burned out
Needed a significant break from the rigor of the scholarship of early cinema (and that crash course on cinematography I decided to take). That was a lot of reading and research and at the end I felt I could have spent another year reading and researching. About a week ago, I finished school, handed in that final paper on Jean Vigo's L'Atalante and have not even thought about film or photography since.
Then the Canon TX1 finally arrived (3 months since I ordered it) . So I started shooting HD video, 720 @ 30p people! insane. I started covering the shots of all these mental storyboards I had in my head for the last three months. Just a quick exercise of the equipment and for my eyes but I haven't stopped since. Because it is fun, this little camera is about the size of a box of marlboro 100s, incredibly inconspicuous. I'll shoot for another week around Cambridge (I am not telling you what I am shooting right now), I will go at it on Final Cut Pro, and then I will upload it to Viddler, Virb, Vimeo, Blip.tv, or whatever site it is that the cool people have their eyeballs on. I will be doing a pulldown to 24P in FCP soon and see what that looks like (what's a 20% reduction of speed amongst friends).
So there is nothing about photography here. Let me add this then: I'm buying T-Max 100 on Readyloads and a JOBO 2521 to shoot 4x5 this summer on my converted 110B.
One last thing on Vigo, Brightcove has some of his films online. In order: À propos de Nice (1929). The documentary on the swimmer Jean Taris Taris, roi de l'eau (1931) here on youtube. Zéro De Conduite (1933). Jean Vigo's last film before his death at 29: L'Atalante (1934), a poem which I will always try to steal from like a Pixies record. The films on Brightcove are part of an "anarchist" film collection. Jean Vigo's father was a well known anarchist who was assassinated in prison under mysterious circumstances. The majority of the early criticism on Vigo's films made the simple assumption that they were all agit prop one way or the other and missed Vigo's important aesthetic concerns. Those few bars of Le théme d'amour always grab me.
First scene of L'Atalante:
Labels: film, photography
posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Monday, June 04, 2007,
