Here’s a repost of a little Christmas film I made last year.

MATURE CONTENT AND LANGUAGE:

I got a nice surprise submission to my Vimeo Candlelight Stories Short Film group this week.  It’s a fascinating documentary about one famous actor’s experiences during the turmoil of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

John Cromwell, the son of actor James Cromwell, directed this short film with Joshua Bell. It’s about his father’s experience with members of the Black Panther Party civil rights organization in 1968. It’s a fascinating short documentary look at someone who finds himself in an unfamiliar world just trying to lend a decent helping hand. James Cromwell has been involved with the defense of the Black Panthers and other human rights causes for decades.  I like the film’s professional quality and easy capturing of the sixties look.  It presents its important and dramatic subject matter with a good dose of rather charming humor.

Here’s an article and interview with the director and his father.

Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film posted a film by Bill Mousoulis called The Experimenting Angel. I liked it. So I’ve posted another of Mousoulis’ films. It features Jennifer Levy who returns from a long absence to Australia and feels dislocated while visiting a city. She wonders why the people seem so ‘deflated’ as they wander through various public/corporate spaces like malls. The film captures something increasingly common worldwide which is that quiet, blank, but seemingly normal behavior encouraged by any structure designed and erected with a corporate idea behind it. We all know how we are expected to behave when we walk past a row of Gaps, Starbucks, Banana Republics and Wetzle’s Pretzels. We obey. We perform the routine and go about our business making sure that we are perceived as correctly normal. We are guests in someone else’s house, even in our public spaces. We behave like new guests, ingratiating ourselves to the dome camera in the ceiling.  The cell phone is the absolute symbol of complete obeisance to the corporate superstructure looming above us.  We are told to engage in meaningless chatter while we walk, drive, breathe, eat, date, watch movies, run, bike, and work.  We are told to do this until it seems like normal and seems to make perfect sense.  It is as logical as being told to drop a penny on the ground every third step for every day of your life.  Steve Jobs tells you to leave him a penny on the ground every third step of every day of your life… and you damn well do it.  You know how many times Steve Jobs uses a cell phone during an average day?  None.  Why?  Because he’s much smarter than you are.

Director Robert Rodriquez shows how he put several sequences together for his low-budget first feature, El Mariachi. His solutions for working with a single camera and extremely limited resources are ingenious. His consistent recommendation to young low-budget filmmakers is to simply refuse to spend any money on anything. After watching this film it becomes very apparent that the only thing really preventing people from making films is a simple lack of ability.

For further study, Mubi.com has nice in-depth article called 30 Minute Film School that covers all the shot types and lighting setups one needs in order to make a narrative film.

Here’s a fascinating continuation of the 10-minute film school in which Rodriguez shows how he filmed a complex shootout for Desperado with Antonio Banderas by using a video camera to pre-plan the entire sequence.

Rachel Tejada shot and edited this film about independent and underground film in China. It was produced by dGenerate Films.  It’s in six short parts and covers the basics of independent film festivals and efforts to make films that will somehow survive the oversight of the repressive government.  I post this out of a measured interest, but I cannot overlook the depressingly passive sadness of everyone who so much as glances into the camera.  They consistently refer to themselves as independent filmmakers or underground filmmakers.  Underground they may be out of necessity, but they are most certainly not independent.  They are comfortably passive and have an absolute zero level of confrontation or rebellion in them.

I cannot muster significant respect for billions of people who want to express themselves and flourish but do not ever make the decision to pick up their totalitarian government leaders and drown them in the sea.  You can talk to me until you are blue in the face about your independent cinema, but until your cameras shoot something I’m not listening.

Parts 2 – 6 after the jump

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Luciana Botelho turns cab rides in Tokyo into a gorgeous abstraction that maintains its romantic atmosphere flawlessly.  What I like about these films is how the filmmaker seems able to surrender herself to a particular time and place over the extended period of time necessary for making the film.  Not an easy thing to do.  I’ve posted about this filmmaker’s work before.

Fabio Scacchioli is an Italian filmmaker who turns ordinary shots on Super 8 film and video into magical and mystical pieces about memory and all that it does for us. I am always impressed by his work and how he finds the perfect moments to let glimmer through the haze to catch us unaware. I maintain that as we move further into the 21st century, we are developing a new cinema completely removed from the theatrical aspects of the last century’s cinema. It is filmmakers who do not try to make films that look like American features who will make the new cinema. Filmmakers making films that look like American features are looking at forms as outmoded as 19th century theatrical works were during the age of the early silents. The new cinema is as natural and immediate a form of expression as writing or painting.

I know that Scacchioli is currently working on something new and I’m looking forward to seeing it. I’ve posted about Scacchioli’s work before.

Seattle avant-garde filmmaker Jon Behrens made this gorgeous piece in 2008 with 16mm film, latex paint and inks applied directly to the film surface. It creates a mysterious space travel and exploratory sensation that has some connection – at least in my mind – to Kubrick’s 2001.  There’s a big pile of magnificent work waiting for you to enjoy from this filmmaker.  Visit his Vimeo page and personal website for more information.

You can rent Behrens’ films for 16mm projection from Canyon Cinema.  He also has a DVD of collected works.

Filmed in the dullest imaginable environment of shops along a major Los Angeles street at night when the shops were closed.

My Christmas film.

The music is a public domain recording of Artie Shaw and his orchestra playing ‘There’s Something in the Air’ in 1936. The singer is Peg LaCentra. I found it at the Internet Archive.

Mike Everleth at Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film, has posted this fascinating documentary about legendary filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar. They’ve been making films separately and together for over 50 years. Don’t be misled by the term underground. These are simply wonderful and exuberant filmmakers who work in their own way and make films exactly the way they want to make them. Their enthusiasm for film, from totally independent low-budget to full-blown Hollywood spectacular, is infectious and should inspire any young filmmaker to follow his or her own muse and make what they really, deeply, necessarily want to make.  You can find out a lot more by reading the Bad Lit article about the documentary.

By the way, Bad Lit is in fact the most infectiously enthralling film site you will read for a long time. Go there!