While shooting footage for the Vertigo-inspired sections of his 1983 landmark work San Soleil, Chris Marker teamed with John Chapman and Frank Simeone to create a short nonfiction piece called Junkopia (1981). Their film is a document of detritus, focusing on an area outside of San Fransisco known as the Emeryville Mudflats where age-old objects and long-lost pieces of art and other projects can be found. The various sights sit in abandonment as the natural world continues on around them, progressing with the flow of time while these pieces of history — each surely possessing their own individual histories — remain rooted in a state of solitude and stasis.
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Paul Schrader(The Canyons, Light Sleeper) |
Matt Johnson & Matthew Miller(The Dirties) |
Margarethe von Trotta(Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxemburg) |
Barbara Hammer(Nitrate Kisses, Tender Fictions) |
Thomas Vinterberg(The Hunt, The Celebration) |
2013 Canadian Screen Awards(Live Show Highlights) |
William Vega & Oscar Ruiz Navia(La Sirga) |
Le Mepris (Contempt) & Diva(Video Essay) |
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Latest Posts
Video collection: highlights from the “Labour In A Single Shot” project
“Sometimes I see movies or watch TV, and they never show people working. Do you know why?” – Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, 1982)
Today, a treasure trove. The video embedded above (Hadas Emma Kedar | Control Room | Tel Aviv | 2012) — and those collected below — are particularly exceptional examples of the micro-documentary works created for Labour In A Single Shot, an ongoing project started in 2011 by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki that initiates the production of such films through workshops around the world.
In their words (from the official website’s ‘Concept’ page, which you should read), “the task of the workshops is to produce videos of 1 to 2 minutes, framed in a single shot. The camera might be static, panning or travelling – only cuts are not allowed”, and this is done to investigate “‘labour’: paid and unpaid, material and immaterial, rich in tradition or altogether new”.
These short-form works of observational cinema possess a stunning clarity of vision, drawing upon the distinct presence of process and repetition in a recordable reality strewn with all the myriad forms of work that one can discover.
Ignacio Masllorens | Soap Packaging | Buenos Aires | 2013
For a wider master-shot view of the same, see part 2.
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Piyush K Kashyap | Ants | Bangalore | 2012
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Andrew Sala | Backstage | Buenos Aires | 2013
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Ignacio Masllorens | Museum Guard | Buenos Aires | 2013
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Antje Freitag | Pet Crematorium | Berlin | 2012
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Paul Schrader is influenced by Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats
Back in April, we brought Paul Schrader to Toronto and sat down with him for an extended interview. In the clip embedded above, Paul talks about the influence of French Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan‘s Heartbeats on his upcoming film The Canyons. Schrader brought up Dolan several times over the course of his stay — needless to say he’s a fan.
“There is no style anymore. This guy from Montreal, this young kid, Xavier Dolan had made this film, Heartbeats. I liked the film and I looked at it again, and I realized, “He’s going from scene to scene, changing his style based on the scene. A Godard-ian thing, now he’s doing a Hollywood thing, now he’s doing kind of a Bertolucci thing … He keeps changing, and he doesn’t really care if one scene doesn’t match the scene before it. And I said, there’s nothing wrong with that, that’s where we are, that’s the new kind of style.”
Our own in-depth interview with Xavier Dolan will be released in an upcoming issue of The Seventh Art, and you can watch the entirety of our 80-minute Paul Schrader interview HERE.
What do you think? Is the death of consistency the new style? Will you check out The Canyons?
Issue 13 Now Available! Paul Schrader, Margarethe von Trotta, Barbara Hammer and Matt Johnson & Matthew Miller (The Dirties)
We are finally able to announce our jam-packed 13th issue! It’s another all interview issue, kicking off with the last of our Toronto International Film Festival conversations: a discussion with New German Cinema legend Margarethe von Trotta about her latest film, Hannah Arendt.
Continuing on the path of significant women directors, we were thrilled to talk to pioneering experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer about her films, performance pieces and autobiographical book, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life.
On the other end of the spectrum, we’re very excited for the first feature from Canadian director Matt Johnson: The Dirties. The film has won major prizes at Slamdance and the Sarasota Film Festival, while also acquiring distribution from Phase 4 Films. We had a really fun and candid conversation with Matt and the film’s producer, Matthew Miller, discussing faux documentaries, the Canadian film industry and Johnson’s pioneering web series, Nirvana, the Band: The Show.
Finally, we were extremely fortunate to be able to invite legendary American writer and director, Paul Schrader, to come to Toronto, discuss his work, and present a clip of his new film, The Canyons, for our Live Directors Series. We were able to talk to him about his entire career, hearing classic stories and gaining insight into the much anticipated Canyons.
Video essay: a fragmented multi-frame examination of Claire Denis’ 2004 film L’Intrus (The Intruder)
Coming from an auteurist symposium in a 2009 issue of the invaluable online journal Reverse Shot, this video essay (constructed by Kevin B. Lee) takes to assessing Claire Denis’ enigmatic 2004 work L’Intrus (The Intruder) in a manner befitting the fragmented and elliptical nature of the movie. Lee’s approach of a loosely abstracted interpretation rhymes nicely with the densely subjective aesthetic that Denis explores so masterfully in the film.
And as a bit of complimentary content, here are some related thoughts from the always perceptive Ignatiy Vishnevetsky:
“The movie isn’t structured along the lines through which we usually approach memory and experience. It passes over the ‘conscious’ story, the way we think about our experiences, instead presenting a sequence of events and memories in the way we experience them. And it’s not concerned with who is experiencing what or why, or the usual delineations of character and time. It shows how a moment exists before we understand that it has occurred.” – Sounds, Images
