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Showing posts with label underground film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label underground film. Show all posts

Monday, 11 January 2010

On INCITE! A journal of experimental media & radical aesthetics



An image from Michael Robinson's Victory Over the Sun (2007)

A shivering, but purposefully heroic, Film Studies For Free has crept out from its cosy igloo in order to excite some more, much merited, interest in INCITE!, the online and Open Access journal of experimental media & radical aesthetics.  

INCITE! describes itself thus:
Merging handmade and online platforms, this hybrid [on and off-line] publication addresses the lack of critical attention afforded film and media artists working today. In addition to scholarly articles, INCITE! publishes aesthetic statements, manifestos, artist projects, multiples, archival documents, interviews, reviews, and hastily drawn plans.
Stationing ourselves at the cross-flow of research, scholarship, and creation, we encourage personal writing, critical poetics, and radical approaches to film and media.
Issue # 1: Manifest appeared in Fall 2008 -- see the wonderful list of contents below.

Issue # 2 "Counter-Archive," which should go online in early 2010, is thus much anticipated. But the journal has also just launched "Back & Forth," a new monthly interview series.

In the first edition of the series, Cat Tyc talks to the poetic pop recycler Michael Robinson about his filmmaking roots, cultural references, thematic trajectories, and future directions (see also Michael Sicinski's wonderful Cinema-Scope article about Robinson here).





 





Tuesday, 18 August 2009

This and that (Perkins, Rich on Kuchar Bros, Westerns, Fan Videos, Timecode, Kubrick and the Coens)


Trailer for It Came From Kuchar - As Alexandra Juhasz writes at Media Praxis: '[This] documentary does little more than let the brothers, their films, and fans speak for themselves. And what more do we need? Inventive, life-long bohemians making their work outside dominant structures and to an international fanbase of crazed cineastes. As I implied regarding Fig Trees recently: it becomes an increasingly rare pleasure to see work that resides outside the dumbed down regime of the popular.'

Having been briefly out of action, Film Studies For Free is sorting through its in-tray and to-do lists. Below are some assorted bits of online news and links that it wanted you not to miss:

In this audio interview Emmy Winner Charlotte Robinson talks with B Ruby Rich, American Scholar and Film Critic about Director Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary “It Came From Kuchar.” Long before YouTube, there were the outrageous, no-budget movies of underground, filmmaking twins George and Mike Kuchar. George and Mike grew up in the Bronx in the 1950’s. At the age of twelve, they became obsessed with Hollywood melodramas and began making their own homespun melodramas with their aunt’s 8mm camera. They used their friends and family as actors and their Bronx neighborhood as their set. Early Kuchar titles featured in this film include “I Was A Teenage Rumpot” and “Born of the Wind”. In the early 1960’s, alongside Andy Warhol, the Kuchar brothers shaped the New York underground film scene. Known as the “8mm Mozarts”, their films were noticeably different than other underground films of the time. They were wildly funny, but also human and vulnerable. Their films have inspired many filmmakers, including John Waters, Buck Henry, Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin and Wayne Wang (all are interviewed in this film). Despite having high profile fans, the Kuchars remain largely unknown because they are only ambitious to make movies, not to be famous.