Mubi are showing a few animated short films from Hungary. They date from the 1970s.
Marvellous.
(animation) Hungarian Shorts (mubi)
All posts by Paul Rennie
(art doc) David Lynch – the art life (mubi)
Mubi are showing a lovely film with David Lynch working in his studio and speaking about his childhood. His descriptions of “the art life” (coffee and cigarettes mostly, and talk) are wonderful.
(films) Hal Hartley x3 (mubi)
The Mubi film streaming platform is showing a few films by US indy director, Hal Hartley.
These are
The Unbelievable Truth (1989)
Simple Men (1992)
Amateur (1994)
(doc) Naples 44 (BBC4)
BBC4 showed a terrific film based on Naples 44 by Norman Lewis. The book is widely recognised as one of the best volumes of memoir from WW2. It tells the story of the city and its people in the aftermath of battle and against a backdrop of German retreat and Anglo-American administration…the book captures the balance of life and squalor amongst the grandeur and ruins of the city…
The film combines readings from the book with vintage documentary film footage etc.
(BLM doc) AfroFuturism (BBC4TV)
BBC4TV showed a terrific documentary about the idea of AfroFuturism…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000wfcj/dark-matter-a-history-of-the-afrofuture
This is an idea that was expressed, back in the 1970s, as part of a counter-cultural and musical expression and combination of black-is-beautiful, black power, and the origin stories associated with Africa.
The big idea was to reclaim the trauma of slavery and the realities of post-colonial and post-slavery experience through a forward looking, progressive and optimistic form of liberation, through and as a form of science fiction…
In general terms we may be familiar with this through the the music and performance of Earth Wind and Fire…but their interest in pyramids etc was derived from Sun Ra and George Clinton, who both featured in the film.
I was especially interested to learn of the underwater utopia conceptualised by Drexciya…and of the Zambian Space Programme. There are obvious links to the Latin-American, Liberation Theology movement. And a reminder that our understanding of the world, through theory, should help…not to make us feel worse.
Here’s the programme notes from the BBC website
The arc of black history shares an uncanny resemblance to the plot points of classic sci-fi including ‘alien’ abduction, enslavement and rebellion. It’s this unlikely relationship that provides the inspiration for Afrofuturism, the broad cultural trend that encompasses works by Jean-Michel Basquiat to Grace Jones, Solange Knowles and Sun Ra. In this film, we meet, see and hear from artists across three continents who each, in their own way, explore the Afrofuture to look at the horrors of the black past and imagine alternative futures.
The mysterious yet influential Detroit techno duo, Drexciya, take the Atlantic Ocean, a site of death and destruction during the African slave trade and reclaim it as a place of creation and beauty. Through a series of releases from the late 1990s through the early 2000s, they envisage the unborn children of enslaved pregnant women, thrown overboard during the Middle Passage to the Americas, adapting to breathe under water and thrive in a Black Atlantis. The mythos is vividly brought to life by the Drexciyan collaborator and graphic artist Abdul Qadim Haqq as a thriving, technological undersea world…(see image above)
Visual artist Ellen Gallagher similarly transforms the violence of the ocean into rebirth and renewal. Her film Osedax, made with Edgar Cleijne, is an imaginative retelling of how the skeletal remains of dead whales sustain new life in the curious form of the bone-devouring worm of the title. Whereas for artist Hew Locke, as well as the ocean itself, it’s the Atlantic’s coastal fringes that inspire his world of bricolage phantoms, plucked from the ghost stories of a Guyanese childhood.
The Afrofuture is perhaps most commonly imagined through the rubric of outer space, thanks in no small part to avant-garde jazz musician and poet Sun Ra. Born in the southern US in the early 20th century, Ra underwent an interplanetary conversion, claiming to have been teleported to Saturn. As with funk pioneer, George Clinton, who describes a similar close encounter with extraterrestrials, Ra’s identification with an alien presence can be read as more than simple escapism. It’s also a biting satire on the alienating experience of being black in America. For Ra, space is also an alternate destiny for black people, as the title of his 1973 Afrofuturist feature film Space is the Place insists.
Reaching beyond these fictional ‘Afronauts’ is the conceptual artist Tavares Strachan. His performance piece, Star City, Training in Six Parts, sees Strachan visit the famous Russian space centre to undergo the same rigorous – and often tortuous – training of the Cosmonauts. Strachan likens one of the exercises, which measures our capacity to withstand disorientation and gravitational stress, to his impoverished upbringing in The Bahamas.
The film concludes with an exploration of the idea of double consciousness. Coined in the early 20th century by WEB Du Bois, the influential African American sociologist, double-consciousness describes how black people in western societies see themselves twice over. Through their lived experience but also how they’re perceived within a dominant white culture.
Curator and writer Ekow Eshun traces uses of the idea through Ralph Ellison’s lauded mid-20th-century novel Invisible Man, and painter Kerry James Marshall’s image of the same title, right up to the Black Lives Matter movement. Predicated upon recordings of anti-black violence often captured through digital tech, Eshun argues these ‘expose’ a double consciousness at work, the world as experienced and seen through black eyes, laid bare for all to witness.
Other artists and commentators featured in the programme include Nuotama Frances Bodomo, Aria Dean, Ayesha Hameed, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Shabaka Hutchings, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Cauleen Smith and Greg Tate.
Hew Locke, featured in the film, was part of the second Folkestone Triennial in 2011
(art doc) Photography (BBC4TV)
Monday eveningds on BBc4TV are photography night…Yesterday we had
Rankin’s photography challenge…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wfcy
Interview with Mark Lawson and David Bailey
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03xsfrs/mark-lawson-talks-to-david-bailey
and, the first in series about the history of photography in Britain
episode one, the 19C
(music doc) Delia Derbyshire (BBC4TV)
The BBC showed a terrific documentary about Delia Derbyshire and the radio-phonic workshop (1960s). The workshop was a technical research laboratory at the BBC that was tasked with using machine and synthesised sounds in new ways.
Delia Derbyshire was one of the workshop’s most significant personalities and is credited with having made a number of key developments in tape-loops, synthesised sounds and electronic music composition, Nowadays, she is best remembered as the composer of the Dr Who theme music, and as a pioneer of electronic dance music…there’s an element of retro-fitting going on here, but she is a very important figure.
(film) Slack Bay (mubi)
The Mubi streaming service is showing Slack Bay (2016), a film by the French director Bruno Dumont. The film is a period comedy drama that explores the discombobulations that derive from the light and space of the sea…a sort of deconstruction of the aquatic cure
Cold Comfort Farm (1932) is an English novel that does the same thing in relation to the rural idyll. Slack Bay is a comedy police procedural…set against the wide sandy beach and dunes of the northern French coast (Wissant). And with a spectacular neo-Egyptian house at the centre of the action.
(arts doc) The Eyes of Orson Welles (BBC4TV)
BBC4 are repeating a documentary about the drawings of the film director Orson Welles…
Well worth watching
(arts doc) Tap America (BBC4TV)
BBC4TV are repeating an amazing documentary series about the history of American tap dancing…