Question Bridge is an innovative transmedia project that facilitates a dialogue between Black men from diverse and contending backgrounds and creates a platform for them to represent and redefine Black male identity in America.
Chris Johnson originated the Question Bridge concept with a 1996 video installation he created for the Museum of Photographic Arts and the Malcolm X library in San Diego, California
PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE - Directed by CÉLINE SCIAMMA (2019)
Synopsis: In late 18th century France, painter Marianne is commissioned by a countess to paint the wedding portrait of her daughter Héloïse. While posing as her hired companion, Marianne is instructed to complete the portrait in secret. However, intimacy and attraction begin to blossom between both women.
Bacurai (2019) - Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles
Superb film now showing on MUBI. Great soundtrack by John Carpenter too.
Synopsis: ‘Bacurau, a settlement in rural Brazil, is shaken by its matriarch’s death. But something strange is happening, the water supply has been cut off, and the village has disappeared from satellite maps completely. Under threat from an unknown enemy, Bacurau braces itself for a brutal fight for survival.’
MUBI’s Take: ‘ From Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius) and Juliano Dornelles comes a daring, intoxicating blend of neo-Western, siege thriller and political allegory—powerfully resonating with today’s Brazil, where the film was a box-office hit! A winner of the Cannes Jury Prize, starring Udo Kier and Sônia Braga.’
Watch here (on till 18 April 2020). Students can sign up to Mubi for FREE Here.
Found Footage
A collection of films that use existing works, or materials to make something new. Big Thanks to Irene Lusztig (UC Santa Cruz) for many of these ideas.
Also see: Archive page and Archive for Education links
SODA_JERK
By Soda Jerk (http://sodajerk.com.au), not me. A remix of the sequence from Stanley Kubrick's 2001 in which apes learn to use tools.
Hollywood Burn is an anti-copyright epic constructed entirely from hundreds of samples pirated from the Hollywood archive. It pits a righteous league of video pirates against the evil tyrant Moses and his Copyright Commandments. Determined to alter the present by changing the past, the pirates travel back to 1955 to construct the ultimate weapon: an Elvis Presley video-clone.
Part trash cinema and part remix manifesto, Hollywood Burn adopts the tactical responses of the parasite, feeding off the body of Hollywood and inhabiting its cinematic codes. The unwitting all-star cast includes Elvis Presley, Charlton Heston, Jack Sparrow, Monkey Magic, Bette Davis, Batman, Jaws, Jesus, the Hulk, the Hoff and the Ghostbusters.
Completed over 4 years in collaboration with artist Sam Smith, Hollywood Burn is available to view, clone, share, or screen and can be streamed or downloaded here. Or please get in touch if you'd like a hi-res screener file.
Also see:
A Movie (Bruce Conner, 1958, 12 min)
Adam Curtis
Material Worlds
Further Reading:
Project Ideas from Irene Lusztig (UC Santa Cruz)- Found Footage Module. Thank you!
(UCSC students are asked to do two of these for the module)
PROJECT 1 (RE/HOLLYWOOD): Use Soda_Jerk’s Anarchivist Manifesto as a call to action for this project: “You are to infiltrate, sabotage and cut communications. Statements by authorities need to be messed with and set in motion. Texts and images must be used unexpectedly, tossed into the world—both commandeered and set free. Settings, views, and attitudes taken for granted have to be rigorously dissected, torn apart, reconfigured.” Inspired by this week’s screenings and readings, make a project that uses images from mainstream / mass / entertainment media—Hollywood, video games, network television, etc.—to critique, reconfigure, rearrange, analyze, scrutinize, or interrupt the intended message or values of the original media.
PROJECT 2 (DIGITAL DETOURNEMENT): This week’s viewing and readings invited you to think about online digital media—amateur YouTube videos, multiplayer online games, Google Maps, etc.—as emerging and rapidly expanding archives that artists might use as source material for the creation of new works. Your project this week should identify a genre, theme, type, or archive of digital / online found footage and use it to make something new that transforms, critiques, comments on, or changes our relationship to the original material. How can your creative recycling invite us to look at the Internet and user-generated content in new ways?
PROJECT 3 (MATERIAL WORLDS): Inspired by this week’s screenings and readings, make a project using found physical media (NOT digital or digitized media that you find online, though you may digitize the materials yourself to make the project)—as a point of departure, this might include photos, slides, cassette tapes, yearbooks, magazines, brochures, paper advertisements, printed personal ads, postcards or letters, written diaries, 16mm or super 8 film, instruction manuals, trading cards, or quilts. There are many other possible ideas! You might find materials at home, in your family’s home, on eBay, in a thrift store, in a yard sale, in a library, or elsewhere out in the world. How can 14 you take discarded, old, or unexpected media objects and give them a new context, meaning, or story?
PROJECT 4 (REVISIONIST HISTORIES): This week’s prompt asks you to consider the relationship between found footage, archives, and the (re)telling, revealing, or erasure of historical narratives. What histories are documented and catalogued in archives, by whom, and for what purpose or audience? What histories are erased, hidden, buried, or were never recorded? Who is behind the camera when historical images are made and how does that change the story that is told? How can you work with historical found footage to show us a previously recorded historical moment, event, or narrative in a new way? How can your intervention help us see alternate histories, speculative histories, revisionist histories, or gaps and absences in the historical record?
PROJECT 5 (PERSONAL ARCHIVES): Michelle Citron characterizes her family’s home movies as “powerful and necessary fictions that allowed us to see and explore truths that could only be looked at obliquely.” Use this idea to frame your project this week, beginning with materials from a personal or family archive (your own or someone else’s). What kinds of interpersonal dynamics are revealed through a close reading of images from a personal archive? How might you begin with images that look ordinary— christmases, birthdays, family vacations, baby’s first steps—and reveal what is extraordinary? Does your own family have home movies? Why or why not? How do personal images change over time, what does it feel like to look at intimate images from the past, and how can you convey these affective layers in your editing? What is hidden from view and how can you show that to us in your transformation?
PROJECT 6 (USEFUL FILMS): For this week’s project, choose a type of training, educational, or “useful” film to use as the basis for constructing your project. Yesterday’s useful films may no longer be so useful, but might shine a fascinating light on values, priorities, cultures, and norms of the past. Or you might make a project using “useful films” from the current moment (consider what types of training materials you have encountered personally: school shooter videos, health / workout videos, corporate training videos, etc.). What kinds of situations are we being prepared for, why, and how? How do ideas about “training,” preparing, disciplining, or learning reveal larger patterns of anxiety in our past or present society? Can you transform something useful into something other than its intended use?
You want more from The Avalanches ? This video below is great, also put on the album ‘Since I Left You’ and check out some of their other videos including the fantastic Frontier Psychiatrist
Desktop Cinema
‘A loose chronological primer on desktop cinema aka "Screen Life" aka desktop documentary’ by Conor Bateman.
‘Drawing In The Future’ by Laura Houlberg was the winner of Bertha DocHouse's Creative Response to Self-Isolation Competition #6 2021, 'Back to the Future.'
The etymology of "contract" is "to draw several objects together, to draw in." 2020 broke every social contract we thought we had. Big Tech continues to insidiously draw us into a new contract that requires us to always be online. And in response to all the chaos, I contracted into myself. It made me feel weird at first, but maybe a little cool down is just what we all need.
Check out a time capsule of the screening & party for the film, hosted in a Google Sheet: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/195AiOPubMfHvEIfYSfAduLIV31YT_LCiSzm1NzFgRVA/edit#gid=1293633960
Also see these threads for other ideas of films that could be explored in Lockdown/ with limited means:
MUBI and other online Cinema links
Students can get free access to Mubi via MUBI Schools Program. https://mubi.com/filmstudent
They are also offering 3 months free subscription for everyone, via Watershed cinema
I’ll start adding some other links on here too such as:
Detour (2017) - Directed by Michel Gondry
‘Michael Gondry, the Oscar-winning French director and screenwriter whose films include "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," has shot a short film for Apple entirely on the iPhone 7 Plus, and it's utterly magical.
"Detour," which is running on Apple's homepage in the U.K., is the story of a child's tricycle that becomes separated from its young owner shortly after the family set off on vacation in their camper van. There begins a journey in which it follows the family along highways and backroads down to the South of France, having many adventures on the way.
That story would be charming in itself, but Gondry uses the opportunity to pay playful homage to classics of French cinema, like Jaques Tati and Albert Lamorisse, as well as show off the many features of the iPhone. He plays with with perspective, animation, underwater filming, time-lapse and slo-mo -- and you can find out more about how it was made in a set of accompanying online masterclasses, (These links seem to have expired?) "Through the eye of Michel Gondry" that demonstrates some of Gondry's preferred filmmaking technique’ https://adage.com/creativity/work/detour/52158
Unsane (2018) - Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Unsane is a 2018 American psychological horror film directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer. The film stars Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple, Aimee Mullins, and Amy Irving, and follows a woman confined to a mental institution after she is pursued by a stalker. The film was shot entirely on the iPhone 7 Plus. (Wiki)
Recommended by Mark Tapley
Official Site: http://www.Unsane.movie LIKE us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/UnsaneMovie FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/UnsaneMovie FOLL...
Stefan Pape sits down for an extended interview with director Steven Soderbergh to talk about his new film, Unsane, which was shot on an iPhone. He gives a g...
How My Family Dealt With the Coronavirus Outbreak - Junting Zhou
‘The coronavirus outbreak didn’t decimate my family’s hometown, Guangzhou, China — at least not the way it did in Wuhan, the epidemic’s epicenter, more than 500 miles away.
But when I visited my parents from New York for Chinese New Year, we quarantined ourselves anyway, as the government advised. I documented our experience in the film above, shot entirely on my iPhone.’
Watch film above or follow links below to watch film via - New York Times article page or Junting Zhou’s website.
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2019) Dir. Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky
Some of you may remember the Edward Burtynsky photography exhibition we visited whilst in Berlin and 'Manufactured Landscapes' film. This is the third film in the trilogy.
‘A cinematic meditation on humanity’s massive reengineering of the planet, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is feature documentary film, four years in the making, from the multiple-award winning team of Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky.
Third in a trilogy that includes Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013), the film follows the research of an international body of scientists, the Anthropocene Working Group who, after nearly ten years of research, are arguing that the Holocene Epoch gave way to the Anthropocene Epoch in the mid-twentieth century because of profound and lasting human changes to the earth.
From concrete seawalls in China that now cover 60 percent of the mainland coast, to the biggest terrestrial machines ever built in Germany, to psychedelic potash mines in Russia’s Ural Mountains, to metal festivals in the closed city of Norilsk, to the devastated Great Barrier Reef in Australia and surreal lithium evaporation ponds in the Atacama desert, the film-makers have traversed the globe to document evidence and experience of human planetary domination.
At the intersection of art and science, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch witnesses a critical moment in geological history — bringing a provocative and unforgettable experience of our species’ breadth and impact. Narrated by Alicia Vikander.
Screening at Wateshed, Bristol, October 14th 2019 from 18:00
A panel after the showing on 14 October explores what climate change in the Anthropocene means for us and especially for cities in the week of Festival of the Future City.
This film is part of Festival of the Future City – an initiative of Festival of Ideas. Festival of the Future City takes place every two years in Bristol celebrating and debating the future of cities with talks, walks, debates, arts projects and new books. The 2019 Festival of the Future City includes classic utopian films about cities; cities in silent cinema; documentaries on New Towns, democracy, the housing crisis and the anthropocene in the series: Cities, Future Cities and Film. We are grateful to BFI for their support for this programme.’
BAIT (2019) - Dir. Mark Jenkin
‘Stunningly shot on a vintage 16mm camera using monochrome Kodak stock, Mark Jenkin’s remarkable new film is a timely and funny, yet poignant tale that gets right to the heart of a Cornish community facing an unwelcome change.’ Watershed
Modern-day Cornish fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe) is struggling to buy a boat while coping with family rivalry and the influx of London money, holiday-homes and stag parties to his harbour village. The summer season brings simmering tensions within the community to boiling point, with tragic consequences.
Mark Kermode reviews Bait. A fisherman without a boat - his brother having repurposed it as a tourist tripper - is displaced to the estate above the harbor after his childhood home becomes a getaway for holidaying Londoners. Please tell us what you think of the film -- or Mark's review of the film.
SORRY TO BOTHER YOU (2018) - Dir. Boots Riley
White lines
Director Boots Riley talks to Kaleem Aftab about capitalism, race and resistance in his fabulous absurdist comedy Sorry to Bother You, while Hannah McGill examines Hollywood’s long history of workplace satires.
Log into Sight and Sound via our VLE to access full article from December 2018 edition
‘In 2012, The Coup's frontman Boots Riley completed the first draft of the screenplay for the 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. While he would later direct the film from that screenplay, Riley had no way to produce the film in 2012. As such, The Coup made the album of the same name, which was inspired by the screenplay.[12]’ Wikipedia
Environments
ENVIRONMENTS - A photographic – video - art project exploring issues of identity, histories, space and time, on an overland journey from Birmingham to Beijing and Back on public transport. March 2006 - June 2008 (Revisited 2020)
See more about the project at: www.environments.org.uk
Environments has been exhibited in Birmingham and Bristol and published as a photography book. It was presented at 7th Aoteroa Digital Arts Network Symposium (2010) in Whanganui, New Zealand, whilst our Film 'Team Tibet' was screened in McLeod Ganj, Himachal Pradesh, India, its UK premier was at the Heart of England International Film festival, where it picked up the Festival Director’s Special Award.
This post here has some of the video shot, some of which has been shown at events listed above, others within music videos or on the travel blog.
One day I might finish a full edit.
All Tomorrow's Parties (2009)
‘A kaleidoscopic journey into the parallel musical universe of cult music festival All Tomorrow's Parties.’ IMDB
‘All Tomorrow's Parties is a 2009 documentary film directed by All Tomorrow's People and Jonathan Caouette covering the history of the long running All Tomorrow's Parties music festival. Described as a "post-punk DIY bricolage", the film was created using footage generated by the fans and musicians attending the events themselves, on a multitude of formats including Super8, camcorder and mobile phone. All Tomorrow's People is a name representing the contributions of these attendees.
The film features music and performances from Belle And Sebastian, Grizzly Bear, Sonic Youth, Battles, Boards of Canada, Portishead, Daniel Johnston, Grinderman, Lightning Bolt, David Cross, Animal Collective, The Boredoms, Les Savy Fav, Mogwai, Octopus Project, Slint, Dirty Three, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Gossip, GZA, Roscoe Mitchell, Seasick Steve, Iggy and the Stooges, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Fuck Buttons, Micah P Hinson, Two Gallants, The Mars Volta, Akron/Family, Jah Shaka, Saul Williams, Shellac, Patti Smith and John Cooper Clarke. ‘ Wiki
a documentary about the All Tomorrow's Parties festival held yearly in England. features interviews and performances by Animal Collective, Grinderman, Battles, Belle and Sebastian, Dirty Three, comedian David Cross, and more
Tarnation (2003) Director: Jonathan Caouette
‘Filmmaker Jonathan Caouette's documentary on growing up with his schizophrenic mother -- a mixture of snapshots, Super-8 film, answering machine messages, video diaries, early short films, and more - culled from nineteen years of his life.’ IMDB
I for India - Sandhya Suri (2005)
‘The myth of return. In 1966, Yash and Sheel Suri leave India for a temporary stay in England while he burnishes his resume as a doctor. He buys projectors, tape recorders, and movie cameras, and sends one set to India beginning a 40-year exchange of tapes and Super 8 movies between his family in India and his household near Manchester. We watch their three daughters grow and we hear increasingly plaintive calls from Yash's parents and sister to return home. In 1982, it's back to India where Yash sets up a practice. A return to England, one daughter's marriage, another's move to Australia, and the third's film project complete the 40-year story. Yash still loves his homeland.’ IMDB
Director: Sandhya Suri
A chronicle of immigration, from the Sixties to the present day, as seen through the eyes of one Asian family and their 40 years worth of Super 8mm home movies.
Cameraperson
Directed By: Kirsten Johnson Cameraperson Official Trailer 1 (2016) - Documentary Exposing her role behind the camera, Kirsten Johnson reaches into the vast trove of footage she has shot over decades around the world. What emerges is a visually bold memoir and a revelatory interrogation of the power of the camera.
Interviews
"I don't see a clear line around a situation which you do or don't use things. I think it's always a question of sort of who is choosing to tell it and for what purpose."
Cobain: Montage of Heck
Hailed as one of the most innovative and intimate documentaries of all time experience Kurt Cobain like never before in the only ever fully authorized portrait of the famed music icon. Academy Award® nominated filmmaker Brett Morgen expertly blends Cobain’s personal archive of art, music, never seen before movies, animation and revelatory interviews from his family and closest friends. Wildly creative and highly acclaimed, follow Kurt from his earliest years in this visceral and detailed cinematic insight of an artist at odds with his surroundings. Fans and those of the Nirvana generation will learn things about Cobain they never knew while those who have recently discovered the man and his music will know what makes him the lasting icon that he still is today
MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A.
Drawn from a never-before-seen cache of personal footage spanning decades, MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A. is an intimate portrait of the Sri Lankan artist and musician who continues to shatter conventions. https://www.instagram.com/miadocumentary https://www.facebook.com/MIAdocumentary https://twitter.com/MIAdocumentary
A Woman's Epic Journey to Climb 7 Mountains—Shot on a Phone | Short Film Showcase
‘National Geographic Emerging Explorer and Adventurer of the Year Wasfia Nazreen doesn't just climb for the thrill; she climbs for a cause. The first Bangladeshi to scale the Seven Summits, Wasfia has made it her purpose to brave these climbs for the sake of something larger - for the women of Bangladesh. Lyrical and poetic, this short documentary, shot entirely on an iPhone 6S, is a reflective character portrait that takes us from the depths of Wasfia's struggles to the highest peaks on the planet, as we explore what it means to pursue the unknown.’
Read more about Emerging Explorer Wasfia Nazreen
About Short Film Showcase: A curated collection of the most captivating documentary shorts from filmmakers around the world. Know of a great short film that should be part of our Showcase? Email sfs@natgeo.com to submit a video for consideration. See more from National Geographic's Short Film Showcase at http://documentary.com
