Invisible Cinema

KITTYPIE by Jennifer MacMillan and Sound by Alex Zhort (2007) 4 min.

Meow . . . I'd be honored if you viewed my new painted super 8 to video, KITTYPIE!

Thanks to Alex Zhort, Courtney Hoskins, Tim Reardon, & Nisi Jacobs!

A super 8 film to video, including footage that has been painted, bleached, and then composited in Final Cut Pro, this is a cinema-poem of and for my cat, Camille. Is this the animal merging with the divine? Sound by Alex Zhort . . . turn up the volume!

Avant-Gardening, Monday, August 27

My video, The Garden Dissolves into Air, will be included in the upcoming Film-Maker's Coop program:  Avant-Gardening: Post-Modern Representations of Nature on Film curated by Sandra Racek!  Stop by & say hello & see it on the big screen at the Collective for Loving Cinema.  :)

Avant-Gardening: Post-Modern Representations of Nature on Film, Monday, August 27, at Collective: Unconscious, 7:30 p.m.

Including film/video by: Marie Menken, Jeroen Eisinga, Mark Street, Lynne Sachs, Kiki Allgeier, Flavia Souza, and jmac

Collective: Unconscious
279 Church Street, New York
Tel. 212-254-5277

"Avant-Gardening is an installment of the collaborative monthly program Jewels and Gems sponsored by the FMC and Collective: Unconscious. This show is about relating post-modern attitudes toward the environment and a sense of place from the absurd to the sublime. The representation of nature and landscape through out these films is reflective of the attitudes that have manifest in contemporary society and inform the actions or inactions humans take toward nature. Integral to how we treat our environment are our attitudes toward it. Does the subjective mind delight in physical space in nature? Is a sense of place valuable? Or does apathy let it fall into neglect? Just as 19^th Century painter’s attempted to harness the powerful wonder of nature on canvas, many post-modern avant-garde film-makers, who make some of the most evocative and brilliant representations, attempt to capture nature like moths in a jar." - S.R.

You

"When I say the word, you, I mean a hundred universes."

-Rumi

Bergman & Antonioni- a series of questions

I've enjoyed reading your essays, comments, and personal diaries on Bergman and Antonioni.  I finally see how so many of you examine a film like a scientist, a researcher with the microscope and the telescope . . . and I'm impressed. 

Antonioni and Bergman have deeply influenced me, but I have not seen their films in years.  More than once I've insisted that the cinema of the great international auteurs is a part of contemporary experimental cinema, and I'm baffled to hear that people think Bergman and Antonioni are nowhere to be found.  How can I prove their present existence to you when my only evidence is my own formerly wounded, anguished, damned soul, resuscitated by cinema?   

In order to refine my thoughts a bit more, I've derived a series of queries to address Bergman and Antonioni as part of the expansive fluid consciousness of cinema that flows right up to now.  The following list includes a set of honest, perhaps naive questions addressing the nature of poetic cinema . . . the avant-garde . . . or if I'm being really honest . . . my cinema:

• What is the difference between a poem and a film?

• Is the impulse to make a film the same as the impulse to read a poem?

• Is the impulse to make a film the same as the impulse to watch a film?

• Is it possible for an entire discussion to be conveyed in one glance?

• If you had to condense the essence of an Antonioni film into 3 minutes without any of his original footage, what would the film look like?

• When you think of Antonioni and Bergman, what are the first two images that come to mind?

• Which type of image do you remember more vividly: the stare of a beautiful actress or a brilliant white light?

• Is the motion of the trees in the wind one possible answer to any philosophical question?

• What compelled you to see the works of Antonioni and Bergman?

• How do you imagine the films of Antonioni and Bergman have influenced you on a sub-conscious level?  Be specific.  :)

• 2 part question:
  Do you think that a film like L'eclisse can only reappear in present cinema as a 90 min. to 2 hour plus format?  If so, what aspects of this film would you like to see reinvented in this format?

• If Rimbaud made a film in NYC right now, what would it look like?

• If cinema ceased to exist, which part of the experience of seeing a film would you miss the most?

• Did you see the films of Antonioni and Bergman in a movie theater?

• What do the most lowly amateur video artists and the greatest of the international auteurs have in common?

• Is it possible that what lives on most fervently since the invention of cinema is the original impulse to participate in it?

Meeting of the "J"s

Hello!  I hope that you are having a nice summer.  It's been awhile, I know . . .

I still am on vacay from blogging, but do you know what is so difficult about this?  The most difficult thing is seeing cinema writing without me in it . . . Several of you bloggers have been so generous, so kind in ways that I have been unable to reciprocate, so so so good to me, but it is not the same.  It is not the same as my writing.  It calls to me.  You know, the way vampires go out at night and hunt?  It's kind of like that . . .

(I'm not like this all the time, I promise . . .)

Anyway, once in awhile a film critic comes along and simply writes it for me!  Like this.

Thanks, J . . . I love it . . . (minus that first paragraph) . . . love it!