committing thought to action.

theres something about the satisfaction of breakage.

Cutting through the passive stage (fantasizing) and committing lips to lips, or knife to flesh.

Carrying through a temptation or an intense emotion to a concretized end.

There's  just something about stabbing.

DRIVE got it right.

And about ten yrs earlier, TROUBLE EVERY DAY nailed it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfENjj_VqfQ

for the record

for the record, i wrote this

http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=566:tren-de-sombras&catid=25:rapporto-confidenziale&Itemid=27

totally nautical dudes

acknowledge me!!!

i get mercilessly teased at work for repeatedly calling out assistants' names until they respond to me and ask me what i need.
Is this essential behaviour for me to function at work? or is it a self obssessed need to direct others acknowledgment of the things i say and do?

Above is a still from Guerin's TREN DE SOMBRES, a film that i think has a lot to say about acknowledgement.  Featuring lies and truth and a real place and a fake history, the intersections of knowledge and memory are confused. But people, be them real or fake, exist in this unique film universe.  And people in TREN DE SOMBRES are often posing for photographs, or in idealized actions like family picnics or bike rides. Or they are engaged in work that is the foregrounded activity of the frame ( a man raking leaves.)  They are sometimes/always  ghosts, yet their visibility is never doubted because they are looking back as we watch them. As you can see from the picture, these people have a modern need for acknowledgment.

don't make an Event out of It

People make events out of the strangest notions.

 

I'm struggling to compose  notes on TRAIN OF SHADOWS, a Jose Luis Guerin film that purports to be many things that it isn't, which is just one of the  reasons i am so fond of it.
 TRAIN takes the form of an examination into the disappearance of filmmaker Gerard Fleury, who vanished while working on a film in 1930.
Guerin explores the place that this happened by way of both new and old footage.  The old footage turns out to be shot by Guerin himself, though it is shaped and cloaked as if it were found footage made by Fleury.

Hoping to cleanse my palate, I turn on tonight's Rock Center with Brian Williams, an event built around an expose of the president's war /situation room, which , in turn, was built around the anniversary of Bin Laden's death/capture.

It is funny to pretend that the exciting war room narrative, constructed for tonight's newsmagazine episode, is anything but smart political manifestation.  I don't believe a word of it.
I'm keeping my liberal ID card despite clearly  seeing the news for what it is: not news at all but fabrication. A shabby michael bay ish production on a budget.

Both the TV Show and the movie make the decision to highlight certain angles and convergences that have occurred as " events " and 'Important moments."  Both use narrative  and performance built on the mystique of the real  that we will never know.   Only Guerin's film is in on the joke.

Even the program's title, Rock Center , seems to make brevity (it's referring to the benign location of the stage it's shot in, Rockefeller Center) an exciting and mysterious locale.

i wonder if this story merited the same import before it became altered by  an anniversary.  It doesn't matter.

plain shirt, plain set, "glitters cold and grand.."

Jacques Demy's student film, LES HORIZONS MORTS (1951): involving 2 glasses, 2 spaces ( one is a room, inside, and the other is a field or park, outside.) There are also shirts, worn shirts, worn by the nameless lead, who is also Jacques Demy. One watches this movie, and if the viewer remains active and aware, he is likely to become obsessed by the dulled white shirt . It is a contradiction of plainness and busyness, the busyness expressed in the web of lines and creases that map it's life.

The sound design of the film is all edges and abruptness. Sounds and shadows occur,often simultaneously, but there is no song. For all it's distinctive style, LES HORIZONS MORTS remains a circling maze of pencil marks that we watch an artist draw over and again.
At one point there is even a mirror that his character/Demy himself, smashes. It smashes as his hand extends, yet never making physical contact. The notion is more psychic than real. The moment is strained and self involved.
The UBU site's description tells me this film highlights point of view in Film. There is little description in his threadbare sets, there is only the placement of the shirt and it's jacket in the center of my field of vision.
All the expression is left to this ugly map of evasions. Little paths that don't lead me to anywhere. Finding my eyes glued to the woven tracks on his back, I've located my source of pleasure in the film.
I'm currently reading William T Vollmann's vol 1 in his SEVEN DREAMS anthology. It's called THE ICE-SHIRT. It is a book of North American Landscapes. in THE ICE-SHIRT, landscapes of ancient north america are physically worn (both taken on and off) by Nordic/Icelandic sounding ancient characters. These characters' sagas and affairs make up the forests and beaches we know today. When a lover is feeling alone, he goes to a beach which cliffs that look like a skull ( an empty person.) Everything is inside and out, and drawn out like maps, but worn on the body.
"Never did Gudrid suspect that the beautiful leaf which she fingered day and night was BOLVERKR's. Oh, just as the Bear-Shirt made men see red-leaf forests through a hot rainy haze of blood; just as the Blue-Shirt made the wearer's world glitter cold and grand and beautiful in a thousand twinkling mirrors, so the Gold-Shirt glared and shone like the sun's eye, so hot and bright that only an unseeing rose like Gudrid could open herself to it trustingly and lovingly and feed upon it and grow from it; she was warm and happy; she was thrilled with the gold she longed to feed on...So she drew on the Gold-Shirt; she smiled and kissed her baby; she lashed him to her back and set out in the forest...and her hair was golden, so she hooded herself in gold..."(p 242)
There may be a larger notion at display here, in Demy's student film, one that is Christian, or spiritual, in it's concern.
If that is the case, then i now understand why it has eluded me. I'm left with my own self satisfying perspective, that of the creases on the shirt and the wrinkled collar on the jacket he once wears over it.
I wonder how many years it's lasted, and i wonder what color it should be. How has it covered or blocked things? What and who does it cover?

German character on display in Maren Ade's FOREST FOR THE TREES

Melanie...like Germany itself, is brimming with optimism until she acknowledges she is hard -wired for failure.

FOREST FOR THE TREES.
Also, see earlier post at http://hersuzanne76.blogspot.com/2011/03/linda-ronstadt-1977-07-poor-poor.html