"People haven't gotten really mad--that annoys me."

In an effort to improve blogging sustainability, I continue to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Last week, BSC's assistant director of alumni relations sent a query email re: what faculty are reading this summer. Here's the skinny....

ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac....I'm mentoring Mike Gálvez's ATP grant project, which is to make a documentary film while driving across the USA. Kerouac grew up in Lowell, and this classic captures some of the crazy maddening bliss of an extended road trip...We're reading all of these books together, and then talk about them on iChat (me on the Cape, him on the Road)...

DEKALOG 1: ON 'THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS' edited by Mette Hjort.... Mike's film springboards off of THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (2003), a superb collaboration between two Danish directors: Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier--von Trier sets up a series of "obstructions" to push Leth forward as a filmmaker and as a human being. This thoughtful collection makes us go back to the film again and again...

DOGME UNCUT: LARS VON TRIER, THOMAS VINTERBERG, AND THE GANG THAT TOOK ON HOLLYWOOD by Jack Stevenson....Lars von Trier was principal instigator behind the Dogme95 film movement whose attempts to jump-start creativity through constraint quickly translated beyond Denmark and into something of a global contra-Hollywood strategy. Nothing says "student filmmaking" quite as succinctly as "creativity through constraint," right?...

LARS VON TRIER: INTERVIEWS edited by Jan Lumholdt....This collection allows us to see von Trier wrestling with ways to attack film form and style in thoughtful and direct ways. Sample banter: "Q. What are your comments on the reactions [your thesis film] has brought? A: Well, they've hardly been good enough, because people haven't gotten really mad. That annoys me. But we'll just have to hope that that happens a little later."...

~bpi

4-3-2: a must-see

Just watched one of the best films I've seen in some time--also one of the hardest films to watch in some time. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (2007) was the last of the "big three" Romanian films of recent years to make it to DVD (after The Death of Mr. Lazarescu [2005] and 12:08, East of Bucharest [2006]).  4-3-2 won the Palm d'Or @ Cannes 2007, and deservedly so.  It's wrenching, it's heartbreaking.  It's the real deal.

Technically, the film is actually reminiscent of our Danish friends from Dogme95 (e.g., The Celebration [1998] and The Idiots [1998]): long takes, handheld, no music soundtrack, etc.  The DVD extras are quite nice, including extended interviews w/ the director and the cinematographer.  Also, there's a short documentary about taking the film on the road to show in provincial Romanian towns that no longer have a dedicated cinema in which to watch these films.

In light of my current research on Lithuania, I'm arguing that--at least from an audience perspective--Lithuanian "national cinema" was only viable while Lithuania was not a nation-state, but rather a republic of the USSR.  Conversely, after re-independence, Lithuanian national cinema has collapsed.  In the Romanian case, this collapse of the audience is also clearly happening... And yet we've seen some amazing, world-class films come from there in the past few years.  What lessons can Baltic filmmakers take from the Romanian case?

Below, I've posted the trailer for the film (now out on DVD).  Do yourself a favor and see 4 Months...  But be forewarned: it's a bitter pill.

The 8-bit Scene (or, behind the curve yet again!)

So the crew @ WBIM were kind enough to give me this hilarious compilation of 8-bit covers of Kraftwerk songs last semester called 8-Bit Operators (2007)....I have made public my deep affection for Kraftwerk in classes, conversation, and even a previous blog entry (see the Archive). It's a nice compliment in my collection to the compilation Trans-Slovenia Express (1994), which of course is a set of Slovene artists doing songs like "We Are The Robots" and such. 'FHB used the disc to make a series of station promos before I finally was allowed to abscond with it to my office....

If you're scratching your head going, "Erm, 8-bit?" think of the bleeps and pops you used to get with those 1st-Gen home gaming systems (Atari or Intellivision, anyone?). These systems were going into homes right around the time that Kraftwerk was coming out with records like Computer World (1981). (True fact: I had to read and write about an article in a science magazine for 8th grade science w/ Ms. Guptil, and I managed to get by with writing about a review for Computer World in a computer magazine....Then biked to Park Mall and picked up the record, much to the befuddlement of my Motley Crue-listening friends)....

8-bit seems like a pretty funny / cool mode to work in: using the aural landscape of the early home computing age, ripping it out of original context and re-processing it in all of its lo-fi glory. What a cool idea, I thought to myself. Then, thinking a little more, I realized I had students back in Bloomie two-plus years ago that were already way hip to 8-bit.

The course was "Production as Criticism," and we used Dogme95 as our problematic. For the final project, and in the spirit of Dogma, students had to draft a set of rules / constraints that they agreed to work under--the idea being that contraints can potentially invigorate ideas and creativity through problem solving. Anyhow....

One set of students did a project that looks for anything like a role play game you might have found on your Apple II, called In The Year 20XX (2006). You can cut & paste this link into your browser to see the film (note that the hero is uncoincidentally named Lars):

http://www.archive.org/details/In_The_Year_20XX

Long story short: guess who is behind the curve yet again? But you know, you could die trying and still never have a chance. The fun of teaching is enabling folks to do stuff you would never think up yourself, and see them learn/grow doing it.

Priceless.