Archiv für den Monat Juni 2012

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Péter Forgács: „Wittgenstein Tractatus“, Hungary, colour, 32 min.

 

Tattooed Dolphins, 19 January 2007 

 
Author: tedg (tedg@FilmsFolded.com) from Virginia Beach

 

Regular readers ask about what writers about film I like. It isn’t any of those French guys; in fact my history starts with Harriot and goes through Wittgenstein, then to theorists in logical narrative. (No, not Peirce.) 

Wittgenstein is a fascinating guy to study, in part because his ideas are clean, very clean. But more important was that over time he abandoned every one of them, replacing them with something more subtle, elegant and hard to reach. The ideas in „Tractus“ were his earliest and while some nice phrases can be extracted for posters, if they are worth reading at all, its worth reading the repudiation of them.

Still, anything that draws from even the first Wittgenstein trumps any silliness you will find in „What the bleep,“ „Tao of Steve,“ or „Waking Life.“

This is a very ambitious film. It has these components: text of Wittgenstein phrases from the Tractus and private statements about his own life and psyche, with that same text spoken in different time. It shows „found“ home movie segments (though some are apparently faked). These are silent of course but have some appropriate sound effects added. The era of the images varies quite a bit, most from the 50s it seems. Tractus is from about 1919. There is an effective score as well.

So we have several things in parallel, what I call „folded.“ We are given this man’s life. He was profoundly bipolar, what we now call bipolar and some of his philosophical (and architectural!) musings were specifically to counter suicide (like his brothers). We are given some very strong ideas from Tractus, which deals with the distance among the three concepts: „picture,“ „world,“ and „language.“ To use images from the world in apparently random ways (except the editing rhythm) and written and spoken language to illustrate these ideas is a brilliant notion.

We have the distance between the ideas, the distance between each of the images, and the distance among the components of what we see: its first, second and third meanings. One phrase: „everything you see could be otherwise,“ permeates. 

I saw this together with „Cremaster 2“ and this for its flaws was vastly superior. It floats above meaning but has meaning. It shows something that must be incomprehensible but must also be. One registration: all the home movies are of Hungarians. Wittgenstein was Austrian; Vienna and Budapest were cities of the same empire until Tractus and afterward Hungary began a long slide toward internalism.

So forgive the filmmaker for not getting deeper into the ideas. What he’s done is good enough to be head and shoulders above other „idea“ movies.

Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.

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Vision and Communism: The Films of Aleksandr Medvedkin and Chris Marker at „The Film Studies Center, Chicago“ (Review Article)

Vision and Communism: The Films of Aleksandr Medvedkin and Chris Marker at „The Film Studies Center, Chicago“ (Review Article)

Medvedkin and Marker met at the Leipzig Film Festival in 1967. Marker was drawn to the Russian director after he came across Medvedkin’s Happiness (Schast’e, 1934). Four years later, in 1971, Medvedkin came to Paris. He helped Marker and his collaborators organize a release of Happiness in France. Projections of the film were accompanied by Marker’s documentary The Train Rolls (Train en marche, 1971), which introduced Medvedkin’sHappiness, and also featured an interview with the Russian director. The Train Rolls begins with a montage sequence showing the impact of the Russian Revolution on film and other arts, after which Marker describes the organization of the film train and the crew’s activities in addressing social problems. The notion of film as fact, which is implicit in the notion that documentary filmmaking can provide proof of fact that will lead to social change, is emphasized by Marker’s direct, hand-held footage of Medvedkin (1). Marker’s film links the two men formally through choices that consciously acknowledge the filmmaking process and also intimately, on a personal and collaborative level. Unfortunately both The Train Rolls and The Last Bolshevik (Le Tombeau d’Alexandre, 1992), Marker’s ode to his departed friend, are noticeably absent from the Vision and Communism film series. While these films would have further informed viewers, their exclusion compels spectators to generate their own links between the films and filmmakers.

 

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Dsiga Wertow im LURU-Kino am Montag, 25.06. mit THOMAS TODE

Anlässlich des F/STOP Leipzig gibt es im LuRu-Kino filmische Arbeiten des sowjetischen, avantgardistischen Filmkünstlers Dsiga Wertow zu sehen |
19:00 Uhr
Vortrag mit Filmbeispielen von Thomas Tode

Weiteres Film-Programm:
‚“Histories of Now“ | Kurzfilmreihe | Dienstag, 26.6. | 19:00 Uhr
Kuratiert und moderiert von Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Animierte Dokumentarfilme – Der subjektive Blick | Kurzfilmreihe | Samstag, 30.6. | 20:00 Uhr
Kuratiert und moderiert von Annegret Richter

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A bientot, j’espere (Chris Marker et Mario Marret, 1967-68)

Les Révoltés de la Rhodia”
On February 25, 1967, three thousand workers in Besançon occupied the Rhodiaceta textile factory owned by Rhône-Poulenc, then one of the largest French corporations, and declared a strike that lasted over a month.8 This was the first facto- ry occupation in France since 1936

Tracing the historical conjunctions and disjunctions that led to the genesis of the group, this essay will focus on the first two films produced through the common labor of those previously kept separate: À bientôt j’espère (1967–68), a documentary on the struggles at Rhodiaceta by Chris Marker, Mario Marret, and SLON; and Classe de lutte (1968), the Medvedkin Group’s first collective film. As a means of coming to terms with the specificity of the Medvedkin Group’s cinematic practice, this essay will end with a discussion of Jean-Luc Godard’s con- temporaneous work in the Groupe Dziga Vertov, with its parallel but ultimately irreconcilable claims for self-reflexivity, collectivity, and class consciousness.

In the recent Winter 2012 issue of October, Trevor Stark has published an impressive essay entitled “‘Cinema in the Hands of the People’”: Chris Marker, the Medvedkine Group, and the Potential of Militant Film.” Thankfully not put behind a pay wall, the article is available for download from mitpressjournals.org.

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”: Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group, and the Potential of Militant Film*

here the text
–> http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00083

below you can see
Happiness (Alexander Medvedkin, 1934)

In 1961, at a film festival in Brussels, Marker saw Medvedkin’s Happiness (Schastye; 1935), and described it as “a superb film as beautiful as Eisenstein’s, as popular as Mussorgsky’s music, deeply moving. . . . Where was the author? Dead? Alive?”

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Happiness (Alexander Medvedkin, 1934)

 

Cinema in the Hands of the People”: Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group, and the Potential of Militant Film

In 1961, at a film festival in Brussels, Marker saw Medvedkin’s Happiness (Schastye; 1935), and described it as “a superb film as beautiful as Eisenstein’s, as popular as Mussorgsky’s music, deeply moving. . . . Where was the author? Dead? Alive?”30 Struck by this comedy on the difficult adjustment of an incompetent yet sympathetic peasant to his new life as a collective farmer, a film whose very emphasis on satire seemed to exceed the bounds of Socialist Realism, Marker searched mostly in vain for any information on Medvedkin. In his research, he eventually came across Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (1960) by Jay Leyda, an American filmmaker and historian who had studied with Eisenstein in the 1930s.31 Leyda’s book, in under two pages, provided one of the only English- language accounts of Medvedkin’s kino-poezd, or ciné-train, which consisted of three train carriages transformed into a film-production studio complete with projection room and living quarters.32 Leyda concisely describes the “several sided task” of Medvedkin’s “self-contained film studio” as they traveled the Soviet Union in 1932 under the orders of the Central Committee with the aim of making agitational films for and with local populations:

In addition to making instructional films to help local problems, for example, overcoming winter condi- tions to speed up freight shipments, the film crew was able to produce crit- ical films on local conditions (bureau- cracy, inefficiency, nepotism, etc.) that they or the local political workers judged to require their ungentle attention. The prime audience for these, as for the instructional films, was the local one, who would greet these barbed film vaudevilles with wel- come laughs and blushes.33
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The Orchestra (1990) by Zbigniew Rybczynski

http://vimeo.com/22386235

Zbig Rybczynski (pronounced Rib-CHIN-ski) was born in Poland in 1949 attended Lodz Film School.

Zbig is a pioneer of the High Definition television technology, and an innovator and experimentator in the technical field. He holds several US patents, most of them for innovative ideas in film and video making, including the „Zbig“ software for matting.

Zbig also has a distinguished academic career. He has had teaching assignments as an instructor at the Lodz Film School, Poland (cinematography), at the Columbia University in New York (electronic filmmaking) and as a professor of experimental film at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. At the present time Zbig holds a position of a visiting professor at Joshibi University of Art and Design in Tokyo, Japan.

Currently Zbig is involved in the development of a new technology for live image compositing and he is pursuing his filmmaking career. Since December 2007, along with the renowned Israeli writer and journalist Eli Barbur, Zbig has been working on a two-hour film The Short History of White People (working title). The film portrays the fate of the Jewish people throughout the history of European civilization.

–> extended Bio and Filmography: http://www.zbigvision.com/ZbigLongBio.html


„Ist Risikobereitschaft wichtig für Ihre Arbeit?
Das mag vielleicht komisch klingen, aber ich weiß, wie man einen guten, erfolgreichen Film dreht, der in Cannes gewinnt. Doch das interessiert mich nicht. Mich reizen die Projekte, bei denen ich nicht weiß, wohin sie mich führen – wenn man das Drehbuch noch bei den Dreharbeiten umschreiben kann.“

zur Ausstellung „The State of Image“:

http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$7847

Die Ausstellung »The State of Image. Die Medienpioniere Zbigniew Rybczyński und Gábor Bódy« stellt mit Zbigniew Rybczyński (*1949) und Gábor Bódy (1946-1985) zwei Medienpioniere aus Polen und Ungarn vor, die sich in der Tradition der ersten europäischen Avantgarde entwickelten. Obgleich sich beide den Medientechnologien ab den frühen 1970er-Jahren offensiv angenommen haben, sind ihre Gesten sehr verschieden.
»Im vergangenen Jahrhundert haben wir uns an den Gedanken gewöhnt, dass die erste Techno-Avantgarde der Künste aus dem Westen Europas und aus Nordamerika stammt. Dieser Gedanke ist falsch. Nahezu alle Grundlagen für die Entwicklung elektronischer Bild- und Tonwelten sind im Osten entdeckt und erfunden worden.«(Siegfried Zielinski)

Zu Gast in Karlsruhe | Zbigniew Rybczyński:
http://bit.ly/KRGgdy

Im Rahmen der Ausstellung „The State of Image. Die Medienpioniere Zbigniew Rybczyński und Gábor Bódy“, die noch bis 19.08.2012 im ZKM zu sehen ist, findet diesen Samstag ein interessanter Filmabend im ZKM statt.

FILZ-Plakat:
FILZ – Filminitiative Leipzig