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Resurrection Documentary

7/31/2013

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The 1993 film Silverlake Life: The View From Here, by Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, is a documentary classic. It began when Joslin started keeping a video diary of his lover Mark Massi's struggle with AIDS. Then Joslin began dying of AIDS. Massi, in better shape, took over the camera. When he died, a former student of Joslin's, Peter Friedman, edited the film. The result, according to Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly,  is

a glory of documentary-making and an important addition to the defiant stockpile of AIDS-inspired art being created in these modern Plague Years: Silverlake Life: The View From Here is intimate and dry-eyed, charming and powerful, idiosyncratic and wrenching. It's also, at times, blessedly comic and light. The grace of the film, which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is in its ability to mix dying with living-deftly, wittily, superbly--so that we come to know these men as full individuals.

Now some students of filmmaker Abraham Ravett, a professor at Hampshire College, have carried on that legacy, editing 10 hours of footage for a film left incomplete when Joslin died. The result this time is called Architecture of Mountains. Reports the Valley Advocate: 

"This came about because I was teaching a class on recycled material in visual arts and writing as well,” explains Ravett. “I called [Hampshire alum] Ken Levin and asked whatever happened to the footage. He said, ‘It’s been sitting in my garage in L.A.—I didn’t know what to do with it.’ I told him about this course and asked if he would consider letting us take a look at it.”
...
For Ravett, working with the footage provided another surprising resonance with Joslin’s later work. In Silverlake Life, Joslin films himself in bed late at night. The roots of that idea can be seen in Architecture. In that film, Joslin explains that he wants to get at his own dreams, so he installs a camera and a light, all set to go on at random intervals in the night, in hopes that he could convey his dreams. Since Joslin blurs the lines between fact and fiction in Architecture, it’s not immediately apparent whether he actually created that setup.

Ravett says that Joslin really did. “He was truly awakened—he had an alarm that turned on the camera. There’s a mixture of truth and non-truth [in the film], but ultimately he’s very self-concious—he was, always. He was interested in the power of dreams, the subconscious. He wanted that in the film. What strikes me is how prescient he was in terms of how he looked in that footage [and how he looked in Silverlake Life]. For us it was really startling.”


Read more in The Valley Advocate.



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Virtual Newsstand

7/22/2013

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We asked via Twitter for suggestions of documentary art websites to include on our virtual newsstand (left). V.V. Ganeshananthan, a novelist (Love Marriage) and journalist, suggests two great sites combining photo, text, and in some cases, audio: Cowbird, a platform open to everybody and all the better for that; and i am, "portraits of Sri Lanka's elders in sound and image." Don't know much about Sri Lanka? You don't have to. i am is a simple but superb example of the democratic documentary possibilities opened up by the internet. Check it out.
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Beware Beauty

7/21/2013

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"A 'beautiful image' can very well be the worst thing that can happen to a scene."

49 more rules for filmmakers, many of them applicable to writers and editors, from the great Wim Wenders, here.
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Open Carry

6/22/2013

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Portraits from a libertarian jamboree in New Hampshire, an "open carry" state. 
--Jeff Sharlet
Picture
I met Alex, a student at the University of New Hampshire, while he was sampling some chili in advance of the big cook-off. Guns are forbidden on his campus, much to his frustration. 

"I've heard that at Dartmouth there's an armory for students' guns," I said. 

Alex didn't like the sound of that. "Might as well hand your gun over to the police." 

Picture
"I don't open carry at home," said this man, washing a pot near his family's tent. "I don't want to be a target."

"Is it for hunting?" asked my four-year-old daughter.

"Not this," he said. "It's for protecting my two little girls."

Picture
You can just make out Chris Pacia's .40 caliber beneath his boa, donned for the festival's ongoing "Big Day Dance Party." The gun's loaded with 11 rounds; Chris is carrying a specially-made magazine with 15 more in his pocket. He's just come from a talk on investing in ammunition, and he's heard some vendors at the festival will accept bullets as currency. This is Chris' first open carry. He bought the gun a couple of months ago. "After Boston--I mean, the Connecticut thing--I thought, I gotta get a gun before I can't anymore."

Picture
Kaylene does like to open carry her own weapon, but this one happens to be her husband's, a .357 Taurus.

Picture
"There is chaos and darkness within me," this little boy shouted with glee as he pushed his pals on a roundabout. His father poked his head out from a motel room above a decommissioned police cruiser. "I'm fine!" the little boy hollered. Then, to me: "Want to see my badge?" It read: "Shiny Badges Don't Grant Extra Rights."
***
I took these pictures at the tenth annual Porc Fest. "Porc" is short for porcupine, a mascot members of New Hampshire's libertarian Free State Project decided was friendlier than the "don't-tread-on-me" rattlesnake. I attended just to visit some friends, but as it happens I've reported a bit on the Free State Project in the past.
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