closes the image. But in reality, he wasn´t especially interested in the technique themselves. He was interested in comunicating and transmiting what he felt. For example, to try to bring closer two things in the same scene he invented the Zoom, much before the one we know today was patented. And his efforts to try to reproduce the sound of water made him invent a system called “Diafonia”, a kind of “Dolby Sorround” predecessor.
For Val del Omar cinema is the starting point. From cinema he reaches other places more related to plastic experimentation. He was a filmmaker that was closer to conceptual art, closer to contemporary art than cinema reduced to 4 walls. His idea to expand the screen was the first thing that attracted me to him but also his mix of the real with the abstract. He himself defined his work as abstract documentarys.
Val del Omar burnt his first film because he found it unsatisfactory, and thereafter He burnt an unfinished film during more that 50 years.
Even the films he did finish he always closed with a “Sin Fin” “Without ending” .
RECREATING MOVEMENT
Recreating Movement is a computer program for analysing film sequences and has been developed within a diploma thesis.
With the help of various filters and settings Recreating Movement makes it possible to extract single frames of any given film sequence and arranges them behind each other in a three-dimensional space. This creates a tube-like set of frames that «freezes» a particular time span in a film. By using the keyboard the viewer can browse through the sequence of frames, chose any kind of view of the sequence of frames and influence the displayed frames directly via a displayable menu bar.
If you want to see more please see the link bellow…
LEV MANOVICH’S SPATIAL MONTAGE, DEANN BORSHAY LIEM, GEOPOLITICS AND CULTURAL IDENTITY
What resonated most for me within Manovich’s chapter “The New Language of Cinema”, and which relates to our ‘space-time’ theme, is his discussion of the spatial montage. He cites cultural geographer Edward Soja in prefacing the renewed interest in spatial montage, stating that “…it is only in the last decades of the twentieth century that this mode has made a powerful comeback, as exemplified by the growing importance of such concepts as “geopolitics” and “globalization” as well as by the key role that analysis of space plays in the theories of postmodernism” (323). I’d like to briefly explore filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem as emblematic of this particular claim, specifically drawing on her film In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2009). Deann becomes a integral player in this kind of wave of spatial montage (or experimentation with such within the documentary filmic form) in a service to a geopolitical analysis of her identity as a Asian transnational adoptee. The film serves as a sequel to her first autobiographical documentary First Person Plural(1999), and takes us on her journey back to South Korea to find the girl Cha Jung Hee who she replaced years ago at the orphanage and whose identity she has assumed throughout her adolescence. Deann’s personal exploration and journey becomes a story about a collective, historically-infused experience of transnational exchange that stems from neocolonial economics and politics from the 1940s onward between South Korea and the United States. She takes up the use of spatial montage within her documentary in order to provide a visibility as well as spatiotemporal simultaneity to the different identities that she has simultaneously assumed her entire life.