Inception remade as a 60-second Victorian woodcut animation
"This Gilliamesque 60-second adaptation of Inception uses delightful Victorian woodcuts to tell the story. It was an entry in a Jameson's whisky competition by Wolfgang Matzl."
(Cory Doctorow, 11 March 2011, Boing Boing via Super Punch)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Revisioning La Jetee as a series of video tableaux vivants
"An adaption and reconstruction of Chris Marker's La Jetee(1963) film. Its tells the story about a man who is marked by an image of his childhood in a post-nuclear war experiment on time travel."
(Choy Ka Fai, 2010)
[This revision of Chris Marker's masterpiece transposes the static black and white photographs of the original through a series of video tableaux vivants. In this way actors hold their position as they are photographed using live-action video. The resulting effect is both eerie and evocative.]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Sister Midnight: metamorphosis, alienation and collapse played out in the border town of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
The ongoing femicides in the border town of Ciudad Juarez, a real and socially relevant and current, ongoing news story is something that I will attempt to present using comic art, adapting Kafka's story to use as a foundation for visual treatments of real horror. The themes of metamorphosis, alienation and the collapse of a family unit are shared in Kafka's text and the news coverage of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The comics medium will be used to communicate with the audience and have them interact with the issue.
I first heard of the situation in Juarez from my Spanish teacher while in Guadalajara, Mexico and the story stayed with me. A very different Mexico was depicted closer to the border than what I had seen in my experiences of travelling around the country. The ugliness of the murders is heightened by the ongoing corruption that surrounds them. I feel confident that I can now give the story a worthy visual treatment, something that has been lacking in recent film treatments of the situation. For years, young women have been preyed on by rapists and murderers while commuting to factories on the outskirts of the city. The killings continue and, to use imagery from Kafka, the men who commit these crimes are like vermin or cockroaches.
Fig.1 David Valente (2010). "Sister Midnight". Nottingham, Issuu.
Fig.2 Screen-shots from the music video for The Drive In (2001). 'Invalid Litter Dept'. USA, Grand Royal / Virgin: 6:07.
['Sister Midnight' is a comic book created by David Valente as part of his MA in Illustration at Nottingham Trent University (UK). The comic book was developed through a process of experimentation and discovery where Franz Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' was used as a study for exposing contemporary social issues in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.]
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David ValenteSHARE
The Open City: The Closed System and The Brittle City
"The idea of an open city is not my own: credit for it belongs to the great urbanist Jane Jacobs in the course of arguing against the urban vision of Le Corbusier. She tried to understand what results when places become both dense and diverse, as in packed streets or squares, their functions both public and private; out of such conditions comes the unexpected encounter, the chance discovery, the innovation. Her view, reflected in the bon mot of William Empson, was that 'the arts result from over-crowding'. Jacobs sought to define particular strategies for urban development, once a city is freed of the constraints of either equilibrium or integration. These include encouraging quirky, jerry-built adaptations or additions to existing buildings; encouraging uses of public spaces which don't fit neatly together, such as putting an AIDS hospice square in the middle of a shopping street. In her view, big capitalism and powerful developers tend to favour homogeneity: determinate, predictable, and balanced in form. The role of the radical planner therefore is to champion dissonance. In her famous declaration: 'if density and diversity give life, the life they breed is disorderly'. The open city feels like Naples, the closed city feels like Frankfurt."
(Richard Sennett, 2006)
Fig.1 Busy street in Naples, marlenworld.com
Fig.2 Paris, Les Olympiades, 1969-1974, Thierry Bézecourt in 2005
[3] Sennett, R. (2006). The Open City: The Closed System and The Brittle City. Urban Age.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Illusion of Magnitude: Adapting the Epic from Film to Television
"When Giuseppe de Liguoro's Homer's Odyssey (1910) was released in the U.S. in 1912, a review in The Moving Picture World praised it for beginning 'a new epoch in the history of the motion picture as a factor in education' (1). The ambitious claim was made amid the author's desire to see moving pictures adapt Classic sources in such a way to both 'entertain and instruct the average moving picture audience' (2). This aspiration was repeated in the reviews of early U.S. television, which broadcast its own modest 'epics' in the 1950s and '60s in response to the revival of the cinematic epic. Although constrained by limited budgets and an even more limited screen size, television's version of the epic during the 1950s and '60s was applauded for bringing both spectacle and the high-cultural status of Classical works to this often-maligned medium. Focusing on contemporary reviews, this article argues that adaptations of myth were used to promote (and contest) the legitimacy of early television in the United States. (3)"
(Djoymi Baker)
1. W. Stephen Bush, "Homer's Odyssey. Three Reels. (Milano Films.)", The Moving Picture World, Vol. 11, No. 11, 16 March 1912, p. 941.
Fig.1 Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro, 1911. 'Homer’s Odyssey'
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
