‘Each week we pay homage to a select “Original Creator”—an iconic artist from days gone by whose work influences and informs today’s creators. These are artists who were innovative and revolutionary in their fields. Bold visionaries and radicals, groundbreaking frontiersmen and women who inspired and informed culture as we know it today. This week: Stan Brakhage’ … Read the full article here.

 

Dog Star Man
Stan Brakhage, USA, 1961-1964, 78 min

 

Probably his most famous work, Dog Star Man is a film cycle composed of a prelude and four distinct segments that, in their entirety, span seventy-eight minutes. He worked on the film from 1961 to 1964 and it fluctuates between different layers of image and superimposition. Each segment is compositionally and even narratively different, ranging from subjects such as the beginning of the universe and the Fall of Man. Later, he would expand the film into the four hour epic, the Art of Vision.

 

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#PreviouslyPublishedOnThisBlog : Glaze of Cathexis (1990) here & Cat’s Cradle (1959), here.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

 

Nineteen Eighty-Four
Michael Radford, UK, 1984, 113 min
Based on George Orwell’s novel ‘1984’

 

After The Atomic War the world is divided into three states. London is the capital of Oceania, ruled by a party who has total control over all its citizens. Winston Smith is one of the bureaucrats, rewriting history in one of the departments. One day he commits the crime of falling in love with Julia. They try to escape Big Brother’s listening and viewing devices, but, of course, nobody can really escape.

 

On a beaucoup parlé d’Arthur Lipsett (jamais par contre de sa participation au film Hors-d’oeuvre) sans avoir eu la chance de voir Fluxes et son ‘agonized intensely personal N-Zone‘ …

 

With N-Zone (1970), Lipsett tried something different, including footage of family and friends as counterpoints to his “objective” montage sequences. The film was attacked and Lipsett left the NFB’ (ici)

… À défaut donc d’avoir trouvé le film en ligne, on a déniché ces quelques images :

 

N-Zone
Arthur Lipsett, Canada, 1970, 45 min

 

Arthur Lipsett pieces together his visions of this fragmented world from odds and ends, even leftovers, from other people’s photography and sound recording. By juxtaposing his snippets of “found film” with snatches of comment or dialogue echoing the banality of human communication, Lipsett shows the emptiness of much of what we say or do. N-Zone is one man’s surrealist sampler of the human condition...

 

 

Source des images ici.

Begotten
E. Elias Merhige, USA, 1991, 78 min

 

The film heavily deals with religion and the biblical story of earth creation. But as Merhige revealed during Q&A sessions, its primary inspiration was a near death experience he had when he was 19, after a car crash. The film features no dialogue, but rather uses harsh and uncompromising images of human pain and suffering to tell its tale.

What ever this movie is very hard to understand, the film opens with a robed, profusely bleeding « God » (The Thanatos) disemboweling himself, with the act ultimately ending in his death. A woman, Mother Earth (The eros), emerges from his remains, arouses the body, and impregnates herself with his semen. Becoming pregnant, she wanders off into a vast and barren landscape. The pregnancy manifests in a fully grown man whom she leaves to his own devices.

The « Son of Earth » meets a group of faceless nomads who seize him with what is either a very long umbilical cord or a rope. The Son of Earth vomits organic pieces, and the nomads excitedly accept these as gifts. The nomads finally bring the man to a fire and burn him …

 

 

 

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Din Of Celestial Birds (2006) by E. ELIAS MERHIGE (October 22, 2012)