1125am 1.27.08
At short filmmaker's breakfast. Slept like hell, but feel okay. Somehow, my two roommates snore like container ships. (scene missing) Best of the fest so far for me is a short titled "Dear Bill Gates." It made me almost cry. I love it. A young girl, twenty something, writes an email or two to Bill Gates and explores his Corbis project in which he's purchased over 11 million photographs of our US history and stored them 200 feet below the surface in a former limestone mine called Iron Mountain, which is in a small town in Pennsylvania that has been on fire for 40 years. About images, collective memory, photography's vulnerability, how no one really owns anything anymore or shouldn't and the pitfalls of said ownership. It's so personal and vulnerable and insightful. It's a wounded film. Little people vs. big people. Awesome. I love it.
The in competition shorts are weighted more towards experimental or non-narrative work.
I think I might depart from this diary entry style of blogging. I'm not really digging it. I'm still going to keep a diary but I prefer the Archie blog style. It kills me I can't post pictures. Oh well.
So, to bring you up to speed. I didn't win any awards, but I didn't expect to so no big deal. However, like any filmmaker worth his salt, I compiled my top 3 shorts list to see how I'd do if I were a Vegas man. They are, in no particular order: Dear Bill Gates, Mosaic Mecanique, Ah, Liberty! Mosaic Mecanique is a Charlie Chaplin short you can watch all at once. Experimental would be in this film's tag cloud, though that word doesn't do it justice. This Austrian took every shot(title card, intertitles and credits included) from a Chaplin one reeler, looped them, and arranged them in chronological order on the screen at the same time. So, you are watching the ENTIRE FILM at the EXACT SAME TIME. Yes, it was dynamite. You can watch the film all at once, or you can follow it, shot by shot, like you are reading a book on a 40 foot screen.
'Ah, Liberty!' was the only short I chose that won an award and I'm so happy it did. Ben Rivers, UKer, filmed a family, the Pococks, in Scotland in 16mm black and white cinemascope, aspect ratio 2.65 to 1. That is not a misprint. 16mm scope is my new favorite format. Reviewing the program prior to my Delta departure, I noticed the still for this short and said to myself, "I have to see this based on the still alone." Check it out here. It's a non-fiction work, but not %100 doc. So great. I'm hereby a firm believer that if you have an exclamation point in your title in addition to an interjection, you can't lose.
The other two winners were, As I Lay Dying (narrative) and Observando el Cielo (experimental). Don't remember much about the first one and I liked the second one. It's really cool.
On my plate for today are finding a proper adapter for my phone and ipod, whose battery just entered the red this morning during my 6am - 8am 'ican'tsleepwhytryatleastdosomethingbesideslayherewheresmyipod'. I really cannot adjust to this time change. How long is it supposed to take? World travelers chime in here. I took a sleeping pill the night before last and it sure knocked me out, but I was a disaster all day long. Crippling lethargy until about 6pm, when the drugs finally wore off and I was able to concentrate and not have to pinch myself, bite my tongue or tense my muscles to stay awake in the cinema. Won't do that again. I'd rather stay up than have to endure the Sominex side effects. I should throw those damn pills away. Dreadful. I don't dream when I take them either.
Tonight is the last night in the hostel before moving the the Pax Hotel Rotterdam. Pax is Dutch for Best Western. It looks palatial in comparison. The hostel wasn't all that bad, but the smells range on a day-to-day basis from indeterminate to suspect to foul. When I arrived home last night, a cadre of young blokes were in one sitting area with a blond haired kid jamming on the piano and everyone one was singing a song in Dutch. It was radical.
I saw two good features yesterday of the five total. War, Love, God & Madness: Shooting In Iraq was a doc that I loved. It's about this film director who travels to Baghdad during the occupation in 04 or 05 and successfully shoots a feature film on 35mm with a tiny crew, an 18 year old sound mixer, and a 16 year old boom operator. Director, sound mixer and makeup artist are kidnapped at one point towards the end of filming, tortured, released to American authorities, interrogated, and tortured some more and finally with the help of the Dutch embassy(director is Iraqi-Dutch citizen) are released. Great movie. Loved it. A little self-indulgent once or twice, but I'll overlook that.
Bela Tarr's The Man From London was the other. It's a performance, to be sure and the effect on me was rather complex because of the extreme stylization. I overlooked the horrendous dub/sync job and Tilda Swinton seemed out of place. However, I loved it.
The other movie I love the most is called Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, which is an homage to Albert Lamorisse's Le Balloon Rouge, a classic short film about a boy and a red balloon. The short is great and this feature is extraordinary. I adored it!
I have to go now. Yes, I definitely prefer this method of blogging to the previous. What was I thinking? If it ain't broke, why fix it?
The blog title is an homage to a Sufjan Stevens song title.
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1 comment:
caffeine was always my solution to the time change. just drink a lot of it in the morning (as in, look at how much all the europeans are drinking and aim for that). have one coffee mid afernoon, around 3. eat a big dinner with a couple glasses of red wine and the caffeine crash will set in, full tummy, sleep like a baby.
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