“In 1925,in ‘The Artist Now’, Kracauer notes that it is artists’task to represent the emptied world, the external life that appears, and that has no face and no content. Film,as thin strips of light and shadow play, is the perfect rendition of this surface of reality. It peels off the substance-less surface. It represents ‘the world of appearance’, and especially in terms of glamour and distraction. For Kracauer, the hope is that such stark and excessive representation may make the surface so shiny, so polished, that it flips into something else, so shiny that it is made available for reflection. But this is a gamble.”
Category: quotes
0479 – Human Flow (2017)
Human Flow is a 2017 German documentary film co-produced and directed by Ai Weiwei about the current global refugee crisis. Ai Weiwei also comes from a past of displacement; his entire family was exiled to an isolate village of Xinjiang in the Gobi desert due to his parents being writers in the midst of the Cultural Revolution in China.
Like Human Flow, Ai has created similar art installations such as the “Law of the Journey” that features a 200 foot inflatable boat carrying 258 refugee figures, “Laundromat” where he filled a New York City gallery with discarded clothing and personal notes left by refugees in a camp in Idomeni Greece, and the recreation of the captured image of Aylan Kurdi, the young Syrian who drowned off the coast of Turkey.
474 – Finding Vivian Maier (2013)
spacetime coordinates: 20th century // 2000/10’s Chicago, the Alpine village of Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur > street scenes in Chicago and New York during the 1950s and 1960s
Finding Vivian Maier is a 2013 American documentary film about the photographer Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) written, directed, and produced by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, and executive produced by Jeff Garlin.
July 1957. Chicago Suburb, IL
Undated, Chicago
Undated, New York, NY
Maier was a French-American woman who worked most of her life as a nanny and housekeeper to a multitude of Chicago families. She carried a camera everywhere she went, but Maier’s photographic legacy was largely unknown during her lifetime. The film documents how Maloof discovered her work and, after her death, uncovered her life through interviews with people who knew her. Maloof had purchased a box of photo negatives at a 2007 Chicago auction, then scanned the images and put them on the Internet. News articles began to come out about Maier and a Kickstarter campaign for the documentary was soon underway.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2714900/
“the poor are too poor to die”
0473 – Borgman (2013)
spacetime coordinates: 2010’s Netherlands
“and they descended upon the earth to strengthen their ranks”
Borgman is a 2013 Dutch psychological thriller drama film directed by Alex van Warmerdam.
KINÓWKI.pl
A vagrant enters the lives of an upper-class family, turning their lives into a psychological nightmare in the process. Although never stated in the film, the behavior of Borgman resembles that of an “alp“, a nightmare demon from German folklore.
0464 – Altered Carbon (TV Series 2018– )
spacetime coordinates: Bay City, year 2384 // “The Protectorate”
Altered Carbon is an American science fiction television series created by Laeta Kalogridis and based on the 2002 novel of the same title by English author Richard K. Morgan.
In the future, a person’s memories have been decanted into “cortical stacks”, storage devices of alien design which have been reverse engineered, duplicated en masse, and surgically inserted into the vertebrae at the back of the neck. Physical bodies are called “sleeves,” disposable vessels that can accept any “stack”. Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman), a political operative with mercenary skills, wakes up 250 years after his sleeve is terminated, and he is given the choice to either spend the rest of time in prison for his crimes, or to help solve the murder of one of the wealthiest men in the settled worlds (James Purefoy).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2261227/
“When everyone lies, telling the truth isn’t just rebellion.
It’s an act of revolution. So think carefully when you speak it,
because the truth is a weapon.”
0457 – The Square (2017)
spacetime coordinates: 2010’s Stockholm
“The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.”
The Square is a 2017 Swedish satirical drama film written and directed by Ruben Östlund, and starring Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West and Terry Notary. The film is about publicity surrounding an art installation, and was partly inspired by an installation Östlund and producer Kalle Boman had made.
(development) Originally with the performance artist who entertains the affluent patrons, Östlund was considering modelling the character after G.G. Allin, but deciding that that would be too “extreme”, he fell back on his interest in animal imitations. In crafting the scene, his concept was: “this internationally recognized artist is pretending to be a wild beast. What happens when he enters a room full of people in tuxedos?” The scene was inspired by a real incident with the artist Oleg Kulik, who performs as a dog and had attacked people at a notorious event in Stockholm. Other artists parodied in the film include Julian Schnabel, Robert Smithson and Carl Hammoud.
Oleg Kulik “Reservoir Dog” Zurich 1995
0455
spacetime coordinates: 19th-century England, Yorkshire > the Amazon and its tributaries > the Andes of Peru and Ecuador
Richard Spruce and the Trials of Victorian Bryology
“Pushing against its scientific reputation as downright boring, moss in particular served to create some botanical, aesthetic sense of a setting that allowed for illicit sexual encounters and for primal yearnings. The reasons for this strange dual identity of bryophytes as both mundane and as primal are relatively clear: realistically, moss provided a soft bed for sexual romps that had to take place outside of stuffy Victorian homes. Serving, perhaps predictably, as a slang term for pubic hair, moss was understood to be consistently moist and jewel-like, glittering like emerald colonies under light. (…) Although tropes of sexual encounters occurring in gardens and forests far predated the nineteenth century, both realistically and literarily, these hidden moss grottoes conjured up an image of something semi-religious, some secret refuge from the trials of urban — and overwhelming imperial tropical — life.”
TimeSpace Warps 