Some giants of the experimental film scene receive attention at BOMB magazine. First, a reprint of a letter Stan Brakhage wrote to poet Robert Kelly about the inspiration and trying process of creating Mothlight shows the filmmaker’s literary style almost as dazzlingly abrupt as his cinematic. (“I began thinking that Mothlight must begin with the unraveling of a cocoon and end with some simulation of candle flame…. Much to my surprise, the cocoon was full of spider eggs, or at least what I quickly assumed was spider eggs, and not a caterpillar, or semi-moth, or moth at all; and I realized that I had committed the first (and last) intentional destruction of life in the making of Mothlight by my actions and that I would have done so no matter what had been inside the cocoon, it was a sobering moment in which all the false path I’d been insisting on was revealed clearly. I gave up, as gratefully given sacrifice, both cocoons and candle flame in that instant.”) And four brief excerpts from Jonas Mekas’s memoir “A Dance with Fred Astaire” captures the day he decided to be a dog, the impish humor of Nam June Paik, and two screenings of avant-garde films, one of which seemed to go magically only to turn to a farce at the end, and one that went from a disaster to Mekas’s idea of a “most perfect screening.” (“We stood there, still half asleep, looking at the morning, almost in ecstasy. Then Ken and myself, we pulled out our cameras and we began to ?lm. We had to do it, we had to ?lm; we were ?lled with the ecstasy of cinema. We felt we were the monks of the order of Cinema.”) Via David Hudson.
“’At first I was amused by the fact that Blade Runner was an influence,’ Scott says. ‘Then I got fed up with seeing pouring rain onscreen.’” Brian Raftery’s set visit to Blade Runner 2049 offers no great insights either to the nature of the sequel or how its predecessor earned its beloved cult, but there’s a nice, almost accidental study in contrasts provided of the somber, patient director Denis Villeneuve and the shrewdly bombastic executive producer Ridley Scott, whose every sentence, even on the page, seems wreathed in the smoke of expensive cigars.
Read More “The View Beyond Parallax… more reads for the week of September 29”