In 2012, Bombay Saphire ran an interesting competition called The Imagination Series, where filmmakers were invited to send in their interpretation of a script written by Geoffrey Fletcher. The five most imaginative entries were shortlisted and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival 2013. Here are two of our favourites.
And looking back on the work these filmmakers have made in the past, we reckon James W Griffiths is someone to watch out for. Here’s a film he shot entirely on a Nokia N8 that won the Nokia Shorts competition 2011. Stuff that not only hits the spot, but actually makes you wish you had made it yourself.
Comprising a unique form of live animation and music, The Paper Cinema makes stories come alive with pen and ink drawings that are manipulated in real time before a camera that projects them onto a large screen.
Why go through all this trouble? Why not make an animation, you ask?
Well it’s precisely their handmade process that makes Paper Cinema magical. The drawings that Nicholas Rawling and Imogen Charleston move with artistic precision before the camera lens, the instrumental music performed at close proximity by Christopher Reed; all these aspects of film making and story telling sadly get lost in today’s world of ‘I now watch-everything-on-my-mobile-device’. Paper Cinema takes film making back to its basics, and gives us a story we can feel and see without it all being down to fancy technology.
Here’s a glimpse of the artistic processes involved in a Paper Cinema production. This is taken from a project called West that they did for Bristol’s Mayfest 2013.
‘Paolo Sorrentino’sLa Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013) is a combination of many wonderful things; a considered score, references to a crass contemporary art scene (only the stripper notices the child prodigy’s tears), fashion and its silhouette, and our protagonist – a recently turned 65-year-old Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a slender, caring man, more Redford’s Gatsby than DiCaprio’s, a man who gets away with calling his cleaning lady a ‘little rascal’ without making it sound patronising or harsh.
The film opens with a group of women singing above a pool of water, akin to a Greco-Roman chorus glancing down at the narrative as it unfolds. The camera then flips upside down to reveal a throb of party goers, living like devilish demons inside a choreographed moment, as if caught within the triptychGarden Of Earthly Delights for an unending period of temptation.
As we get to know our sexagenarian Jep, he strolls along the river reflecting that at 26 he wanted to be part of Roma’s ‘whirlpool of the high-life’ and he succeeded in becoming its ‘King’. There are echoes of Michael Haneke’s ‘Amour’ here, not in terms of loss or forgetfulness, but of grace and poise and allowing key actors of a certain age the opportunity to examine and reveal themselves to the audience. But La Grande Bellezza is also enjoyably contradictory, as we grimace alongside the frenetic partying of awkward ‘Mum & Dad’ dancing, booze, drugs, a failed three-some, and a 104-year-old nun, Sister Maria who beckons the producers to increase their budget to fit in some CGI flamingos.
After Jep kindly brings his friend Stefania (Galatea Ranzi) back to earth, it is with great care that he consoles her about ‘a life in tatters, just like the rest of us’, in a way that is touching and not vindictive, serious but not emotionally stifling. And again when at a dinner party someone asks him of his guest, a quiet poet, “why does he not talk?”, Jep simply replies; “because he listens.”
A beautifully constructed score, the music balances from high synth-euro pop Bob Sinclair in the wild party scenes to Georges Bizet, in the more tonal moments. But this all feels natural to the characters who live lives governed by their Epicurean hedonism, like a late 80’s Malcolm MacLaren fusion. Time however does finally catch up with some of them as we start to lose few of Jep’s friends, but it already feels like time to let them go.
La Grande Bellezza is a high-end Italian parody of reality, that makes you feel like you’ve fallen into a soap opera but without the fluro colours of Pedro Almodovar. The finish and textures here are richer, rich in wastefulness and excessiveness and we haven’t even got to the beach flashbacks, vanishing giraffe or the disappointing broken hearts yet. There is a lot to experience here and I would definitely partake in it all over again. Bello!’
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A big thank you to the very talented Scott Ramsay Kyle who you can also follow on Twitter. We’re intrigued and are making our way to see this film pronto!
And here’s the English version of the trailer if your Italian, German and French are as non-existent as ours.
Here’s introducing a new series of guest posts called Friday Inspired, where some of our favorite creatives contribute ideas and images that have inspired them this past week.
Independent curator Veeranganakumari Solanki’s find this week is A Brief History of Modern Architecture through Movies –
“It’s like the movies!”
Incidents that seem unreal, dreams that come true, perfect settings for perfect situations – these are things that don’t occur on a daily basis (at least for most people), and when they do, we often compare them to being picture perfect or the utopic realisation from movies that we’ve seen or heard of. I recently came across this piece on “A Brief History of Modern Architecture through Movies”, which in fact reverses the above mentioned outlook and “Ways of Seeing” (John Berger would be glad!)
This post on Architizer takes one on a guided tour of architecture from Art Nouveau in Midnight in Paris all the way to Futurism in The Fifth Element! In a world of moving imagery and rapidly fading histories being swallowed with the progress of the future, this one’s a great find for architecture and movie buffs to pause time and recreate utopias! Travel through these movies to learn the history of architecture…
Veeranganakumari Solanki is an independent art writer and curator based in Mumbai, India
Her curatorial work includes Barbed Floss that opened at The Guild on 31 July.
It is not often that you will meet a man like John Hull.
A former professor at the University of Birmingham who lost his sight in his mid 40’s, Hull kept a remarkable audio diary over the next three years that reveals the impact this loss had on his life and those around him.
His candour is refreshing on the tapes, and he delivers his musings without a trace of sadness and completely factually. As if he was a bystander to his own life.
This made me realise, that along with my having lots to be grateful for including 20/20 vision, the wisdom and skills you develop when you have no choice but to do so, could give inspiration to the many others who do have a choice.
Directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney have made a couple of poignant dramatisations to go with Hull’s audio diary entries that will form part of a documentary called Into Darkness. And though these dramatisations fit exactly, you realise halfway through that when it comes to Hull’s passages, the visuals will always take second place.
Love your Schumann and Tchaikovsky.
Be unabashedly anti-establishment and yet non-sensibly poetic.
Thank your Mom + Dad at the end of (nearly) every film.
Use Twitter to maximum random effect.
Grayson Perry’s three-part series on taste tribes in Britain is probably one of my favorite TV documentaries. It not only gave me insight into what it means to some to be British, but it also helped me analyse the stereotypes that were so easily passed on to me when I first came to the UK, and that I in turn pass on to others.
Perry used this research to make six tapestries which were displayed at Victoria Miro gallery last year, in an exhibition aptly titled The Vanity of Small Differences. These tapestries have now been donated to the Arts Council and will tour the country this year starting with Sunderland in June 2013.
Enjoy Perry being Perry. His inquisitiveness and ability to join in without judging, are inspiring.
Apologies if this doesn’t stream at your location. But I’m hoping it does.
I’ve trawled through Banksy’s website innumerable times now and though I love his work, to me the most atrocious and audacious piece he has ever done is his film Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)
Recently I’ve also done a bit of exploring London’s murals which brought me in contact with Positive Arts and Boyd Hill. And out of a conversation with Boyd about graffiti artists, came the realization that graffiti is like no other art I have ever explored. These artists paint for paintings sake. They have no need for their work to be preserved or deified, knowing fully well that something that takes hours to create can completely disappear the next day beneath the work of another artist. Respect is not demanded but earned. And if your work remains untouched, it is because you have impressed the other artists who scour your terrain. At least for today.
This concept seems so out of place from the gallery/auction house world I have come from. But still the edgy feeling and the lawlessness it imbibes fascinates me. So last weekend I sat to watch the Banksy film, hoping to get some insight into his magic. Alas, the film is not quite what I expected while being so much more. It’s what I call half sense.
Watch it for for Mr. Brainwash who after learning the ropes from the best, shams the entire art market all easy peasy…
For the music which makes me smile.
For the ‘paint it + run away and don’t get caught + hide in the shadows and watch what happens’ attitude of these artists…
For the artist Borf – his name supposedly comes from his best friend who died when they were 16. He signs off as Borf so that his friend’s name can stay alive.
And for the artist Shepard Fairey famous for the Obama poster, who comes across as absolutely adorable.
Watch | Chuckle | Shake your head in disbelief
As a blog post I recently read states so eloquently – every industry needs a Borat. Mr. Brainwash is one for the world of street art.
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I’ve been struggling to stay inspired the past few weeks. Life has gone back to being a little tedious and blank as it does every few months.
So it’s time to dig deeper and google wider for things that make me go wow.
beanstories 