& I can spend a few minutes. @tothegallows - Tumblr Blog

THE GOD DAMNED CINEMA

the package (jesse v. johnson, 2012).

one of dolph lundgren’s great strengths as an actor is how much warmth and humor he can bring to a situation, and a character, that requires an equal and simultaneous capacity to demonstrate a frightening hollowness, a total lack of feeling, a mercilessness, that sets him apart from, say, the similarly enlivening style of a keanu reeves, whose characters - even at their most despicable, as in much ado about nothing - provoke sympathy at their most vulnerable.

lundgren’s characters’ vulnerable moments - as they do, for example, elsewhere in the package - may spark an awareness of their human frailty, but rarely do they seek the audience’s collaborative identification. what happens around them can be and often is very funny or sad or any other feeling you can feel because of a movie, but you don’t laugh with them.

it’s the old joke about running away from a bear, and making sure you’ve got your shoelaces tied more tight than the other person, the one running way behind you. you know the punchline to this joke, and you probably laughed - but that doesn’t mean you suddenly identify with the bear.

tothegallows

It’s too simplistic to say—as many people have done—that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention … was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable … The neurosis I sought to describe in Red Desert is above all a matter of adjusting. There are people who do adapt, and others who can’t manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that are by now out-of-date. – Michelangelo Antonioni

Colloque de chiens, 1977 (Raoul Ruiz).

#Colloque de chiens #Raoul Ruiz #Film #short

tothegallows

“You are the sun. The sun doesn’t move, this is what it does. You are the Earth. The Earth is here for a start, and then the Earth moves around the sun. And now, we’ll have an explanation that simple folks like us can also understand, about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness, where constancy, quietude and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine, in this infinite sonorous silence, everywhere is an impenetrable darkness. Here, we only experience general motion, and at first, we don’t notice the events that we are witnessing. The brilliant light of the sun always sheds its heat and light on that side of the Earth which is just then turned towards it. And we stand here in it’s brilliance. This is the moon. The moon revolves around the Earth. What is happening? We suddenly see that the disc of the moon, the disc of the moon, on the Sun’s flaming sphere, makes an indentation, and this indentation, the dark shadow, grows bigger… and bigger. And as it covers more and more, slowly only a narrow crescent of the sun remains, a dazzling crescent. And at the next moment, the next moment - say that it’s around one in the afternoon - a most dramatic turn of event occurs. At that moment the air suddenly turns cold. Can you feel it? The sky darkens, then goes all dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds… the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then… Complete Silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the Earth open under us? We don’t know. We don’t know, for a total eclipse has come upon us… But… but no need to fear. It’s not over. For across the sun’s glowing sphere, slowly, the Moon swims away. And the sun once again bursts forth, and to the Earth slowly there comes again light, and warmth again floods the Earth. Deep emotion pierces everyone. They have escaped the weight of darkness.”

tothegallows

Atlantiques, 2009. (Directed by. Mati Diop)

thefilmstage

Photographer Khalik Allah has been documenting down-on-their-luck New York denizens on the streets for several years. During the summer of 2014, Allah swapped his still camera for a video camera, and set about shooting life at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 125th Street in Harlem. But Field Niggas is nothing like a typical documentary that “profiles a milieu.”

Allah recorded audio and video separately. While the characters speak about their religious beliefs, or their opinions on current events, or just how their day went, slow-motion imagery plays across the screen. The movie tends to focus on blowing up the smallest gestures, such as hands rolling a K2 blunt or walking-and-talking arguments. Most often, it’s simple shots of people — the homeless, the police officers, the pedestrians — merely looking the camera in the eye. The disconnect is only momentarily disorienting, and, after the viewer adjusts, it helps make the documentary extraordinarily hypnotic.

Our full AFI Fest review of Field Niggas.

salesonfilm-deactivated20180514

oh hey @danschindel

#yes!

erikapurringtnn

ordet (1955), carl theodor dreyer

televandalist

The wisdom of Jean Cocteau.

(full version on Ello & Twitter)

serriform

I can’t explain why but I am very nervous to see ‘Love’ tonight- like a few seconds before a roller coaster drops scared; and I’ve never been on a roller coaster.

Just about to meet Rick Alverson- goals.

I did not care for The Lobster.