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:

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posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Monday, June 04, 2007, , links to this post




quick silent hit


I'm still swimming across the ocean that is early Cinema and its criticism. Vigo, Renoir, Lang, Ozu, Chaplin, Dreyer, Dovzhenko. I'm barely hanging there but I can see land now. Film/DV have become concepts that comfortably fit in my head and my now time goes (besides work and life of course) mostly on conceiving cinematic ideas. Thus I am in the middle of another hiatus from the shutter-clicking-and-chimping routine. I managed to take some portraits of Matters and Dunaway for their upcoming release. Here is André with the look of a man with too many mixing hours in him, ready to send their tracks to the mastering gods.

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posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Monday, May 07, 2007, , links to this post




The Good Fight


The customer is always right but I don't have to freaking like it. I don't have to take a photo I don't want to take. I know it is a banal observation but it is powerful and liberating. A friend recently quipped on an email:
"I get the feeling that a lot of people want a lot of really bad, really cheesy concept photography. Because there is tons of it and I think you have to try hard to make your pictures that lame"

I seem to find myself in the middle of fighting "the cheesy concept" fairly often. It's a hard battle and it takes its toll. I'm fairly aggravated with a client right now. Marina Warner when writing about the simplicity of Jean Vigo's L'Atalante writes "For it is often poverty of imagination that spins a great foam of dramatic incident in which to hide; richness that allows the banal its beauty."

I ran into Mike Slack's work recently when I read his interview in Andrew Long's fotolog.com (via 2point8). Afterwards, I found another interview with him at flashfilm.com that yielded an interesting tidbit:

"Instead of a favorite subject, I keep a long mental list of things that I try (and often fail) to avoid shooting. That list includes: funny-looking bushes; chain link fences; street signs; arrows of any kind; empty parking lots; painted brick walls; weeds; stairs; shadows; doors; rain gutters; tools; words; hats; the backs of people's heads; trash; trash cans; empty roads; plush toys; food; loading docks; telephones; cracked sidewalks; shopping carts; manhole covers; water towers; inanimate objects that resemble sex organs; airplanes; shoes; telephone wires; water puddles; clouds; stray dogs; ugly office buildings; brightly colored flowers; the ocean; empty hotel rooms; long hotel corridors; birds; air conditioners; fire hydrants; curtains; framed paintings; crashed cars; cell phone transmitters; and sofa cushions."

This list is obviously personal to him (and the "often fail" clause is a very important part of the power of such list) but it was very cathartic to write mine. But I'm not posting that list yet.



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posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Thursday, March 15, 2007,




alright march, bring your ides!

A little more breathing room this time. Nothing exciting happening photographically up in my yard. Mostly spending my time doing the kind of work that pays rent in Boston (let me state the obvious here: not photography). Meanwhile I've been cleaning up the flickr bucket and re-examining a lot of of my photography to consider various ways to integrate it into my hopelessly out of date website. Perhaps I will finally print a couple of portfolios and send them out, recenter the website around better work... So much to do, so little time but I really need to take care of this.

I did get to see "Thin" By Lauren Greenfield as well as attending her talk about the process of making the documentary. I saw the first scene of that film about two years ago to this date I think. At that time I had gotten the impression the majority of the work was done. Not so. For somebody of the stature and talent of Lauren to work on this sort of time scale, as a dear friend pointed out, "bespeaks of the difficulties involved in making a documentary." So true. I won't bore you with a discussion of the film itself, that's for some other kind of blog, but you ought to go see it.

I'm also knee deep in the middle of surveying a great number of silent films from the 20s and 30s. It is incredibly inspiring to see how much was done with so little equipment (isn't that always the case?). Here are two of my favorite stills this week. First one is a frame out of the beginning of Zemlja (Earth) by the Ukranian Olexandr Dovzhenko. The second one is from the Dane Carl Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (youtube).





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posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Thursday, March 01, 2007, , links to this post