In Remembrance of Film Past

Decasia



Decasia Home page

The New Yorker, 2004

From the New York Times, 2002:

''I wasn't just looking for instances of decayed film,'' Morrison recalls of his two-year excavation. ''Rather, I was seeking out instances of decay set against a narrative backdrop, for example, of valiant struggle, or thwarted love, or birth, or submersion, or rescue, or one of the other themes I was trying to interweave. And never complete decay: I was always seeking out instances where the image was still putting up a struggle, fighting off the inexorability of its demise but not yet having succumbed. And things could get very frustrating. Sometimes I'd come upon instances of spectacular decay but the underlying image was of no particular interest. Worse was when there was a great evocative image but no decay.''

Hua Yang De Nian Hua



From Wikipedia:

Hua Yang De Nian Hua is a 2000 short film by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai that was shown at the 2001 Berlin International Film Festival.

It consists of a 2m 28s montage of scenes from vintage Chinese films, most of which were considered lost until some nitrate prints were discovered in a California warehouse during the 1990s, set to a song from the soundtrack of Wong's In the Mood for Love (2000). It is available on the Criterion Collection DVD release of In the Mood for Love as an extra, as well as various bootlegged VCD releases of Wong's features.

Rose Hobart



From Senses of Cinema:

Rose Hobart consists almost entirely of footage taken from East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle B-film starring the nearly forgotten actress Rose Hobart. Cornell condensed the 77-minute feature into a 20-minute short, removing virtually every shot that didn't feature Hobart, as well as all of the action sequences. In so doing, he utterly transforms the images, stripping away the awkward construction and stilted drama of the original to reveal the wonderful sense of mystery that saturates the greatest early genre films.

An except is on Youtube:

Things

The history of man can be written with objects. - Eduardo Paolozzi

Joseph Cornell
Review of Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell
and
An online gallery of Cornell's work

Jan Švankmajer
Jabberwocky
and
An interview
and
A Commentary: Animated Anxiety

PES
Download his videos at http://www.eatpes.com/

Kris Moyes:

“The clip took 14 days to shoot and was all mapped out from the beginning. I notated the whole song and used that as my bible. The words and musical sections were divided equally allowing 7 days each. We were shooting about 25-30 words a day and working 9 hour days, (about 1 word every 15-20 minutes) which ended up being too much for my art director who pulled out halfway through. For the word section the more solid ideas were executed in the first few days allowing the others to ferment. Naturally there were a few that didn’t go exactly to plan so I had to treat them on a case to case basis. I think the results from the ones that needed lateral thinking are my favourites, especially “and” which was spelled out of the laptop, external drive, wacom tablet and ipod speakers.” (from Motionographer)

Download a high-res version here

Saatchi and Stuart

Charles Saatchi, owner of Saatchi Gallery, is a smart man:

In May Mr. Saatchi, famed for spotting young unknowns and turning them into art-world superstars, created a section on his Web site for artists of all ages to post their work at no charge. It is called Your Gallery, and now boasts contributions by about 20,700 artists, including 2,000 pieces of video art.

Everything there is for sale, with neither the buyer nor the seller paying a cent to any dealer or other middleman. About 800 new artists have been signing up each week.

And since Stuart (shorthand for “student art”) went online last month, some 1,300 students (including 450 in the United States) have created Web pages there. No one vets the quality or style of the art.

With dealers and collectors scouring student shows for undiscovered talent and students hunting for dealers to represent them, Mr. Saatchi has tapped a vein that can’t stop gushing. If Stuart gains anything like the cachet of MySpace, it has the potential to morph from a nonprofit venture into a gold mine for Mr. Saatchi. (More from the NYT)

Now why didn't someone else think of that first?