Loom: Blade Runner style 4K short film by Luke Scott
"He is an acclaimed commercial director who has pushed through his work to step out of the shadow of his father, Ridley Scott. And now Luke Scott is transcending boundaries in video technology with a visually-arresting 20-minute short film, Loom. Shot in coordination with RED Camera, the sci-fi short features Giovanni Ribisi and Jellybean Howie, although cinematographer Dariusz Wolski just might be its star.
The film follows Ribisi's character Tommy - a lab tech who genetically modifies meat and begins a dangerous at-home experiment he struggles to perfect. It ends with a monologue taken from the conclusion of Darwin's Origin of Species, leaving many of the story's questions left unanswered. 'There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved,' says Howie's character.
Visually, Scott - who directs for his father's production company RSA - gives nod to the filmmaker's 1982 classic Blade Runner, shooting the piece in the tone and style of the dystopian thriller. Constructed for 3D, the piece was crafted to test the limits of the colour range and exposure, allowing viewers to see fine details often lost in dark scenes.
RED initially presented Loom at the 2012 National Association of Broadcasters [NAB] Show this past April. The company has since continued to screen the film, and on Wednesday President Jarred Land released it online via REDUSER, with a disclaimer for cinephiles."
(Jennifer Madison, 31 August 2012, Mail Online)
Fig. 1 published on 28 Aug 2012 by ENTV, YouTube
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Britain in a Day: record and upload your footage
"On Saturday 12th November, Ridley Scott and director Morgan Matthews invite you to record your day and be part of Britain in a Day. It's really easy to get involved! Just pick up a camera, shoot, then upload your footage here. You will be able to upload from 12 November to 21 November 2011."
(Ridley Scott and Morgan Matthews)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Moebius Redux: A Life in Pictures
"Jean Giraud achieved worldwide recognition not only for his comic book work - often under the pseudonym Moebius - but also for his artistic input into a host of hit films, including: Tron, The Fifth Element, Space Jam and Alien.
Winner of Best Documentary and Best Picture at San Diego ComiCon!, Moebius Redux features Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee and American comic book artists Jim Lee (X-Men) and Mike Mignola (Hellboy), as well as Alejandro Jodorowsky and Dan OBannon (Alien), discussing the breathtaking work of a true visionary."
(Sky Arts)
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David ValenteSHARE
Alphaville exists. Everywhere!
"Science-fiction films tell us as much about the time in which they were made as the future they project and between the two moments – the one specific, the other nominal (1984, 2001, etc) – a sense develops of their qualities of prescience and allegorical vision. The enterprise of proposing a world-to-be is always a hostage to the future's fortune. The law of diminishing returns that applies as regards special effects bears this out. How soon before Matrix-era 'bullet time' looks as dated as Douglas Trumbull's 'star gate' pyrotechnics in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)? Which may explain why Alphaville hasn't aged as badly as other examples of the genre; it finds its 'special effect' in the specifically cinematic resource of light.
But this light, let's remind ourselves, is the light of the past brought to bear on the presence of the future now. Would it be going too far to suggest that, in adding the dimensions of past and future to the present of 1965, Godard was able to set the controls of his particular time machine to withstand the very test of time? There's no shortage of films that seek to travel in time following Alphaville, from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Mauvais sang (Leos Carax, 1986) to Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997) and Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998). There is also the developing genre of what critic Jonathan Romney has named 'steel and glass cinema' which he describes 'as cinema set in the recognisably contemporary urban world but framed and shot in such a way that it becomes detached, not unreal so much as irreal, bordering on science fiction', examples of which include Elle est des nôtres (She's a Jolly Good Fellow, Seigrid Alnoy, 2002), Demonlover (Olivier Assayas, 2002), Cypher (Vincenzo Natali, 2002) and Code 46 (Michael Winterbottom, 2003). Romney claims Alphaville to be 'the mother' of such cinema and with good reason. In the forty or so years separating Alphaville from Demonlover it has become evident that the no-place of Godard's dystopia, with its labyrinth of corridors and lobbies, was already one big non-place in waiting. The presence of the future that Godard was keen to capture back in 1965 has since taken shape as a global nonplace crossing continents and time-zones. 'It may be that we have already dreamed our dream of the future', J.G. Ballard has mused, 'and have woken with a start into a world of motorways, shopping malls and airport concourses which lie around us like a first instalment of a future that has forgotten to materialize.' Or, to put it another way, Alphaville exists. Everywhere."
(Chris Darke, Vertigo Magazine)
This is an edited extract from Chris Darke’s monograph on J-L Godard’s Alphaville to be published by I.B.Tauris in 2005. Chris Darke is a writer, critic and lecturer on the moving image. His book of selected writings, Light Readings, is published by Wallflower Press. He is also represented, with his film study Chris on Chris, on the DVD of La Jetée and Sans Soleil. See also pages 26 and 38.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Reconstructed Warfare To Be Consumed Within The Safe And Controlled Vestiges Of Home
"Godard has reserved the 'bedroom' as the primary site for consumption of contemporary Hollywood cinema. In Baudrillardian fashion, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001) plays on a super-sized widescreen television at the foot of the bed: as a form of 'reconstructed' warfare to be consumed within the safe and controlled vestiges of home."
(Alex Munt, Macquarie University, Australia)
[Jean-Luc Godard's recent exhibition at the Pompidou Centre presents a commentary on the nature of cinema and its enduring interest despite its various transformations. He makes his commentary through the form of an installation sculpture arranged as three viewing rooms. The rooms represent three points in time: The Day before Yesterday; Yesterday; and Today. Interestingly works within the Today room seem to suggest a shift away from the practice of cinema being a collective viewing activity to being a private activity played out in domestic spaces.]
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
