List of Monumental sculpture projects 2015

  • 1 http://swannbb.blogspot.fr/2015/02/sunday-robot-play.html
  • 2 http://shuengitswannjie.blogspot.fr/2015/02/interactive-reading-room-tea-house-2015.html
  • 3 http://swannbb.blogspot.fr/2014/06/neo-ming-bed-luxembourg.html
  • 4 http://swannbb.blogspot.fr/2013/02/yuzi-paradise-tell-moon.html
  • 5 http://swannbb.blogspot.com/2011/09/12th-changchun-international-sculpture.html
  • 6 http://www.saatchionline.com/Shuen-git

Thursday 28 February 2013

saachi online gallery

http://www.saatchionline.com/profiles/portfolio/id/12404

Magic Flying Machine© 2005
5% model
copper, wire, bronze

HuaHui/HuaKui Dome


Left:  Maquette of the smallest HuaHui/HuaKui Dome - 3m diameter  

Right:  Sunday Robot Picnic Pose

Bottom:  artist Shuen-git Chow

HuaHui (HuaKui) Mobile Music House 10% 2010


    Virtual Model of HuaHui Mobile Music House in Secondlife, scenario : China Sim by avatar Aston Leisen

    Real life HuaHui Mobile Music 10%, Taiwan, Mabuville  2010




Yuzi Paradise - Tell the Moon // now Club Med...


"Tell the Moon" artist: Shuengit Natasha Chow 
 Yuzi Paradise has become Club Med - 

Tuesday 26 February 2013

4 months, 3 wks and 2 days;

4 months, 3 wks and 2 days ***half

Drama 

Very humanist film, everything is in order. Reality of life, the cruelty of people being taken advantage of during weak moments. Friendship, feminine determination. The lighting is grey and cool, something fresh even though the environment is not a pampered one. Otilia helps her friend Gabita to get an abortion from a piggish man. He speaks like any rough crude guy and he wants to be paid - with sex - when the money is short, and Gabita can no wait any longer at 4months + 3wks.   Otilia helps her get the rest of the money, sleeps w the man.  Otilia has to juggle her schedule with a v nice boy friend who is from a much cushier milieu, from a family of medical profession - so he seems to not  understand problems or need to handle problems the less protected ones needed to - so the dinner of doctors naturally talk about operations etc. This aligned with the illicit abortion and the baby fetus wrapped in a towel in the bathroom. Otilia has to help her friend get rid of it, so she goes through some housing estate, in the dark, the last public buses - with dog barking (we think oh, those dogs will smell the blood in her handbag). Suspense, and finally, she got back; Gabita not in the bedroom. (Did she got found out? Did she faint in the room, where is she? More suspense) Gabita was fine sitting in the restaurant; where one half of the dining room is used for a wedding - happiness and this other half, used for ordinary diners. The restaurators comes with wedding food - the same menu - brain, pork, beef, marrow all heavy duty viscerous food fitting for a wedding, soft fine delicacies made of innerds of animals; and the nature of these yummy food to be taken into the stomach as food, is all so similar to this other soft innerd thing that Gabita just got rid off. They asked to see what else is on the menu.

Dialogue and story very well constructed.  Everything fits. Good tension and sensitive.
I think the abortion scenes are well constructed, nudity and just right.  The womens body are seen just like that, from a medical persons eyes.  The reality of what this involves:  physically, mentally, and socially.   For women, its very hard and how they endure all this; and the society's unfairness when it comes to responsibility.  The film gives fine intricate workings of how life naturally creates problems, and how women solve them through strength of intimate friendship - very moving friendship and maybe sisterhood.

Monday 25 February 2013

JinXing interview



http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/ballet-a-sex-change-and-a-small-revolution-the-odyssey-of-jin-xing-a-407683-2.html

JinXing interview

Sunday 24 February 2013

Le chat du rabbin: the girl, the cat; Cat Soup (Nekojiru-Sou) de Tatsuo Sato



Making of Le Chat du Rabbin: The girl



The cat


The Russian


The Rabbi's Cat








Cat Soup (Nekojiru-Sou) de Tatsuo Sato




Cats Memories w Barbara Streisand


Acrobat Ballet




Acrobat Ballet















對面的女孩看過來 , Camille: Tchin Tchin, Tsai Chin


阿牛(陳慶祥)-對面的女孩看過來 (官方完整版MV)



對面的女孩看過來
作詞 阿牛
作曲 阿牛

對面的女孩看過來 
看過來 看過來
這裡的表演很精彩 
請不要假裝不理不睬

對面的女孩看過來 
看過來 看過來
不要被我的樣子嚇壞 
其實我很可愛

寂寞男孩的悲哀 
說出來 誰明白
求求你拋個媚眼過來 哄哄我 
逗我樂開懷

我左看右看 上看下看 
原來每個女孩都不簡單

我想了又想 猜了又猜 
女孩們的心事還真奇怪

寂寞男孩的蒼蠅拍 
左拍拍 右拍拍

為甚麼還是沒人來愛 
無人問津 真無奈

對面的女孩看過來 
看過來 看過來
寂寞男孩情竇初開 
需要你給我一點愛


Camille: Tchin Tchin

CAMILLE TCHIN TCHIN LYRICS
Tchin tchin
Dans le bleu du soir
Tchin tchin Pomerol ou Pommard

Je chine
Sur les bords de Loire
Tchin tchin
Ou j’ai perdu l’espoir

Tchin tchin
Saveurs oubliees
Le Spleen De la veuve fanee
L’abime Flatte mon palais

Tchin tchin Je trinque a ta sante
Souviens toi nous qui aimions la vie
Le lait chaud la cannelle et l’eau claire
A present nous buvons toutes les nuits
Un nectar au gout amer 

Tchin tchin Le ciel se fait lourd
Tchin tchin
Trop de Saint-Amour
Chagrine A la lueur du bouge
Tchin tchin A toi mon ballon rouge


Cat Duet : Rossini





Cat Duet :  Hinge and Bracket (Rossini)











Rossini Overture


Bugs Bunny Barber of Seville



Design of newspaper, Jacek Utko

http://www.ted.com/talks/jacek_utko_asks_can_design_save_the_newspaper.html

Each page could be a beautiful poster - thats why people want to see this, everyday i think.

Friday 22 February 2013

Man on Wire, Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly; rotoscope, rasterbator

Man on Wire, ****

The documentary has achieved a great feat of story telling - because we already know that Philippe Petit has walked across the twin towers successfully!  He is already a globally famous wire walker.  How to tell this story?  The director carefully did reconstructions, and no details spared.  Its like watching someone putting delicate pieces of puzzles of a house together - any one error, slightest false move, the house would have collapsed.  Its a cheerful film too, it gives everyone power to watch this, such an incredible feat - but with proper planning - dreams do come true!  I really like the characters, their personality have shone through a very sensitive handling of material and diplomatic editing.  

At one point i was quite astonished that Jean-Louis the friend of Philippe started to cry, tears just rolled down his face and he covered it with his hands.  In other films, scenes of this type is usually avoided, and the camera would have moved to another part of the person without showing the face.  But here, it is very subtle, if he had not cried, i would not have understood the relationship between the two.  Yes, there is love, and this feat has been made possible - maybe, because its a love story.


Waking Life, ***

I love the painting - the rotoscope work - in this film, not only is the dialogue the story fresh and vibrant but the screen itself is such a pleasure to watch.

A Scanner Darkly ***

I am so happy to see a second film with the same beautiful hand painted rotoscope.  The story is once again fantastic - it took many hours of painting!  better be a good story to be worthy of such love.


Rotoscope
Then I checked out rotoscope - what has become of rotoscope in animation?  I wish more films are made like this.  
There is a software, Studio Artist which could do automatic rotoscope - but the quality?  Even though its a magnificent tool, the outcome is still not the same as a handpainted output.  Not the same at all.  Its like the difference between a hand crafted piece of lace work and a perfect automatic 3D printer output of a piece of lace.  One feels vibrant, and the other mechanical, a little dead.

Rotoscope
http://www.toonyphotos.com/
And I found also a freebie software, Rotoscope or a game rather, a rotoscope online; just play with it and it does the rotoscoping for you, afterwards you could download your creation too!  And you could also upload to share with others online.

Rasterbator 
rasterbator.net 
http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/

convert files, A Scanner Darkly

http://www.zamzar.com/#

http://www.soxia.cc/film90451/#
about A Scanner Darkly, v gd info


acting, Anne Hathaway lil wayne, 腾讯视频



http://my.tv.sohu.com/u/vw/16921055




Films w 100% ratings from Rotten Tomatoes (cult films)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/top_100_cult_movies_movies/
1. 100% Toy Story 2 (1999) 161
2. 100% Man on Wire (2008) 151
3. 100% Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) 91
4. 100% The Interrupters (2011) 83
5. 100% The Godfather (1972) 77
6. 100% Toy Story (1995) 76
7. 100% Waste Land (2010) 68
8. 100% Citizen Kane (1941) 65
9. 100% Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) 62
10. 100% North by Northwest (1959) 62
11. 100% Rear Window (1954) 62
12. 100% Afghan Star (2008) 60
13. 100% Aruitemo Aruitemo (Still Walking) (2008) 60
14. 100% The Third Man (1949) 60 
15. 100% Poetry (2010) 59
16. 100% The Invisible War (2012) 57
17. 100% The Taste of Others (2000) 57 
18. 100% Laura (1944) 56
19. 100% Repulsion (1965) 56 
20. 100% How to Survive a Plague (2012) 55
21. 100% The Sweet Hereafter (1997) 54
22. 100% All About Eve (1950) 53 
23. 100% Jaws (1975) 53
24. 100% Modern Times (1936) 53
25. 100% On the Waterfront (1954) 53
26. 100% Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai) (1954) 53 
27. 100% The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups) (1959) 51
28. 100% 56 Up (2012) 50
29. 100% Last Train Home (2009) 50
30. 100% The Evil Dead (1981) 49
31. 100% Rashômon (Rashomon) (In the Woods) (1951) 47 
32. 100% Singin' in the Rain (1952) 47 
33. 100% The Crying Game (1992) 46
34. 100% The Last Picture Show (1971) 46
35. 100% The Terminator (1984) 46
36. 100% Three Colors: Red (Trois couleurs: Rouge) (1994) 46 
37. 100% The Philadelphia Story (1940) 45
38. 100% Cool Hand Luke (1967) 44
39. 100% The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) 44
40. 100% The Maltese Falcon (1941) 44
41. 100% Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone (2011) 43
42. 100% Il conformista (The Conformist) (1970) 43
43. 100% 12 Angry Men (Twelve Angry Men) (1957) 42
44. 100% Rebecca (1940) 42
45. 100% The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) 42 
46. 100% Battleship Potemkin (1925) 41
47. 100% Frankenstein (1931) 41
48. 100% The Gold Rush (1925) 41
49. 100% The Grapes of Wrath (1940) 41
50. 100% We Were Here (2011) 41
51. 100% Anatomy of a Murder (1959) 40
52. 100% M (1931) 40
53. 100% Nostalgia for the Light (2010) 40
54. 100% The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) 40
55. 100% Mary Poppins (1964) 39
56. 100% Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) 39
57. 100% Pinocchio (1940) 39
58. 100% La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1950) 38
59. 100% Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness (2011) 38
60. 100% The Leopard (1963) 38
61. 100% The Wages of Fear (1953) 38
62. 100% Three Colors: Blue (Trois Couleurs: Bleu) (1993) 38
63. 100% Tokyo Story (Tôkyô monogatari) (1953) 38
64. 100% Before Sunrise (1995) 37
65. 100% Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) (1920) 37
66. 100% Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) 37
67. 100% Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2008) 37
68. 100% The African Queen (1952) 37
69. 100% Top Hat (1935) 37
70. 100% Bob Roberts (1992) 36
71. 100% Husbands and Wives (1992) 36
72. 100% Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) 36
73. 100% Stagecoach (1939) 36
74. 100% Rio Bravo (1959) 35
75. 100% Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander) (1982) 34
76. 100% Playtime (Play Time) (1967) 34
77. 100% Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993) 34
78. 100% Spoorloos (The Vanishing) (1988) 34
79. 100% Henry V (1989) 33
80. 100% Live-in Maid (Cama adentro) (2004) 33
81. 100% My Left Foot (1989) 33
82. 100% Sita Sings the Blues (2008) 33
83. 100% The Killer (Dip huet seung hung) (1989) 33
84. 100% The Order of Myths (2007) 33
85. 100% I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba) (1964) 32
86. 100% The Birth of a Nation (1915) 32
87. 100% The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) 32
88. 100% Hukkle (2002) 31
89. 100% Local Hero (1983) 31
90. 100% Nóz w Wodzie (Knife in the Water) (1962) 31 
91. 100% Quai des Orfevres (Quay of the Goldsmiths) (Jenny Lamour) (1947) 31
92. 100% Shadow of a Doubt (1943) 31
93. 100% The Invisible Man (1933) 31
94. 100% The Killers (1946) 31
95. 100% The Odd Couple (1968) 31
96. 100% Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer (2007) 30
97. 100% Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) 30
98. 100% Ikiru (Doomed) (Living) (To Live) (1952) 30
99. 100% Mitt Liv som Hund (My Life as a Dog) (1985) 30
100. 100% Scarface (1932)

rotoscope free download

http://en.kioskea.net/download/download-17112-rotoscope

Wednesday 20 February 2013

A Waking Life; A Scanner Darkly

Richard Linklater 2001

simple version of freebie rotoscope
http://en.kioskea.net/download/download-17112-rotoscope  
Richard Linklater 2006

Duprat, gadfly makes jewellery

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/25/assets/movies/duprat.mov

birds of paradise birds in action

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=YTR21os8gTA
many birds in action, they transform themselves into something else.

Thursday 14 February 2013

Tuesday 12 February 2013

The Human Face, BBC




















How to catch a liar, Paul Ekman; Antonin Artaud


How to spot a lying moment
with Chinese subtitles


How to train yourself everyday for 20mn/day for 6 months





Antonin Artaud: an actor is an athelete of the heart











9th China International Cartoon and Animation Festival 2013



This year's fair will begin two days earlier than before to coincide with the Labor Day holiday from April 29 to May 1, instead of May 1-3 as in previous years, organizers said.


Exhibitors will have a better and quieter environment for business negotiations before April 29.


Afterwards, children and students, the main consumers of cartoon and animation products, will throng the fair.


The festival will open with a concert of theme music and songs of classical cartoon films from home and abroad.


Last year more than 2 million visitors and 461 companies from 61 countries and regions took part in the fair, which ended with 165 signed deals, valued at 14.6 billion yuan (US$2.3 billion).

=======================================================================

8th China International Cartoon and Animation Festival 2012

http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-04/28/content_15173395.htm
 


=======================================================================
 

Monday 11 February 2013

Parkinsons patient doing Taichi in sl gets better; musical landscape in sl

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2013/02/second-life-possible-parkinsons-therapy.html
parkinsons patient gets well from watching avatar do TaiChi.

http://www.visitproteus.com/
Interactive immersive musical "game" - music generated from moving around in immersive landscape

Friday 8 February 2013

Hit and Miss ***

Hit and Miss *** 
tv film, first season, 6 episodes 2012

Transexual contract killer - from man to woman - with mid-Western attachments of a half family.
Intriques, local illicit affairs, white trash cultures, romance between a man and his acceptance of a transsexual man-woman.  Many details are not tightly woven.  Good cinematography, unlike tv episodes, it has the feel of a feature film.

Gummo ***half






Gummo ***half
genre:  cult film, fictional docu-drama, no romance docu-drama on America with mainly non-actors

director:  Korine Harmony

This is a grainy, catch as catch can style film on poor people of America.  75% scripted.  Poor, not only in resources but often mental illness, and tornado ravaged environment - but you could see that even pre-tornado, it wouldn't have been very much better.  The lively parts are the young children full of life and joy in ordinary living, swimming in a plastic pool in the rain; kissing for fun in an non-exclusive, non romantic way.
Compared to the film "paperboy" this is much more fresh looking and its shot in 1997.  Harmony's method and rules to makings this film is v interesting.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gummo.
A visual film maker, its an unusual setting in America - we see mid-West small towns for what they really are.

'The film was shot in some of Nashville's poorest neighborhoods. Producer Cary Woods comments, "we're essentially seeing the kind of poverty that we're used to seeing in Third World countries when news crews are covering famines, [but] seeing that in the heart of America." 

The film's portrayal of "poor white trash" has garnered both glowing reviews and thunderous condemnations for its disturbing content and unusual style, which is simultaneously hyperrealistic and surreal.'

 Errol Morris has a similar "reality" focus, but Errol Morris is a much more polished ad man, his films are extremely well designed and researched.

The subjects they both cover are in the same global ball park arena.  Away from glossy myth of refinements and successful dreams of America - its everyday life for a lot of people.

PaperBoy ***

PaperBoy *** 2012
genre: intrique in small town Texas with murder, sex, psychological dents in everyday people

I like this movie, its very rich in all its details.  Everything fits.  Nicole Kidman is very good in this movie.  She is usually a bit cold and wooden, here, she somehow inhabits the character well.  She has a walk and a gait... all in character.
I like everything in the movie.  There is a wave of middle-lower white trash body of film work coming out.  Is America ready to tell this range of human stories coming from their world?  "Winter's Bone" etc all coming through maybe Doris Day, Woody Allen type of cushy refinements of America is finally all told we must get more grass root, the people stories.
I guess every country has a layer of "grass root" stories, it will get told when the glossier subjects are over told.  Everywhere is the same.  People want to hear something with more authenticity in it, whether its the "truth" or not, the details are also interesting.  We recognize the pop tunes, LaBelle singing, alligator gutting.  Working in a garage as newspaper office... home like relations of servant and the boss.  Something easy going and truthful, or believable.

However, overall speaking, this is story telling with a fishing net, all kinds of period details and sounds, images are quickly caught, linked together with a story line - alls well balanced explained accounted for, we are told from beginning to end, through the mouth of the servant (how would she know?  why is she so complacent?  She is not afraid of consequences as a black person in deep south in a low powered situation?  ) So the story is constructed, reasoned, and covering lots of ground it gets told with little twists of the plots.

In a lot of places, the story is not quite believable because of the construction has not been chosen carefully - for example, I don't think it makes sense that we are asked to believe the situation (the swamp) is so dangerous, and the newspaper boys are unarmed - no weapon! and they still go dig in - just for a newspaper story?

Little bit bumpy story logic in the details but overall nice movie.

Wednesday 6 February 2013

8 bit art



    http://make8bitart.com/

Django Unchained ***half



Django Unchained (2012) Poster




Django Unchained (2012) ***half

  

Tarantino's new comic book live action flick.  I always enjoy watching his vibrant quick paced flicks.
Here, the central character Django - the quickest gun in the South along side humorous, cultured, dapper German bounty hunter (a little too suave and smart to be doing such kind of job, after all, he seem to not care much about money, no family - how come  he is such a good shot, well read, fine mannered?  Though this is a charismatic character but it is a comic book type character.  I could easily imagine its styled a bit a la Peter O'Toole type - quick witted and cool.  The Django character is all tension, well played, but all on the surface - and of course, comic book characters need go no further for fear of tiring the readers/viewers.  The black actrices are all v gd looking.  The sister, just the right pinch of self restrain, it is hinted that she is interested in the German visitor.  DiCaprio played the evil plantation owner - well, he's a gd actor - but not as impressive as in his earlier roles.  Everything is beautifully stitched together, music, visuals, sounds... but still its an eye candy comic book film.  Spike Lee says he will not see it because its disrespective to his ancestor.  The subject of America's past and how they have stolen black Africans to make into slaves is too heavy a subject to be dealt with via a comic book - yes, this subject has not been dealt with - and doing it comic book style is fundamentally putting on entertainment where it is not amusing if it were your own ancestor.  And I think Spike Lee is right.  This film lacks depth and its inattentive, too quick to glossily this bitter dark cruel inhuman part of American history, and to make this part of history into entertainment is somehow, not enough.   Though i admit, i like the use of music - a smooth canvas for revisiting pop culture, beautiful sounds, warm nostalgic country songs of yester years - use of spaghetti Western fonts - visual and musical history of film/radio itself- these are smooth and slick entertainment action sequences... but this film lacks a certain humanity.  Compare to a film somewhat similar set in colonial/oppression/opportunist/women-as-play-things context - a film for example, like Fitzcarldo of Herzog - which also deals with exploitation of indigene  people to outsider/intruders/profit making opportunists there is a great difference in the orientation of the two films. Both are set in hardship contexts.  One is a comic book set in a dark past history on a very serious subject; the other is also a sort of comic book with much more depth on another part of dark history - but Herzogs hero has a dream and Tarantino's character has only been allowed to wish for reuniting with his wife.  

Both these films show visual events in lawless times, how people deal with fear and cruelty, going through a power struggle/personal-against-all-odds-dream-come-true process and when the character is allowed some luxury of existential poetry, it does make a much better movie.

Sunday 3 February 2013

8 bit art, Chris Marker NY Times





http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/movies/chris-marker-enigmatic-multimedia-artist-dies-at-91.html?_r=0


Chris Marker, Pioneer of the Essay Film, Dies at 91
By DENNIS LIM
Published: July 31, 2012
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Chris Marker, the enigmatic writer, photographer, filmmaker and multimedia artist who pioneered the flexible hybrid form known as the essay film, died on Sunday in Paris. He was 91.
Enlarge This Image

Gamma-Keystone, via Getty Images
Chris Marker, left, with Alain Resnais in 1954.
Multimedia

Critics' Picks: 'La Jetee'
Enlarge This Image

Courtesy of New Yorker Films
Hélène Chatelain in “La Jetée,” Mr. Marker’s best-known film.
His death was announced by the French Culture Ministry.

A transmedia artist long before the term was coined, Mr. Marker resisted categorization throughout his career; he once referred to “career” as “that despicable word.” His sprawling and constantly evolving body of work, which ranged from books to installations to CD-ROMs and included more than 50 films of varying length, was at once fragmentary and cohesive, united by an abiding interest in the nature of time and memory and by a strong physical and intellectual wanderlust.

Mr. Marker’s best-known film, the 1962 short “La Jetée,” about a man haunted by a childhood memory, was the basis of the 1995 Hollywood movie “12 Monkeys” starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. Whether taking the form of time-warp science fiction like “La Jetée” or archive-rich historical surveys like “A Grin Without a Cat” (1977), about the fate of the New Left after the pivotal year 1968, most of his films involve a kind of time travel.

A lifelong leftist and perennial globe-trotter, he documented almost every political hot spot of the mid- and late-20th century: the Soviet Union, China, the new state of Israel, Cuba after the revolution.

In his later works — like the installation “Silent Movie” (1995) and the feature “Level Five” (1997) — he was also an early explorer of video, digital technology and cyberspace.

Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve on July 29, 1921, Mr. Marker hid many aspects of his biography. He once claimed he was born in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, though some sources have cited his place of birth as the Parisian suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. He granted few interviews and typically refused to be photographed. Information about his survivors was not immediately available. But in his work, at least, Mr. Marker was not anonymous so much as he was playfully evasive.

His films often feature a first-person narrator, a device he once called “a sign of humility.” They abound with avatars and alter-egos, including his own cat, Guillaume-en-Egypt, which sometimes appeared, in the flesh and in cartoon form, as his surrogate.

The pseudonym Chris Marker — which originally appeared in print as “Chris. Marker” — dates from the late 1940s, when he published criticism, editorials, poetry and fiction, including a novel, “Le Coeur Net,” set in Indochina.

After his first directorial effort, “Olympia 52,” about the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games, Mr. Marker wrote the narration for the documentary “Statues Also Die” (1953), which he directed with Alain Resnais. Ostensibly about African art, the film doubled as a critique of French colonialism. It received the prestigious Prix Jean Vigo but was banned by French censors for more than 10 years because of its political content.

Mr. Marker refined his signature approach to voice-over narration, at once intimate and quizzical, in the early works “Sunday in Peking” (1956) and “Letter From Siberia” (1957). The latter film’s provocative rethinking of the relationship between word and image — one sequence replays the same shots with vastly different commentaries — prompted the critic André Bazin to use the term “an essay documented by film.”

Borrowed from the poet Henri Michaux, the opening words of “Letter From Siberia” — “I write to you from a far-off country” — could serve as Mr. Marker’s motto. He had a foreign correspondent’s drive to “capture life in the process of becoming history,” as he put it, but there was also a science-fiction strangeness to many of his travelogues.

He retained his outsider’s perspective, his taste for oddity and digression, even when shooting at home. The ambitious “Le Joli Mai” (1963) was an attempt to map the national psyche as the Algerian War drew to a close, culled from dozens of man-on-the-street interviews in Paris. The film is often called an early example of the documentary mode known as cinéma vérité. But Mr. Marker rejected the term and proposed a more modest alternative: “ciné, ma vérité” (“Cinema, my truth”).

On days off from “Le Joli Mai,” Mr. Marker embarked on a photography project that became the half-hour “La Jetée.” Composed almost entirely of still images, this recursive loop of a film was both an homage to a beloved movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” and a self-reflexive testament to cinema as a time machine.

Like many of his peers, Mr. Marker became increasingly politicized in the 1960s. In 1967, he formed a film collective called SLON (Russian for “elephant” and also an acronym for Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles, or Society for the Launch of New Works).

SLON’s documentaries include “À Bientôt, J’espère,” about a strike at a French textile factory, and “The Sixth Side of the Pentagon,” about an antiwar march on the Pentagon. One of the collective’s major initiatives was the omnibus film “Far From Vietnam,” a protest against American involvement in Vietnam, with contributions from Mr. Marker, Mr. Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, among other filmmakers.

“Sans Soleil” (1982), often acknowledged as the masterpiece among Mr. Marker’s late works, is one of his least classifiable, a free-associative mix of ethnography, philosophy and poetry. Purporting to be the footage of a fictional cinematographer accompanied by his letters to a nameless woman, the film roams from Iceland to Guinea-Bissau to Japan, a favorite destination of Mr. Marker’s since “The Koumiko Mystery,” which he shot in Tokyo during the 1964 Olympics. A bar in Tokyo’s famous Golden Gai district is named for “La Jetée” — an honor that Mr. Marker once said was “worth more to me than any number of Oscars.”

Mr. Marker also turned his attention to fellow filmmakers. He made two essays on Soviet cinema and history centered on the neglected director Alexander Medvedkin (“The Train Rolls On,” “The Last Bolshevik”), one elegy to his friend Andrei Tarkovsky (“One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich”) and a portrait of Akira Kurosawa on the set of the 1985 film “Ran” (“A.K.”).

He remained active into his 70s and 80s. His last film appears to have been a short about the history of cinema, commissioned as a trailer for the 50th anniversary of the Viennale Film Festival in October. The film is scheduled to be shown at the Locarno Film Festival on Saturday.

Mr. Marker gave one of his final interviews — in 2008 to the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles — through the virtual medium of Second Life. In response to a question about pseudonyms as masks, he said: “I’m much more pragmatic than that. I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, pronounceable in most languages, because I was very intent on traveling. No need to delve further.”



Saturday 2 February 2013

Documenta 12, Ai Weiwei, Hito Steryl

http://www.dmovies.net/documenta12/

Documenta 12, Ai WeiWei, Hito Steyerl

http://www.dmovies.net/documenta12/
documenta 12, Ai WeiWei, Hito Steyerl

Eurotrash: Jean Paul Gaultier, Antoine de Caunes



Richard Williams

original unfinished

cobbled version
Credits for "Casino Royale" with Peter Sellers

Sakamoto

Kizuna and Sakamoto