THREE SONGS ABOUR LENIN [1934]

how i love cinema...

[top photo from here]




I wonder how my coffee tastes after watching Dziga Vertov's Three Songs about Lenin (1934). A smile, fundamental to all things, and a comforting yet voluminous feeling of joy composed the whole of my emotional state. There is, in a way, a revelation in all this. That cinema is a methodical way of documenting reality and that this has been a home for many filmmakers. Vertov goes further when he compared man to machines saying:

"In the face of the machine we are ashamed of man’s inability to control himself, but what are we to do if we find the unerring ways of electricity more exciting than the disorderly haste of active people... I am an eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, I am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see"

Vertov has a poetic eye, i suppose this might be one's comment when one look at his frames (see images below). Though the film was shot a year after Pudovkin's Deserter (1933) --- probably the last of the Soviet Montage kind (1924 - 1930), it still remains true to its origins. Thus, editing, which is so fundamental today, is much of an art, and perhaps central to Three Songs. Superimpositions, juxtopositions, and capacity to encapsulate momentary pauses and chaos dominates the editing style of Three Songs. The quality of the images is rich with symbolic overtones, and often 'faces' (some close-ups are shown below) draws sympathetic response to audiences.

I never seen Lenin filled with such humanity and character!



PS. My coffee tastes better!


Ciaofck!
***

Goodnight!

peeking...

Empire (Andy Warhol, 1964, 8 hr & 5 min)

I just wanna say goodnight to my blog before turning my laptop off. I am pretty busy with ChE and i wish to watch more, a lot more films for the benefit of mankind but i think i am stuck with this repetitive megalomaniac obsession of being on top of everything: on top of the Empire State building while Warhol films his uneventful real-time whatever film, or maybe on top of a blueberry cheesecake fondly eating the icing smearing on my skin, or just a mere idea of being on top of my BED to dream of 'that' night again and again. And tomorrow i must write more and more about films, and to what festival one Filipino cinephile should go this week, or to what color pallet did Alexandro Jorodowsky used in The Holy Mountain (1973), or perhaps the extinction of the Soviet Montage, or the volatile shots of Ça brûle(Claire Simon, 2006). But then i have to zero-in some points about the new Cinema-Scope issue and its infestation to the web, notably the greatly comedic yet purposeful argument-convolutions of Mark Peranson's Cannes 2009: Stupid, Adjective,and also i must acknowledge the presence of an emerging cinema webwriter, Rex Baylon, on his focused and well-shape articles on Classical Hollywood Cinema compiled at FILM EXPRESSION. Or because I love Catherine Grant, i must put in some 'favorited' links from her new link-post at FILM STUDIES FOR FREE. One mus truly appreciate her TEN MONDAY MUST VISITS. I must also note that if one exempts thermodynamics from Chemical Engineering, one must note that Chemical Engineering, is, in itself, an application of the serious and tedious thermodynamic laws and properties (ChE 122). But gladly, I must say that one must watch Blow Job (Warhol, 1964) right here, right now.

Blow Job by Andy Warhol, 35 min.

***

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK [2008]

a 'other than that' post

I watched Synecdoche, New York (2008) for my birthday with the hope of stirring raw emotions and medusa-like fantasy.

And it did.

Kaufman's frames are vested with solidity and dynamism. Non-diegetic inserts were mostly of questionable origin but yielded multi-layered meanings. His sense of space is flexural, it can be distorted without affecting the narrative layer. His frames, though mostly not staged in depth, is characteristic of a blossoming auteur aesthetic mindset influenced by certain directorial giants (i beg you know them) who have worked with Kaufman. His images are associative (i.e. burning house, micro-paintings of Adelle, the whole theater set of New York).

He reminds me of Kafka!


***
Thank you so much to everyone who greeted me yesterday! Thanks Thanks Thanks!
***

MIRACULOUSLY 'STUPID'!
[or what is happening in the film blogosphere]
Coming Soon!

***

Ciao!

Looking Back

'I was born today' post

[some images are from village-oblivia
and some are mine]

I was thinking of making the best post for my birthday but i don't think there will ever be a greater post than a series of random, eccentric images to depict the evolution of my thoughts but then i don't have to discuss further the notion of birth or existence (leave it to my inner being, he will handle my existentialist thoughts) the only thing that puzzles me now aside from pulling this off is the quintessential fact that i have to celebrate a day that i think one of the most ordinary days of my life time is such a pain in the ass no wonder why James Joyce contracted ULYSSES in one single day I hope i can be more engaging in writing this post but it seems that I am stripped away from reality after watching Dziga Vertov's Three Songs for Lenin (1934)

Three Songs for Lenin

but anyways i always do want to have a bit of a post for my birthday one that will recount the best days of my one year of constant struggle of finding a niche a public place and a clean methodical way of living the lift of my pen and the plunge of every finger in my keyboard signifies a new journey or another term paper or a spreadsheet document willing to wait until the hour of doom the streak of light from my window or the quiescent coffee beside the foliage of my film books floods my candidness and lift my spirit to heights It is as if my year has been locked in these moments the fire is drenched and refurnished and there is nothing i could do

My birthday.

****

OLDBOY [2003]: Oh boy!

A 'that!' post...

As suppose to stylistics, reading Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson's monumental The Classical Hollywood Cinema, i cannot suck in the significance of Park Chan-Wook's dizzying and perhaps the 'best style' from a Korean filmmaker. His approach is much of Hollywood meets Wong Kar-wai which i cannot stomach in the context of originality and ingenuity. No innovation at all, just a recycled bunch of ideas.

His frames, images below, extols a much mature aesthetics but not fully grown than his other Asian predecessors. Oldboy (2003) has a color palette not much of a high contrast but more normalize than Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together (1997). I can see how much Wong's sense of space has dominated his mise-en-scene. But then Park Chan-Wook attempted to put contemporary devices on framing such as splitting the frames, shooting in wide-angle lens for distortions, staging in depth, deploying long takes, and using handheld camera movements to develop chaos and realism.

There is also a Kafkan element present. Note the illusion of the ants superimposed on the melancholia and alienation of both characters. If i could think clearly, he borrowed some thoughts on Dostoevksy's Note from Underground --- perhaps its parallelism to the imprisonment of Dae Su for fifteen years. This intertextual referencing is perhaps central to Oldboy. The stylize conglomeration of this textual sources made it an insoluble mass of art, definitely not an avant-garde but of mainstream specificity which i did not expect.

However, the thing is, honestly, i am intense in saying that he borrowed some of the montage elements from Chungking Express (1994). The Oldboy use of the calendar-type transition of time has the same function to the ones in Chungking Express. Anyway, i have to let my dissatisfaction simmer down and approach Oldboy in other aspects than this.

But i have to admit, his narrative construction is superb!


Ciaofck!

****