Sergei Eisenstein. Leni Riefenstahl. Michael Moore. Steve Bannon? At an event entitled “Alternative Facts: The Steve Bannon Reality Show” on the opening weekend of the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival (Cph:dox), writer and host Lars Trier Mogensen argued that Trump’s chief strategist might just be the most influential filmmaker among these titans of polemical documentary. A year ago, that claim might have seemed far-fetched.
Back then, the young crowd now packed into the “Social Cinema,” a performance hall in festival’s new center Kunsthal Charlottenborg, had likely never heard of this alt-right auteur. Lounging on stylish sofas, they were willing to sit through nine tedious Bannon trailers and a two-hour analysis of populism and propaganda with a Princeton professor, political scientist Jan-Werner Müller, and artist Christian von Borries. Given Bannon’s disdain for factual integrity, it would be hard to claim that his 90-minute political screeds could even be called documentaries.
Back then, the young crowd now packed into the “Social Cinema,” a performance hall in festival’s new center Kunsthal Charlottenborg, had likely never heard of this alt-right auteur. Lounging on stylish sofas, they were willing to sit through nine tedious Bannon trailers and a two-hour analysis of populism and propaganda with a Princeton professor, political scientist Jan-Werner Müller, and artist Christian von Borries. Given Bannon’s disdain for factual integrity, it would be hard to claim that his 90-minute political screeds could even be called documentaries.
- 4/3/2017
- by Paul Dallas
- Indiewire
This eccentric, diverting film about the world of mould and its enthusiasts is as weird as they come, but it could teach us a thing or two … well, maybe
Here is a documentary that in filmic and scientific terms is the equivalent of a lengthy mandolin solo on a triple gatefold prog-rock album. It’s all about the weird world of slime mould. We hear from amateur slime mould enthusiasts who love to study time-lapse footage of the frilly, bulbous mouldy growths spreading and branching all over fallen trees, like the fractal images in those films that used to be shown on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Slime mould is part plant, part mysterious, shapeless animal.
There is an intriguing link with early cinema. In the days of magic lanterns, things like this were a favourite spectacle: the pioneering film-maker and naturalist F Percy Smith produced what he called “time magnification” films of fungi.
Here is a documentary that in filmic and scientific terms is the equivalent of a lengthy mandolin solo on a triple gatefold prog-rock album. It’s all about the weird world of slime mould. We hear from amateur slime mould enthusiasts who love to study time-lapse footage of the frilly, bulbous mouldy growths spreading and branching all over fallen trees, like the fractal images in those films that used to be shown on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Slime mould is part plant, part mysterious, shapeless animal.
There is an intriguing link with early cinema. In the days of magic lanterns, things like this were a favourite spectacle: the pioneering film-maker and naturalist F Percy Smith produced what he called “time magnification” films of fungi.
- 3/9/2017
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
From acrobatic flies to suckling bees, Smith’s stop-motion nature films astonished viewers a century ago. Now Tindersticks’ Stuart Staples has set them to music in a dark and dreamy movie
Mould spreads like a firework. A bee suckles at a sweet pea bloom like a baby on a breast. Runner bean shoots sway and twirl as gracefully as dancers. It is difficult to put into words the alien strangeness of the microscopic worlds depicted by the pioneering film-maker F Percy Smith. Self-taught and working before and after the first world war, Smith mastered early microscopic, time-lapse and underwater photography with contraptions he fashioned from Meccano, candle wicks and gramophone needles.
Related: Secrets of nature
Continue reading...
Mould spreads like a firework. A bee suckles at a sweet pea bloom like a baby on a breast. Runner bean shoots sway and twirl as gracefully as dancers. It is difficult to put into words the alien strangeness of the microscopic worlds depicted by the pioneering film-maker F Percy Smith. Self-taught and working before and after the first world war, Smith mastered early microscopic, time-lapse and underwater photography with contraptions he fashioned from Meccano, candle wicks and gramophone needles.
Related: Secrets of nature
Continue reading...
- 10/26/2016
- by Patrick Barkham
- The Guardian - Film News
Stuart A Staples says: "I think this film has been such a gradual process and what it has instilled in me is a sense of patience and commitment" Photo: Courtesy of BFI Speaking about his interpretive film Minute Bodies: The Intimate World Of F Percy Smith, director Stuart A Staples says: “One of my hopes is that it just allows or invites people to discover his work. Hopefully the work is respected, but it was made to be exciting and challenging, but which gives it a life in this situation.” Smith, who is known for his Secrets Of Nature films, worked out of London in the early part of the 20th century. A pioneer, who developed time-lapse, animation and micro-photographic techniques to capture the nature in action, he and his work have been lost in the folds of film history. Staples and editor David Reeve - accompanied by a contemporary score by Tindersticks,...
- 10/20/2016
- by Paul Risker
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Stuart A Staples says the film started " I think this film has been such a gradual process and what it has instilled in me is a sense of patience and commitment" Photo: Courtesy of BFI Speaking about his interpretive film Minute Bodies: The Intimate World Of F Percy Smith, director Stuart A Staples says: “One of my hopes is that it just allows or invites people to discover his work. Hopefully the work is respected, but it was made to be exciting and challenging, but which gives it a life in this situation.” Smith, who is known for his Secrets Of Nature films, worked out of London in the early part of the 20th century. A pioneer, who developed time-lapse, animation and micro-photographic techniques to capture the nature in action, he and his work have been lost in the folds of film history. Staples and editor David Reeve - accompanied...
- 10/20/2016
- by Paul Risker
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Sneeze face, cheese mites, and techno Charles Chaplin: San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2014′s ‘Amazing Tales from the Archives’ (photo: Fred Ott’s ‘sneeze face’ in the short film ‘Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze’) The "Amazing Tales from the Archives" presentations at the 2014 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which ran May 29-June 1, focused on three subjects: "A New Look at an Old Sneeze" nearly bordered on redundancy. Fred Ott’s sneeze, officially known as Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, was filmed by the Edison Manufacturing Company in 1894 and is one of the oldest surviving "motion pictures." The approximately one-minute short film illustrates a man — Thomas Edison’s assistant Fred Ott — in the throes of sneezing. While historically a cinematic event and notable as the first motion picture to be copyrighted in the United States, Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze never does quite illustrate the potential of what film can do.
- 8/11/2014
- by Danny Fortune
- Alt Film Guide
Sex-obsessed newts, a vampire vine, slime moulds – nature films of the interwar wars focused not on big beasts in exotic places but on the world around us. Robert Macfarlane hails a golden age of natural history documentary.
In the summer of 1903, the hottest ticket in London was for the Alhambra Music Hall in Leicester Square, where a minute-long silent film called Cheese Mites was showing to packed houses. The film was the work of an amateur naturalist called Francis Martin Duncan, who had hit on the idea of pointing a motion-picture camera down a microscope. Cheese Mites, the result of his experiments in micro-cinematography, was a miniature B-movie masterpiece. An Edwardian gentleman sits at a table, browsing his newspaper through a reading glass while lunching on bread and cheese. He idly turns his glass upon his cheese and – horror! – discovers it to be seething with dozens of "great uncanny crabs...
In the summer of 1903, the hottest ticket in London was for the Alhambra Music Hall in Leicester Square, where a minute-long silent film called Cheese Mites was showing to packed houses. The film was the work of an amateur naturalist called Francis Martin Duncan, who had hit on the idea of pointing a motion-picture camera down a microscope. Cheese Mites, the result of his experiments in micro-cinematography, was a miniature B-movie masterpiece. An Edwardian gentleman sits at a table, browsing his newspaper through a reading glass while lunching on bread and cheese. He idly turns his glass upon his cheese and – horror! – discovers it to be seething with dozens of "great uncanny crabs...
- 9/24/2010
- The Guardian - Film News
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