Landscape Suicide

27.12.13

At sea #13

Prayer ceremony for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami - Arun Sankar K., 2013, for AP

8.12.13

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

Les salauds - Claire Denis, 2013, HD video

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

15.11.13

Traveling Light #2

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

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.