UbuWeb | Summer 2008
UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission: They rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; they scan as many old books as they can get our hands on.
“The pioneers of concrete poetry could only dream of the now-standard tools used to make language move and morph, stream and scream, distributed worldwide instantaneously at little cost.” –UbuWeb’s Editors
Essentially a gift economy, poetry is the perfect space to practice utopian politics. Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication considerations, information can literally “be free”: on UbuWeb, we give it away and have been doing so since 1996. We publish in full color for pennies. We receive submissions Monday morning and publish them Monday afternoon. UbuWeb’s work never goes “out of print.” UbuWeb is a never-ending work in progress: many hands are continually building it on many platforms. –UbuWeb’s Editors
Dziga Vertov’s “Man With A Movie Camera” (1929)
Vertov said that this silent, experimental film was “directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.”
the intro states:
The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC TRANSMISSION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCRIPT
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
“Control” is released in U.S.
the Ian Curtis (of the band Joy Division) biopic is finally released outside the UK
Dossier Journal, Issue I
Dossier is a bi-annual arts and culture journal incorporating fashion, photography, creative writing, art, music and culinary pursuits. Inspired by the French word for file, Dossier has no themes, features or specific guidelines. Dossier is independently published and owned.
www.dossierjournal.com
also, be sure to check out Skye Parrott’s photography online at http://www.skyeparrott.com/. Skye began her career in Paris before becoming a founding editor and the Creative Director at Dossier.
Werner Herzog’s “Stroszek” (1977)
In a Herzog film we have to keep checking what we are hearing against what we’re seeing. They are seldom the same things, but forcing us to reconcile contradictions is one of the ways in which he works. The film is described by Mr. Herzog as a ballad, which is probably as good a way as any to categorize it initially.
“Bruno S. stars as an ex-mental patient who dreams of the so-called promised land of America. He aligns himself with like-minded prostitute Eva Mattes and elderly, near-senile Clemens Scheitz. Upon their arrival in Wisconsin, the three misfits find that they’re just as trapped in Dairy Country as they’d been in Germany–if not more so.”
Herzog’s “Minnesota Declaration” -
Truth and fact in documentary cinema “LESSONS OF DARKNESS”.
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.”
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can´t legislate stupidity.”
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species – including man – crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999
more of his personal statements can be found here
Bob Dylan film released on DVD
“Cate Blanchet’s performance is a wonder, and not simply because, as Jude Quinn, she inhabits the twitchy, amphetamine-fired Dylan of 1965-66 with unnerving accuracy. Casting a woman in this role reveals a dimension to the acerbic Dylan of this era that has rarely been noted. Even as she perfectly mimics every jitter, sneer, and caustic put-down, Blanchett’s translucent skin, delicate fingers, slight build, and pleading eyes all suggest the previously invisible vulnerability and fear that fueled Dylan’s lacerating anger. It’s hard to imagine that any male actor, or any less-gifted female actor for that matter, could have lent such rich texture to the role.” –Anthony DeCurtis, 6 Characters in Search of an Artist
leave a comment