Realism(s) #37, or: on déplace le problème

Les salauds - Claire Denis, 2013, HD video

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I think I focus on fathers. To be a father, like Marco is a father. And what happens when this kind of thing occurs between a daughter and a father. Because the daughter is not completely a victim of her father, she is accepting it too. In a way—maybe I'm about to be completely crazy—when I was the age of a daughter I thought if I had a bad experience with sex, even though the man was brutal or ignorant or whatever, I always took it for granted that this was my problem. That this was the problem of women, to keep it for ourselves. On déplace le problème. [We shift the blame.] I remember when I was very young and coming home and thinking: "Well, this is my problem. There is nowhere I can go and complain." There's not a guiltiness of being a woman, but women deal with their bodies in a very complex way, a total way, a global way. Not like men. Men, they have a hard-on or not. The feeling of a woman is so much more complex, because she can pretend, she can fake, she can also be terrified and hate and not show it. I think to be a woman is a complete sexual experience in a way. And this makes everything more complex.

--Claire Denis, interviewed by Kiva Reardon in cléo 1.3.

History Lesson(s) #24

Vers Madrid (The Burning Bright!) - Sylvain George, 2012-13, digital video

Traveling Light #2

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For the next month, Gina Telaroli's great Traveling Light (2011) is streaming at Lumière and freely available to download in HD. I wrote a short text about related sounds (see also: the post below) to accompany this release, one of many fragments of prose, images and video also compiled here. Alongside watching the film itself, I strongly recommend reading Gina's 'precarious preamble', which addresses issues of craft, labour, class and gender with an openness and honesty that often seems to be absent in reflections on contemporary filmmaking. Traveling Light will also be playing at Anthology Film Archives in New York (before the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon) alongside a short programme of train movies – a good excuse, if needed, to revisit 4'8 1/2" from afar.

Realism(s) #36

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The way we make music is not like this calculated, conceptual thing; sometimes we'll have an idea that's mostly sort of affective and nebulous. Like the song "Ready for the World" came from this idea where we were talking about what it would be like to be a little boy and to have this downstairs neighbour who'd just gotten broken up with by his boyfriend and you can hear him crying though the floor and you can hear R&B music coming through the floor, and so we just started making the song in light of that. And usually we'll make a song and I'll just open my mouth and sing. After the fact, I'll listen to it and hear words that I've sung and then kind of write something down, get something formal from that, but still relatively informal. I guess I just sing R&B hooks because... I really think KS 107.5; man, the first music I listened to. When I open my mouth to sing, I sing these melodies.

--Tom Krell (How to Dress Well), interviewed by the Village Voice in 2010.

This reminds me of a dream I had when I was a kid, that ghosts were flying around my bedroom. The only way to calm the anxiety of their pace and intensity was to focus my gaze on theirs, at which point they would fly straight through me. The sensation was overwhelming, but it felt much better than watching their random flight patterns and erratic behavior. I think about this dream a lot as a metaphor for what songs are to me. Some of the ghosts are mine, and some of them aren't. It doesn't always feel great to engage with them, but in the end I’m usually glad to have their company.

--Liz Harris (Grouper), interviewed by Dummy earlier this year.

Des animaux #9

Repast - Mikio Naruse, 1951, 35mm

History Lesson(s) #23

Untitled - Diana Markosian, from the series Chernobyl's Last Breath (2011)

History Lesson(s) #22

Pripyat - Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 1999, 35mm

Reprise

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On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, a retrospective of Peter Nestler's cinema returns to London and Sheffield. The following films will be screened on 16mm, 35mm and digibeta: By the Dike Sluice / Am Siel (1962); Ödenwaldstetten (1964); A Working Men’s Club in Sheffield / Ein Arbeiterclub in Sheffield (1965); From Greece / Von Griechenland (1965); Up the Danube / Die Donau Rauf (1969); How to Make Glass (manually) / Wie macht man Glas? (handwerklich) (1970); Chile Film / Chilefilm (1973-74); The Jewish Lane / Die Judengasse (1988); Time / Zeit (1992); Pachamama – Our Land / Pachamama – Nuestra Tierra (1995). Worth revisiting: Martin Brady's essay on Nestler for Afterall, and the English version of Martin Grennberger and Stefan Ramstedt's conversation with Nestler from last year.

Also in London: Honoré Daumier at the RA, and Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor in conversation with Philip Hoare at the Tate Modern. Elsewhere: Warhol's L.A., and Malevich in Amsterdam.

Some links too: Glyn Davis' tumblr; Amy Cutler on Writing Britain and The Robinson Institute; Aaron Cutler on Lav Diaz (w/ addendum); Sylvain George: Giving a Voice to the Invisible; Philippe Garrel interviewed by Jean-Michel Frodon in the press kit for La jalousie; a new DVD and book of René Vautier's great Afrique 50 (1950); Serge Daney's La rampe (1983), translated by Laurent Kretzschmar and Otie Wheeler; an interview with Nathaniel Dorsky – "we’re all mutually alone"; forgetting to remember the reminders of old; Jenny Diski's defence of Liz Jones; Owen Hatherley on Richard Rogers; excerpts from Richard Skelton's Landings (also: a new Archival release, and a rare live performance by Skelton next year); a study in Sincerely Yours (2005–2013); Adam Harper on R Plus Seven and Daniel Lopatin's XLR8R mix; Rashad Becker: Nontraditional music; The People Dreaming in Church (and an interview with Julia Holter); Rene Hell's beautiful Dummy mix; i think life might be elsewhere; and Songs for Sleep.