Dokumentarni film Javiera Izquierdea o životu i djelu Chiriboge, ekvadorskog pisca kojeg su izmislili José Donoso i Carlos Fuentes.
https://www.arcoiris.tv/scheda/es/87/
subota, 5. prosinca 2020.
srijeda, 14. listopada 2020.
Moj novi roman - Bogart i Seranoga
ulomak:
U ovoj urnebesnoj mješavini krimića, grčke tragedije i homeopatskog futurizma svijetom vladaju algoritmi, a ljudi (opet) znaju gdje im je mjesto – daleko ispod „bogova”. No to je futurizam bez budućnosti (budućnost se već dogodila, a nepoznanica je prošlost - jer se stalno mijenja), krimić u kojem se ubojstva tek trebaju dogoditi. Likovi koji izgledaju poput Bogarta, Becall, Bergman i Warhola, ali to nisu, u lančanom reaktoru obrata i iznenađenja razmeću se šašavim tragedijama, kao u Chandlerovim krimićima. Grčke tragedije govorile su zapravo o algoritmima, sada algoritmi ispisuju novu grčku tragediju, a najvažnije je pitanje: što se događa ako spajanje ljudi (organske inteligencije) i algoritama (anorganske inteligencije) ne uspije? Junaci uvijek propadaju jer imaju „jedno oko previše”.
No u svemu tome nema ničega tragičnog, ovaj roman začinje novu religiju, istinski je utješan jer potvrđuje da su ljudi iznimni baš zato što su strašni, jer nitko ne bi otvoreno bio toliko užasan kada iza njega ne bi nešto stajalo. I zaista, i stoji: u svojem dubokom zlu ljudi skrivaju i čuvaju neizmjernu ljubav da je ne bi oteo kozmički predator. U ljudima živi mrtvi bog, oni su grobnica ljubavi. No tko je predator?
Distopijska komedija s mnoštvom sudbinskih odgovora na loša pitanja. Miks 2001.: Odiseje u svemiru, Stockhausena, Raymonda Chandlera, Nicka Landa, Flanna O'Briena, Euripida i Alana Forda. Pomrčina romana po kojoj će se pamtiti 23. prosinca 2020.
Dragi, ti si velika, neizmjerno duboka tajna, ali nitko je više ne želi otkriti.
Recenzija:
Sanna Kekäläinen - My Sword has 7 Edges and 3 Knots (1992)
Moraš biti dovoljno lud i dovoljno racionalan, biti ranjiv i imati dovoljno pozitivnih iskustava.
Sanna Kekäläinen may well be the most important contemporary
Finnish artist
although she is overshadowed by the popularity of Finnish composers such
as Kaija Saariaho, Magnus Lindberg, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Kekäläinen’s
works are not something one goes to see because of instant gratification,
easy wittiness, or comfortability. One goes to see Kekäläinen’s works like one
goes to therapy or to court. The purpose is not to be entertained, but to get
to the truth.
From a layperson’s point of view, Kekäläinen’s artistic practice approaches
romantic and sublime ideals: she is one of the exemplary artists of our time.
From Kekäläinen’s own point of view, the work of an artist is much more
banal and profane: “I don’t mystify the life of the artist and I don’t consider it
to be eccentric compared to other modes of existence. I made the decision to
pursue this path in life so early on that it has been carved deep in my identity,”
she explains. But even if she understands art as one vocation among others,
it is apparently possible only through extraordinary effort. “It’s a difficult
line of work, in which you have to bear a great deal of uncertainty,” she says.
“But I don’t feel that it amounts to a threat or a gamble, not really.”
And yet my respect for Kekäläinen’s work has a lot to do with this courage.
In her view, “It also depends on what world a person was born into. You
have to be crazy enough and rational enough. You have to be vulnerable, and
also to have had enough positive experiences. Somehow there has to be this
damned psychological contradiction in a human being before art can happen.”
In the 1980s Kekälälinen studied at the London School of Contemporary
Dance. In 1986 she helped to found Zodiak Presents, now the Zodiak-Center
for New Dance in Helsinki. In 1996 she founded K&C Kekäläinen & Company,
which she still directs. - OLLI AHLROOS
Excerpts of PASSION (2016) from Kekäläinen & Company on Vimeo.
Excerpts of PRIVATE - Narcissism remix (2014) from Kekäläinen & Company on Vimeo.
Excerpts of If I Would Lose My Voice (2020) from Kekäläinen & Company on Vimeo.
IF I WOULD LOSE MY VOICE
About humankind’s irreversible effect on the biosphere
If I Would Lose My Voice, a brand new production by Kekäläinen & Company, is an extraordinary display of humanity’s impact on Earth’s transformation. It is a thought-provoking piece about the state of the world, and how the actions of humankind are affecting nature more than ever before.
In recent years, it has become commonly accepted that the Earth has shifted into an entirely new era, the Anthropocene, in which human beings have become the driving force affecting the world’s ecosystems, geology and climate. With her new stage piece for the Finnish National Theatre, Sanna Kekäläinen creates an fictive constellation in which this new era can be envisioned and imagined through artistic work.
The stage of the Finnish National theatre is where things begin to unfold. The situation is threatening, there is something unsettling and irrevocable about the event. We have exploited the world and slowly, because of this, a new Earth has come alive under us, with new soil, new waters, new rivers and zones. This new Earth has begun to move, to tremble, react and froth: the Earth is revolting.
If I Would Lose My Voice is a piece consisting of two independent parts commenting on each other. The first part is named Voice and the second is My Friend Ed.
Sanna Kekäläinen is the founder of Kekäläinen & Company and an undisputed pioneer of Finnish contemporary dance. During her career she has created more than 70 stage productions that have been presented both nationally and abroad. With the piece If I Would Lose My Voice she moves on from her autofictive work tackling gender politics to a new form of fictional reality.
https://pragmahelsinki.fi/portfolio/kekalainen-company/
Excerpts of VIERAS - FRÄMLING - STRANGER (2019) from Kekäläinen & Company on Vimeo.
Excerpts of Hullut 2018 from Kekäläinen & Company on Vimeo.
Excerpts of Autuaiden lauluja - Songs of the Blissful (1994) from Kekäläinen & Company on Vimeo.
Excerpts of White and Silent Cries (1989) from Kekäläinen & Company on Vimeo.
Excerpts of My Sword has 7 Edges and 3 Knots (1992) from Kekäläinen & Company on Vimeo.
Excerpts of Kuuhullut - Moondrunk (1994) from Kekäläinen & Company on Vimeo.
more videos:
utorak, 17. ožujka 2020.
Vincent Ward – The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey (1988)
Tražeći spas od srednjovjekovne kuge prokopaš tunel i završiš u suvremenom Novom Zelandu.
Ideja za bijeg od korona virusa?
“A tantalizing meditation on faith, mystery, and imagination.
Sometime in the
Middle Ages, a group of men living in fear of the Black Death follow
the visions of a nine year-old boy (Hamish MacFarlane) to go on a
pilgrimage by digging a tunnel through the center of the earth (!)
emerging instead in twentieth century New Zealand (!) where they try
to complete their journey by erecting a cross atop a church steeple.
A willing suspension of disbelief (or the kind of unquestioning faith
that the main characters have) never hurts when watching something
like this, but if you’re in the right frame of mind, this fable
will gradually draw you into its tantalizing meditation on faith,
mystery, and imagination
The Navigator’s dream-like storyline revolves around Griffin
(Hamish McFarlane) a psychic nine-year-old boy who experiences
strange visions of an alternate reality. The film begins in
14th-century England in a small snow-tipped mining village, where
news arrives that the Black Plague will soon consume the populace.
A handful of men,
including Griffin’s brother Connor (Bruce Lyons), take the boy’s
advice and, as you do, dig a tunnel deep into the bowels of the earth
in an attempt to find “the far side of the world.” They emerge,
looking understandably perplexed and rather worse for wear, in a late
20th-century metropolis.
The film morphs from
grainy monochrome photography to colour, a transition deployed to
equally striking effect in Wim Wender’s seminal romantic fantasy
Wings of Desire (released one year prior).
Surprises keep
coming, The Navigator’s luminous visual inventions (in part the
work of long-time Australian cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson, who
also shot Shine and Satellite Boy) designed from the perspective of
imagining what a modern world would look like from a medieval
perspective.
Gazing for the first
time at skyscrapers and city buildings lit up in the night, Martin
(Paul Livingston, the Australian comedian best known for appearances
on shows such as Good News Week as his alter ego Flacco) says in
wonder: “It must be God’s city. There’s so much light.”
The chubby and
grubby Ulf (Noel Appleby) finds himself in a precarious situation in
the middle of a busy highway, struck by the beauty of incoming
headlights.
“So pretty, so
pretty,” says the discombobulated time traveller, who lugs around a
wooden carving of the Virgin Mary and looks like a distant relative
of Robin Williams’ crazy homeless man character from Terry
Gilliam’s The Fisher King.
In The Navigator
there are many moments of intense beauty that branch off the film’s
core fish-out-of-water premise, including a man attached to the front
of a fast-moving train and the group’s violent reaction to a
submarine rising from the water (they interpret it as a giant beast
attacking them).
The simplest and
most effective is the sight of Griffin discovering rows of stacked
televisions behind glass in an electronics shop. Film-maker Rolf de
Heer’s staged a similar scene in his 2007 time travel comedy Dr
Plonk, when his displaced protagonist accidentally found himself
transferring from the silent film era to modern society.
The mission for the
characters in The Navigator is to climb to the top of a church spire;
the film is ripe with religious undertones. Ward contemplated ideas
around heaven and hell directly in his more mainstream, but
nevertheless distinctive Hollywood experiment, 1998’s What Dreams
May Come. He was at one point on board to direct Alien 3 after
producer Walter Hill saw The Navigator and was blown away by it.
Almost three decades
later, the film is still gobsmacking to watch and shows no signs of
ageing. It is the sort of head trip that leaves audiences gasping for
air and critics lunging for adjectives. Turns of phrase such as
“visual poetry” are sometimes synonymous with “boring” or
“plot-less.” That’s certainly not the case here: this is a
jaw-dropping experience up there with cinema’s best out-of-world
experiences. - Luke Buckmaster
The Black Death
looms large over the evocative first act of Vincent Ward’s The
Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey. Penitent monks wander the landscape of
14th-century northwestern England, hoping to come under God’s
protection. Occasionally the dead pass through the film’s
black-and-white frames in coffins, with villagers muttering solemnly
about the countless other corpses that litter the country with no one
to give them proper burial. The malaise left by the plague haunts
almost every shot, so plunged in darkness.
In their fear,
peasants fall back on superstition and faith for comfort. A village
adventurer, Connor (Bruce Lyons), returns from a sojourn shaken by
the spectacle of mass death. Looking to stave off the plague, he and
a group of fellow villagers are drawn to a psychic young boy, Griffin
(Hamish McFarlane), whose visions of earning God’s mercy by placing
a copper cross on the tallest cathedral in the region are taken as
prophecy by his desperate elders.
This band of men
sets out to cast a copper cross and place it on the steeple of “the
biggest church in all of Christendom.” They tunnel into the earth
for the finest copper ore, only to dig so deep that they travel
through time, emerging in present-day New Zealand—and in so doing,
the film switches to color. In their confusion and provincialism, the
men assume this is what any large city from this period is supposed
to look like, and they navigate Auckland undeterred in their quest.
The stage would appear to be effectively set for a fish-out-of-water
comedy in the vein of Time Bandits.
Ward, though,
doesn’t settle for cliché, tinging his heroes’ journey with a
sense of the fantastic as they confront such obstacles as a bustling
highway, the towering spire of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, even a
submarine that surfaces in a harbor and that the men attempt to spear
like a whale. Ward originally intended to make a jauntier film, and
he even planned to cast little people as the time-traveling troupe.
Yet the final film is a serious attempt to fully empathize with the
displacement felt by his characters.
Take the scene in
which the heroes emerge in Auckland and find themselves at the edge
of the wide and busy highway, scared witless by the existence of
cars. Instead of playing the scene for laughs, Ward homes in on the
sheer terror felt by the old and kindly Ulf (Noel Appleby) as he
unsuspectingly finds himself on the other end of the highway
separated from the rest of his party. Connor reveals his panic over
the group’s situation before then making the decision to abandon
his friend in order to continue their quest—and the scene is capped
by Ward poignantly highlighting the old man’s uncomprehending,
tear-stained face as his friends desert him.
The party’s
unwavering focus on their quest gives The Navigator its propulsive
momentum. The film’s second half is devoted to the group’s
attempt to place their cross on the spire of St. Patrick’s, a
seemingly simple matter that’s delayed by various
setbacks—digressions that successfully work to enrich the
characters. The issue of Connor’s occasional cowardice and dubious
qualification to lead comes to a head, as does Griffin’s increasing
zeal to contribute to the group’s efforts. Griffin’s religious
fervor is contrasted with the wavering faith of his compatriots, who
feel more displacement than ever when attempting to reconcile St.
Patrick’s, with its classical architecture and interior design,
with the modern city that surrounds it. The doubt sown among the men
plays out in the film’s dour coda, which directly questions the
efficacy of not only this quest but any mythic journey to counter a
foe like the Black Death that cannot be slain with swords or sorcery.
- Jake Cole
Vincent Ward's first two films are strikingly original and
atmospheric, and this is the more straightforward of the two (despite
a story-changing denouement).
The Navigator (an
antipodean co-production which won Best Film at the 1988 AFIs)
provides a rousing showcase of Vincent Ward's capabilities.
Noticeable in Ward's work is a curious trend of complexly evolving
relationships with father figures, his work ever brought vividly to
cinematic life through differing perception. The most stunning
passage of the film is the escapist, doomsday-defying quest through
modern-day New Zealand in search of a vision, the film reaching a
giddy high of overlapping, fish-out-of-water reality.
The Navigator
represents one of the finest displays of how to make a film fun and
adventurous, as well as haunting and timely. An encounter with a
submarine here demands to be seen. The subtextual spectre of 80s AIDS
simmers throughout, including a glimpse of the iconic grim reaper
commercial down under. This desperate plight, at the brink of
apocalypse (whether black death, AIDS or nuclear holocaust), recalls
the spiritual yearning of Bergman and Tarkovsky.
The Navigator, like
Ward's other films, is not for everyone, but it does benefit from
being one of his more disciplined (one of those directors who
flourishes best under confined budgets, loses direction and form when
the limit heads skyward). Like with Vigil, if this often brilliant
work does connect with you, you'll revel in one of his more
mesmerising works. - Ruth Scouller
A great little
parable that has a killer central premise - 14th century Englishmen,
desperate to escape the onslaught of the Black Death tunnel their way
through the world and emerge in modern day New Zealand - shot through
with Vincent Ward's unique eye.
The premise is given
credence with a decent set up - an offering needs to be made to god,
but all villages around the travellers own are infected so there is
nowhere else to go but down, fuelled by the clear and stark visions
of a young boy. And these scenes are given a real 'Hard to be a God'
flavour by being shot in high contrast, stark black and white, giving
the whole thing a horribly realistic, grim and gritty texture to it.
Once the adventurers
get to NZ, the film switches to bold colour, emphasising the duality
of the two eras. There is no fish out of water hilarity here - no Les
Visituers style comedy capers thank fuck, however the 'realism' of
the opening narrative gives way to something else, something much
more 'fable-like' which is not apparent until the films final act:
some may be disappointed by some huge narrative leaps here, but stick
with it as these come into stark focus come the films conclusion.
There is much that
can be read into the film - musing on the place of religion in the
modern world, the relative ease of modern life that comes at a
spiritual cost, etc - but it can also be enjoyed as a simple fable.
Its very well put together - no huge visual effects are needed, so it
looks very tactile and real - and its acted very well by all,
although here is where my biggest criticism comes in: the actors
playing the medieval group have accents that are not only all over
the place, but are so thick a lot of initial dialogue is difficult to
understand. Its not a deal breaker not by any means, but it does mean
that those early scenes are harder work than they should be, seeing
possible authenticity get in the way of cinematic story telling.
But that's a minor
gripe - this is a very different type of film, one that's well worth
seeking out and yet again, ruing the potential of Ward's
could-have-been-amazing Alien 3. - Mark Costello