Bounce Bounce: Animation by Hayley Morris

This is an undersea stop-motion animation by Hayley Morris that takes place in a world entirely created by the filmmaker. She made all the sea creatures too! Her materials are clever and convey life under water brilliantly. She made the film for Hilary Hahn and Hauschka’s song ‘Bounce Bounce.’

 

Carry That Weight: Super 8 Film by Andrea Nevi for Italian Tribute to the Beatles

Andrea Nevi of Italy directed this short film that is apparently a music video for a band called Mama’s Gan. The band has recorded a female tribute to the Beatles and this is their version of ‘Carry That Weight.’ I like it and I like the film a lot. I also like that beautiful face of the actress who is probably a member of the band. Incredible! I think I might fly to Italy to meet such a face. Every shot in this film is magnificent, but it’s that face around which the film pivots. I don’t think it is very easy to film a beautiful face. I know I always get very distracted whenever I try. I end up dropping my camera and forgetting all about what I’m doing.

Nevi’s film is a free-flowing beauty shot in Super 8. It won ‘Best Italian Film’ at the International Super 8 Film Festival 2011 in Milan, Italy.

The Rolling Stones – Highway Child – Unreleased 1968 Song


I like it. Chug chug. It sort of motors along. Nobody plays this way anymore. Nobody makes rock. I think to make rock you have to enjoy being an asshole and you have to look around at the world without worrying about being a good person. You also can’t commit suicide if you want to be good at rock. If you commit suicide, it means you wanted to be nice but couldn’t. Nice people get eaten. They don’t become rock stars. It’s not an anger thing. If you’re mad at something, you can’t do rock either. I think you’ve got to enjoy the anger, drift above it, relishing it, mocking it, using it for an advantage, but you can never let anger be your thing… like the punks. Only funny punks are worth listening to. The mad ones suck because ultimately they’re only mad about ice cream. Jagger is a laughing little bitch punk who wins every song he plays.

Bob Dylan Talks Music and Draws in a Trailer (1986)

Bob Dylan has always been in the enviable position of being taken seriously even when he is just messing around. God he must be fun to hang out with. I think he is one of the funniest human beings I have ever seen. He carries on here as if beginning an interview but he’s really drawing the interviewer with total focus and determination. He then proudly holds up one of the worst drawings I’ve ever seen in the long history art. But have you ever seen someone answer questions this way? I like the way in part 2 he predicts the sudden change in music about to happen when the kids who don’t like all the machine music of the eighties make something new in four or five years. He was predicting the emergence of the alternative scene and bands like Nirvana I think.

Attempt: A Short Film by Jennifer Sharpe

The film seems almost out of time. It could have been filmed fifty years ago. The gently swaying palms of Los Angeles fit between buildings easily but seem to have a romantic life in this film. The music, a piece for theremin and string quartet by Herbert A. Deutsch, fits the imagery in Jennifer Sharpe’s film to perfection. This kind of filmmaking, done with a small camera and then edited and colored in a relatively simple digital editor, is very close to the simplicity of the poet working in a notepad or the artist sketching from her window. Sharpe’s films are deeply felt poetic expressions that seem to exist in the only possible form that they could have. She turns her video images into something close to painting, extending time and finding mystery in simple movements. She has a very gentle approach but with strength in her observation and emotional ability, sort of like a butterfly with steel wings.

You can find out more about Jennifer Sharpe’s digital videos and paintings at her web site.