There is nothing inherently meditative about a man shooting eggs at another man who is wearing goalie gear. And there is nothing inherently transcendent about two elderly people bowling. But artist Graeme Patterson can make it so. Patterson is a maker of tiny puppet-figures and usually those puppet-figures star in his memorizing stop-motion animation. Blackflash magazine, a journal of photography and new media art, features Patterson’s recent Taming the Wild project, a collection of his puppet-figures posed in arresting photographs like the one to the left. He’s assembled a larger collection of his work on his YouTube channel, where we found these films:

Source:  Blackflash  

The recent Academy Awards may have exhibited Hollywood’s robust health, but the current state of independent film is not so rosy. Andrew Rodgers reports for Soma (article not available online) that the world of independent film in fact experienced a seismic shift in 2008, as a number of indie distributors either shut down altogether or were folded into larger parent companies. 

Rodgers hypothesizes two causes: 1) as independent film distributors became more successful, they neglected indie business practices that spread risk over a variety of small projects and instead invested heavily in larger ones, thus increasing the impact of any individual box-office failure (in other words, they acted like big Hollywood studios); and 2) the economy, of course, as marketing costs rose and ticket-buying audiences declined. 

Signs of hope include the emergence of smaller niche distributors such as Oscilloscope Pictures (helmed by the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch) and Chicago’s Music Box Films. Rodgers also envisions a future in which theatrical releases are only one small part of film distribution, as audiences increasingly receive content via online or mobile device downloads. 

Source: Soma

Slumdog Millionaire may be the darling of this year’s Golden Globe and Academy Awards, but the film has Carmen Van Kerckhove and Thea Lim wondering how a story that features poverty, violence, abuse, and torture gets sold as the feel-good movie of the year.  In Addicted to Race, a podcast for New Demographic, they discuss how race may have impacted public reception to the film (as an added bonus, they also analyze how race plays out in He’s Just Not That Into You).  Listen and weigh in.

Sources: New Demographic, Addicted to Race        

Image by A y A n, licensed under Creative Commons.

Cinema’s response to war has changed since Vietnam, Michael Bronski postulates in Z Magazine. For instance, the war in Iraq has been immediately made into documentaries (No End in Sight and Standard Operating Procedure), independent films (Redacted and Battle for Haditha), and even Hollywood productions (In the Valley of Elah and Stop-Loss), while it took years for many films to be made about Vietnam. Mainstream movies like Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now weren’t released until the late 1970s, almost a decade after the war ended.

Bronski credits Vietnam with influencing other film genres as well: The slasher film, beginning with Halloween in 1978, was created as an avatar for the senseless killing of American youth during the Vietnam War, and testosterone-swelling action hero films like Rocky (1976), Terminator (1974), and Die Hard (1988) were used to reassert our postwar nation’s masculinity, as if to say, “We could have won in Vietnam!”

Further, Bronski claims that the stoner buddy movie genre, with a new understanding of masculinity, was invented in response to the absurd man-movies emblematic of the “unholy three” (Willis, Schwarzenegger, and Stallone). Films like Dumb and Dumber, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and Dude, Where’s My Car? exhibit an apolitical, peace-and-love sense of masculinity that is a direct backlash to action hero archetypes. 

Bronski’s argument is interesting, but I believe he is ignoring some important, much earlier incarnations of this same sensitive masculinity—the two most prevalent examples being Harold Ramis’ Animal House and Stripes. Both of these films, released in 1978 and 1981, respectively, put goofball, slacker men in positions where they are confronted by archetypal masculinity. Further, in both of these films this masculinity is represented by military figures (ROTC Cadet Officer Niedermeyer in Animal House and Sergeant Hulka in Stripes). The characters use disarming and nonthreatening humor to combat aggression, much like modern-day stoner comedies. But, instead of remaining apolitical, the heroes in Ramis’ films are forced to face the warlike masculinity emblematic of Vietnam militarism, proving that nonviolence can be an answer. 

Reading his article made me think of how we view masculinity in our modern time of war. If cinema is any refection, then our current perceptions equate masculinity with naïveté. Films like Jarhead and Stop-Loss present characters anxious to go to war, blinded by masculinity and a sense of duty, then humbled by the true nature of the conflict. Even stoner buddy movies like Harold and Kumar have ignorant über-masculine villains blinded by testosterone. The current trend seems to be that of peace and intelligence, which is itself a critique on war in general.  

It’s impossible to say what, if any, genres will come in response to the current Iraq War, but it seems safe to say that glorified violent masculinity is no longer something to be admired; rather it is a manifestation of ignorance and last resorts.

(Image by Jurek Durczak, licensed under Creative Commons.)

A string of 20 three-minute films sounds like a YouTube self-distraction session, and that’s what the final showing of films at Paris’s Festival International des Très Courts felt like. But admission was only a euro, and in a two-euro-espresso town, I forgave a little less-than-careful culling.

The films were either sans dialogue or in English, convenient for me as a non-French speaker. Some communicated their humor silently, like the Paris Metro acrobatics in Nové in the Subway 3, the attack-chair ninja spoof In Sit U, or the wry, wordless commentary on the repetitiveness of pop lyrics in Papayes Hands. Several of the films even featured symbols of American culture, like the Statue of Liberty and Ground Zero in the animation New York, New York, and one of the stomach-sinking images from Abu Ghraib in a poignant animation of The Declaration of Human Rights.

Mostly the showing was silly, the work of nerds (comic book, video game, and band nerds, to name a few varieties) equipped with video cameras. Nerds—filmmakers and viewers alike—enjoy their inside references, and I admit to my own geeky pleasure when I suspected the creators of the Live Good music video had enjoyed the same Sleeveface instruction video (pose with an album cover over your face!) on YouTube that I had. True, I probably could have tracked down Live Good on my own, but then I couldn’t have enjoyed a two-euro espresso afterward.

Image by Christopher Buttigieg, licensed under Creative Commons.