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Brendan Fowler's Frame Of Mind

Cynthia & Nico — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:37:33 +0100

A beautiful exhibition that we saw in the end of last year at the Rental gallery in Chinatown, NYC, as a part of the Performa 09 biennial. More about the artist and his work.

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - Behind The Scene

Cynthia & Nico — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:13:42 +0100

Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. The official video for the recorded version of "This Too Shall Pass" off of the album "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky". The video was filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The "machine" was designed and built by the band, along with members of Synn Labs over the course of several months.

See also this ad for Honda and it making of.

French New Wave - Jean-Luc Godard, A Bout De Souffle (Breathless) 1961

Cynthia & Nico — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:21:12 +0100

Director: Jean-Luc Godard - Writers: Jean-Luc Godard (screenplay) & François Truffaut (story) - Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg.

French New Wave - Jean-Luc Godard, Pierrot Le Fou 1965

Cynthia & Nico — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:20:22 +0100

Director: Jean-Luc Godard - Writer: Jean-Luc Godard - Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina.

Henri-George Clouzot's Inferno with Romy Schneider

Cynthia & Nico — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:52:51 +0100

Directed in 1964 H enri-Georges Clouzot, L’Enfer (Inferno) was a dark psychological study charting the mental disintegration of hotel owner Marcel (Serge Reggiani), consumed by jealousy at the supposed infidelity of his pretty, flirtatious wife, played by the vivacious Romy Schneider, then one of France’s most bankable stars. Sadly, the film was never to be. Following catastrophic delays in the production schedule, budget problems and a walk-out after three weeks by Reggiani, already tired of the director’s endless perfectionism, finally a heart attack suffered by Clouzot on set put paid to the ambitious project. Noted film restorer Serge Bromberg and co-director Ruxandra Medrea have done a wonderful job in piecing together the fragments of Clouzot’s lost film, not least in persuading his widow, Inez, to give them access to the missing 185 reels mostly without sound.

Clouzot’s main action was shot in black and white but the real joy of this documentary lies in the extraordinary and intensely-coloured test shots that Clouzot intended to symbolise Marcel’s disintegrating mental state.Clouzot conceived a whole battery of hallucinatory effects, jarring camera angles, inspired use of mirrors and auditory distortion to launch a new way of filmmaking. Schneider is bathed in a series of kaleidoscoping lights twisting her features, two actors’ faces are morphed together, anticipating Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, and most stunningly Clouzot toyed with the idea of colour reversal, which would turn blue water blood red but required the actors to paint themselves green to retain their normal skin tone.

In the end it all proved too much. Reggiani left claiming a nervous disorder and the production was already on the verge of collapse before Clouzot’s fateful but thankfully non-fatal heart attack. Whether Inferno would have become a masterpiece we will never know – Bromberg suggests not. French film critics had already derided Clouzot’s meticulousness as old fashioned, which may have contributed to the director’s mental malaise.