BLOG - Archivo MARZO de 2010
Adolfo Arrieta. From the sidelines
Fotograma de Tam-Tam, 1976. CortesÍa: La Casa Encendida.
Always from the sidelines, indifferent to the trends and adulation which film lovers are so prone to lavish, and to the lack of interest of the uninitiated, who do not see his films as a valid option for a Sunday afternoon, Adolfo Arrieta is a filmmaker who belongs on the (in)visible map of European cinematography. However paradoxical it may seem, the father of Spanish underground cinema –and a key figure in the French scene– is always “on the verge” of being (re)discovered in our country. This “on the verge” is entirely irrelevant to Arrieta’s work, which is not suitable to play a role in the debate regarding whether film can be considered a popular art or is merely a mass entertainment industry. It is worth noting, as Víctor Erice used to say, that film and the film industry are not the same thing, however many links they share, and despite the unconcealed efforts of the market to cause their paths to converge. The work of Arrieta is outside this discussion. In fact, it is outside the two fields, and does not depend on the formula viewer-subsidy-critic.
Read more...Red Bucket Films: Joyful Abundance
There are people for whom filming is like breathing. People who can’t avoid doing it and, who, while most of us are sleeping, reading, strolling and cooking, are shooting all sorts of films. The Safdie brothers are this kind of people, and they were destined to be filmmakers from the moment their father gave them a video camera for their birthday. Their accomplices are the creatives Alex Kalman and Sam Lisenco.
Read more...Aesthetic Mimicry. On Speak of the Devil by Beto Hernandez
In a few years, I hope, a sociologist-critic will realise that the current transculturalisation between the Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon worlds, which will serve as a paradigm to understand the time we are living, has been most clearly and firmly expressed in the work by Beto Hernández, rather than in the places where critics have been insistently looking. Despite this, a few critics have had a look at Love & Rockets, the exceptional magazine with which the Hernández brothers made their name. However, very few have ventured beyond the comfortable territory of easy classifications, particularly with regard to the clear differences displayed by the work of each of the brothers in their early days. Those who felt closer to the visual arts preferred Jaime’s work, which was much more suited to its time, as well as being more experimental, despite its narrative absurdity. Those who approached comic books from the perspective of narrative were likely to prefer the work by Beto (Gilbert), which was clearly inspired by Latin American literary narrators, and was much more conservative in terms of its graphics.
Read more...PES. Hits Frame by Frame
Why do we think that everything that is new is bound to destroy the old? It seems that computer graphics will kill pencils and paper (as we know, “video killed the radio star”), when, in fact, the many technical options available (regardless of whether they are cutting edge or obsolete) can help rethink the ethical and aesthetic meaning which underlies the choices regarding the ways of doing something. Because of this, those who today embrace stop motion animation (traditional animation using objects, produced frame by frame) deserve to be seen differently from their illustrious mentors.
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