RIP Albert Maysles (1926 – 2015)

Albert Maysles was an American documentary filmmaker best-known for the documentaries Gimme Shelter (1970) Grey Gardens (1975).

He is best known for the direct cinema/cinéma vérité – documentaries he made with his brother.

You can watch Gimme Shelter[1] and Grey Gardens[2] in their totalities on YouTube. And Salesman[3] too (practically).

If your new to the Maysles, I’d start with Grey Gardens, the story of an eccentric mother and daugther.

“All About Money” is WMC#951

As I’ve mentioned before, I have been working on a musical top 1000 since 2007. It’s almost finished, another 50 or so tracks to go. Let’s call it my musical fingerprint.

It has come to my attention that a certain Dan Snaith, who works under the name Caribou, has been doing the same thing.

He recently published his top 1000.

There is about two to three percent overlap with my list.

Not on my list was “All About Money” (above), a queer but wonderful composition by an eighties studio project called ‘Spontaneous Overthrow’.

“All About Money” is also on the compilation Personal Space (Electronic Soul 1974 – 1984).

Keywords are cosmic, druggy, weird.

Drawing the contours of the ‘American fantastique’

“The Eye of the Beholder” (1960) is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. Its theme is aesthetic relativism.

It is a prime example of the American fantastique, the fantastique being a sensibility which is a sibling of horror, fantasy and SF, and child of speculative fiction.

You can watch the full episode (only about twenty minutes) here[1].

I previously mentioned this episode here[2].

10/10

RIP Lasse Braun (1936 – 2015)

RIP Lasse Braun (1936 – 2015).

He was one of the last living protagonists of the ‘porno chic‘ era. The only two survivors now are Radley Metzger (1929) and Tinto Brass (1933).

Here are two clips from Youtube (of all places)

An animated short film, a collaboration of Siné and Braun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LKS2O7W5v8

And this rarity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwUHjlbiYew

Body Love, a film by Braun starring Catherine Ringer, with music by Klaus Schulze.

I previously paid attention to Lasse Braun here[1].

“The Double’ is World Cinema Classic #218

The Double is a 2013 dark comedy written and directed by relative newcomer Richard Ayoade, starring Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) and Mia Wasikowska. The film is based on the novella The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is about a man driven to mental breakdown when he is usurped by a doppelgänger.

“Ayoade has cited Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation “The Trial” as a key influence, with its similarly labyrinthine sense of entrapment, along with “Alphaville,” “Eraserhead” and the dry Nordic comedies of Roy Andersson and Aki Kaurismaki; the latter’s imprint is particularly apparent in “The Double’s” regular eruptions of deadpan humor and its rich, almost Sirkian color palette. And so long as there are cinematic references to be footnoted, it’s hard not to flash back to “Rear Window” when Simon uses a telescope to spy on Hannah in her apartment — at first with longing, then with frustration as he bears helpless witness to her trysts with James.” –Justin Chang [1]

The Double is World Cinema Classic #218.

I like hybrids, mixed media …

… I like paintings you can listen to, music for the deaf and drawings for the blind. I like playing with medium specificity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuMI4lMk_-s

I recently discovered High Note (1960, above), a Warner Bros. Looney Tunes animated short directed by Chuck Jones.

In this charming film, various musical notes set up the sheet music to get ready for a performance of The Blue Danube Waltz. However, a sole note is missing. It turns out the note (a red-faced “High Note”) is drunk upon staggering out of the sheet music to “Little Brown Jug“, and the irritated conductor chases after him to put him back in his place so the waltz can continue as planned. Eventually, the rogue note is put back into place, but when the performance starts again, it has disappeared again, along with the rest of the sheet music. The composer then discovers that all the notes have gone into the “Little Brown Jug” to get drunk.

This film entered my head as visual music, although it is less so than the music visualization of Fantasia (1940), of which Oskar Fischinger‘s interpretation of J. S. Bach‘s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is online here.

See also: https://blog.jahsonic.com/listen-to-this-drawing/

RIP Anita Ekberg (1931 – 2015)

Anita was more than Sylvia of the Trevi Fountain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_99e25pmd5c

She was also Sister Gertrude, the Killer Nun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muWJxdOBqbI

Here are the deaths in 2014 and the ones who have died in 2015.

On the subject of death: I’m still recovering from the Charlie Hebdo murders. I feel that the world will never be the same again, much more than I felt that about 9/11.

On absolute music and abstract art

[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (2014,Mark Evan Bonds) appears to be an interesting read.

I found it while researching the origins of abstract art (in the modern sense of non-figuration, as starting with Whistler[1], Turner[2], some Constables[3], and later on De Stijl[4]).

During my research, I finally stumbled upon my own archives at Jahsonic.com, where, on the abstract art page, I re-read the famous August Endell quote:

“We stand at the threshold of an altogether new art – an art with forms which mean or represent nothing, recall nothing, yet which can stimulate our souls as deeply as only the tones of music have been able to.”

This in turn, led me to the Bonds book where the origins of abstract art (or thinking about abstract art) is described as:

“The sense of painting as an art primarily of form rather than of representation won growing acceptance toward the end of the nineteenth century. The French painter and writer Maurice Denis (1870–1943) pointed out in 1890 that “it is well to remember that a picture — before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote—is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” In lectures delivered at Harvard in the 1890s, Santayana speculated on the possibility of a “new abstract art” that would “deal with colors as music does with sound.” Along similar lines, the German architect August Endell (1871–1925) spoke in 1898 about “the beginning of a totally new art, an art with forms that mean nothing and represent nothing and remind one of nothing; yet that will be able to move our souls so deeply, as before only music has been able to do with tones.” The writings of the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965) lent further prestige to the aesthetics of abstraction. In his influential Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (1908), he asserted that throughout history nonrepresentational art […] reflected a society’s distrust of materiality and a correspondingly greater attraction the world of the spirit.”

That about sums up what I expected to find.

See absolute music and abstract art, and the famous dictum by Walter Pater: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music“

I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs

Above is the trailer to  Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film in 23 years

The Dance of Reality (2013) is an autobiographical film by Alejandro Jodorowsky (born 1929).

Other films of 2013 I have enjoyed: