I’ve been following Kevin B. Lee for a few years (ever since I saw his film essay on Out 1). He talks a lot about a genre he calls “desktop film” https://www.alsolikelife.com/home/desktop-films and I thought it would be cool to do a few things in this vein.
I think it will make for a fun change of pace. Plus, with a bunch of youtube-direct picks, maybe we’ll inspire John to join us!
All of these are really excellent, so I hope you see them even if you don’t join for the discussion.
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Kevin B. Lee + Jonathan Rosenbaum, Out 1: Solitaire. / 7m
Vincent Ocasla, SIMCITY 3000 - MAGNASANTI - 6 MILLION - ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM.flv. / 7m
(see also this moma article )
Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Foresickness. / 40m
Fredrik Knudsen, TempleOS Down the Rabbit Hole. / 1h 25m
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Kevin B Lee (on Out 1)
Léaud also verges on the bring of madness… so it seems appropriate that some of the messages he receives verge on nonsense. Like Berto’s, to some extent, he oscillates between believing that everything has meaning and is significant to some extent and believing that nothing has meaning or significance.
Jonathan Rosenbaum (on Out 1)
The final episode… showed all for of the major characters… going to pieces in a separate extended sequence. Lonsdale’s scene is placed last, and his reduction to mass of blubbering jelly on a beach seems to bring the serial full circle from the wordless hysteria of his group’s first exercise….
I haven’t had an opportunity to query Rivette about his deletion of Léaud’s climactic scene, but I suspect that this hair-raising sequence which showed Léaud’s character alone in his room in a state of hysteria oscillating between despair, and more briefly, exuberance, carried too many suggestions of Léaud’s subsequent real life emotional difficulties for Rivette to feel comfortable about retaining it…. The sequence shows him crying, screaming, howling like an animal, banging his head against the wall, busting a closet door, writhing on the floor, then calming down and picking up his harmonica.
After throwing away all three of the secret messages he has been trying for most of the serial to decode, he starts playing his harmonica ecstatically, throws his clothes and other belongings out into the hall, dances about maniacally, and then plays the harmonica some more.
Chloe Galibert-Laine (from Foresickness)
But perhaps the real issue, for the Boston redditors, was not revealing the truth. Perhaps they had started, like me, from a sincere desire to understand, and then found themselves, like me, caught up in the irresistible pleasure of pretending. Perhaps it was their way of making sense of this cloudy, undeciphered event, an event so difficult to integrate into the fabric of reality – that is the terrorist attack – to put their hand inside the chaos of the sensible, to pull out whatever turned up, to look to see if itt would be suitable for the construction of their little homes, that sometimes acquire, poor things, fantastic shapes…