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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: July 25, 2009 at 12:19 am by Eve Tushnet

2009-07-25T00:19:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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IN WHICH A NATURE DOCUMENTARY COUNTS AS “AVANT-GARDE” FOR SOME REASON: Thoughts on Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and ’30s: Disc One. This is the remainder of the first disc. As before, no accent marks.

Brumes d’automne: Same guy as “Menilmontant,” but only 12 mins long. Does what it says on the tin. Falling leaves; parallel between fire and rain. He leaves her, she burns his letters, she stares soulfully, she walks through fallen leaves. Blur effects felt kind of cheap (unlike e.g. the underwater, Monet blur effects in “L’etoile de mer”). Really cool singing on the soundtrack, which is original I’m pretty sure, not new.

Lot in Sodom: Biblical retelling; old-fashioned music; shirtless boys leaping about in makeup. The opening is fantastic, with “Bride of Frankenstein”-style electricity effects lancing down through a clouded sky; then mists part like fire from Heaven, and we zoom down onto the city. Unfortunately, the flick itself doesn’t live up to its opening. …Does “Mulier templum est” really mean “Woman is a temple”? (Or, “The woman is a temple”? Or something completely different?) Snakes, doves, blossoming flowers = sex. No trains into tunnels, sadly. A hilarious beard which looks like the cotton-ball concoction we used at JCC day camp to play “Pin the Beard on Mordecai.” There’s a lovely moment with Lot’s wife running, just before she looks back at the city. Her transformation is done in a way that reminded me a bit of the original Star Trek crossed with modern “become a flower” dance.

Rhythmus 21: It’s a Severed Heads video from 1990, only seventy years too early! …No, actually, it’s three minutes of rectangles. Ohhhhhkay.

Vormittagsspuk/Ghosts Before Breakfast: “The Nazis destroyed the sound print of this movie as ‘degenerate art.’ It shows that even objects revolt against regimentation.” Charming, playful imagery—hats flying upward, a shirtcollar baffling its wearer, an assassin’s target making his head fly around to defy the assailant, men stroking phantom beards. Kind of “Monty Python” animation meets children’s television, with (new) cabaret music. There are a lot of guns here, giving a sense of menace, but the overall tone struck me as lighthearted… for now. This is the same guy as “Rhythmus 21,” but this one is delightful and more than a little foreboding.

Anemic cinema: Marcel Duchamp, anagrammatic. (We’re so proud that little Marcel has won the Surrealist Spelling Bee of 1922! His wonderful prize is a dictionary in which all the definitions have been replaced by pictures of alley cats.) The new music is slightly Doors-like, hypnotic, paired with what I found predictably hypnotic and willfully-nonsensical imagery. Possibly the wordplay is a lot more fun if you’re French.

Ballet mecanique: The new music is lovely, thin and shivery, but I admit I zoned out for most of this. It’s, you know, gears and stuff. There are some really fun shots of women’s eyes opening—women’s eyes are made for the movies, but maybe especially for the avant-garde. There’s a nice if heavyhanded bit of imagery-punning as the O’s in a newspaper-style headline become the pearls of the stolen necklace which is the subject of that headline. There are some odd shots of a stocky woman walking up a road; not sure what those are doing.

Symphonie diagonale: The director’s first name is “Viking”!!! TOO MUCH AWESOME. Ooooohhh I’m loving the new music. I’m not sure how it would play with the original soundtrack (if any?), but with this music it comes across as a study of pacing. The kind of thing fanvid makers often talk about: matching visual movement to music beats. (I may be over-influenced by the pre-title here, which talks about how the piece explores time in film. Don’t worry—only two of the movies have pre-titles, and both are decades old, so you’re more or less allowed to come to these movies raw.) Man, this music is hot. If Sue Harshe composed this specifically to mirror the beats of the visuals, rather than simply adapting original music which did the same thing, she’s a stone genius.

Le Vampire: Original music, very jazzy and cool. Nature is bizarre! “Fully articulated appendages suggest a supernatural being.” At first I thought that meant that anytime you find fully-articulated appendages, that articulated critter is like a supernatural being in some way, but actually I think it’s intelligent design theory. Oh well. This short quotes from “Nosferatu” and locates the origin of the vampire myth in the various eldritch horrors of the natural world. An intelligent designer need not be a benevolent one!

Animal was harmed in the making of this picture. (Guinea pig, playing a guinea pig.)

The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles!!! …and also William Vance. Parodic Southernisms including blackface and much grotesquerie. It becomes a thing which might be a protest against lynching, without sacrificing its avant-garde artistry in the service of politics.

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