The Book of Dreams project:
Sarah Fuller gives participants a pinhole camera and a notebook; thanks to the long exposures, the pictures portray 8 to 9 hours of sleep.
The notebook holds the dreams.
More here
(Via Culturehall)
***
(“¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesÃ.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño:
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.”)
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-Pedro Calderón de la Barca
“Yo vengo de un provincia del norte de Argentina donde existÃa la costumbre de dormir la siesta–la duermen los adultos que trabajan y a los chicos hay que tenerlos quietos. En mi casa mi abuela nos contaba cuentos, la mayorÃa aterradores, y tenÃan la función de inmovilizar a las criaturas en la cama o donde sea para que los adultos pudieran dormir. Ese mundo de las narraciones orales y muchos aspectos de esas formas de construcción del lenguaje definieron el cine que hago.
Sumergidos en el aire, como en una gran piscina vacÃa de agua, asà estamos. Crecemos entre conversaciones, ondas que se desplazan por el aire y nos envuelven, nos atraviesan. Pero hemos consagrado nuestro tiempo al ojo. Hay una forma de construir el cine desde el sonido y entre todos los sonidos, el de la lengua materna. Podemos cerrar los ojos y evitar ver, pero no tenemos párpados para el oÃdo. El sonido en el cine es lo inevitable. Somos animales muy especiales que emitimos sonidos con sentido. Eso nos convierte en unas rarezas. El que escribe para cine, y el que actúa, tiene que hacer ese juego de escribir una partitura para ser emitido por ese animal extraño; con la doble cualidad de que ese sonido tiene todas las caracterÃsticas comunes–ritmo, volumen–y además una muy compleja que es la del sentido. Cuando mi abuela nos contaba cuentos yo creo que su arte era no era sólo lo horrible que eran las historias–que todavÃa gravitan en las mentes de nosotros, de los hermanos que las escuchamos–sino también en el ritmo, en las formas de las pausas, en las formas en que ese sonido que nos iba envolviendo hasta atraparnos y retenernos en la cama.”
-Lucrecia Martel-
(Loose transcription of a talk she gave in Spain, watch full video here)
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“we were trying to be incomplete, abrasive, oddly beautiful”
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVZ6SWoW-q0&[/youtube]
A Mexican classic from the 50s, filmed in MexiScope.
(Gracias Carlos Gutierrez)
The yellow skeleton of our first feature-length film baby, mmm.
Almost finished, one month to go, news and website soon.
*
‘”Casi ficción. Allà donde la realidad está a punto de volatilizarse o volverse fantasma y vacÃo, la palabra la contiene o retiene en el lÃmite, mediante los hilos poco menos que invisibles de la imaginación y la poesÃa, es decir la no ficción. Al borde de la ficción.”
-Juarroz
*
“No film was ever made by a complete grownup”
*
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2fQHnvfPf4[/youtube]
Images by the fabulous Eunice Adorno, who is part of the “Tóxico Mentorship Program” for emerging Mexican artists, and whom we are celebrating today, once again:
Eunice has won absolutely every national and international grant and competition she has entered this month, including the coveted “Premio Nacional de periodismo cultural Fernando Benitez 2010″, and just yesterday got news that she also won an international residency grant in NYC for 2011. Ah sÃ, ah sÃ. We are so damn proud and oh so very happy to have her be part of Tóxico.
The pics above are from her series Frau Blaum, a project on Mennonite communities in Mexico
See more here, and do keep an eye on her: she is going places, and going quick. Mark our words.
Filed away in the Centro de Documentación at the Cineteca Nacional are promotional brochures from 1975, records of an orange-saturated world of geometric-patterned carpets that hasn’t existed for thirty years. The Cineteca caught fire in 1982, less than ten years after opening, its entire collection destroyed. (Within Mexico, the cause of this “cultural crime†is still officially listed as unknown, although those inclined to paranoia whisper that it was sabotage, the obliteration of a country’s past. Legend has it that the print of the Polish film playing when the fire started was somehow salvaged from the rubble, and that everywhere it’s shown a fire breaks out.)
The Cine Móvil program sent mobile cinema units ambling around rural Mexico in those pre-fire years, bringing ‘buen cine mexicano’ to small villages that often didn’t even have electricity, let alone a movie theatre. There were three different vans with three different routes, outfitted with four-wheel drive (“taking the abruptness of our geography into considerationâ€) and with room for two: beds, a bathroom, a kitchen, storage space for the projection equipment, a small film archive, workbench, screens, sound equipment. The young projectionists lived in the vans for the month it took to wind their way through the countryside, traveling from town to town during the day, setting up their equipment for a screening each night and making super 8 documentary films on those they encountered.
(But where are the vans? And where are the films? Were they lost to the fire? Or are they out there somewhere, hidden away?)
-Audrey Young, Tóxico International Intern–
Says Alinka EcheverrÃa:
“Six Million Pilgrims (2009) is a photographic typology of the backs of three hundred Mexican Catholic pilgrims on their journey to the
Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City. Â This yearly pilgrimage, undertaken by approximately six million people every year takes place
on the anniversary of the five apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe between the 9th and 12th December 1531 to the indigenous man Juan Diego in Tepeyac, the sacred place of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin. The myth of the apparitions marks a turning point in the spiritual conquest of native Mexicans by the Spanish and lead to the amalgamation of Tonantzin and the Virgin Mary. This is the origin of the devotion of Mexicans to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Â Since the spiritual conquest of Mexico (arguably one of the most important legacies of the colonial period), the image of the Virgin has been of central importance in the history of Mexico. Her image was used by political leaders as a symbol of faith and freedom during the Independence movement in 1810, and again during the Revolution a century later.
In 2010 the Virgen de Guadalupe continues to be the center piece of our cosmology as Mexicans. This work is an observation of her role in contemporary visual culture and the vast layers of symbolism transmitted through her iconic image. I am also interested in the pilgrimage as a socio-political and cultural phenomenon and in the psychological and emotional relationship that each individual has with the Virgin.  The work is inspired by the Becher tradition of systematic documentation.  I chose to photograph the pilgrims that are carrying their virgin, which is usually hanging in their home.  They take their paintings, sculptures, posters or cloaks of the Virgen to the Basicila to be blessed and to give thanks. Each portrait was taken separately, then ‘cut out’ and mounted onto a plain background. This decontextualization is intended to focus our attention on the individual. It also functions as a means to be able to then recombine it with the other hundreds of pilgrims. When placed back into the series the image has a direct relationship to the other portraits
rather than with the rest of the elements originally in the image. The large number of portraits creates a visual maze of similarity and difference, perhaps metaphoric of Mexican identity and makes us imagine the millions of pilgrims that visit the Basilica every year.”
***
(Alinka is part of “La (otra) maleta mexicana”– a Tóxico collective art project.)
(Click pic twice to enlarge)
[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6728530019973103765#[/googlevideo]
O Pátio. Short Film by Glauber Rocha, an influential Brazilian film director, actor and writer.
(The name Glauber, given by the mother, is inspired by the name of the German scientist Johann Rudolf Glauber (1603-68), who discovered the sodium sulphate or “Glauber ‘s salt”.)
This was the first film he ever made. He was 17 years old.
(“Donde no hay imágenes vivas no hay arte ni poesÃa”, le dijo alguna vez su padre. Al parecer le hizo caso.)
***
“We were modestly looking to escape from the “creative†effortlessness that literature and the plastic arts (as well as music) could offer us, and we searched for what would be considered difficult or impossible: organize a filmic universe, living for itself, without knowing, principally, the human problematic emerging from it. The work process was simple: like two human figures – male and female -, thrown on a patio in black and white, with sea and sky view and surrounded by foliage, we start with the camera, used as an instrument, in search for the cleanest appearance, more purified, and which would leave from its real state for the poetic state, only by framing solutions, from the selective point of view of the filmmaker in search for valid elements that, in the editing room, would propose the problem of “creating†the rhythmic organism, the film in its state of cinema as cinema.
It’s true that the use of human figures created, inside the filmic logic, a small anecdote. However we believe that it’s isolated on the background, since what will impose on it, basically, is the filmic climate, the new dimension of poetry that the play creates. “Patio†doesn’t want to “mean†anything, doesn’t want to “make a speech on or tell†this or that human attitude, but simply create in its proper scope what we would find in the Greek Cacoyanis and in the Kubrick of “Killer’s Kissâ€: “states†that only can be created by framing and montage, the work materials of a filmmaker who’s aware of his trade. This affirmation can seem pretentious, but it’s just an honest attitude towards the cinema, that, in the right term of the critic Cláudio Bueno Rocha, nowadays doesn’t exceed the simple art of entertainment.
-Glauber Rocha, in “Jornal do Brasilâ€, Rio de Janeiro, March 29, 1959-
(Buen artÃculo en español aquÃ.)
*
“Today, in 1954, I am going to start a “new lifeâ€, studying, writing and also…dating; despite not being any sort of Apollo of the body or Don Juan of the lips, I am still going to try. I think it is very difficult to date: first, I am shy; second, I hate frivolous girls; third, I am only interested in ones that would be cultured and intelligent and do not swoon when thinking about John Derek or T. Curtis [American heartthrobs of the day]; fourth, I am not a cheap and short-lived flirt; I want to love like in the last century: an ardent and dangerous romance.”
From Cartas ao Mundo, translated by Audrey Young
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veMBIWv0ews&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Great short animation directed by Niles Atallah, Cristobal Leon & Joaquin Cociña
(Chile / 2008)
(Gracias Andrés C.)
“The first film archive began in Henri Langlois’ bathtub. A rumpled, film-mad Parisian, he began a small film club before rapidly progressing to compulsive hoarder after discovering that old, silent films were being quietly destroyed or recycled by their producers. (“The comb you use every morning might well have been made from a fragment of Broken Blossoms, The Cheat, or Coeur Fidèle,†he once said.) He began to tuck away can after can, sometimes purchased, often surreptitiously stolen, under his bed, and then in the bathtub until, in 1936, he found a space of his own: the Cinémathèque Française.”
-Audrey Young
(Audrey is part of Tóxico’s International Internship program)
(“Dear you”, wrote Tess Bird in an email, “Check this wonderfulness on the pleasure of the brief breaks from the gnawing neurosis that is the human condition. Speaker is Augie March, in Bellow novel.”)
“…Jaqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here’s the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or to have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fSlWkvWt9k[/youtube]
The wonderful Vanessa Eckstein of BLOK Design asked me to send over an informal video with some thoughts on the theme of “getting lost”, to be presented during her AIGA talk in San Francisco today.
And so here they are: some brief rambling lost reflections of an afternoon.
