April 2008

Two Docs on Uganda

Still on the activist documentary, I recall two films on orphans in Uganda. They  number over two million because of AIDS and war, and we all know that cameras love tragedy. The first film, ABC Africa, began when the International Fund for Agricultural Development invited Abbas Kiarostami to film in Uganda. They hoped to draw [...]

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Imagining Documentary

My friend and colleague Genny Baudrillard invited me to speak with her college humanities class on documentary filmmaking. They have recently watched Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, a rich, complex film. So I mostly spoke on photography. A digressive version of the talk follows after the jump. Early in When the Levees Broke, we [...]

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More Muracrag Kamihead, Etc

On Wednesday, I’ve been invited to lecture at a small college out in the sticks, so Tuesday’s post will appear Wednesday, with notes on the talk. It’s a pleasant lecture about ethics and the documentary image, not a stern one about cleaning your room. Until then, some notes: *** In the inbox moments ago, Warren [...]

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More on Murakami

Good to see more people saying what I have (on this blog & in an article in the new TCJ) about Takashi MURAKAMI not being “Japan’s Andy Warhol,” as Mia Fineman does in a slide essay for Slate . Instead, she compares him to Walt Disney, another master marketer. But Japan already has its Disney, [...]

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Enthusiasm

Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm, one of those remarkable Soviet silents, thinks it’s a documentary almost until the end. Like Man With the Movie Camera from two years previous in 1929, it shows the workers working, building up the glorious Soviet state, with a pulsating, innovative soundtrack attached.  It hovers right between sync sound and “silence,” though [...]

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Snips from PingMag

I wind up at PingMag, a bilingual English-Japanese design journal, fairly often.  I first found it through this article on Namaiki while researching Fukuokan permaculture and the Power of Duck.  Since then, I often return to its articles on art, film, design, and pop-cult detritus .  A sample: This time, I was researching Koi no [...]

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Schjeldahl on Murakami

In his review of the (C) Murakami exhibit, Peter Schjeldahl admits at the outset why he dislikes the work on display. Murakami, like the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, reminds him of New Yorkers’ “new geo-spiritual fate, as provincials in a world of creative paradigms that no longer entreat our favor.” In other words, it’s not [...]

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Aya TAKANO notes

I have a long essay about artists who jump between manga & galleries in the new Comics Journal. One of the artists, Aya TAKANO, works as a part of KaiKai Kiki, the group organized by Takashi MURAKAMI. Their web page has a profile of her work. Her work has been covered in a variety of [...]

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Akino KONDOU notes

I have a long essay about artists who jump between manga & galleries in the new Comics Journal. One of the artists, Akino KONDOU, has a web site showcasing her work. She also has a number of animated shorts floating around the web. On dependable, ugly YouTube: Opening Animation for the 2002 Digista Awards “Tentoumushi [...]

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Across the pond

A few cartooning/illustration tidbits from the new Economist: Their talented cartoonist KAL is celebrating some 30 years with the newspaper, with a gallery of his work and a video about his job and how he got it. The British children’s book is in trouble, squeezed by the Internet, foreign competition, and high production costs. Also [...]

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Notes: Bordwell, GeGeGe, Backhoe

Finally watching Ozu’s Equinox Flower reminded me that David Bordwell‘s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema has been reissued as a PDF file. Bordwell has the story on his blog, which bizarrely enough has stills from… Equinox Flower. I feel strangely reflexive. The book is one of the best pieces of criticism, film or otherwise, [...]

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