Unintentional film stills


                  





































Looking back through the images taken from Rome's Eur district I was struck by a sort of half-formed narrative slowly appearing within the shots. The place was deserted, the whites and greys of the buildings adding an unsettling stillness upon the entire area - the only sign of life was the traffic on the wide boulevards, and Italy's small Fiats swerving around roundabouts at speed looked nearly comical in comparison to the towering architecture above. (which, out of habit or disinterest, the drivers ignored.)
These starkly impressive monuments to fascism loom over you like a held-in breath. It creates a cinematic and palpitating atmosphere; there is the sense that this stillness, stagnation, is temporary, a bell will sound
and streams of animated people with surge out of the buildings and populate the avenues - but simultaneously an air of resignation weighs down upon you like the stifling summer heat: a knowledge that it has always been like this, it will always remain like this. 

Michelangelo Antonioni shot L'Eclisse here in 1962. 

The individual becomes what everyone fears around these structures - miniscule, alone, insignificant. Still photographs reflecting the sensation of a place frozen in time, a stranger in a strange land, Chris Marker's La Jetée; Picnic at Hanging Rock. Déja vu, two people in the same place in different times - don't hold your breath here. 

These photographs were taken with no thoughts lingering behind them; but environments will make one act differently, walk differently and impress their presence upon a place in sometimes unnatural ways. Being in the Eur instilled a sort of reverence in me, and deliberateness of manner: every move I made felt slowed down, considered, paced to accommodate the nature of my surroundings. 

You just have to stand there and take it all in - it's not about you anymore. 


From the photo collection 'In Italy', Rome June 2014.

Paris through the blinds with furniture - a series




Paris on film - inside Musée des Arts Décoratifs, photographing the Tuileries through the sheer blinds, creating the effect of an interior projection of outside. Ash peers through the blinds to capture an unobstructed shot. Art Nouveau furniture quietly fills the foreground. 
The framing, narrative and diffused light have such a cinematic quality. 
Images to be converted into slide film and projected somewhere which isn't Paris. Because even though this is Paris, it doesn't really feel like it. 

Pom-poms in action






                                                                                 

Italian skier Roland Clara competing in the 30 km Skiathlon at Sochi Winter Olympic Games, 2014 / George Lazenby as James Bond killing some henchmen in Switzerland in 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service', 1969.

Great blue ski suits, even better pom-poms.

Stills from the weekend










Film stills from 'Suna no Onna (The Woman in the Sand) /  newly acquired record rack (made in Sweden!) / pie / Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl
The weekends become increasingly more important as winter inches nearer, and the nights grow even longer, dusk now falling some time between 4 and 4:30 pm. By the time I leave work during the week, it has already been dark for about an hour, skewing one's perception of time. So I try to take advantage of my weekends, the only time I can go out and wander around Malmö without turning on my bike headlights. 
Saturdays are the best days for doing things. On Sundays nearly everything is closed, or at least feels that way. Sundays are good days for cycles to the beach, which is a rather soothing place when it is cold and grey. Last weekend when I saw an old man swimming - it was probably 6 degrees at best. I am sure he has been swimming in November for many years. Old people are very resilient, I find. 
Yesterday was a day of small achievements for me. I saw a fantastic film at Cinemateket, Suna no Onna  (The Woman in the Dunes) as part of the Japanese New Wave series they are showing this season. Though visually captivating, I was also able to actively engage myself in the narrative as my Swedish comprehension appears to have reached the level where I can easily follow Swedish subtitles. A small coup as I continue to attempt to carve out a life for myself here.
After the film I challenged myself to make a meat pie, including the short crust pastry shell. My culinary skills are pretty hit and miss (though somewhat improving) and I began to think I had bitten off more than I could chew. (this would literally, be the case when it came time to consume the pie.) I conveyed my fears to a pie maker of some repute, who told me it would be a success and that I was "excellent at making mince". The pie, I must admit, turned out better than expected. I even went back for seconds. 
Sunday I went to a second hand store, ostensibly hunting for a  gift for someone and naturally coming away with a few for myself instead, coming away with a near perfect condition record rack in handsome navy to house my slowly expanding collection of singles, and a lucky find of a collection of short stories by Roald Dahl, the blurb on the back cover proclaiming "If your taste is for the macabre, the sick, the outrageous, the unexpected, the horrifying - Roald Dahl will give you orgiastic delight. If not, you are going to miss one of the most sophisticated collections of short stories in print."
I look forward to some sophisticated orgiastic delights  from Roald Dahl, starting with my lunch break at work tomorrow.








Den nakna ön









Hadaka no Shima (The Naked Island), has been one of the highlights of this season's Cinemateket programme so far, and it was spellbinding viewing tonight. I look eagerly forward to the remainder of the Japanese New Wave selection.
Kaneto Shindo's 1964 film centres on the continuous uphill struggles, living in isolation on a small island in the Seito Inland Sea.
Shot in black and white, and almost completely void of dialogue, Shindo uses repeated daily actions to spell out the monotony of hardship - the breaks from the constant work (a family trip to the mainland, local celebrations) stand out in stark contrast as short interludes of spontaneity. Dialogue is not necessary; even if there had been a script, it doesn't feel like family would have anything to say to each other that could be conveyed with language.
Accompanying the daily farming grind is an incredibly moving soundtrack by Hikaru Hayashi, perfectly reflecting and enhancing the back-breaking labour, one repeated motion after another. Tending to their precious crops, staggering up the rocky, precarious slopes of the island laden with full buckets of precious water - there is a certain elegance to the characters movements, as the gingerly place one foot in front of the other, sinewy arms supporting the yokes across their backs and shoulders in a delicate tightrope balancing act.

Films like this continue to fuel my love of, and fascination with, islands.

Untitled: The 12th Man

Alain Delon as Tom Ripley in Plein Soleil (1960). A great film I watched recently. based on Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Delon's first starring role. Here he is most likely listening to 'The Only One' by Roy Orbison.

I have spent the weekend listening and dancing to some great music on Friday and Saturday nights. Nothing quite like twirling around on an empty dance floor to a favourite song with a Red Stripe in your hand. People watch you and they can see, that for that moment, you are having a good time.
These 12 songs are a collection of Florence staples and recent discoveries, a mixture of songs I own on record, ones sourced through various compilations I have inadvertently stumbled across, and recommendations from certain people who usually know what I like before I do.
I seem to be naturally drawn to songs whose lyrics are of a more sombre nature, and these days, the more organ the better. Great songs to listen to in the evening while nursing a gin & tonic and reflecting upon life, or a soundtrack to accompany a spring clean on a Sunday morning.





Untitled: The 12th Man* 


Hurt - The Futuras
She - The Monkees
Disillusion - The Minute Men
Always With Him - The Living Daylights
I've Got A Way With Girls - Lavender Hour
The Only One - Roy Orbison
Mirage - Tommy James & The Shondells
My Baby Is Gone - The Untamed
Don't Think It's Me - Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
So Many Times - The Sweetarts
Lonely Weekend - The Remains
So Hard To Bear - The Banshees

* I felt the need to give this collection of songs a cricketing title, having had just watched the West Indies' triumphant win over Sri Lanka at the Twenty20 World Cup. Titling things is hard, perhaps I should do the opposite to what I do with artworks, which are often named after songs, and name mixes after artworks. On that note, let's just add an 'untitled' in there for good measure.

You I'll Be Following




On my final day in Stockholm, Claire and I went to Moderna Museet, to primarily see the the Yoko Ono exhibition Grapefruit, a collection of films, sculptures and text-based works all stemming from her 1964 self-published book of the same name. Grapefruit contained a collection of 'instructional pieces' describing actions to either be completed in a tangible form, or to exist solely in the imagination. Numerous film works of Ono's are visual interpretations of these instructions.  

Film No. 5 (Rape, or Chase) Rape with camera. 

One and a half hours, colour, synchronized sound. 
A cameraman will chase a girl on a street with a camera persistently until he corners her in an alley, and, if possible, until she is in a falling position. 
The cameraman will be taking a risk of offending the girl as the girl is somebody he picks up arbitrarily on the street, but there is a way to get around this.
 Depending on the budget, the chase should be made with girls of different age, etc. 
May chase boys and men as well. 
As the film progresses, and as it goes towards the end, the chase and the running should become slower and slower like in a dream, using a high-speed camera. 

Rape was the most intriguing film, made with John Lennon in London in 1969. While watching I could feel the twist in my stomach and a tension in my chest related to the precarious, downward-spiralling situation of 'the woman' (Eva Majlata, a 21 year old Hungarian actress who couldn't speak English) as a couple of men relentlessly pursued her through London - on foot, by taxi, even into an apartment. It readily captures and (due to the year it was made, clothes, make-up and therefore perhaps a detachment from one's present reality) inadvertently glamourizes the thrill of the chase, and the perverse nature of what is actually happening. 




The decadence in the style and aesthetic of the late sixties, are so embodied in this film I feel it has become a sort of time capsule. And what once was intended to have a more gritty, documentary presence about it, now is more fictionalized, just another glimpse of 'The Swingin' Sixties', no part of our present reality. The longer you watch the film, the more engrossed you become, but at the same time, the sense you, as the viewer is being taken for a ride, strengthens. It's all a set-up, just like every other film, and all other 'reality tv' - the woman was in on it all along. I guess it give us comfort to think like that, as to accept that she was involuntarily hounded makes it more difficult to watch - especially from today's viewpoint.

Rape succeeds because it interacts with the audience on many levels, as many Ono films do. It can be a heavy-handed social commentary, as John says - "We are showing how all of us are exposed and under pressure in our contemporary world. This isn't just about the Beatles. What is happening to this girl on the screen is happening in Biafra, Vietnam, everywhere." - or just a standard chase scene, albeit a rather subversive one.

 In fact while I was immersed in this film I couldn't help but notice a young two year-old girl in front of the monitor next to mine fascinated by Ono's Film No.4 (Bottoms) - (the title tells you all you need to know really), and having a great time, much to her brash American mother's horror/ my amusement.

After wandering around a city for three days, it was quite nice to site down and follow someone else.

På Cinemateket


Mannen på Taket (The Man on the Roof) dir. BoWiderberg (1976) / Elvira Madigan dir. Bo Widerberg (1967) /  The Trial dir. Orson Welles (1962) / Kärlek 65 (Love 65) dir. Bo Widerberg (1965) / Tabu, a Story of the South Seas dir. F.W Murnau (1931) / Los Olvidados dir. Luis Buñuel (1950) / C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in The West) dir. Sergio Leone (1968) / Death in Venice dir. Luchino Visconti (1971) /

Every Tuesday and Saturday at Spegeln cinema, runs the Malmö branch of Cinemateket - a sort of film society organized by the Swedish Film Institute, showcasing films from throughout the history of cinema - spotlighting the oeuvre of directors, actresses, or focusing on a specific theme. It has allowed me to not only watch examples of classic cinema on the large screen, but discover new favourite directors, such as Malmö's own Bo Widerberg; see films from Argentina to Scotland, from the early silent days to present offerings.
There should really be something like this in every city - it's regularity and variety means there is always something too look forward to, with the opportunity to see films you may never otherwise have had the chance to see.

Above are some posters of my favourite films seen at Cinemateket, many have become some of my all time favourites - I love leaving the cinema feeling 'so deeply moved'. I would recommend seeing any, and all of them.

Sea Legs
































































The RMS Queen Elizabeth on fire and as a shipwreck in Hong Kong Harbour, 1972.  While being converted into a University cruise ship (a rather amazing idea), the world's largest passenger ship mysteriously caught fire as her refurbishments neared completion.  So much water was poured into her, in a vain attempt to combat the blaze the ship eventually capsized from the weight, and lay wrecked in Hong Kong Harbour for many months, until eventually being partially scrapped to be used as landfill for Hong Kong Airport. Parts such as the keel and boilers still lie on on the seabed, and are still marked on local maps as 'Foul', an unsafe area to anchor a boat.


The wreck of the RMS Queen Elizabeh made for one of the more interesting film locations and sets when used as a covert MI6 headquarters in the 1974 Bond film 'The Man with the Golden Gun'. To accommodate for the capsized liner's continuous lean, the Secret Service apparently constructed new floors, ramps, staircases and bookshelves, making for excellent clashing wallpaper patterns, bizarrely distorted corridors,and staircases upon staircases.







Light Thickens


Yasujiro Ozu
The Only Son
1936

Tacita Dean
Disappearance at Sea
1996

- For many, Donald Crowhurst is just a cheat who abused the sacred unwrittens of good sportsmanship. But for some, it is more complicated than this and he is seen as much a victim of the Golden Globe as the pursuer of it. His story is about human failing, about pitching his sanity against the sea, where there is no human presence or support system on which to hang a tortured psychological state. His was a world of acute solitude, filled with the ramblings of a troubled mind.
Tacita Dean, 1997


The film Disappearance at Sea is part of a series of Tacita Dean's works under the same name focusing on Donald Crowhurst and the Teignmouth Electron, and the effect the sea had upon his mind.


The Only Son was Ozu's first talkie - exploring the mother/son relationship, and perhaps also the idea of 'big fish in a small pond' and vice versa. Ryosuke moves from a small town to Tokyo with his tutor,  to continue his education, but both are small pebbles cast into the swelling sea of people in Tokyo, and their efforts result in little success, Ryosuke teaching in a unremarkable night school, and renting cheap shabby rooms for his wife and child, and his tutor now running a tonkatsu restaurant in the lonely outskirts of the city.

At Sea



Clinton Watkins
Cont Ship #1
2005



Joseph Cornell
Jack's Dream
c. late 1930's




























The abandoned Teignmouth Electron is discovered: Donald Crowhurst's trimaran in which he attempted the Golden Globe Race, that would result in his eventual insanity and suicide.

via, via, via

The image from Jack's Dream by Joseph Cornell comes from a fascinating blog by the name of the art of memory, in particular a collection of atmospheric imagery of the ocean, film stills featuring the sea, illustrations of ships, fog lights and horns, misty rigging and alongside paintings and photographic works of waves. I stumbled across it looking for film stills from L'avventura (Antonioni, 1960).

My interest in islands and the sea grows continuously. Ships are, in a way, similar to moving islands. So much mystery surrounds both, and both can maintain an almost continuous isolation as long as one is deprived of the other.

Cinema Replica














 Hand painted Russian movie posters
KILL BILL / MEN IN BLACK 2 / MATRIX 3 / 50 FIRST DATES / TROY

foreign films that were brought to Russia's rural areas and shown makeshift cinemas were promoted with these captivating naive posters, made to measure and on demand by hired 'professional artists'. many were employed in house to keep up with the steady stream of incoming films, seemingly mostly sequels.


via designboom

(This Bird Has Flown)

 Toru and Naoko and Toru and Midori

Images from Norwegian Wood, an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's much cherished novel from 1987, released late last year. I am uncertain as to whether or not I would like to foray into the cinematic version, as I hold the novel so close to my heart. Along with Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, it is one of a select few books I can open randomly on any page and pick up where I left off.  I am apprehensive because I fear that Norwegian Wood will leave me with the same bitter after taste of disappointment as Mike Nichol's 1970 adaptation of Catch-22. The images I have built in my head, the sound of the characters voices and intonations and the environments they live in, will always seems more complete and real than any film. Perhaps, as a novel in one part about memories, it is best to keep your version of it inside your head.


However I am sure my curiosity will trump my well intentioned Murakami purist mindset, and if the opportunity arose I would watch it.

A spanner in the works





The door to my mind / forlorn fishing nets / dual 'Persona' /Naval Star gazing

It feels like lately I have been swamped by a deluge of swedish vocabulary, verb tenses and other such thrilling components which make up the untamable beast known as svenska. It is not as bad as it sounds, in fact, I thoroughly enjoy learning languages; nothing is so satisfying as drunkenly rambling in another language and people being able to understand you, as my friends and I discovered on saturday night. While my previous party trick may have been exclaiming 'How did I get so drunk?' in swedish, I am now able to give a detailed description of this inevitable demise.
Last night I prepared for my final swedish test by watching Ingmar Bergman's Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) without subtitles. Judging by todays effort in my listening comprehension, it was perhaps not the most suitable method of practice, but in any respects the most engrossing. I am satisfied by the fact that I understood enough to figure out the plot lines.


The above film still is not from Smultronstället but another Bergman film, Persona, featuring the same actresses, Bibi Andersson and Ingrid Thulin. I have always liked the director who has a stable of trusted actors whose names become synonymous with the directors own.

I am also now completely intrigued by star charts, islands and fishing nets, to add to the ever growing list of 'things that inspire me that I really should do something about'. These include birds, faux bois, whittling, and such like. A collection of "things" laid out like in the positions of stars / faux bois embroidered stockings / balancing bird Alexander Calder-esque mobiles / whittled bath feet / tunnels of fishing net / on an island?

It all makes me feel rather intrepid. I definitely have more exploring to do in the coming warmer climes.
Spend my winter thinking, and my summer doing.

The mind boggles.

Love Story


Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

(Serbo.Croatian: Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice P.T.T. )

Yugoslavia, 1967

Directed by Dušan Makavejev

Quite a strange feeling watching a film from a country which no longer exists. Perhaps it is due to living in a foreign country and learning a new language, but I am now continuously drawn to films in other languages. Just so I can hear how different languages are spoken.

The second film still feature amazing film cartoons! Early tetra-pak perhaps?

Matinee Idol




[clck photos to enlage]

IL GATTOPARDO 1963
Luchino Visconti


Known for its lush colours and and decadent costumes and scenery, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) is a true epic of Italian cinema, a production of a grand scale with exacting attention to detail. I first saw this film in a small cinema on Auckland's North Shore called the Bridgeway, on a quiet saturday afternoon in 2004 in a near empty theatre with the attendees comprising of my friend and I and a smattering of elderly who probably saw it when it was first released in '63, or just used to harbour unrequited feelings for Burt Lancaster.

The first film which started my fascination and love of Italian cinema.


"Where so many widescreen epics merely use the image to bludgeon the audience with production value, Visconti maintains a constant dialogue between the grandeur of the prince's surroundings and the minute gestures that define him in the midst of historical upheaval."

-Sam Adams, Los Angeles Times