Monday 8 November 2010

Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake Part One




A participatory video shot by people around the world who are uploading footage to dziga.perrybard.net to interpret Vertov's 1929 classic film Man With A Movie Camera.

Log onto dziga.perrybard.net where there is a list of SCENES. Click on any scene to see the shot list.Click see all uploads to see the uploads for each shot. Click upload to upload your interpretation. You can also participate by selecting SHOTS BY TAG.

Software developed for this project archives sequences and streams the submissions as a film.As the same shot can be uploaded more than once infinite versions of the film are possible. A new film is built daily and streams on the website. Click START to see today's version.

Concept/Director: Perry Bard
Software Development: John Weir
Sound Design: Steven Baun
Participants: See list at dziga.perrybard.net

From: http://vimeo.com/6345709


Slightly different from the one in the previous post.

Sunday 7 November 2010

Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake Part One





 Perry bard invites interpretations of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929). He is streaming them alongside scenes from the original.

Perry Bard's website:
http://dziga.perrybard.net/

Thursday 4 November 2010

Owen Land/George Landow - Remedial Reading Comprehension [1970]


I came across Owen Land in Malcolm Le Grice's Abstract Film and Beyond. Owen Land was then known as George Landow (not to be confused with  George Landow Professor of English and Art History at Brown University). In Le Grice's book  there is a still from Remedial Reading Comprehension on page 139. It was of the sequence featuring a page of a book where we can see part of the sentence "to pupil is an emot". The rest of the text is blurred.  The page is part of a montage which also includes the face of a sleeping woman.

Le Grice is concerned with the way in which the film addresses the audience directly “giving instructions, asking questions or proclaiming blandly ‘this is a film about you- not about its maker’, it forces the audience to recognize the apparent surface intentions, like the instructions to participate in a way which cannot be complied with, are ‘not’ the subject of the work. They are a provocative demonstration that the audience must treat film, however subjectively structured by the film-maker, as raw material for their own use. This is a demand that film should be approached sceptically counteracting unquestioned acceptance of the film’s authority” (Le Grice, 1977 p.139-40). 




 I like this from the Harvard Gazette: "In several of these films, Land constructs facades of reality, often directly addressing the viewer using the language of television, advertising, or educational films".

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/04/film-archive-screening-to-fete-works-of-land/