Exit Through the Gift Shop

Over the course of my artistic education I thought that graffiti was under-appreciated as an art-form, then Banksy hit the scene in my art periphery and I was happy to see the medium gaining fast acceptance.









My interest in street art waned and the number of innovative and unique voices seemed to dwindle to nothing. And I became mesmerized by the fantastic accidental art-form of graffiti removal. Something I still have a massive passion for and continues to influence my own personal work.

In the mean time, Banksy has become ridiculously overexposed and commoditized and the mere sight of a rat on a wall sends people around into hysterical fits of "I'm hip! LOOK WHAT I KNOW ABOUT ART!" instead of appreciation for the art itself.







Yeah, I'm a jerk that hates when people know stuff. But since Banksy's plastered San Francisco this year in promotion of his film Exit Through the Gift Shop, it's been a continual topic of conversation. It's actually at the point where just ANY piece of black and white graffiti is pointed out as "A BANKSY."




Not quite...


So when I saw we had Exit Through the Gift Shop at work, my thoughts could best be described by this image:



Happily though, it's not the Banksy exaltation I thought it would be. In fact, it was a thousand times better than anything I could have ever expected!


The film tells the story of Thierry Guetta, a guy who may or may not be the greatest artist that has ever lived... or at least the new Warhol.


He was a man at the right place at the right time, that managed to pal around with some of street art's greatest voices. Filming their every move and filing it away in gigantic crates in his room. As Banksy's artist stock grew, Banksy became irritated by the dilution of his artistic intent and the fact that he was becoming a mere symbol of status in the art community.
So Banksy asked Thierry to take all that footage he had piled away and turn it into something that showed what the street art movement was all about. Banksy wasn't entirely satisfied with what Thierry produced so he recommended that the filmmaker go to L.A. and try and create some street art of his own. Thierry took the idea to heart and created "The Factory" of the 21st Century.




His studio produced hundreds of paintings virtually overnight by slamming pop-culture with pop art with art from throughout time. The results are sometimes TRULY HORRIFYING! Whether he's a genius or completely insane, it's really up to the viewer to decide. But either way, the film is well worth your time and money!

Expressions of Light 8: Alamo Square

I went for a walk to return a slug in our kitchen to its natural habitat.

I wound up at Alamo square and decided to try out some of the night features on my phone. I am constantly struck dumb by the quality of the pictures my camera takes.

And the video, while still pixelated during pans, holds up pretty well when stationary. So I have been using this handy little device as my new pallet and brush. My photography and video art are all created with this magical little portable phone. It feels so natural, like an extension of my arm. I just pull out the phone, hit a button and I'm ready to go. I don't have to worry about film running out (just memory) or cluttering up my already ridiculously tiny office like with Super8 or miniDV, and I don't need to deal with HUGE file sizes that eat up drives in seconds like with 1080p HD. It's the most green and sustainable form of filmmaking I've found that is also vegetarian! (film itself is gelatin based, so PETA start boycotting the film industry!)

Anyway, I have also been trying to explore the connections between film and paint so without further introduction....

Eurika!

My current loves of film of late have been Joseph Cornell, Sergei Eisenstein, Nathanial Dorsky (no video available, he is analog only), Stan Brakhage, and the greatest editor/artist of all time: Dziga Vertov! I thought I was the first person to enmesh these giants together and create my art by their guiding voice. But, as it turns out, I was mistaken. There was another...

I was in Virgin today trying to get in on the sales that are going on before the billion dollar rip-off machine finally closes down ($34 dollars for a dvd?), I had intended on buying a Murnau box set that I saw in there the other day for $44.99. When much to my chagrin, it turns out the price had magically shot up to $70. So I began combing the store in search of something more reasonable when I happened upon a little DVD box set hidden amongst the others that caught my eye rather out of the blue.

It sounded interesting. Cut-out animation, non-narrative story, fantasy worlds, everything I've been looking for since I started my trek into the avant garde underbelly of the film world. Also, one of the films was narrated by Orson Welles himself. Pretty hard to go wrong with that.

As I looked at the booklet and stared at the art inside the slip case, I became entranced.






I had found the missing piece to the great puzzle: Les Filmes de Monsieur Lawrence Jordan.


It turns out the man was Brakhage's friend in High School, devoured Eisensteinin college and studied under Cornell after his graduation. Which is really no surprise, since his films look like moving Cornells. They're a dreamscape of stream of consciousness animation in 19th Century woodcuts. He saw his work as a way to re-invent society. The woodcuts inject something we have lost, a reminder of the way we used to be. Interesting fact, the naked man and the toga wearing woman in the video are from two of films earliest works. The man from one of Muybridge's many studies of motion, and the woman from an Edison film. This simple clash between the scientific film and the escapist film is a continuing theme throughout his work. Don't let that dissuade you, his world is very accessible and incredibly inspirational. You can definitely tell he and Brakhage were friends despite the completely different use of the medium.

If you have the time, I highly recommend Netflixing the first disc of "The Lawrence Jordan Album." And just watch "Our Lady of the Sphere." It's a fantastic surrealist journey that takes Mellies, Cornell, Dali and Eisenstein to the next meta-textual level. He may not be my favorite filmmaker of all time, but he is certainly in the top ten.

from ///Froth///

here's an excerpt from an interview that "indieWIRE" did with filmmakers Nick Dorsky and Stan Brakhage...

iW: -- yesterday, Nick, when I saw your film "Variations," from 1998, I was shocked to see a very familiar-looking scene involving a plastic shopping bag floating around in the wind in a city street. It looked exactly like the scene in "American Beauty," except you documented something real. Was there a connection?

Dorsky: I have not seen the film "American Beauty," and some people have told me that I shouldn't. When I made "Variations," I included a scene with a plastic bag, which I almost didn't use, because the image is similar to what has been used by many avant-garde filmmakers in the past - even back to "Symphony of a City" in the '20s, but I was walking on the sidewalk and there was this thing happening, it was very magical, and I shot it, and the light was perfect and I took a really good shot. I thought, well even though this is really kind of an avant-garde cliché, I would use it because the shot had so much psychological depth to it.

iW: Jem Cohen has a similar bag sequence in "Lost Book Found," from 1996, which is also a city film.

Dorsky: Yeah you can't help it;- it's like one of the characters of the city. So anyway, then "Variations" came out [in the 1998 New York Film Festival] and Stephen Holden in the Times wrote a review of the festival's avant-garde showcase. I think it called something like 'Avant-garde film: Heavenly and Harrowing,' and the opening part was about "Variations." It said something like, "Is there a cinematic image more beautiful than a plastic bag circling around on the pavement in the wind? Not in the case of Nathaniel Dorsky's 'Variations,' one of many shots expressing the evanescence and ineffability of life," et cetera. So that came out, and four days later, I get this telephone call from a woman, and she says, "Hello, I'm calling from Dreamworks. I represent the director of 'American Beauty.' He read about your film in the New York Times, and he would like to see it." So I said, "What is American Beauty?" At this point, the film was maybe at the beginning of post-production. She says "Oh, it's a love story." I said, "Why do you want to see it?" She said, "The director read about it and thought it might be very interesting." So I said, you can rent it from Canyon Cinema.

It's funny, because my good friend Jerome said, don't send it to them, they're gonna want to rip you off. And I said, no, maybe I'll get a job shooting a montage for them. The point is, I don't really know what happened. But, as I said, it's not an original idea, you know, people have shown me versions of the script which mention the plastic bag. The script may have been done years ago. So I think it might have just been a coincidence. But the weekend it opened, I got six phone calls from people around the country telling me, "they ripped you off." In the midst of this, I called Stan up and said, "What should I do about this Stan?"

Brakhage: I said, "Don't worry about it. It's not a bad movie." When you want to worry about it is when they rip you off and make a bad movie or sell some product that's disgusting. We've all had a lot of that. But if someone makes a decent movie that's the way it should go...

Dorsky: Have you heard Stan's "Superman" story before? He happens to know that the birth sequence in "Superman" is based completely on [his 1974 film] "Text of Light." He knows because they rented it three times when they were making the movie. It looks very similar. But he wasn't upset. He says to me, "You know, when I was a fat little kid running around Denver in my 'Superman cape,' if I ever thought that my films would affect a 'Superman' feature, I would have been really proud!"

Here's P. Adams Sitney on the same subject:
"...the difference is : if you look at the two films, Dorsky is wonderful, it really is beautiful. He spent all his life learning how to do it so when he films the bag it's gorgeous. The Hollywood film looks like there were machines, [...] blowing the bag. It looks bad.
You can imitate but you can't absorb, because these filmmakers spend every week of their lives looking through the camera, thinking about it. You can't absorb that, it's personal style."

I've Watched the Watchmen.

Let me start by saying, in the past week I changed my tune and was syched beyond all get-out to see Watchmen. I was all set to hate it, but I said hey, let it go, don't be a jerk.

Sadly, I talked to Corey before posting this, so a good deal of my venom has been unleashed already.

I remarked this as I left the theater:
"If you're gonna adapt the bible, you might as well read it first."

Nicole liked it more than me, though. And she hates the comic. Let me state, she didn't love it, she just thought the ideas contained within it were intriguing and provoked interesting thought... LIKE THE BOOK THEY'RE TAKEN FROM.

So let me put this simply. Watchmen is a history lesson on the medium of comic books itself. Starting in the golden age, leading into the silver-age, and ending in the post-Taxi Driver New York of the 80's. It's a story about America and it's mythology. It's a story about what makes us human and our capacity to do good, and what does it take to be a hero and when does that line begin to blur? It's not our history because (as the Comedian says) in their world, the American dream "came true." If the masked vigilantes of our mythology did exist, what would our world be like? How would society change? And even though its details are different, it's still the same cesspool. There. There are your themes. Stick to that.

**Spoilers beyond**
And if this film is from a VISIONARY, he should be able to SHOW NOT TELL! Yes, the graphic novel is wordy. I will admit that all but maybe twelve panels in twelve issues do not have a word balloon or a narration box that has three sentences. And there are even three pages of prose at the end of every issue to boot (maybe they should have tacked something like that at the end as well. A novella for a proposal for Watchmen 2: Electric Boogaloo). But when you distill Alan Moore's overwriting down to its most simplistic, try not to end up with sequences that tell the audience what they have just seen. "ZOMG, LAURIE! TEH C0MED14N IZ UR F4VVER!!!1!"
The series is a textbook on "visionary" editing. If you want to know how to write a movie, or edit a film or understand how to build a world, Watchmen is it. There are entire sections that are parallel cut. Sequences that weave together in a quilt. Laurie figures out who her father is once she understands how to see the world from Dr. Manhattan's perspective (NOT BY BEING TOUCHED BY HIS MAAAA4AAGIC FINGERS!!!). Time and sound interweave to create the truth. It's brilliant and filmic. You can open up to any random page and find a sequence that lends itself quite simply to film and needs little changes (except getting the film to be under 12 hours of course) even Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons transitions lend themselves rather neatly to the chronal art. And I was rather shocked that some of the simpler fades/hard cuts were missing in favor of a cut to something completely unrelated.

And before everyone starts saying, "but Dylan! There's a director's cut! Maybe it's in that!" I hope it is. To be honest, I wanted to see the Fountain, and I wound up seeing Watchmen Episode I: The Phantom Topknot.

I was really frustrated by the trailers and was certain this film was going to be a pile of crap. But over the past few days I actually gave in while I was re-reading the graphic novel and said, "why not believe the hype? Maybe Zack Snyder gets it? Maybe he loves this book just as much as I do and he'll create something truly breathtaking. Maybe it will revolutionize the world of editing/cinematography and do for film, what Watchmen did for comics? Why not just believe the dream a little, eh? Everyone else is." I was especially excited to see the Moloch scenes because of the red neon light outside of his apartment and I was certain Zack Snyder would go hog wild with that punctuating lines in the Comedians speech a little better than Moore was able to given the constraints of his medium. Surprise, surprise, it was nowhere to be seen. I was completely baffled. It seems like it would be a cg-filter-whore's wet dream. But alas, nothing.
Instead, Dr. Manhattan GLOWS SO LOUD THAT EVERYTHING IS BLUE! Excellent compromise. So when he changes the saturation of his blue at the TV studio, it must be brilliantly saturated then, right? I mean if Zak Snyder's using up the film world's supply of full CTB filters on this film, he might as well go for broke. RIGHT!? Instead, he puts the saturation on his skin up maaaybe ten percent and then keeps the filters the same/gets rid of them when lights are hitting people near him during the taping. Oops. Now, it's possible that because he's pulling his molecules closer together to make him appear more saturated, perhaps he's not emitting as much light, but considering some of the other gaffs, I'm not goin' for it.
In all honesty, LARRY FONG SHOULD BE RUN OUT OF HOLLYWOOD WITH PITCHFORKS! His cinematography makes my stomach churn. He has no sense of light. And Zak Snyder missed the entire point of the cutaways that are littered throughout Watchmen. There's only one series of inter-cut shots using Drieberg's lenses. It's nice and probably one of my favorite shots in the film, but a far cry from what it could be. It's also in one of the worst acted scenes in the film too. Heck, they're all pretty poorly acted.

Also, going along with one of the reasons I love the book to begin with, Dan is a schlub. He's a Hellenistic superhero.

He's a man that is worn out. He is past his prime and he's overweight, but it's okay, because he fights crime with his gadgets anyway. Regardless of how out of shape he is, though, when he puts on that hood and they go out on patrol, you cheer in the book. He is Night Owl. And he gets the girl! "Oh no! We'd have to see Drew Carry naked!" Yes. That's the point. It's every comic book nerd's dream. Get the beautiful girl because she loves you for who you are. Apparently the world's still not ready for that simple little message.

This should have been as good as Blade Runner or the Fountain, and what I got was the biggest disappointment since I realized how bad Phantom Menace is.

Guess I had a lot more venom in me.

I could keep going on and on and on about all the things I love about Watchmen and how the film managed to leave out pretty much every single one of them, (except Veidt's line which is probably the greatest line in history) but I'll just let people comment.

Expressions of Light

I've started on a project that represents a strong move away from traditional linear narrative and brings me more in line with installation. My big inspiration on this is the writings of Christian Metz.

The first six videos are up on Youtube. And over the coming months, you can expect to see a lot more of them.

HAPPY TRICENTENNIAL!

The Passion of Charlie Sheen hit 300 views!




That's the most views any piece of art I've ever uploaded has received! I know a lot of people out there who have 400,000,000,000 hits for their cat barfing twinkle twinkle little star, but I'm just happy that 300 random strangers stumbled upon my project and maybe made it through the first five seconds.