Image of the Day: Interior with Young Man Reading

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with Young Man Reading, 1898

yes

"...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. "

Prostitute in Naples, Italy 1920

source

a revelation

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False Consciousness

Grievances / Social Systems (Part 2)

Matthew Flanagan's contribution to The Daily Notebook's year-end feature, featuring a picture from London's Day X3 protests (December 9, 2010) against the rises in tuition fees:

NEW: Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland)
OLD: History Lessons (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, 1972)

WHY:

The Democratic organisations, on which he could still have leaned in the Autumn, were in ruins. The City had betrayed the little man according to all the rules of the art, except the one that prescribes that the victim shall not notice anything.
— the banker Mummlius Spicer, from Brecht’s The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar.

To show, above all. To show the possible. That's all.
— JLG

Not so much a fantasy double bill as two films, and three filmmakers, that meant a lot to me this year. Looking back, it seems the year’s great films about the political and spatial decay of the present — Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins, Thom Andersen’s Get Out of the Car — could only be paired with films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. I’ve clung to these two for their clarity, their abstractions, and their hope.

Grievances / Social Systems (Part 1)

Just published: The Daily Notebook's 3rd Writers' Poll: Fantasy Double Features of 2010

My contribution:

NEW: The Social Network (David Fincher, USA)
OLD: The Night Cleaners (Part 1) (Marc Karlin & James Scott, 1975)

WHY: Two films that use the act of giving depositions as a means to explore the interactions of individual emotions and history: David Fincher's The Social Network (2010) uses deposition-based set pieces to showcase the personal grievances that help drive the creation of a new form of social interaction, a sort of computer-powered social efficiency engine. In The Nightcleaners (Part 1) (1975), the Berwick Street Film Collective uses interviews to show the human cost of daily underpaid drudgery and unfairness—the personal grievances that result from participation in an engine of grand economic efficiency.

Image of the Day: The Smoker (1891)

Paul Cézanne, The Smoker, 1891

2010: A Year in Cinema

Films seen for the first time in 2010, or revisited and reconsidered, in rough order of preference:

Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 1960)
The River (Jean Renoir, 1951)
Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935)
Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)
A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936)
The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
The Naked Prey (Cornel Wilde, 1966)
L'avventura (Michelangelo Antonio, 1960)
Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932)
Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001)
Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
Little Boy Male, Little Girl Female (Pedro Costa, 2005)
I Can Feel the Sea Falling Over My Head (Matthew Swiezynski & Diane Granahan, 2010)
The Nightcleaners (Part 1) (Berwick Street Film Collective, 1975)
Ici et ailleurs (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Anne Miéville, 1976)
Sayat Nova (Sergei Parajanov, 1968)
Role Models (David Wain, 2008)
War Photographer (Christian Frei, 2001)
Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010)
Four Lions (Chris Morris, 2010)
The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992)
Runaway (Kanye West, 2010)
It Is Something Invisible (Matthew Swiezynski, 2010)
Where The Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)
I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)
Party Girl (Nicholas Ray, 1958)
Rambo: First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982)
Black Knight (Gil Junger, 2001)
Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim, 2008)
Catfish (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2010)
The Meaning of Life (Don Hertzfeldt, 2005)
Framed (Andy DeEmmony, 2009)
The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009)
The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932)
City of Life and Death (Lu Chuan, 2009)
L'auberge espagnole (Cédric Klapisch, 2002)

Happy Christmas!

John Leech illustrations for the 1843 edition of A Christmas Carol (via).

"There's a suggestion that you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair. Is that true?"

0:00 - 0:09 -- a shot of a wheelchair, static
0:09 -- camera whip pans left. a blur of yellow police jacket appears just to the left of the disabled protester, just out of what was previously the frame.
0:10 -- whip pan right, capturing another police officer running toward the wheelchair (and thus the first officer)
0:12 -- camera pans left again, following a woman's shout
0:16 -- next to the cameraman, a male voice says "over there, pushing forward"; the camera pans back right and searches for the frame to capture the action
0:19 -- the camera finds a view to the protester in a wheelchair, who is in the same location as 10 seconds previously, at this point being dragged out of the chair and pushed to the ground by 2 police officers. shouts of protest from the crowd.
0:22 -- police officer in riot gear stops a protester from intervening.
0:24 -- police officer in yellow jacket drags the disabled protester along the pavement by his arms.
0:28 -- disabled protester pushed to the ground by the same officer.
0:30 -- the man who was assisting the wheelchair tries to pull him back up into the chair. the police officer -- the same one who dragged him previously -- this time drags the disabled protester all the way to the curb, throwing him down at the end, twisting his body in order get full leverage on the throw.
0:39 -- other protesters begin to confront this officer.
0:44 -- confrontation begins to escalate verbally.
0:48 -- the other police officer involved in pushing the protester to the ground, as well as the officer dressed in riot gear, physically pull at the first officer to separate him from the protesters. he looks back at the crowd from which he's being pulled.


***


"Now these pictures APPEAR to show Jody McIntyre, 20-year-old fiscal activist and blogger, who suffers from cerebral palsy, being pulled out of his wheelchair and dragged across the road to the pavement."
[Emphasis as originally spoken by BBC presenter Ben Brown]






BBC Complaints - Homepage

Celestial, bodies

But Mr. Hagelmayer. It's still not over.













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bodies moving: social interactions, humans inside houses inside villages, attempted loves.








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"György Eszter, a major character in the film, gives a monologue propounding a theory that Werckmeister's harmonic principles are responsible for aesthetic and philosophical problems in all music since, which need to be undone by a new theory of tuning and harmony."