J.B. #5

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I always believe that any learning comes through concentration and patience, and that you have to train yourself to have that patience and to perceive. That isn't slow to me, that's hard work. It may be slow in the movement of things but it isn't slow in the stuff that's going on in your mind when you watch something for a long time and you see very minimal changes: you start to learn from that. So time is a function of becoming more intelligent, I think; you need to take time. The word 'slow' seems to belittle that process. How can you rush that?

I remember years ago when I saw a neighbourhood film with Gene Hackman, Night Moves [1975]. He's talking about an Eric Rohmer movie and says 'It's like watching paint dry', and when he said that I thought 'Oh, that's what I have to aspire to!' That's so brilliant, to make a film that would require such concentration that you would notice paint drying. And then to actually feel the way the paint dries, the way light would come off the wall in a different way when it's wet and dry: as that transformation comes I think you could learn a lot about light. I'm kind of joking, but at the same time I'm serious. That's not slow, that's hard work and learning.

--Extract from Nick Bradshaw's interview with James Benning (accompanied by a particularly unflattering profile pic) [pdf]; Sight & Sound 23.10, p.49. Wonder whether Benning has seen David Gatten's The Extravagant Shadows (2012)?

Illuminations #19

sections of loop-film from a performance of Iimura Takahiko's Circle & Square (LUX, 13th October 2003), via

Realism(s) #33

Untitled - Jan Postma, from the series Se non è vero... (2009)

Illuminations #18

Flutterbye - Ray K. Metzker, 2007, composite of 13 mounted prints (24 x 20")

Realism(s) #32

My Tears Are Dry - Laida Lertxundi, 2009, 16mm

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I was listening to different songs, and I picked that one because he talks about how he's found a new love and is never going to cry again, and it feels very positive. But then there's this contradiction at the end: If that's true, "then why am I still crying over you?" Somehow that fits the southern California landscape, the idea of utopia, a place with oranges growing everywhere. The reality is that it's a big, improvised mess, congested by traffic and inattentive to its history.

I try to bring the making of a soundtrack to the foreground and make it so that image is never more important than sound. This soul song is music that can’t exist in the background. It's pouring its heart out and it's recorded in an intimate way, so you have to listen to it. I gave the song the time to develop and take over against a black background, playing also with postponing the end of the film. When we see a black screen and hear music, we start to think about whether the film is over. Has the ending happened already? It can also make us think of intermissions or the moment before the show starts.

The texture of the field recording includes the song that I use and ambient sound. If you listen really close to "My Tears are Dry" after the image fades to black, the song is playing in the alleyway where the palm tree is and you hear someone walking to the tape player and turning it off. While you were listening to the song, the sound of the city was there too. I never have anything recorded in a studio; everything exists in the world of the things that you’re looking at. When I had a screening at Marfa, it was a quiet night and you could hear a cop car go by or trains in the distance. They didn't interfere with the film or feel external because this inclusive field recording fabric sounds like the world in general.

--Extract from Genevieve Yue's interview with Laida Lertxundi, "Walkin' in the Sand" [pdf]; Film Quarterly 66.2, p.39-40. A recording of "My Tears Are Dry" can be heard here, and more info on the (beautiful) film itself here. Also: a much shorter recent interview in Frieze, and Lertxundi's contribution to This Long Century [194].

Realism(s) #31

Placerita - Karin Apollonia Müller, from the series On Edge (2006-2008)

Illuminations #17

The Liquid Serpent - Nicolas Janowski, 2011-2012

History Lesson(s) #19

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What comes at the end of cinema?

Not what comes after cinema—a good question for marketing gurus like Spielberg and Lucas and Cameron to lock themselves in a room and argue until they expire, choked on their own hot air—but right there at the end, in death tranquil or terrifying or both, as the movies take stock of a lifetime of failures (and, okay, more than a few successes). As a moment, it’s the end of both the particular (the last movie) and the universal (the cinema): the world-as-projector clicking senselessly onward, the projectionist long gone (or maybe never around to begin with), and the cinema-as-film caught in the stasis of perpetual motion, run through, ass-end slapping ceaselessly toward disintegration against its one true companion. When that delivery finally comes in the form of a complete formal breakdown—the comfortable order of the classical style churned into a maelstrom of frames and pixels (cf. Film socialisme [2010])—will the unifying force of Bazin’s trusty old ontology hold? “Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were.” If one accepts that the cinema will come to an end before the world does (i.e., as long as there’s still duration; figuring out what comes after duration is the real question of what comes after cinema), then there’s no reason to think otherwise—even a radically decentred cinema, one whose tatters are sent flying off in infinite directions, both analogue and digital, would still hold together around this core of mummified change. It might finally be a real big bang for the movies, which is to say that as long as there’s a world, what comes at the end of cinema isn’t an end at all: it’s cinema.

--Phil Coldiron on Raya Martin and Mark Peranson's La última película (2013) [pdf], which premieres on 35mm next month at TIFF.