Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side)

“Designer Olympia Le-Tan’s embroidered clutch-bags spring to life in director Spike Jonze’s tragicomic stop-motion animation Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side). On a shelf in famed Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company, the star-crossed love story of a klutzy skeleton and his flame-haired amour plays out amidst Le-Tan’s illustrations of iconic first-edition book covers. “It’s such a beautiful and romantic place,” offers Le-Tan of the antiquarian bookstore. “The perfect setting for our story!” The project started after Jonze asked for a Catcher in the Ryeembroidery to put on his wall and the plucky Le-Tan asked for a film in return. Enlisting French filmmaker Simon Cahn to co-direct, the team wrote the script between Los Angeles and Paris over a six month period, before working night and day animating the 3,000 pieces of felt Le-Tan had cut by hand. “I love getting performances from, telling stories about and humanizing things that aren’t human,” said Jonze of working with Le-Tan’s characters. After spending five years adapting Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, Jonze’s recent shorts include robot love story I’m Here and an inspired G.I. Joe-starring video for The Beastie Boys. “A short is like a sketch,” he says. “You can have an idea or a feeling and just go and do it.” Here the iconic director reveals his creative process to writer Maryam L’Ange.”

Race Horse First Film Ever 1878 Eadweard Muybridge

September 30, 2011July 13, 2018 | Paul Greer

“This Race Horse was the first Film ever, filmed in 1878 by Edward Muybridge.

Eadweard J. Muybridge (pronounced /ˌɛdwərd ˈmaɪbrɪdʒ/; 9 April 1830 — 8 May 1904) was an English photographer who spent much of his life in the United States. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip.

By 1878, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion. This series of photos taken in Palo Alto, California, is called Sallie Gardner at a Gallop or The Horse in Motion, and shows that the hooves do all leave the ground — although not with the legs fully extended forward and back, as contemporary illustrators tended to imagine, but rather at the moment when all the hooves are tucked under the horse as it switches from “pushing” with the back legs to “pulling” with the front legs. This series of photos stands as one of the earliest forms of videography.”

— silentfilmhouse

Viennale-Trailer 2011: The 3 Rs (by David Lynch)

Image | September 25, 2011July 12, 2018 | Paul Greer

With a sledgehammer approach a man, clad in a hat and coat, tries to cast out the nonsense on Earth. Every time he wields his tool and lets it come crashing down a pitiful screeching can be heard underground. The air is humming and buzzing aggressively with the sound of invisible insects flying to the attack. Nature is defending itself. Perhaps the man is having a psychotic episode. Or he is trapped in a film by David Lynch. The 3 R’s may be a reference to the three basic educational skills Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic; cultural techniques that, as Lynch’s dense school nightmare makes quite clear, are simultaneously techniques of manipulation, restriction and control. The question posed at the beginning regarding the number of stones in Pete’s hands is not trivial. Why two? Why not three? Or 14? In accordance with the Lynchian dissolution of cinematic narratives in an associative tangle of terror, everything that seemed to be linear, firmly established and secure is breaking down. Liberated images liberate thoughts. Or do free thoughts free images? There are spaces where experiences beyond the scientific-technical conception of the world can be made. In cinema even a squeaky bathtub duck can bleed if you cut off its head.