Excerpt from Examined Life, 2008. (imdb)
Slavoj Zizek investigates the surprising ethical implications of charitable giving.
Slavoj Žižek on CBC radio
Category: Uncategorized
500
499 – Rirkrit Tiravanija
“THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY IS NUMBERED”
Rirkrit Tiravanija (Thai: ฤกษ์ฤทธิ์ ตีระวนิช, pronunciation: [rɯk-rit tira-wanit] or Tea-rah-vah-nit) is a contemporary artist residing in New York City, Berlin, and Chiang Mai. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element in his work. (wiki)
Tiravanija’s second feature film, Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours was released in 2011. The documentary features a retired farmer that lives in a tranquil village in Chiang Mai, far from the recent political turmoil in Bangkok. At a moment when many people are demanding equality, opportunity, and democracy, we see in Lung Neaw an existence marked by compassion for his environment and his fellow villagers. The film offers a contemplative look at one man’s humble dialogue with his surroundings.
“It is not what you see that is important but what takes place between people.”
495
491
“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.”
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”
0471 – Coraline (2009)
spacetime coordinates: 2000’s Ashland, Oregon
Coraline is a 2009 American 3D stop-motion dark fantasy horror film based on Neil Gaiman‘s 2002 novel of the same name. It was the first feature film produced by Laika and distributed by Focus Features. The film depicts an adventurous girl finding an idealized parallel world behind a secret door in her new home, unaware that the alternate world contains a dark and sinister secret. Written and directed by Henry Selick, the film was made with Gaiman’s approval and co-operation.
Coraline was staged in a 140,000-square-foot (13,000 m2) warehouse in Hillsboro, Oregon. The stage was divided into 50 lots, which played host to nearly 150 sets. Among the sets were three miniature Victorian mansions, a 42-foot (12.8 m) apple orchard, and a model of Ashland, Oregon, including tiny details such as banners for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. More than 28 animators worked at a time on rehearsing or shooting scenes, producing 90–100 seconds of finished animation each week. To add the stereoscopy for the 3D release, the animators shot each frame from two slightly apart camera positions.
Every object on screen was made for the film. The crew used three 3D printing systems from Objet in the development and production of the film. Thousands of high-quality 3D models, ranging from facial expressions to doorknobs, were printed in 3D using the Polyjet matrix systems, which enable the fast transformation of CAD (computer-aided design) drawings into high-quality 3D models. The puppets had separate parts for the upper and lower parts of the head that could be exchanged for different facial expressions. The characters of Coraline could potentially exhibit over 208,000 facial expressions. Computer artists composited separately-shot elements together, or added elements of their own which had to look handcrafted instead of computer-generated – for instance, the flames were done with traditional animation and painted digitally, and the fog was dry ice.
At its peak, the film involved the efforts of 450 people, including from 30 to 35 animators and digital designers in the Digital Design Group (DDG) directed by Dan Casey and more than 250 technicians and designers. One crew member, Althea Crome, was hired specifically to knit miniature sweaters and other clothing for the puppet characters, sometimes using knitting needles as thin as human hair. The clothes would also simulate wear using paint and a file. Several students from The Art Institute of Portland were also involved in making the film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coraline_(film)
TimeSpace Warps 