Ten Thousand Waves

Last year on May 21st, we were lucky to be in Shangai at the Opening of Isaac Julien’s latest nine screen film installation Ten Thousand Waves’ opening at ShanghART Gallery. The work can currently be seen at Metro Pictures Gallery in New York.

Film Stills from the video installation

Made on location in China this epic work poetically weaves together stories linking the nation’s ancient past and present. Through an elaborate architectural installation the work explores the movement of people across countries and continents and meditates on unfinished journeys. A single screen version of the film called Better Life, premiered at The Venice Film Festival this month, where the Telegraph’s David Gritten, descibed it as “a sorrowful, strong and haunting work”.

Conceived and made over four years, TEN THOUSAND WAVES sees Julien collaborating with some of China’s leading artistic voices, including: screen goddess Maggie Cheung; rising star of Chinese film Zhao Tao; poet Wang Ping; master calligrapher Gong Fagen; artist Yang Fudong; acclaimed cinematographer Zhao Xiaoshi; and a 100-strong Chinese cast and crew. The film’s original musical score is by fellow East Londoner Jah Wobble and The Chinese Dub Orchestra and contemporary classical composer Maria de Alvear.
Filmed on location in the ravishing and remote Guangxi province and at the famous Shanghai Film Studios and various sites around Shanghai, TEN THOUSAND WAVES combines fact, fiction and film essay genres against a background of Chinese history, legend and landscape to create a meditation on global human migrations. Through formal experimentation and a series of unique collaborations, Julien seeks to engage with Chinese culture through contemporary events, ancient myths and artistic practice.

The original inspiration for TEN THOUSAND WAVES was the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which 23 Chinese cockle-pickers died. In response to this event, Julien commissioned the poet Wang Ping to come to England and write Small Boats, a poem that is recited in the work. In the successive years, Julien has spent time in China slowly coming to understand the country and its people’s perspectives and developing the relationships that have enabled him to undertake this rich and multifaceted work.

Through conversations with academics, curators and artists both in China and the UK, Julien uncovered a symbolic body of material which he has used to create a work that explores modern and traditional Chinese values and superstitions. These are encapsulated in a fable about the goddess Mazu (played by Maggie Cheung) that comes from Fujian Province, from where the Morecambe Bay cockle-pickers originated. The Tale of Yishan Island tells the tale of 16th Century fishermen lost and in danger at sea. At the heart of the legend is the goddess figure who leads the fishermen to safety. Using this fable as a starting point Julien deftly draws on this story and the poignant connection between it and the 21st Century tragedy of Chinese migrants who died struggling to survive in the North of England.

Following ideas surrounding death, spiritual displacement, and the uniquely Chinese connection with ‘ghosts’ or ‘lost souls’, the film links the Shanghai of the past and present, symbolising the Chinese transition towards modernity, aspiration and affluence. Here, Julien employs the visual language of ghost stories, with recurrent figures and images appearing and disappearing. Mazu’s spectral figure traverses time and space, serving as a guide through the interlocking strands of the work. Mirroring the goddess of the fable, a ghostly protagonist (Zhao Tao) leads us through the world of Shanghai cinema via the Shanghai Film Studio, to a restaging by Julien of scenes from the classic Chinese film The Goddess (1934), and finally to the streets of Modern and Old Shanghai.

This entry was written by Pinar&Viola, posted on April 10, 2011 at 10:44 am, filed under Art, Video. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Webcam capsule

Petra Cortright, vvebcam

HalfLife, Marco Brambilla

Petra Cotright
vvebcam
Petra Cortright’s work is nothing if not a cypher, but it certainly makes for alluring objects of interpretation. Cortright’s animated gifs, videos and still image pieces take their aesthetic inspiration straight from the lore of the internet, drawing on misspellings and trailing cursors and emoticons to form genuinely stunning experiences.

The result? A “low-res” and “fast” quality what makes her work so striking and if it works, it works.: “I try to be better at this but I am a really impatient person. Gifs and webcams are so fast, low file size, load fast, they are almost scraps. I like not having the commitment of working with hi def vid/images. It just sucks how serious you have to be, it requires too much thinking. Gifs are lil treasures of the internet, its so great when you stumble onto a huge unknown index that you hadn’t seen before.

Marco Brambilla
HalfLife (Surveillance, Game Engine, & Garden Grove channels), 2002
Collection Metronome Foundation for Contemporary Art, Barcelona

HalfLife from Marco Brambilla’s own words
“The multi-channel video installation HalfLife juxtaposes surveillance footage of video gamers in cyber-cafés playing the popular video game, ‘Counter-Strike’, with a live video feed of the game they are playing. The surveillance channel shows their expressions from the cross-hairs’ point-of-view while the game engine channel captures their virtual actions inside the game-world. The virtual world of ‘Counter-Strike’ is re-photographed from a live video feed from each player’s point of view as they play against each other in the same environment or “map”. The gamers’ actions are recorded as they engage each other in various missions: when a character is killed off in the game, the corresponding surveillance footage of the real player disappears. The third channel films the players in a cyber-café in Garden Grove, California, where video surveillance systems were implemented by the City Council in 2004 in order to monitor the increase in gang violence.”

This entry was written by Pinar&Viola, posted on March 30, 2011 at 9:28 am, filed under Art, Internet, Video. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Brilliantly disorientating

It’s the second time that we’re posting a video of Mr. West. The first one, after seeing Civilization in The Standard Hotel’s elevator in New York, he commissioned Marco Brambilla for his viode Power, and Tom Kan for the second one. The simiarity between the credits sequence of Gaspard Noé’s Enter the Void and the typographical sequences of Kanye West - All Of The Lights ft. Rihanna, Kid Cudi video is evident.
Please see the article A soul drifting in neon limbo of Rick Poynor on the treatment of words and typography in the contemporary feature films, and focuses on Wes Anderson and Gaspar Noé.

A soul drifting in neon limbo
By Rick Poynor

Published in Eye no. 78 vol. 20 (text in full)

Even in an era as typographically aware as our own it is rare to find feature film directors who treat words and typography as an integral component of their work. Jean-Luc Godard’s oeuvre, especially the classic films of the 1960s, remains the benchmark against which all typographic film-making must be measured.

Only two contemporary directors, Wes Anderson and Gaspar Noé, use words and type to reflect their cinematic vision with any consistency, though their style and aims could hardly be more different.

Hipster or not, Anderson has an old-fashioned, almost literary, taste for chapter-like breaks in his films’ narrative, and his typography, generally based on Futura, also works as a form of self-branding. This elegant, imaginary Anderson-world has undeniable flair and humour, though the self-reflexivity is too whimsical to pose much of challenge.

Noé’s use of the word as a filmic device is much closer to Godard’s: he wants to disrupt and disturb. In his first feature, Seul contre tous (I Stand Alone, 1998), an alarming tale about a butcher at the end of his tether, which unfolds as a scathing, non-stop monologue, he introduces sections with inter-titles in huge capitals – ‘Justice’, ‘Morality’, ‘Living is a selfish act’. A warning that viewers have 30 seconds to leave the screening, followed by the flashing word ‘Danger’, prefaces one particularly gruelling sequence. Noé might be toying with the audience but the frenzied hammer blows of the lettering add to the film’s unnerving harshness.

In terms of placement, Noé’s use of type in his latest film, Enter the Void, could seem more conventional: he confines it to the beginning and end. Even so the type plays the same vital role – see also Irréversible (2002) – as a means of expressing the film’s dark vision. Enter the Void’s titles can be viewed online (UK DVD release is scheduled for April 2011) but the best place to experience them is with the film, on a big screen in a cinema, as an overwhelming fusion of image and sound.

The sequence, directed by Noé with design by the Paris-based Japanese art director Tom Kan, is brilliantly disorientating. From the first frame, it is like being seized by an irresistible vortex of brain-scrambling sensation and sucked down into the film’s chemically modified consciousness. The type fills the entire screen and the editing is precision-welded to the stuttering beats of ‘Freak’, a 2003 track by the English techno band LFO. The credits flash by so fast that it is impossible to absorb them all, though a few names register in the visual noise.

As a piece of graphic design, the titles are both crude and sophisticated. This is an area of tacky popular graphics previously visited for its experimental potential by the late P. Scott Makela, The Designers Republic and Jonathan Barnbrook.

Kan exploits every trick in the commercial lettering manual: drop shadows, bevelled edges, Gothic type, neon type, 1960s futurism, shattered letters, melting letters. Spliced together with Japanese characters and subjected to jittery filters and treatments, this maelstrom of words signals the delirious, immersive excitement of Noé’s Tokyo, a city of nightclubs, logos, adverts, neon, throbbing music, drugs and sexual sleaze, a place where spiritual compasses can easily spin out of control.

Enter the Void’s psychedelic spectacle of a young man’s soul drifting after death has divided audiences. Some see it as a work of exhilarating technical innovation; some find it overblown and tedious. Some type enthusiasts complained that the film failed to live up to its stroboscopic titles. This response seems not only to misunderstand how titles can condense and reformat a film’s themes, turning narrative detail into graphic shorthand, but also to overlook Noé’s broader use of typography in his work as prompt, goad and pseudo-didactic audience-baiter.

After the title sequence comes the single word ‘Enter’. Enter the Void aspires to be a door of perception and we have been invited, or dared, to venture inside. Not until the end is the phrase completed, when it transpires that the whole film is clamped, like a big queasy burger laced with hallucinogens, between great slabs of type. The words are not, then, purely functional elements that could be cast aside without changing anything. The type is an intrinsic part of the void’s texture and meaning.

This entry was written by Pinar&Viola, posted on March 10, 2011 at 11:24 am, filed under Music, Other ecstatics, Typography, Video, Visual ecstasy. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Romain Gavras & M.I.A

M.I.A - BORN FREE VIDEO OFFICIAL (real and explicit version)
Geüpload door elnino. - Bekijk de laatste uitgelichte muziek video clips.

[...] M.I.A.’s Born Free clip is a docudrama-style depiction of American military forces rounding up members of a targeted minority in an unnamed city, taking them to the desert and executing them. Much-discussed reference points include the Peter Watkins 1971 countercultural film “Punishment Park” and, because the raided people have red hair, the South Park episode “Ginger Kids,” which satirized the idea of targeted minority groups by putting redheads in the victim role.
YouTube removed the short film by French director Romain Gavras for its graphic content, which included a child being shot in the head and a young man being blown up by a land mine — she simply declared, “BOOOOOOOOO” and provided a link to the “Born Free” video on her own website.

The transnational hip-hop star’s decision to team with Gavras and release a video that clearly connected to the history of political filmmaking is no rash impulse. With “Born Free,” M.I.A. lets her growing cult of fans know that she has no intention of softening her message to court the mainstream.

In fact, Gavras will soon release his directorial debut, “Redheads,” which takes the plot of the M.I.A. video feature-length and promises to be both ultra-violent and free of Kenny jokes. His work with the filmmaking collective Kourtrajme, which he co-founded, and on videos for other artists (most notably the French electronic duo Justice, whose song “Stress” became the backdrop to Gavras’ blunt depiction of Paris gang violence) lands smack in the middle of what’s long been fruitful ground for political filmmakers, including Gavras’ own father, Constantinos “Costa” Gavras: the killing field where dramas of racial prejudice, institutional control and minority resistance are enacted.

[...] The jittery scenarios of marauding military captured by hand-held cameras come very close to what we see in many scenes of Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning film, “The Hurt Locker.” That deep exploration of the contemporary warrior’s predicament left some people wondering what Bigelow’s politics might be. [...]
“Born Free” does away with the softening effect of exploring characters’ psyches, concentrating fully on the physical horror of gun butts and bullets hitting flesh.

M.I.A. doesn’t appear in the video, a formal choice that makes sense; the presence of a pop star in the middle of Gavras’ fully imagined inner city and outlying badlands would have made no narrative sense. The rapper’s decision to keep herself out of this first promotion for her third album further signals her determination to keep her message front and center. [...]

One of M.I.A.’s tricks has been to use the classic boasting style of rappers and Jamaican dance-hall toasters to lend a voice to what fancy academic theorists have called the subaltern — people who can find no place within society’s power structures. She does this again on “Born Free,” starting with the title, which becomes the main hook. Snapping out the words, “I was booorrnn FREE!” M.I.A. takes a phrase most famously associated with lions, the kings of the jungle, in the 1966 environmentalist film of that title, and offers it up to those people historically pegged as not quite tamed: immigrants, people of color, refugees.

“Got myself an interview tomorrow/I got myself a jacket for a dolla,” she says in the song, sounding a lot like someone who, in Arizona, might soon have to start carrying around a birth certificate at all times. Such pointed descriptions of poverty and living on the fly intermingle with more conventional boasts.

Then in a coda, M.I.A. turns the scrutiny on herself. “Don’t wanna talk about money, ‘cos I got it/Don’t wanna talk about hoochies, ‘cos I been it,” she snarls in what’s becoming the song’s most quoted verse. “And I don’t wanna be fake, but you can do it.”

Article written by Ann Powers for LA Times.

This post is made possible by Daniel van der Velden.

This entry was written by Pinar&Viola, posted on February 20, 2011 at 10:43 am, filed under Music, Political glam, Video. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Destruction of stereotypes and patriarchal ideologies

The Campari campaign is a post-modern approach around sexuality (& gender). How these subjects intersects with race, class, ethnicity, religion, age, and (dis)ability to produce and maintain power structures within society that ensure social inequality. With the notion that however one identifies, gender, sex, and sexuality are not intrinsic. In fact, sex, gender, and sexuality are socially constructed.

This entry was written by Pinar&Viola, posted on February 16, 2011 at 11:09 am, filed under Political glam, Video. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.