Jørgen Vestergaard: Storm P. Opfindelser

Selvfølgelig har jeg altid spekuleret på, om Storm P. opfindelserne ville virke, hvis de blev bygget. Det gør de! For nogle år siden satte Jørgen Vestergård nogle dygtige folk til at bygge dem i sit værksted. Og de lavede dukkerne, som maskinerne skulle bejene, og som skulle betjene maskinerne. Alt virkede! Bitte små og enkle opgaver blev løst på den mest komplicerede måde, tænkes kan. Alt i dyb, dyb alvor, med en vedvarende boblende, men al tid omhyggeligt tilbageholdt latter. Fastholdt af Henrik Koefoeds knastørre læsning af Storm P.’s tekniske forklaringer til maskinerne.

Filmen er en suite af ti små episoder, hver med en opfindelse på det alleromhyggeligste  skildret af dukkefilmmesteren (hvad han altså også er..) Jørgen Vestergård. Den er i hans stædige arbejde med at få alle sine film ud på DVD gjort tilgængelig ved at Storm P. Museet til sin butik så forståeligt har bestilt et antal kopier. Køb den der, den er i hvert fald pengene værd, hører hjemme i samlingen, har gemmeværdi som det stykke gedigne frederiksbergske kultur det er. Fortolket af en thybo.. 

Jørgen Vestergaard: Storm P. Opfindelser, 2001, 15 min. English subtitles. JV Film & TV og Tinderbox. DVD’en kan købes på Storm P. Museet http://www.stormp-museet.dk/index.html

The Quay Brothers

The reason for this long presentation is the fact that the Danish Film House, in its Cinematheque in Copenhagen, shows an excellent retrospective of two of the greatest film artists of our time. New Danish viewers should go and discover the twin brothers surrealistic world, and others can acquire dvd’s of their work through Zeitgeistfilms. The following text is taken from the company’s site:

The extraordinary Quay Brothers are two of the world’s most original filmmakers. Identical twins who were born in Pennsylvania in 1947, Stephen and Timothy Quay studied illustration in Philadelphia before going on to the Royal College of Art in London, where they started to make animated shorts in the 1970s. They have lived in London ever since, making their unique and innovative films under the aegis of Koninck Studios.

Influenced by a tradition of Eastern European animation, the Quays display a passion for detail, a breathtaking command of color and texture, and an uncanny use of focus and camera movement that make their films unique and instantly recognizable. Best known for their classic 1986 film STREET OF CROCODILES, which filmmaker Terry Gilliam recently selected as one of the ten best animated films of all time, they are masters of miniaturization and on their tiny sets have created an unforgettable world, suggestive of a landscape of long-repressed childhood dreams. In 1994, with INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA, they made their first foray into live-action feature-length

filmmaking.

The Quays have also directed pop promos for His Name is Alive, Michael Penn, Sparklehorse, 16 Horsepower, and Peter Gabriel (contributing to his celebrated “Sledgehammer” video), and have also directed ground-breaking commercials for, among others, MTV, Nikon, Murphy’s beer and Slurpee.

The Quays’ work also includes set design for theatre and opera. In 1998 their Tony-nominated set designs for Ionesco’s The Chairs won great acclaim on Broadway.

In 2000 they made IN ABSENTIA, an award-winning collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as two dance films, DUET and THE SANDMAN. In 2002 they contributed an animated dream sequence to Julie Taymor’s film FRIDA.

In 2003 the Quays made four short films in collaboration with composer Steve Martland for a live event at the Tate Modern in London (read about the collaboration in The Guardian) and in 2005 premiered their second feature film, THE PIANO TUNER OF EARTHQUAKES, at the Locarno Film Festival.

www.cinemateket.dk
http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/film.php?directoryname=quayretrospective&mode=filmmaker

Jørgen Leth Box Collection Completed

1st of October is the day where the 6th and final box of films by Danish film icon Jørgen Leth is published. The collection, administered and published by the Danish Film Institute, though financed primarily by a private investor, is an exemplarily well composed piece of publishing, in this case – box 6 – with his experimental film from the 1960’es amd 70’es plus 5 hours of bonus material and a teaser from his coming ”The Erotic Human”.

English subtitles and a booklet accompanies the box. The book- and filmshop at the Danish Film House sells the complete collection.

http://www.dfi.dk/shop

Andris Gauja: Victor

It is one of those films that slowly develops. Something went wrong between Victor and his wife. He drank too much, he used drugs, he cheated on her, she did not want to go on, and he moved from her and their small child.

Which is where the film starts and where we get to know that Victor has cancer. Will he get an operation, will he survive, and at the same time, will he accept the wish for divorce from his wife, who still has a lot of warm feelings for him. Not to forget the relationship he has to his little daughter.

It is one of those films where the interest in and sympathy for the main character grows gradually. The film crew has followed him with respect and he has generously let them into his world of pain, anger and hope.

Latvia, 2009, 52 mins.

www.vfs.lv

Bettina Haasen: Hotel Sahara

Mauritania, Nouadhibou, a place at the coast, a place from where Africans want to go to the promised land, Europe, and from where many boats are leaving and have left, with people on board… with many tragic drowning events as a result. Many never made it.

Extremely well shot and produced, this film takes the audience to a place and an atmosphere of Waiting and to characters, who open their hearts and reveal their dreams to the camera. It’s a film with the ambition to describe a collective, it has the structure of a collage, it gives information, there is a respect for the characters so it understandable and well deserved that the film travels so well – visit the site of the film – as a reference point of one of the most actual problems of today.

But it is also a film that some times, though not all the time, seems to have been taken over by the cameraman. The images are so well composed and constructed (stranded ship wrecks, the Sahara landscape, sequences that play with light and the ocean in several angles, purely aesthetically thought and not really serving any narrative purpose), that they once in a while kill the contents and do not involve the audience emotionally.

Germany, 2008, 52 & 85 mins. (I saw the shorter version)

www.hotelsahara.tv

Aleksander Gutman: 17 August

This fine Russian director has, apart from the masterpiece ”Frescoes” from Georgia, made a couple of very strong documentaries shot in prisons, ”Three Days and Never Again” and ”Blatnoi Mir” (directed by Finnish Jouni Hiltunen, Gutman was production manager), and here comes another that I do not hesitate to call masterly done as well.

One day in the life of a prisoner, sentenced to lifetime for murders, a man in a small cell, watched through the small window in the dark cell door, walking from one end to the other, exercising, making a cup of tea, praying with his head towards an icon of the bleading Jesus hanging on the wall, getting some food… and a small walk to a strongly fenced and guarded courtyard, filmed from above to achieve the impression of a man in a cage, A close-up study that works because of the brilliant combination of pictures with the monologue of the prisoner. On Life, on the conditions in the isolated prison, on being alone and away from it all, on being close to guards who are there all the time and in a way sharing his destiny.

Sometimes with some shots from the courtyard outside. A horse stands there, an old man comes and makes it ready for transport, they leave the prison, and the camera stays – later on they come back with a coffin to pick up the corpse that we have seen in a previous scene. Or a window with a cat. Did I say that it was black and white. And slow. And extremely well edited. Not a moment too much. Sympathy for the murderer? No, not really, but respect for a human being, curiosity.

Russia, Poland, 2009, 62 mins.

http://www.eurekamedia.info/index.php?id=209

Bichlbaum & Bonanno: The Yes Men Fix the World

Well, no need for a review, the film has already been on the market for a long time, discussed and created debate, it is funny, it is a modern satirical, political film, it raises questions like Michael Moore does, you can not but agree with the two activist showmen and wish them good luck. See the film and read this from their website. It will soon be on dvd everywhere, on tv, and in festivals and in cinemas:

“Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two guys who just can’t take “no” for an answer. They have an unusual hobby: posing as top executives of corporations they hate. Armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, the Yes Men lie their way into business conferences and parody their corporate targets in ever more extreme ways – basically doing everything that they can to wake up their audiences to the danger of letting greed run our world.

One day Andy, purporting to be a Dow Chemical spokesperson, gets on the biggest TV news program in the world and announces that Dow will finally clean up the site of the largest industrial accident in history, the Bhopal catastrophe. The result: as people worldwide celebrate, Dow’s stock value loses two billion dollars. People want Dow to do the right thing, but the market decides that it can’t.”

www.theyesmenfixtheworld.com

Ton van Zantvoort: A Blooming Business

It is actually ”a dirty business” to be interpreted in different ways: the use of chemicals in the flower farms and the consequent pollution of the Kenyan Lake Naivasha, and the abuse of people living there who have no labour rights, very low salary, long hours of hard work, sometimes unprotected against the spraying of chemicals… and so on, so forth. But the film  pleasantly refrains from shouting to its audience, on the contrary the director treats the subject in a careful way, in a low voice bringing the mentioned terrifying information to the spectators through the characters, he has chosen, who are the ones with whom we get linked emotionally:

The mother with three children who gets up early in the morning to make breakfast and who goes to work and comes back late evening to cook again and be with her children. The fisherman who claims that the water is polluted because of the chemicals from the farms. The man who sells water (from the lake!) and transports it around on donkeys. The young filmmaker-to-be who has filmed inside the farms and wants his footage to be shown all over the world instead of the lying news reports from BBC and other Western tv stations. And others…

I learned something I did not know about, I met some people whose life situation is tragic and I was touched and informed in an intelligent non-sensational cinematographically beautiful manner. Thanks!

Have a look at the site of the film, a very well designed and informative piece of work – and did you know that 300.000 people work in the flower industry!

Holland, 52 mins., 2009 (next bigger festival: DOKLeipzig)

http://www.newtonfilm.nl/

Jørgen Vestergaard: Et rigtigt bondeliv

Nogle af Jørgen Vestergaards film er simpelthen umistelige. Blandt disse først og fremmest hans mesterværk Et rigtigt bondeliv. Som altid har Vestergaard taget sagen i sin egen hånd og nu fået også den ud på dvd som led i et stort genudgivelsesprojekt. Det er så godt. Og gensynet med den 15 år gamle film er gribende. Det er jo en stor, en omfattende, men også præcist lavmælt elegi over en vældig kulturs sidste årtier i midten af 1900-tallet.

Det første jeg hæfter mig ved, er de medvirkendes aldeles usentimentale munterhed. Dernæst ved deres vedkommende viden om tingene og nøjagtighed i hver oplysning, i hvert udsagn. Vestergaards værk rejser sig som monument ved sin uhyre omfattende og detaljerede research. Her er noget så sjældent som ordentlig besked om tingene, og arkivmaterialet er på plads. Det, der tales om, er det, som indklippet viser. Det er frydefuldt. Grønthøster og Ferguson. Møgspredning og roehakning. Faglig og nøgtern præcision.

På dvd-en ledsages bondefilmen af den på mærkelige måder noget svagere Fjordfiskerne og den i mine øjne mislykkede Brødre. Den første lider under tydelige ambitioner om større tv-relevans. Om det er pålagte eller selvpåtagne begrænsninger er ikke klart, men så kompromisløs som Et rigtigt bondeliv er den ikke. Værre er det med Brødre, hvor Tue Steen Müller (dengang SFC programredaktør) foreslog at optage den uden dialog! Dels er de to medvirkende ikke meget uden deres særlige sprog som bærer af en særegen livstolkning, dels er det vestjyske sprog nok selve sammenhængskraften i Vestergaards sørgesange over denne egns forsvundne bonde- og fiskerliv. Og skildringen af de to fine mænd i den smukke gård fungerer slet ikke som billeddigt. Heldigvis findes der flere dages optagelser med de to brødre. Med dialog på vestjysk fra Holmsland. Der ligger i det materiale en film og venter på Jørgen Vestergaards energiske dvd-projekt, som han egenhændigt så prisværdigt fører ud i livet: samling på det samlede værk.        

Jørgen Vestergaard: Et rigtigt bondeliv, 1994. 59min. Fjordfiskerne, 1996, 55 min. Brødre, 1996, 11 min. With English subtitles. Forlaget Knakken, Thisted orpo@thisted.dk

It’s (not) only Television

… is the obvious and banal slogan for a professional meeting in Trento, Italy that starts today and goes on in the coming three days. Buyers, tv commissioning editors, festival people, film fund representatives and some critics from around the world meet to talk about documentaries in general and first of all look at what is new in Italian documentary. Organised by the Italian documentary organisation doc.it, which launches the themes to be discussed in captions like these:

Discussion on cross-platforms, Are we serious on series, Theatrical releases for documentaries – How can we break the monopoly of theatrical distribution that banishes documentary-films?, Alternative Distribution.

The headlines illustrate clearly the necessity for the documentary community to find other funding possibilities than public broadcasters. In Italy more actual and necessary than in most other European countries… with the (almost) total monopoly of the Berlusconi entertainment channels. 

http://www.italiandocscreenings.it