Showing posts with label Dziga Vertov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dziga Vertov. Show all posts

Watch Films You Do Not Know Online

Shaving the Tree, I mean, the Bush of Life at Christophe Honore's
Homme Au Bain (2010): No pun intended


If you are, by chance, trolling at some movie forums at the crack of dawn, or making some obscure watch-all-this-and-be-hysterical-in-floral-dress list at MUBI.com, stop for awhile. Just stop. Look at the sky. Back to your computer and back to the sky. And you'll figure out that these films I've written below with their corresponding links to their full and complete versions, are unknown to many. You think you're a self-proclaimed film buff and you know every inch of cinema from around the world, from every genre, every experimental bent, underground or otherwise. Think again big boy! You're not very far from the mainstream arthouse. Are you tired of canons like:
  • Wong Kar-Wai Choke-Me Express
  • Hanake Buffoonery,
  • Cooking-for-Doctor-Godard,
  • Andu-Wellesian Bitch,
  • Antonioni-pinini,
  • Nouvelle-Vague-Vague-Vague,
  • Apichatpong Wisiteraktakulsansantantieng,
  • Lars Von Nazi-Ass,
  • Kurosawa-nakakasawa
  • As-I-Saw-Tree-of-Life-Occasionally-I-Saw-Glimpses-of-Art-Porn
Well, if you think you're fed up with Cannes, Berlin, and Venice, this list might re-surged you back to life. Well, not life as in 'life' exactly, but the life on the other side of cinema, the cinema of the unknown. But please don't ever think of using these films to push your hipster-self to your peers by saying: "What!? You haven't watched Noite Vazia? Are you crazy? That's the most fucking awesome film I've ever seen!" And believe me, using these films as conversation openers with your cinephile friends wouldn't work either.

Enjoy big boy!


1 | A Sixth Part of the World | 1926 | dir. Dziga Vertov | 65 min | [watch now]


2 | Island of Flowers | 1989 | dir. Jorge Furtado | 13 min | [watch now]



3 | Noite Vazia | Eros... The Bizarre | 1964 | dir. Walter Hugo Khouri | 93 min | [watch now]


4 | Very Nice, Very Nice | 1961 | dir. Arthur Lipsett | 7 min | [watch now]


5 | The Cameraman | 1928 | dir. Buster Keaton | 67 min | [watch now]


6 | Anamnesis | 1969 | dir. Frans Zwartjes | 16 min | [watch now]


7 | Le Femme Qui Se Poudre | The Woman Who Powders Herself | 1972 | dir. Patrick Bokanowski| 16 min | [watch now]



8 | Mababangong Bangungot | Perfumed Nightmares | 1977 | dir. Kidlat Tahimik| 93 min | [watch now]


9 | Reconstituirea | Reconstruction | 1968 | dir. Lucien Pintilie | 100 min | [watch now]


10 | Bontoc Eulogy | 1995 | dir. Marlon Fuentes | 56 min | [watch now]


11 | 21-87 | 1963 | dir. Arthur Lipsett | 9 min | [watch now]


12 | ...A Valparaiso | 1962 | dir. Joris Ivens | 27 min | [watch now]

13 | The Song of Ceylon | 1934 | dir. Basil Wright | 38 min | [watch now]

14 | Traité de bave et d'éternité | Venom and Eternity | 1951 | Isodore Isou | 120 min | [watch now]

15 | Faat Kiné | 2000 | Ousmane Sembène | 120 min | [watch now]

16 | Mirt Sost Shi Ami | Harvest: 3000 Years | 1976 | Haile Geriman | 137 min | [watch now]



17 | Mujo | This Transient Life | 1970 | Akio Jissoji | 1970 | 143 min | [watch now]


18 | Klassenverhältnisse | Class Relations | 1984 | Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub | 126 min | [watch now]

19 | Tabiate bijan| Still Life | 1974 | Sohrab Shahid Saless | 93 min | [watch now]


P.S. Has anyone watch a film about Atlantis in the 1910s? Reply with links or be dead!

Ciao!

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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 dominate 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!
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