Pages

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Velvet Underground Live in Boston 1967


A 33-minute 16mm film shot by Andy Warhol of the Velvet Underground playing live at The Boston Tea Party nightclub in 1967.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

Anarchism In Spain - Living Utopia Documentary



Living Utopia is a 1997 documentary produced by TVE and directed by Juan Gamero , in which the lived experiences of the anarcho-syndicalists in Spain are related. Anarchism radically transformed the structures of society in large parts of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).

The film consists of 30 interviews with survivors of the Spanish anarchist revolution, whose testimony shows the constructive work of the social revolution and the historical background of the Spanish libertarian movement. This construction work according to the documentary meant organizing an agricultural community of about 7 million farmers, 3,000 factories and collectively managed firms in cities, the union of anarchists 150,000 militiamen against fascism, as well as cultural , educational activities and the movement of women against patriarchy .

Anarchists interviewed are Miguel Alba, Ramon Alvarez , Federico Arcos , Marcelino Bailo, Batet María Severino Campos, Francisco Carrasquer , Miguel Celma , Valerio Chiné ; José Spain , José Fortea , Juan Gimenez, Antonio Lahuerta , Concha Liano , Fidel Miró, Aurora Molina, Molina Helenus , Conxa Perez, Event Portals , Dolors Prat , Ximo Queirol , Wonders Rodríguez , Juan Romero, Manuel Sanz, Liberto Sarrau Jose Sauces Josep Serra Estruch , Antonio Turon Urzáiz and Jose Antonio Zapata.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Jem Cohen’s “Witness” - (Danceteria '86)



In 1986 the closes thing you could get to the Rites of Pan west of Tangier was a Butthole Surfers concert. Ritual, danger and trance combined into a grinding droning spectacle. This is a short film of the Butthole Surfers at the height of their powers.

In early ‘86 they drove from Los Angeles all the way to New York just to play two lucrative weekend shows at the Danceteria club, only to arrive to find that the second night had been canceled. The band was livid; Haynes got quite drunk just before show time. “During that show it was just complete bedlam,” says Leary, a man who knows from bedlam. After only a song or two, Haynes picked up a beer bottle and viciously smashed Leary over the head with it. Leary’s eyes rolled back in his head as he crumpled on the floor. Then he quickly got up and resumed playing. It was a stunt bottle, made out of sugar. Then Haynes picked up a real bottle and heaved it the length of the room, where it exploded above the exit sign. Soon Haynes had set fire to a pile of trash in the middle of the stage. “And you’re really thinking, ‘Should I get out of here?’” says Michael Macioce. “That was the type of feeling you had - you were 'in danger' at one of their shows.”- Dangerous Minds
Jem Alan Cohen (born 1962) is a New York City-based American film maker, especially known for his observational portraits of urban landscapes, blending of media formats (16mm, Super 8, video) and collaborations with music artists. He is the recipient of the Independent Spirit Award for feature filmmaking. "Cohen's films have been broadcast in Europe by the BBC and ZDF/ARTE, and in the United States by the Sundance Channel and PBS. They are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney, and Melbourne's Screen Gallery." He also makes multi-channel installations and still photographs and had a photography show at Robert Miller Gallery in 2009. He has received grants from the Guggenheim, Creative Capital, Rockefeller and Alpert Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other organizations

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Jungle Fever


The final episode of our Channel 4-commissioned documentary series Music Nation is now online to watch in full! Jungle Fever, directed by Ollie Evans and produced by Friend London, charts the rise and fall of one of Britain's most vibrant, unforgettable scenes, featuring jungle veterans Fabio & Grooverider, DJ Hype, Kenny Ken, Brockie and more. Catch up on last week's Dazed Digital jungle day – when we explored everything about it from the style to the sound – here.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998)


Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon is a 1998 film made for television by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It was written and directed by John Maybury and stars Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, and Tilda Swinton.

A biography of painter Francis Bacon (Jacobi), it concentrates on his strained relationship with George Dyer (Craig), a small time thief. The film draws heavily on the authorised biography of Bacon, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon by Daniel Farson, and is dedicated to him.

The film won three awards at the Edinburgh International Film Festival: Best New British Feature (director John Maybury) and two Best British Performance awards, one for Jacobi and, the other for future James Bond actor, Craig. The film was also screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, graphic and emotionally raw imagery. His painterly but abstracted figures typically appear isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon began painting during his early 20s and worked only sporadically until his mid-30s. Unsure of his ability as a painter, he drifted and earned his living as an interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs. Later, he admitted that his career was delayed because he had spent too long looking for a subject that would sustain his interest. His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion which sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition.

Margaret Thatcher described him as "that man who paints those dreadful pictures"

Sunday, May 04, 2014

Claire Colebrook - We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene



The proposed conception of the Anthropocene epoch marks is radical a shift in species awareness as Darwinian evolution was for the nineteenth-century. If the notion of the human species' emergence in time requires new forms of narrative, imaginative and ethical articulation, then the intensifying sense of the species' end makes a similar claim for rethinking 'our' processes of self-presentation and self-preservation.

One of the dominant motifs of the anthropocene is climate change, which (as Bruno Latour has argued) closes down the modern conception of the infinite universe, drawing us back once again to the parochial, limited and exhausted earth. It might be worth redefining all those hyper-modern proclamations of a post-human and post-racial future as hypo-modern, as refusals of the species' bounded temporality. Nowhere is this more evident than in the seemingly modern fascination with sexual difference. It is the possibility of transcending sexual difference — of arriving at indifference — that has always been harbored as the human species' end.

Thursday, May 01, 2014

Grey Gardens (1975)


Grey Gardens is a 1975 American documentary film by Albert and David Maysles. Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer also directed, and Susan Froemke was the associate producer. The film depicts the everyday lives of two reclusive socialites, a mother and daughter both named Edith Beale, who lived at Grey Gardens, a decrepit mansion at 3 West End Road in the wealthy Georgica Pond neighborhood of East Hampton, New York. The film was screened at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival but was not entered into the main competition.

In 2010, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

"It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present," Little Edie wistfully points out, as her mother boils corn on a hot plate next to her bed. Dressed in a bathing suit and torn fishnet hose, her head wrapped in a towel held in place with a large broach, Little Edie has an outlandish sense of style that gives little indication of her family pedigree.

Born in 1893, Big Edie Beale had two brothers: "Black" Jack Bouvier, who made a fortune on Wall Street and fathered Jackie Kennedy in 1929; and Bud Bouvier, who made his money in oil and drank himself to death before he was 40.

An aspiring singer, Edie Beale made a few records before her 1916 marriage to Phelen Beale, an Alabama-born aristocrat whose grandfather was pals with Jefferson Davis. Little Edie Beale was born in 1918, the second of three children. (Edie's younger brother, Bouvier Beale, became a lawyer; her older brother, Phelen Beale Jr., went into business in Oklahoma; both brothers are now dead.)

In 1923 Phelen Beale Sr. moved his wife and children into Grey Gardens, where he abandoned them 10 years later; when he died in 1956, his estate went to his second wife. Forced to rely on her family for the money to raise her children, Big Edie withdrew into seclusion, and after her children reached adulthood she lived alone at Grey Gardens. In 1936, Little Edie had a lavish coming-out party in New York's Pierre Hotel, and she spent the next 16 years in Manhattan attempting to establish a career as a dancer.

Then in 1952 Little Edie returned to Grey Gardens. Whether that return was a result of her inability to make a life for herself, or because her mother needed her, is a subject of endless debate between them in the film.

Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (1895–1977), known as "Big Edie", and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (1917–2002), known as "Little Edie", were the aunt and the first cousin, respectively, of former U.S. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The two women lived together at Grey Gardens for decades with limited funds in increasing squalor and isolation.

The house was designed in 1897 by Joseph Greenleaf Thorpe and purchased in 1923 by "Big Edie" and her husband Phelan Beale. After Phelan left his wife, "Big Edie" and "Little Edie" lived there for more than 50 years. The house was called Grey Gardens because of the color of the dunes, the cement garden walls, and the sea mist.

Throughout the fall of 1971 and into 1972, their living conditions—their house was infested by fleas, inhabited by numerous cats and raccoons, deprived of running water, and filled with garbage and decay—were exposed as the result of an article in the National Enquirer and a cover story in New York Magazine after a series of inspections (which the Beales called "raids") by the Suffolk County Health Department. With the Beale women facing eviction and the razing of their home, in the summer of 1972 Jacqueline Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill provided the necessary funds to stabilize and repair the dilapidated house so that it would meet village codes.

Albert and David Maysles became interested in their story and received permission to film a documentary about the women, which was released in 1976 to wide critical acclaim. Their direct cinema technique left the women to tell their own stories.