Rosemarys Baby: editing through frame selection
"Rosemary's Baby is a 1968 American horror film written and directed by Roman Polanski, based on the bestselling 1967 novel by Ira Levin. ... Farrow plays an expecting mother who fears that her husband may have made a pact with their eccentric neighbours, believing he may have promised them the child to be used as a human sacrifice in their occultic rituals in exchange for success in his acting career."
(Zach James and Rich Raddon, Movieclips)
Fig.1 excerpt from "Visions of Light" (1992), Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy and Stuart Samuels [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105764/]
[Jump to 7:54 to see Polanski's skilful use of framing to heighten the audience's interest and sense of intrigue.]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
A Town Called Panic: stop-motion film about three plastic toys named Cowboy, Indian and Horse
"Hilarious and frequently surreal, the stop-motion extravaganza A Town Called Panic has endless charms and raucous laughs for children from eight to eighty. Based on the Belgian animated cult TV series (which was released by Wallace & Gromits Aardman Studios), Panic stars three plastic toys named Cowboy, Indian and Horse who share a rambling house in a rural town that never fails to attract the weirdest events.
Cowboy and Indians plan to gift Horse with a homemade barbeque backfires when they accidentally buy 50 million bricks. Whoops! This sets off a perilously wacky chain of events as the trio travel to the center of the earth, trek across frozen tundra and discover a parallel underwater universe of pointy-headed (and dishonest!) creatures. Each speedy character is voiced - and animated - as if they are filled with laughing gas. With panic a permanent feature of life in this papier-mâché burg, will Horse and his equine paramour - flame-tressed music teacher Madame Longray (Jeanne Balibar) - ever find a quiet moment alone? A sort of Gallic Monty Python crossed with Art Clokey on acid, A Town Called Panic is zany, brainy and altogether insane-y!."
(Adriana Piasek-Wanski)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Liquid Sky: pleasure-seeking alien lands in downtown New York and gets caught up in a world of casual sex and heroin abuse
"A time-capsule cult movie from 1982: A pleasure-seeking alien lands in downtown New York and gets caught up in a world of casual sex and heroin abuse (the title itself is slang for 'heroin') by insinuating itself into the lives androgynous hipsters Margaret and Larry (both played by Anne Carlisle). Curiously cool, with plenty of early '80s fashion, a vivid colour scheme and a weird, pulsing electronic score.
Dir Slava Tsukerman US 1982, 112 mins, cert 18"
(Institute of Contemporary Arts, UK)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Fitness For Exhibition: Technical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin (Illuminations) p.225
With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognised as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognised as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Pictorial Language: Modern Hieroglyphs
Walter Benjamin (p.227)
Abel Gance, for instance, compares the film with hieroglyphs: "Here, by a remarkable regression, we have come back to the level of expression of the Egyptians.... Pictorial language has not yet matured because our eyes have not yet adjusted to it. There is as yet insufficient respect for, insufficient cult of, what it expresses." Or, in the words of Séverin-Mars (Armand Jean de Malasayade): "What art has been granted a dream more poetical and more real at the same time! Approached in this fashion the film might represent an incomparable means of expression. Only the most high-minded persons, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be allowed to enter its ambience".
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
