Duchamp's "Anemic Cinema", Residente's "This is Not America", and a moving father-son encounter. Audio-visual refresh!
Our vigorous (and occasional) barging through the doors of perception this Sunday, by means of audio visual. Hope they cleanse the stem and shake up the pre-frontals…
Above, from Aeon:
A seminal work born of the experimental film movement of the 1920s, the French artist Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1926) features a series of hypnotic spinning discs, which he called ‘rotoreliefs’. For the film, the painted circular designs were captured spinning on a phonograph, giving them the illusion of depth.
Throughout, these clockwise sequences trade off with counterclockwise-spinning sentences written in French. While, due to their use of pun and alliteration, these phrases are considered to be somewhat untranslatable into English, each is sexually suggestive or otherwise obscene.
The film is credited to Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, with his frequent Dadaist collaborator Man Ray serving as cinematographer. Like much of Duchamp’s oeuvre, Anémic Cinéma is a peculiar and somewhat opaque provocation, hinting at symmetries or parallels between words and images in its composition and near-palindromic title.
If you want to see and hear Aeon’s digitally restored (and rescored) version, click here.
Many interesting strategies and approaches to be found in the finalists of the Cannes Lions, the ad industry’s main creative awards ceremony (as collated by Creative Review). Under the Entertainment Music category, we found the extraordinary winner, “This is Not America”, by Residente - an answer to Childish Gambino’s This Is America video of a few years ago (which also won at Cannes). More from PromoNews:
Remarkably poignant, the heartwrenching concept is unflinching in its display of brutal injuries, destruction of land and the forced separation of families, and cleverly parallels opposing ideas through match cuts and split screen effects.
An undercurrent of anger is palpable throughout the video, and the portrait-style vignettes interspersed throughout act as a reminder of the people and communities these issues are affecting, whilst also acting as a statement that the victims refuse to be oppressed.
Many of the scenes in the video are based on real political events that are well known in Latin America, but not so much elsewhere - including when Puerto Rican independence fighter Lolita Lebrón shot live rounds into the air inside the US Capitol Building in 1954, in protest to violence inflicted the US government on Puerto Rico (including bombing); and (in the video's most horrifying scene) the assassination of Chilean folk singer Victor Jara, killed for singing songs against General Pinochet's US-backed military coup while imprisoned in Estadio Chile in 1973.
A translation of the Spanish lyric is here.
From Vimeo:
After Tim’s work-related stroke leads to troubling health complications, his son Michael returns home to Montana. As they spend the most time together since Michael’s childhood, they reckon with the past that haunts Tim. Meantime is a deeply personal exploration of memory, guilt, labor, and the attempt to preserve the fleeting.
Director/Editor/Cinematographer: Michael T Workman
Original Score: Nicholas Merz and Evan Backer