lensbased.net

Dodes´kaden, Kurosawa Akira 1970
Life as a discarded object.

all details of the 2 day workshop/conference here.
publish and be damned.

listening to Angela Merkels speak about the change in energy production, i had to think of an advice from the famous radio reporter Ira Glass for performing on broadcast:
“you don’t underline every third word for emphasis because it sound really unnatural.”
anyway, more to the point i dug and found the video where he was talking about this and other things, since i find a lot of what he says applied equally to making films art so i thought i share:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loxJ3FtCJJA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6x7lOIsPE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baCJFAGEuJM
enjoy
(christoph)

By CHRISTINA HOAG The Associated Press updated 5/23/2011 10:10:58  – LOS ANGELES — A dead dog lies among the knee-high weeds, a sign to Guillermo Elenes that the burned out, boarded up house is being used as a dump. Inside, soiled diapers, fast-food trash and the strewn beer and vodka bottles indicate squatters have been living there. The dumping ground-crash pad serves as a squalid symbol of how the foreclosure crisis is riddling communities with blight because no one wants to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining foreclosed homes. “There’s one on every block,” said Elenes, a community organizer with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment in Watts, a low-income South Los Angeles neighborhood pockmarked with foreclosed homes. “All we want is for the banks to step up and be good citizens.”
Communities across the nation have made little progress in getting banks to maintain foreclosed properties, and as the ongoing crisis matures and bank-owned homes fall into advanced stages of disrepair, cities and residents are getting desperate. In a keenly watched move this month, Los Angeles forged a new strategy — it sued one of the world’s major financial institutions, Deutsche Bank, to force it to take care of 166 properties, both vacant and renter-occupied, charging the blue-chip German giant has turned into the city’s largest slumlord. “The buck stops with the owner of record. We’re saying, ‘You are an owner like any other owner,'” said Julia Figueira-McDonough, deputy city attorney.
source

As second sequel to Pixar’s first feature film and 11th feature film in total “Toy Story 3” is the commercially most successful (highest-grossing) animated film of all times and currently the 5th highest-grossing film of all time.

Having used all the classic elements of a well known Hollywood way of film making and story telling, without ever obvoiusly demonstrating this ugly face, with “Toy Story 3” Pixar has created a masterpiece of American entertainment.

It helps to be seeing this film for the first time.

http://disney.go.com/toystory/
 

This is a call for papers for a small 2-day conference to discuss papers in
process with a group of interested people. Any topic is welcome, length of
individual presentation should be around 40min max. Any mixed media format
is fine, there should be an emphasis on text, though.
Please send an email immediately, if you´d like to present something plus
two sentences to give an indication of the content, so I can try to organise
a sensible schedule for the meeting. If there´s enough interest, the meeting
will take place on June 18th and 19th from 10h-17h. This would then take
place instead of the initially scheduled workshop „The pocket“. I will
present some new papers in progress too: on spam, scam and possibly
occupation. (I realised that there are quite many people in the group, who would possibly be interested in such a format, hence the sudden proposition…)

yet another perfectly awesome movie in the Monday screening series:

COMRADES

R:Bill Douglas,England 1986

Bill Douglas is one of cinema’s most under-appreciated heroes and Comrades isn’t even his best known work. He was born in Scotland and his trilogy of short films about his early life earned him critical acclaim. However he only managed to make one film after that (Comrades) due to difficulty in raising money. Funding an epic scale film about one of the first trade unions in 1980’s Thatcherite Britain can’t have been easy. The film follows the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were deported from England to Australia for forming a ‘friendly society’ in the 19th Century. Expect some heavy symbolism akin to Nicolas Rouge (I will show one of his films in a few weeks).

Josh Crowle
[1]

Chinese student takes aim, literally, at Internet regulator.
“Supporters immediately offered the student cash, plane tickets, buffet dinners at five-star hotels, pornography and a virtual private network, or VPN, to help him scale the “Great Firewall”. AFP
 

“Illuminacja” as a mature example of early period of the director Krzysztof Zanussi whose works doesn’t fit in the movements of Polish cinema creates an incisive examination of the essence of knowledge.      Through this we see a scientific approach to an abstract concept as Zanussi himself was also a physicists. The documentary feeling enhanced by merging the records of real-life interviews statistical and visual data (some visuals of medical practises effecting the mind etc.) within the story of a brilliant young physics student’s personal struggle between reason and emotions to reflect a universal knowledge of human existence.      The whole movie itself though carrying the rational/scientific roots does not present a hypothesis. It depicts a question, fills up the inputs of an equation as its sole reason and finishes as the depiction completes.   kutlu  [1]  [2]

This came up, when I googled some of the issues raised during  last class meeting. Quote:
“While I share the op’s opinion that “it’s been done”, I think the real missed opportunity is no one has figured out to monetize the ruins. Disinterested landlords, incompetent , and/or downright hostile ones like DIBC are missing a golden opportunity to make some money here. Imagine if they only authorized entry after a fee was paid or got some back end on the book/print sales? Of course that would open them up to things like ACTUALLY securing the building to keep out free loaders. Probably have to maintain it a bit to keep it safe to protect against lawsuits. Eh.. .strike all that. For anyone to monetize the ruins, the property owners would actually have to be responsible property owners first.” Here is a really good analysis of the whole phenomena.