Trawling the Visual Wreckage: Abridged
Following our inaugural event at Manchester’s An Outlet, we were invited by Abandon Normal Devices to pitch for their Gleaners set of commissions working with the North West Film Archives. Despite being short-listed we didn’t make the final cut but if you click on the eye above, you can see a 6 minute version of the 40 minute film we presented at Trawling the Visual Wreckage.
Chapter One: Manchester
Great cinematography + a great script x by one’s love for a city = Woody Allen’s Manhattan.
William Klein
William Klein, ‘About twenty photographs, a hundred non-photographs, a few contact sheets, a few seconds’. And all you really need to know…
Christopher Doyle
2046-005
Though born in Australia, Christopher Doyle has made his mark by photographing Asian films, especially the work of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai. His work, particularly the films Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love and 2046, is lauded for it’s vivid use of highly saturated colour. Doyle is considered one of the most important architects of Asian New Wave cinema.
In the late 1970s, he went to Taiwan from Hong Kong and then settled in Taipei. He worked as an oil driller in India, a cow herder in Israel, and a doctor of Chinese medicine in Thailand. In 1978, he worked as a photographer for the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre and Zuni Icosahedron. In 1981, he was cinematographer for That Day, On the Beach directed by Edward Yang. For that film, Doyle won the Best Cinematography Award in the 1983 Asia-Pacific Film Festival. He now lives in Hong Kong.
Today’s film clips are from two of the most famous Wong Kar-Wai films Doyle has worked on, firstly In the Mood for Love and, since that won’t be enough for your jaded eyeballs, 2046. Enjoy.
Edward Burtynsky
This week, academics having to point out to the International Energy Agency that they keep lying about there being plenty of oil left reminded me of Edward Burtynsky’s Oil project. You can see a short presentation of this work courtesy of TED, here.
In 2005 Burtynsky won the TED prize. His acceptance speech, here, puts his wrok into context andshows more stunning images.
Michelangelo Antonioni
Last year a couple of other photographers and I discussed a project where we’d each choose our favourite film director and shoot a series of images in their style. As is usual with these things the shooting part is yet to happen, but perhaps that’s just as well, as from the myriad directors we could [...]
Les Astronautes, 1959
If the Apollo astronauts had flown to the moon via Paris in paper spaceships, this is how it might have looked. Walerian Borowczyk’s cut-out 12 minute short co-directed by Chris Marker almost beat the Americans to the moon by a decade. Instead, our ingenious protagonist’s mission is interrupted by the sight of a scantily-dressed young woman and a collision with a larger spaceship.
Diane Arbus
In a working life less than a decade Diane Arbus effected a profound reconsideration of photography’s intentions. Her work turned away from the central concerns of the preceding generation. She valued psychological above formal precision, private above social realities, the permanent and the prototypical above the ephemeral and the accidental, and courage above subtlety. These [...]
Francis Bacon
Today’s film is the 1985 Southbank Show on the then ‘world’s greatest living painter’. Including some nice archive footage, a visit to Bacon’s amazing Reece Mews studio and some amusingly belittling comments on Rothko and Pollock, the film follows Bacon to his common haunts of pubs, bars and casinos and is conducted in suitably inebriated style. Bacon’s desire was to live in the moment, be optimistic and to ‘live life in a state of voluptuousness’, Amen to all that.
The Origins of Modern Power …
… as described by Douglas Rushkoff in a series of videos promoting Life Inc. Includes great examples of conveying complex information through animated stills and graphics. See this clip here.
Stephen Shore
Along with Shore’s beautiful images, he has some interesting things to say about the apparent compression of time within the photograph and the mediums ability to manifest ‘visual thinking’.
Chris Marker’s La Jetée
When a great script and story collide with great pictures, you get Chris Marker’s La Jetée.
