prosthetic knowledge
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City of God - 10 Years Later (Extended Trailer)
A documentary following the actors of the widely praised Brazilian film, how it changed the lives of the cast, both the professionals and first time actors (for good or bad).
It is released at the end of this year, but the video above is ten minutes long, giving a good idea of what to expect.
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Hwan Kwon Yi [이환권]
South Korean artist whose works play on the human form with eskewed perspective.
Currently has a show at the Gana Art Gallery, Busan - more here
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Metropolis Film Programme For London Premiere, 1927
Fascinating and insightful hi-res scan of an incredibly rare piece of film history - via The Cataloguer’s Desk:
The world’s most valuable movie poster, for Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, is to be auctioned again after making a record $690,000 in 2005. Ephemera related to the film is notoriously scarce, with only four copies of the poster known to survive. Almost as uncommon is this amazing film programme, one of only three surviving copies of which we’re aware, produced for the London premiere at the Marble Arch Pavilion on March 21, 1927. Not only a list of cast and crew, it includes eleven short pieces on the making of the movie, commentary from the director and cast, and numerous production photographs and film stills, many attractively arranged as modernist collages. One of the most interesting sections shows in parallel columns how a passage of film scenes was adapted from the novel of the same name by Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou.
You can read and examine the whole booklet here
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Idle Screenings
The Idle Screenings blog which displays entire films in sections of GIF animations. Above you can see the current screening, Avatar, with different films each day (tomorrow is The Dark Knight).
Why do this (especially because there is no sound)? It looks like Idle Screenings is an experimental content delivery platform using screensavers, animated GIFs and Powerpoint presentations:
Idle Screenings works to investigate:
- The ubiquity of consumer access to digital content
- The devaluation of content as it becomes broadly distributed
- Content containers as content
More about Idle Screenings here
RELATED: Movie in GIF format explored with full version of John Woo’s The Killer [link]
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Starring The Computer
Online resource is the IMDB of appearances by computers in film and television:
Starring the Computer is a website dedicated to the use of computers in film and television. Each appearance is catalogued and rated on its importance (ie. how important it is to the plot), realism (how close its appearance and capabilities are to the real thing) and visibility (how good a look does one get of it). Fictional computers don’t count (unless they are built out of bits of real computer), so no HAL9000 - sorry.
Above are:
- Columbo (IBM AN/FSQ-7)
- Ghostbusters (DEC Rainbow 100)
- The Thing (Intertec Superbrain)
- Tron (Apple III)
- Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Siemens System 4004)
- Airplane II (Commodore Vic-20)
- Big (Unisys PW2 Series 500)
- Futureworld (IBM AN/FSQ-7)
There is more to find at Starring The Computer here
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Revving Motors, Spinning Wheels (Action Painting) by mantissa (via Creative Applications)
The video above looks like animated Abstract-Expressionist art, yet it is actually processed scenes from action movies - in this case, car chases from films such as Bullit, Bourne Identity, French Connection, Ronin, The Seven Ups, The Rock, etc.).
From Creative Applications:
The spectacle and surplus masculinity of Hollywood is hardly run-of-the-mill source material for generative art, but Canadian software artist Jeremy Rotsztain has been diligently exploring transforming cinematic convention into rich, abstract compositions for three years now. Rotsztain’s Action Painting project (first featured on CAN in fall 2009) employs scenes and sound design—’data’ from action movies—as raw material to generate abstract expressionist style animations. “Revving Motors, Spinning Wheels” (below) is one of four videos released by Rotsztain this summer that illustrate just how far this project has come – the piece reads as a love letter to both Jackson Pollock and Jason Bourne. On close viewing the source material (culled from Ronin, The French Connection, etc.) is clearly organized thematically and the video functions as a serial examination of the stock components of definitive chase scenes. Screeching brakes, blaring sirens, lead-footed acceleration and the inevitable Ballardian-endgame all filter through the mix in clusters of topical clips.
More info, and other videos of the same series, can be seen at Creative Applications here
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40+ Asian Movie Wallpapers via WildGrounds
Something for everyone here.
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Why Do Video Game Movies Keep Getting Made? An infographic analysis. (via piratepickings)
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Action Painting (Masculine Expressionism) (2009) by Jeremy Rotsztai
In Action Painting, gestures are extracted from action film sequences (car chase movies, fight scenes, explosions, etc.) and used as material to compose digital paintings in the abstract expressionist style of Jackson Pollock. Pun intended.
This series of works uses popular action sequences from cinema - when Jason Bourne drives backwards through the streets of Paris in a nail-biting police chase, when the underdog Rocky Balboa battles Apollo Creed, when a helicopter chases a high speed train through a tunnel in Mission Impossible. It takes these sequences from the adrenalin-filled culture of action cinema and playfully transplants them into the highbrow cannon of modernist painting.
Action Painting runs with custom authored software (written in C++ with openFrameworks) that uses computer vision to analyze movies for motion. For each frame of video, the software samples the changed pixels, saving them to the computer’s memory. It then rearranges all the sampled pixels on screen to compose a series of abstract expressionist images, which are presented as large format prints and video installations.
In art history, action painting falls into the category of process-based works, for which use rule sets and conceptual structures for composition and where the process maintains a more important role than the final outcome. This project follows that same tradition.
The process of Action Painting is revealed to the viewer on a screen hanging slightly below each composition. Each ‘gesture’ taken from a film (i.e. a car taking a sharp turn, or an upper cut punch) is displayed, then extracted from the frame, and finally transformed into a motion that applies color onto a virtual canvas.
This work not only appropriates the cinematic gesture to use it as a compositional tool, but also highlights the cinematic language used in action films.
More Here
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Collection of fake User Interfaces for films 
by Mark Coleran, Visual Designer
