Dark Glass by Clio Barnard

Clio Barnard’s brilliant debut feature The Arbor – an Artangel/Jerwood commission – opens in the UK on 22 October, after Barnard won the Tribeca Film Festival Award for Best New Documentary Filmmaker earlier this year. We’ll be posting an interview with Clio nearer the release date, but in the meantime take a look at Dark Glass.

Clio made Dark Glass in 2006 for Single-Shot, part of the Arts Council England/UK Film Council Moving Image Initiative collaboration, that has also supported Gillian Wearing’s forthcoming feature, Self Made. Shot on a mobile phone, in one take, it’s a remarkably haunting work. You can see it here, along with other Single-Shot commissions and selected films.

Seaweed, Tell No One

A beautiful, twisty piece of filmmaking from the London-based duo Tell No One, aka Luke White and Remi Weekes. Visit their blog to view more snippets of experimental and lo-fi works-in-progress, but remember to keep schtum – it’s a secret!

]]> http://www.apengine.org/2010/08/tell-no-one/feed/ 2 http://www.apengine.org/2010/07/le-grand-content-clemens-kogler-karo-szmit/ http://www.apengine.org/2010/07/le-grand-content-clemens-kogler-karo-szmit/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:39:09 +0000 abigail http://www.apengine.org/?p=5817

Le Grand Content, Clemens Kogler & Karo Szmit

“But you have to face that teenagers like coffee and lets say the stock market are things which won’t stay hot forever.”

Here’s an absurd yet rather philosophical film from Austrian filmmaker Clemens Kogler which uses PowerPoint presentation style graphics to plot a curious correlation between teenagers, taxes and the Easter bunny. Best of all the voiceover sounds a bit like Werner Herzog.

Topic II, Pascal Baes

Animate Projects and Portland Green Cultural Projects – APPGCP if you like – currently have a call out for proposals for animated dance projects – download guidelines here.

Which reminds us that we’re very keen on Pascal Baes. There’s something unassuming but hypnotic about his work – and it’s an amazing alliance between animation and choreography.

Topic II  is from 1990, but there’s more recent work on his Vimeo page. His own website doesn’t give much away, but the website for the lovely Belgian art and media centre Argos tells that he was born in Nice and lives in Brussels. And he trained in biology, painting and photography, which kind of shows.

Red Dead Redemption, directed by John Hillcoat

If you’re the sort that’s unlikely to devote hours of your life playing open-world videogames, then you may prefer to experience the excellent animated world of Rockstar Games’s Red Dead Redemption in short film form. Renowed Australian Director John Hillcoat (The Proposition, The Road) has been given free reign to use the computer animation from the film and in true machinima style combines gameplay sequences and cutscenes from the game to create a new narrative.

Enjoy this 29 minute adventure into the heartlands of the Wild West without the inconvenience of touching a single controller. (Though personally I would recommend that you give it a go – it’s an awesome immersive gaming experience.)

Television is a drug, Beth Fulton

Here’s a great animation by Beth Fulton that uses a wry monologue written and performed by American screenwriter Todd Alcott. The combination of kinetic typography with rapid fire shots of advertising imagery and the imploring voiceover make this one compelling video. You’ll probably find you can’t stop watching… or get a sudden hankering for a cheeseburger…

1500 Images of Kate Moss in 60 Seconds, Graham Dolphin, 2001.

An oldie but a goodie. Almost a decade on and 1500 Images of Kate Moss in 60 Seconds still packs a punch.

Artist Graham Dolphin works across media appropriating objects and icons of the fashion and music industries and reforming them into assemblages that reveal the obsessions and formulas underwriting the temporal world of mass culture. His recent work has involved the laborious reconstruction of various artefacts relating to the untimely deaths of cult musicians, including a plaster cast replica of Jim Morrison’s memorial stone, complete with graffitied tributes by adoring fans, and re-renderings of the (alleged) suicide notes left by singers Elliot Smith, Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis and Phil Ochs.

Dolphin will be showing his work with David Risley Gallery at Art Basel, Switzerland from 16-20 June.

1500 Images of Kate Moss in 60 Seconds, Graham Dolphin from Seventeen Gallery on Vimeo.

Major Lazer: Hold the Line, directed by Ferry Gouw

Now I wouldn’t normally sing the praises of Major Lazer the British music duo and their generally rather saucy videos, but Major Lazer the cartoon monster hunter definitely gets my vote. His back story: a Jamaican commando injured in the secret Zombie War of 1984, rebuilt with a lazer in place of his right arm by the US military – his mission to save the world from the dark forces.

Thank illustrator & music video director Ferry Gouw for some awesome comic book graphics and killer monsters in this music video. Now where can I get hold of those action figures?

Silly Olympics, Monty Python

As there’s been much hoo-ha recently about the rather bizarre London 2010 mascots, fashioned from the steel used to make the Olympic stadium(?!?!), we bring you an equally absurd film from Monty Python. This sketch comes from 1972, a time long ago when Britain had a steel production industry and no one imagined the Olympics would be staged in London.

Here’s the Python team lampooning the Olympics with their own Silly Olympiad, held traditionally every 3.7 years, featuring competitors from over 4 million different countries. Let’s hope the marathon for incontinence won’t be included in the 2012 Games.

Finisterrae for Sonar 2010

The commissioned artwork for this year’s Sonar festival is Finisterrae (end of the world), an episodic film of two ghosts journeying from limbo via the Way of Saint James to the land of the living. This journey is an apt celebration of the expansion of this year’s music and multimedia art festival, which is being held simultaneously in its traditional location of Barcelona and new location of A Coruña in Galicia – Galicia being the region pilgrims once journeyed to (via the Way of Saint James route) to visit the burial site of the apostle Saint James.

Who is actually behind the spectral road movie is unclear, but perhaps once all of the episodes have been released their creator will be revealed. To date the spirits have wandered into the desolate winter landscape, gone fishing and come across some unexpected exchanges with nature. Watch their journey so far on the Sonar site.

Sonar also features Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda and a synaesthesic audiovisual performance from Alexandre Burton and Julien Roy.