Thursday, October 11, 2012

Art Films for a Sick Day

I do apologize for the lack of posting this week! I don't want to whine by any means but I have a head cold that is making me cloudy at best...trying to edit and think about film and read and type is proving difficult as my eyes swell closer and closer to shut! So, since I can't really provide you with anything of my own to ponder I thought the least I could do is share with you some of the more memorable video/film art I've seen lately so....enjoy! (sneezes) Hope to be back in blogging action soon complete with my new discovery of neurocinematic studies!! O, and also, my October horror movie binge!

Idyllwild, Chris Doyle, (video of installation) 2012
This piece by the artist Chris Doyle won't leave my mind and I ache to seek it in person! I remember him describing it to me before it had been made, I pictured planes of light moving throughout a space, questioning our sensibilities of the natural, disorienting and poetic- like a living Calvino novel preoccupied with a fluent time and space that we far to often take as a concrete thing.

 

Squeeze, Mika Rottenberg, (exerpt from 20 minute video) 2010
I only recently learned of Rottenberg's work and there is something feminine and sinister on it's edges that I really seem to like. It being art, it's hard to find her full videos to watch but this (bootlegged?) clip of women in some sort of elaborate, mechanized, sub-sea level existence grooming the hands of female laborers as they shove them through the dirt is a beautiful musing on beauty, ritual and the roles society casts women in...hope to see more...!

 

Hotel Monterey, Chantal Ackerman, (hour long film!) 1972
Ackerman, of Jeanne Dielman fame of course, is the type of filmmaker who picks up a camera and, with no care or worry or thought about those who have held a camera before, creates her progressive, deliberate, moving visions of people and places. This film, an early feature, follows the interiors of a hotel, dreamily and eeriely floating through its spaces revealing the life of a place. It makes me feel like the ultimate voyeur, a space on display for my observation only, a space that seems like it wants to communicate...and that is exactly what Ackerman is doing! Tough yet stunning!