Theatre of the Actors of Looking : Shirin

.

Again a follow-on from the theme of the previous blog, with an emphasis not so much on the given as on the activity of regard. Today the recent film by Abbas Kiarostami, Shirin : our regard of the faces of 113 women as (if) they watch a certain film.

bL has not yet seen Shirin - it was shown this year at the Sydney Film Festival but not at the Melbourne Film Festival - but has been reading about it. Here are some online articles:

Shirin as Described by Kiarostami
by Khatereh Khodaei

It may be an odd experience to sit in a dark movie theater, stare at the screen and see fellow audience members watching a motion picture. Personally, I believe the experience of watching a movie in which the sound of the story that we hear is different from the pictures that we watch can be more interesting.

Shirin is the latest feature film by Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami. It features simple close-ups of the faces of 113 actresses who are watching a movie.

After watching the film and talking with Mr. Kiarostami, I found out that the women, whose faces appeared in perpendicular frames in the film were not actually watching a movie at all; a few fixed spots had been installed above the camera and they were acting with Kiarostami’s special improvisational technique.

What makes the experience doubly interesting is to learn that the story was decided on after shooting was over. It is the love story of Khosro, Shirin, and Farhad, a masterpiece by the great Iranian poet Nezami Ganjavi. The work features effective editing and an attention to details which, as always, render Kiarostami’s movies simple, different and absorbing.

Abbas Kiarostami characteristically attaches a special significance to audiences. In his latest production, Shirin, he goes as far as explicitly suggesting that the silver screen would be non-existent in the absence of audiences.

“Shirin” is the story of the empathy of audiences—the audiences who are watching the empathy of the other audiences.

( click here for full article )

Kiarostami's 'Shirin': watching a movie about watching a movie
by Jeff Strabone

While the world waits for the second Iranian Revolution, it's important to recall that Iran is not just a place of political turmoil, nuclear ambitions, and theocratic dictatorship. It is also a place of great poetry and cinema, as the work of Abbas Kiarostami reminds us. How timely then that he has a new film out called Shirin that adapts—sort of—a twelfth-century romance and offers the world a stunning new achievement: a feature-length film whose narrative is made up entirely of reaction shots.

( click here for full article )

A Conversation with Kiarostami
by Arsalan Mohammad in Tehran
(A.K.): I just read an article today about Shirin – a critic who said, ‘I don’t understand what he wants to say, really, it’s complicated, I don’t even like it, but what I know for sure is that he is saying something. Let’s give him time, to see actually what he is saying – give us time, then we’ll understand what he is saying. I am sure he is saying something, he has something to say.’

( click here for full article )

P.S. 26 August 2009: By a happy coincidence, news just in that "Shirin" will receive a Melbourne screening this Thursday afternoon :

Presented as part of the Film and Television Studies UNDER CONSTRUCTION seminar & screening series – selected, introduced and especially subtitled by André Dias. Refreshments and discussion will follow the screening.

4-6pm, AUGUST 27 2009, ROOM S704, MENZIES BUILDING 7TH FLOOR, MONASH UNIVERSITY - CLAYTON CAMPUS. FREE ADMISSION. ALL WELCOME! BRING A FRIEND.

detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something . . .

LOGOS/HA HA

����� P/L

.

This poster scene of playful synæsthesia is by Uncle Charlie.

detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something . . .

LOGOS/HA HA

Lulo Lo Lo Ks @

.
View Mix

Lul0 lo lo ks at a guitar.

We look at Lulo side-on; Lulo looks at the guitar side-on.

The guitar looks at us front-on; we look at the guitar front-on.

detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something . . .

LOGOS/HA HA

Who else is with me?

.

Yesterday, the regard of proximate consciousness. In that dream, the mighty being came so close at one moment I drew back in trepidation.

This morning, looking at Andre Dias' cinema blog We have yet to start thinking, I saw again a familiar and similar image to that of my dream; but here the exchange is actually in the water/
consciousness and it is not going well. Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) :

detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...

LOGOS/HA HA

"On November 26, 1965, Beuys put the hare into the leading role in an Action. The title: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. The place: Galerie Alfred Schmela, in Dusseldorf, a gallery that had commited itself early and strongly to Beuys and had done a great deal to promote his reputation. Beuys sat on a chair in one corner of the gallery, next to the entrance. He had poured honey over his head, to which he had then affixed fifty dollars worth of gold leaf. In his arms he cradled a dead hare, which he looked at steadfastly. Then he stood up, walked around the room holding the dead hare in his arms, and held it up close to the pictures on the walls; he seemed to be talking to it. Sometimes he broke off his tour and, still holding the dead creature, stepped over a withered fir tree that lay in the middle of the gallery. All this was done with indescribable tenderness and great concentration."

Heiner Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, Abbeville Press, New York, 1987, (Translated by David Britt) p.135

Several days ago another such image, one of a more equal regard, arrived in the mail: this poster, FACE TO FACE (2004), by Lindsey Kuhn of (as chance would have it) Swamp posters.

detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...

LOGOS/HA HA

Dangerous Animal

.

I read yesterday that humans kill 100 million sharks per year. (Stop Shark Finning)

bL spent a week at Varanasi in 1998. Arrived after dark, found a room not far from the Ganges. Next morning first thing took a ride in a low row boat. Solicited to do so, placed a lighted candle on that holy water and watched it drift in the great river spirit of India as pink dolphins gently rose and rolled, in and out and all around. Did not sight these beings again but have never forgotten that welcome.

After last night's dream of watching and wondering from a low grassy bank as a .../dolphin/porpose/shark/whale/... its dorsal fin cutting the air as it circled so near in the crystal clear water... this poster from Spike Press.

Self-Unconscious Narrator Rules, KO!

.

self-reflexive, a term applied to literary works that openly reflect upon their own processes of artful composition. Such self-referentiality is frequently found in modern works of fiction that repeatedly refer to their own fictional status (see metafiction). The narrator in such works, and in their earlier equivalents such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–67), is sometimes called a ‘self-conscious narrator’. Self-reflexivity may also be found often in poetry. See also mise-en-abyme, romantic irony.

Words and Silk: The Imaginary and Real Worlds of Gerald Murnane

.

In recent months there have been revival celebrations for two Australian films: Bert Deling's Pure Shit (1975) and Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright (1971).

Adrian Martin lists Philip Tyndall's Words and Silk : The Imaginary and Real Worlds of Gerald Murnane (1988) in his top 10 Australian films. Despite this, and despite this film receiving awards at several festivals overseas, it has never been screened at any major Australian film festival.

In the recently published Oxford Companion to Australian Film (Oxford University Press, 1999), Philip Tyndall's Words and Silk: The Imaginary and Real Worlds of Gerald Murnane (1990) - one of my all-time favourite Australian films - does not rate a mention. This is sadly symptomatic of how strange, unique, unclassifiable works tend to go underground rather speedily in Australia.
Adrian Martin, March 2000 : full article here

Gerald Murnane has been nominated for the Nobel Prize; has received the Patrick White Award (1999); a Special Award at the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards (2007) and an Australia Council Emeritus Award (2008).

Murnane has been the subject of a film and various critical studies but his work is better known in Sweden than it is here. He is an advocate for both the prominence of Australian Literature and the Australian landscape within it and his work can be read as one large story that folds upon itself, seeking always greater and greater detail. His fictive terrain is called ‘the plains’ – an imaginary place that exists simultaneously at the edges of his sight and deeply inside his mind.Extract from the Judges' Comments at the 2007 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.

It seems worth noting therefore that Words and Silk has just received it's first ever Sydney screening, at the unreviewed avoiding myth & message: Australian artists and the Literary world (below) at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Also in the exhibition, for Murnane fans, are the script and poster ticket for the 1990 performance The Literature Club.

Gerald Murnane in a scene from Words and Silk.
(photo by David Petersen)

Boston Illegal : Shepard Fairey pleads guilty

.

By an odd coincidence, given that the previous post regarded official and unofficial signage on a Melbourne electricity box, Shepard Fairey yesterday pleaded guilty to three charges of graffiti in Boston, including one of putting a poster on an electrical box.

Tina Kells' article 'Shepard Fairey, Obama 'Hope' Portrait Artist, Guilty of Graffiti' is at Now Public : click here

Shepard Fairey's OBEY website : click here

The photo and attributions below are by afagen

Barack Obama "Hope" poster
by Shepard Fairey (born 1970)
hand-finished collage, stencil, and acrylic on paper, 2008

Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture
Smithsonian American Art Museum & National Portrait Gallery
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

OBEY : MANUFACTURING QUALITY DISSENT SINCE 1989

.

bLOGOS/HA HA recently acquired one of Shepard Fairey's Aung San Suu Kyi offset prints. (The initial screen print edition sold out in a flash.)

These are still available for purchase. ( click here )
"The proceeds from this print will go to benefit the Human Rights Action Center and The U.S. Campaign for Burma".

Further, this image can now also be downloaded free for non-commercial use. "Please take advantage of this free download and create your own posters and place them where anyone can see them. Help bring some change in Burma!" ( click here )

Aung San Suu Kyi
Shepard Fairey
Open Edition, 24" x 36", Signed

Here's another Shepard Fairey screenprint image, available as part of Arkitip Issue No. 0051 ( click here )

Projection-Space Thriller (2)

.

COME FACE TO FACE WITH

TRUE /
AMERICAN /
ICONS /
AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISM /
AMERICAN REALISM

COME FACE TO FACE WITH
Michael "Thriller" Jackson
though here we do not actually come face to face with his face
in fact just the reverse.

Apparently he looks at
a floating (unsupported) gold-rimmed image of
a lady who also does not come face to face with his face.

She looks at a gold-rimmed cup.
COMES FACE TO FACE WITH
a gold-rimmed cup.



Why Michael "Thriller" Jackson to represent us
as The Actor of Looking?

Why not Mickey Mouse? or Charles Manson?

Why not The Man With The Golden Arm
to hold the Golden Frame
that holds the Painted Lady
who holds the Gold Framed Tea Cup
... at the Court of King Caractacus?


(Do I get the job?)

"Now if you want to take some pictures of the fascinating witches who put the scintilating stiches in the britches of the boys who put the powder on the noses on the faces of the ladies of the harem of the court of King Caractacus...

...you're too late! Because they've just... passed... by!"

- Rolf Harris, 1965

COME FACE TO FACE WITH

Flight of the Conchords posters

.
bLOGOS/HA HA has been enjoying many of the posters shown at OMG Posters!

In particular those for Flight of the Conchords. This is from a set of two by Aaron Horkey, for their May 24 show at Los Angeles.

And this is Tyler Stout’s poster for their Portland OR show. It goes on sale June 1. (Update June 2. They Sold Out in a flash, as did another I was watching several days ago. Interesting.)