Bizarre Mies van der Rohe pop video
The thought of making a pop video about the most uptight of uptight modernist architects makes the mind boggle.
Le Ballon Rouge
Le Ballon Rouge (Albert Lamorisse 1965)
Albert Lamorisse’s simple and beautiful film from 1956 is the only short film to ever win an Oscar outside of the short film category. Its about a magical balloon that travels with a young boy through Paris, and creates a unique historical record of the city in the 50’s.
Update: Film Freaks Club points out that the director of this movie invented the board game ‘Risk’.
32 min 38 sec Oct 15, 2007
The two Scorsese concert films – Shine a Light and The Last Waltz
Rolling Stones – Shine a Light Trailer
One of Martin Scorsese’s earlier movies was not a gangster pic but a documentary about aging rockstars and the last performance by ‘The Band’. It was released exactly 20 years ago, in April 1978. Scorsese’s latest film, released today is about a performance by the Rolling Stones, who were aging rockstars when the first film was made. Here are the trailers of the two movies, for comparison.
Glenn Gould Chair
Nobody played Bach like Glenn Gould – literally. He made uncontrollable noises while hunched up over the keyboard, perched on an ancient chair with a broken seat that he carried with him for performances. Now someone has made a replica of the completely knackered Gould chair, for over a $1000.
Glenn Gould Chair
Unlike many eccentric ‘artists’ Gould is the real deal, so obviously odd that his manner does not seem affected and his mastery is genuine.
Tales Of Mere Existence “I Have To Get Ready”
March 28th, 2008 Comments Off on Tales Of Mere Existence “I Have To Get Ready” | # link to | posted by david
Lev’s cartoons used to be the highlight of the most excellent Cole Valley Film Festival, when I lived in San Francisco. The technique is both original and simple, a monologue while drawing the cartoon, viewed from underneath back lighted paper, and the cartoons themselves are very good.
Tales Of Mere Existence “I Have To Get Ready”
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Staff upgrade
Owing to my piss-poor level of posting recently (I am now a father of one), Jim Nachlin will be spinning the decks here for a bit. Jim is one of the only people I know who has that trainspotter mentality that makes for a good digital curator.
SmashingTelly sells out
After much agonizing about it, I’ve decided (as some people might have noticed) that I will post clips on SmashingTelly. The reason I though a site about full length programs would work is that the practice of leaving low resolution full length documentaries would encourage people to buy DVDs (I have bought many of the things featured here), so it was a mutually beneficial practice.
That may become a de facto custom in future, but for now many links go dead too quickly. I will continue to post links to full format stuff that I find and have been up long enough that it looks like they are not being requested to get taken down, but will also link to clips. I will try to make the choices of clips be as interesting rather than gimmicky.
Spring Cleanup
I’ve been through and cleared out almost all of the dead embeds, and will introduce some flagging system in future. In the interim, if you see embeds that won’t play, please tell me in the comments.
DG
W.B.Yeats Reading His Own Verse
Yeats is extremely interesting because his life-span ran from the American Civil War to the beginning of the Second World War. He was at one time both Victorian and modern. This recording is from a few years before he died in 1939.
I am fascinated by accents and how they change and this is a perfect example. The interesting thing here is that professional Irishman, Mr Yeats sounds Scottish. Yeats is reading his own poems as he wanted them to sound and therefore the poetic inflection accentuates the accent.
This is not an Irish accent that you hear very often today and in many ways is similar to a West Coast (Gaelic native) Scottish accent, with a touch of Edinburgh sophistication, rather like the voice of Arthur Conan Doyle. Perhaps I am imagining this of course, but that parallel perception would fit well with the reality of Yeats as both a West Coast (Gaelic) Irishman and Dublin sophisticate.
This week is Self Indulgence Week on Smashing Telly
In an attempt to lose readers, and to celebrate self indulgence week, I will be posting items that I find interesting, which either have audio but no video or video but no audio.