Andy Warhol’s films are infamous for extremely long takes, static shots, and excessive lengths. Though not all his movies fit that mold perfectly, films like Empire (1965) are formative for how audiences and critics have conceived his cinematic works. In this video essay, I look at Warhol’s relationship to time, suggesting that his cultivation of boredom… Read more »
Take a film you’ve created and cut it into four sections, equal in length, and spool those sections on four different film reels. Then, hire someone to splice them back together, taking one foot from each roll, in succession, in a 1-2-3-4 pattern, repeated mechanically, for 20 minutes. This was the method used to… Read more »
Before Disney’s Fantasia (Joe Grant & Dick Huemer, 1940) introduced the idea of visual music to mass audiences, experimental filmmakers had been playing with the idea for decades. As early as 1909, Italian futurists were painting abstract forms onto film stock, attempting to translate the purity of classical compositions into moving image media.
As rhythmic meditations on urban spaces that shied away from character and narrative, city films of the 1920s and 1930s blended modernism, documentary, everyday life, and abstraction. The filmmakers took their cameras into the streets, capturing architecture, people, and industrial tempos, and then they pieced together their footage using graphic and thematic modes of organization.
“Do pretty pictures plus symbols equal art?” — Pauline Kael on the film Blow-Up Alejandro Jodorowsky is a man who deals in symbols, which is almost a silly thing to say considering that almost all artists are in some way working with linguistic, physical, or aural means to convey a larger point. Jodorowsky however is… Read more »
I think every artist can learn something from David Lynch. He is a touchstone for many surrealists, but even more conventional writers and painters can learn something from his combination of visuals and sound. I’ve spent the last year making an odyssey into the majority of his filmography, and I’d highly recommend that you do… Read more »