Index (from Vienna)

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: Index (from Vienna)

#51 Post by zedz » Fri Jun 23, 2017 3:34 pm

Great release! The Exquisite Corpus is excellent, and I think Film of Love is the only other one of those I've seen (and if so, it was a looong time ago).

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: Index (from Vienna)

#52 Post by zedz » Fri Apr 17, 2020 1:46 am

PRAXIS SELECTION Dietmar Brehm

This disc presents 40 sections out of 141 from the parent film(s). They’re mostly short, non-narrative works (sometimes a single shot, but some feature complex montage) that explore a single cinematic idea.

They generally have non-diegetic soundtracks, often confrontationally so, and in the later works the soundtrack frequently runs longer at either end than the image track. The early works often take hardcore porn as source material (you have been warned!)

I really enjoyed the programme. Although the individual scenes could be hit and miss, the best of them were great little works, and the way filmic ideas, content and titles were used, reused and abused throughout gave it an overarching sense of structure.

Some of my favourite scenes:

#13: Ubung – A person is engulfed in radiant / flashing light as if they’ve become a vortex into another dimension.

#59: Jayne – A couple of shots of Jayne Mansfield are subjected to manic flipbook animation. There’s not much to this one, but I found it hysterical, which is how Jayne looks, too.

#76: Mittag – A handheld close up of flies crawling over a plate abandoned at a picnic. In the middle of the shot is a static dot. Although your brain is telling you it’s the least interesting thing in the image, and it’s not moving, the slight jiggling of the frame creates the illusion that the dot is moving and you can’t take your eyes off it. Sorry, flies.

#96: Chesterfield – This scene combines a lot of tropes from Praxis (the filmmaker filming himself, doubled images, focal dots like the one in Mittag, negative printing) into a very satisfying whole: two matched shots side by side of the filmmaker filming himself outdoors, in a dirty mirror, moving closer to and further from the camera, checking the focus etc. After a while, you realise that one of the shots is in reverse (the cigarette smoke gives this away), and you spend the rest of the film trying (and in my case failing) to parse the relationship between the two shots (e.g. are they the same shot arranged palindromically, is it the same material edited differently, are they two completely different takes, is the reversed shot actually reversed right through?)

#130: Rolle – A very simple scene, negative printed, of a roll of hay in front of a huge tree. The filmmaker enters the shot, then exits it, then exits it again, and again. The simple Melies camera trick is delightful, but what I really like about this scene is the superb composition.

#141: Coke – The final film features three bendy Coke bottles bopping to the Velvet Underground’s ‘Ride Into the Sun.’ Which is about as perfect an ending to this film as I could imagine.

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