ISRAEL WALL _ urban voids

APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL foi censurado na Tailândia e apresenta primeira exposição individual nos Estados Unidos

WEERASETHAKUL FILM CENSORED IN THAILAND
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest film has been censored in the director's native Thailand. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's Michael Althen reports, Sang Satawat (Syndromes and a Century)—which premiered at last fall's Venice Film Festival—did not please Thai censors, who requested four cuts to the film before its commercial release in the country. Instead of complying, Weerasethakul decided to cancel the release and raise questions about Thai film policies via an online petition. The censor board offered its own form of resistance by refusing to return its viewing copy to the director.
In an open letter to the National Legislative Assembly and the Thai government, Weerasethakul writes, "I, a filmmaker, treat my works as my own sons or my daughters. When I conceived them, they have their own lives to live. I don't mind if people are fond of them, or despise them, as long as I created them with my best intentions and efforts. If these offspring of mine cannot live in their own country for whatever reasons, let them be free. Since there are other places that warmly welcome them as who they are, there is no reason to mutilate them from the fear of the system, or from greed. Otherwise there is no reason for one to continue making art." (Jennifer Allen in Artforum)

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Unknown Forces: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Internationally recognized for his work in experimental and narrative cinema such as Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), Blissfully Yours (2002), Tropical Malady (2004) and Syndromes and A Century (2006), Apichatpong Weerasethakul presents his first solo exhibition in the United States. Weerasethakul’s films explore perception, impermanence and the imaginary, cultivating fanciful potential within the mundane. His abstract interchanges interrogate conventions of cinematic narrative while exploring desire, reality and a kind of melancholy perhaps peculiar to our times.
Weerasethakul’s exhibition at REDCAT features a newly commissioned video installation that expands upon characters developed in his previous feature films, shorts and video installations through comedy. Born in Bangkok in 1970, Weerasethakul holds a degree in architecture from Khon Kaen University and an MFA in filmmaking from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has worked outside the Thai studio system for a decade and, since 1999, has actively promoted and distributed experimental and independent films through his company Kick the Machine.
“The Thai filmmaker and installation artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul uses indeterminacy and incoherence as his aces in the hole. He frequently consults a fortune-teller for suggestions for key elements of his movies; he conceived a whole feature (Mysterious Object at Noon [2000]) around the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse game of chain writing; and even his more deliberately authored works are organized around puzzling narratives that offer few clues to their decryption. In a movie theater, Weerasethakul’s passing of the work of interpretation on to the audience can be maddening or paralyzing, but in an installation context it can have the giddy feel of a free-for-all. His leviathan UNKNOWN FORCES, 2007, boxes the viewer between four giant video screens that open out onto urban Thai landscapes shimmering with pleasure and freedom. On one side of the room, a young man and an elegant, sixty-ish woman—she looks like a Thai Charlotte Rampling—sit on the back of a pickup truck, the wind tousling their hair as they recount anecdotes we can’t remotely hear (but which seem, from the look of the speakers, sweetly nostalgic). On another, a shaggy-haired guy does a pop-'n'-lock number on the back of the same truck, mostly keeping his face from view. On a third, a giant, mysterious object is swaddled in fabric and lit with cheesy carnival lights while cheesier Thai techno pop, evocative of a small-town carnival ca. 1986, blasts this cryptic but oddly good-natured site. In interviews, Weerasethakul claims UNKNOWN FORCES is an allegory of the situation after last year’s political upheaval in Thailand. To Los Angeles viewers deprived of the author’s private Da Vinci Code, it feels like something even better: A quintessentially Weerasethakul space of obscene bliss.” (Matthew Wilder in Arforum)
In anticipation of the Los Angeles Film Festival premiere of Syndromes and a Century, REDCAT will present a selection of Weerasethakul’s films. Screenings include Mysterious Object at Noon, Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady, and Worldly Desires and other shorts selected by the artist.
Weerasethakul has exhibited and screened his films widely and has been presented numerous awards for his art projects and feature films including the Prix Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival, 2002; the Prix du Jury, Cannes Film Festival, 2004; Age d’or Prize, Cine de’couvertes, 2004; and Grand Prize, Tokyo Filmex, 2004. In 2005, he received the Silpatorn Award from Thailand Ministry of Culture’s Office of Contemporary Arts.

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CalArts Theater / REDCAT GALLERY

April 18 _ June 17, 2007 Los Angeles US

ANDRÉ LEMOS novo mural _ parte 2

André Lemos continua atrabalhar no seu novo mural na cidade do Porto.

Mais informações e imagens brevemente.

Condolezza Rice meets Iranian Artists

Unease As Rice Meets Iranian Artists
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was all smiles Thursday (10 may) as she met Iranian artists at an event intended to promote cultural links with Iran. Still, there were currents of unease.
Ten of the 14 Iranians who received special visas for the exhibition refused to be photographed with Rice, and two would not even accompany her through the gallery because they were ``uncomfortable,'' two organizers said.
``Art moves above politics and I didn't want to be a part of politics,'' said Behnam Kamrani, a 39-year-old digital artist from Tehran.
Bahar Behbahni, a 33-year-old mixed media artist from Tehran, added, ``It doesn't mean that the artists aren't political or don't (care) about politics. Artists don't want to make political gestures. Our language is our art, we express ourselves through art.''
What was billed as a unique and open expression of culture bridging vast political differences between the U.S. and Iran became an exercise in crowd control as the State Department scrambled to prevent reporters from even glimpsing Rice's tour.
All journalists, including those without cameras, were kept in the final room of the exhibit behind two immense wooden doors that opened only when Rice finished and appeared with four of the Iranian artists to say how much she enjoyed the show.
``This is really a great day,'' she said in brief remarks. ``I have so enjoyed seeing the work of these great artists.
``They are representing so well the great culture that Iran has, the great culture that goes back for so many centuries but that is being brought here today so that the American people can see another side of Iran.''
Rice's visit was announced Wednesday by State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. He said its importance was ``the symbolism of the American secretary of state reaching out and demonstrating for the Iranian people an appreciation for products of Iranian culture.''
The United States broke diplomatic ties with Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
Relations have remained frozen amid mutual recriminations and animosity, notably over Iran's nuclear program, which Washington claims is a cover for atomic weapons development, and alleged Iranian support for insurgents in Iraq and anti-Israel groups.
The cases of three Iranian-American dual citizens detained in Iran and that of a retired FBI agent who has been missing in Iran since early March have further strained the situation.
Still, the State Department has placed great emphasis on cultural, educational and sports exchanges with Iran. The ``Wishes and Dreams'' exhibition that was to open to the public Friday is just the latest in a series that has already involved doctors, wrestlers and teachers.
Many of the artists whose work is on display at Washington's Meridian International Center said they hoped its presence in the United States would have a positive impact among people in the U.S.
``I am just an artist, I am not an Iranian terrorist and if I can do anything for the peace of the world, that is something I would be proud of,'' said Mitra Kavian, 43. She was less certain when asked if she thought the exhibit was a step toward better U.S.-Iran ties.
``I don't know,'' she said. ``Maybe, I hope. I don't like war, I like peace everywhere.''

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By MATTHEW LEE Associated Press in GUARDIAN

o que significa ser artista em portugal ?

(...) a propósito de alguns comentários que aconteceram durante a conferência de lançamento em Serralves do livro Propostas da Arte Portuguesa. Posição: 2007 editado por Miguel von Hafe Pérez está a acontecer uma discussão em lume brando na blogosfera artística portuense, partindo da pergunta colocada pelo autor do livro como mote para a conversa na noite do lançamento - O que significa ser artista hoje em Portugal?
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Para já deixo uma sugestão para a banda sonora que deveria acompanhar o trabalho de reflexão de boa parte dos participantes da discussão.

ANDRÉ LEMOS novo mural na cidade do Porto

ANDRÉ LEMOS encontra-se actualmente no Porto a desenhar e a pintar um novo mural de grandes dimensões, do qual apresentamos aqui uma imagem parcial do inicio dos trabalhos, a execução deste trabalho surge no contexto de um projecto cultural e comercial que irá abrir no final de Maio.

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Brevemente mais desenvolvimentos sobre este mural e este projecto.

RENATO FERRÃO expo no APÊNDICE

Projecto Apêndice apresenta
17. 38' 51''
instalação de Renato Ferrão
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inaugura dia 10 de Maio (quinta-feira) pelas 18.00h até 16 de Abril.
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Projecto Apêndice _ gerido por Carla Filipe e Isabel Ribeiro.
Centro Comercial de Cedofeita _ Loja nº 100
Rua de Cedofeita _ Porto

CARLA FILIPE expo no IN.TRANSIT

IN.TRANSIT # 29.

apresenta uma exposição de
CARLA FILIPE >

PESQUISA NO CAMPO_ DESERTAR_ ANTES QUE GANHE UM CANCRO

edifício artes em partes na rua miguel bombarda 457 no Porto.

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Instalação site-specific para a sala IN.TRANSIT. Apresentação se uma série de aproximadamente 100 desenhos que relatam viagens realizadas pela artista entre 2002 - 2005. Esta é a primeira apresentação pública deste conjuntode trabalhos.

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fichas técnicas.

ROTERDÃO 04 2004 – 200749 desenhos a tinta da china, esferográfica, com colagens e decalques sobre papel + materiais diversos como postais, fotografias, disco de vinil e recortes de imprensa.

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LONDRES 05 2005 – 200745 desenhos a tinta da china, esferográfica, com colagens e decalques sobre papel + materiais diversos.

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PORTO – PARIS - BERLIM – KASSEL – FRANKFURT 03 2003 – 200712 desenhos a tinta da china, esferográfica e colagens sobre papel.

SARKO FRANCE > Soigne ta droite

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hoje Sarkozy, o candidato da direita, foi eleito o novo presidente da França.
Sarkozy 52% _ Ségolène Royal (47%)

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FIN (?)

IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI

In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni /Cerith Wyn Evans (1997)

CRUMB expo in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts _ US

R. Crumb’s Underground é a exposição que este importante criador ligado aos movimentos da contra-cultura americana dos anos 60 apresenta em San Francisco no Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA).
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YBCA salutes local treasure R. Crumb with an eclectic exhibit of early work, collaborations old and new, and the world premiere of his “spool” drawings. Universally acknowledged as the founder of the underground comic scene, Crumb gained cult popularity for his pioneering Zap Comix and stardom with the Terry Zwigoff documentary Crumb. Extending far beyond comics, the YBCA exhibit shows how his work has grown in philosophical complexity, and highlights his collaborative work, including intimate confessions produced with wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
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Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) _ San Francisco _ US
Mar 17–Jul 8 _ 2007

prémio de arquitectura MIES VAN DER ROHE 2007 para MUSAC

O prémio para arquitectura contemporânea Mies van der Rohe 2007 foi atribuido ao MUSAC - Museo de arte contemporáneo de Castilla y León em Espanha com arquitectura de Luis M. Mansilla e Emilio Tuñón.
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In contrast to other types of museums that focus on the exhibition of frozen historic collections, MUSAC is a living space that opens its doors to the wide-ranging manifestations of contemporary art. This is an art centre that constructs a set of chessboards on which the action is the protagonist of the space; a structure that develops from an open system, formed by a fabric of squares and rhombi, and permitting the construction of a secret geography of memory.MUSAC is a new space for culture, regarded as something that visualises the connections between man and nature.
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In its size, as a single-storey building with white concrete walls and large coloured glazing seen from the outside, MUSAC strives to be a space where art is at ease and helps to erase the boundaries between private and public; between work and leisure; and between art and life.
(excertos do texto de apresentação do prémio)



Entre os finalista estava o projecto português do Centro de Artes de Sines de Francisco Aires Mateus e Manuel Aires Mateus e também um projecto de Zaha Hadid o Phaeno Science Centre em Wolfsburg na Alemanha, na imagem.

SERPENTINE GALLERY pavilhão 2007 de OLAFUR ELIASSON e KJECTIL THORSEN

The Serpentine Gallery has invited the world-famous artist Olafur Eliasson and the distinguished Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen, of the architectural practice Snøhetta, to collaborate on the 2007 Pavilion.
The Serpentine Gallery architectural commission is taking a step into the future by expanding the design team to include a visual artist. This will bring an extra dimension to the project that already holds a unique place in the innovation of architectural practice.
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Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s work explores the relationship between individual people and their surroundings, as experienced in his awe-inspiring large-scale installation The weather project, 2003, at Tate Modern. Eliasson is currently involved in numerous architectural projects internationally, including the Icelandic National Concert and Conference Centre in Reykjavik (design of the building envelope).
Kjetil Thorsen is co-founder of Snøhetta, one of Scandinavia’s leading architectural practices. Thorsen is responsible for the design of award-winning public buildings globally and has collaborated with Eliasson several times, including on the New National Opera House, Oslo, currently under construction. He is a founder of Galleri Rom, Oslo, and is also Professor at the Institute for Experimental Studies in Architecture at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. As in previous years Cecil Balmond, Deputy Chairman, Arup, and the Advanced Geometry Unit, led by Daniel Bosia, will lend invaluable assistance to the structural engineering and design of the Pavilion.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK expo Whitney Museum N.Y.

Exposição de Gordon Matta-Clark: ‘You Are the Measure’ no Whitney Museum of American Art em New York até 3 de Junho 07.
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Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) has attracted increasing interest over the past ten years. Thanks to monographic studies by Pamela M. Lee and Corinne Diserens, published in 2000 and 2003, respectively, and several recent exhibitions in San Diego and New York, Matta-Clark’s ten years of frenetic productivity are becoming known to a larger public. The show currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is, however, the first retrospective of Matta-Clark’s work since that held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1985. The many objects on display include fragments from his celebrated cuttings and splittings of condemned buildings; photographs and photomontages of the results of these cuttings; drawings and sketches; notebook pages; index cards; and, of course, films of the more important actions.
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A number of significant revelations emerge from such a comprehensive collection of material, particularly after so many partial glimpses of Matta-Clark’s work in previous shows. Among the most noteworthy of the items on display, especially given the difficulty of reconstructing the spatial nature of the buildings before and after cutting, are several large photomontages, which provide an almost filmic vision of Matta-Clark’s process. Particularly striking are the photomontages of the “Core” and “Datum” cuts of A W-Hole House, 1973, itself a beautiful exemplar of the complex geometrical nature of Matta-Clark’s actions, as he sliced horizontally and vertically through the square studio with its pyramidal roof. In an incisive catalogue essay exploring Matta-Clark’s relation to his father (the quasi-Surrealist artist Roberto Matta), as well as to architectural history and the “origins” of architecture in particular, Princeton professor of architecture Spyros Papapetros posits a parallel between a consideration of the conceptual nature of the Egyptian pyramids in the second volume of Sigfried Giedion’s Eternal Present (1964) and Matta-Clark’s use of the pyramid as “a median plane to invert his previous architectural education.” Papapetros’s argument is especially persuasive because the influence of Giedion’s earlier book, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941)—the central “set book” of the 1960s that saw the Baroque as the progenitor of the Modern Movement, the dramatic spatial geometries of the former transformed by the collapsing of space-time in the latter—can be felt in the cuttings Conical Intersect, 1975, and Office Baroque, 1977. The large color Cibachrome photocollages documenting the creation of Office Baroque might well be playful elaborations of Giedion’s premise, taking it literally but reversing the historical movement by returning the modern to its Baroque roots.
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The works on view have frequently been adduced as evidence of his strong reaction against the architectural training he received at Cornell University, where he graduated with a professional degree in 1968. After all, cutting houses open with a Sawzall, shooting through windows with a BB gun (as he did at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in New York for Window Blow-Out, 1976), and hammering conical holes through the party walls of Parisian apartment buildings have never been part of the orthodox practice of architecture. Nor were such actions in tune with the prevailing neo-avant-garde works of the time, whether the populist imagery of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, or the rationalist and post-Surrealist work of the New York Five, who represented the dominant tendency at Cornell in the ’60s.
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Behind each of Matta-Clark’s architectural interventions lies a similar impulse: to seek the most fundamental transformation of architecture, one that would respond to the conditions of life rather than art, and certainly not one that followed the already static conventions of the neo-avant-garde. The action of bringing light into the house (in Splitting) might itself be the best metaphor for Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture”: In the end, like his beloved alchemists, systems theorists, and psychologists, and together with the theorists, if not the practitioners, of modern architecture, Matta-Clark was an apostle of light—an “enlightener” in practice and in theory.
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Anthony Vidler in ARTFORUM

JOÃO TABARRA conferência no IPF

ENCONTROS DO OLHAR_Fotografia e Arte
A obra de João Tabarra por João Tabarra

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As imagens / trabalhos que João Tabarra produz, planeando-as até ao mais ínfimo detalhe, estão repletas de ícones, símbolos e outros elementos que, apesar de nos serem familiares, têm o seu potencial de significação minado pela forma como são alterados, reformulados, organizados e relacionados. A ambiguidade que daí resulta, para além do humor ou do burlesco que são evidentes num primeiro olhar, se enfatiza a impossibilidade da condição humana, também sublinha a essencialidade da sua vontade.
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03 Maio _ 21h30
Instituto Português de Fotografia _ Porto
Rua da Vitória, nº 129

PETER SLOTERDIJK em SERRALVES

Peter Sloterdijk conferência "A técnica na sua relação com o humano".

Professor na Universidade de Karlsruhe, Alemanha, e um dos mais importantes pensadores da Razão política, social e cultural contemporânea, indispensável na análise das questões da técnica, na sua relação com o humano. Sloterdijk é o filósofo alemão mais conhecido depois de Habermas. Heterodoxo e provocador, o livro que o tornou famoso fora da Alemanha foi "Crítica da Razão Cínica", um tratado sobre a razão política, cultural e social contemporâneos. A questão da coexistência dos indivíduos nas sociedades modernas e o modo como operam a cultura e a civilização na construção social e na "domesticação do ser humano" ocuparam Sloterdijk na sua obra em vários volumes intitulada "Esferas". Um pequeno livro intitulado "Regras para o Parque Humano" valeu-lhe uma violenta polémica com Habermas que depois se alargou. O que causou escândalo nesse livro foi a utilização de um vocabulário que trazia pelo menos a memória da genética nazi. De qualquer modo (e é preciso ressalvar que Sloterdijk jamais se identificou com a ideologia nazi) esse livro é um dos contributos mais importantes do nosso tempo para discutir as questões da técnica, na sua relação com o humano.

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CRÍTICA DO CONTEMPORÂNEO, CONFERÊNCIAS INTERNACIONAIS

Fundação de Serralves

dia 3 Maio _ 21:30 _ Auditório de Serralves

COCTEAU e EL TOPO em DVD

EL TOPO o filme realizado por Alejandro Jodorowsky em 1970 e que deu origem nos Estados Unidos aos filmes da meia noite foi finalmente editado em DVD.
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During the 1960s, Jodorowsky travelled back and forth between Mexico and Paris. Greatly inspired by surrealism and determined to reinvigorate its artistic movement, Jodorowsky contacted André Breton in Paris, but was dismayed to find that Breton had become very conservative in his old age as surrealism became accepted and incorporated into high culture. While Breton still envisioned a poetic and fantastic movement, Jodorowsky was more influenced by elements of popular youth culture that Breton did not appreciate – such as rock music, science fiction, pornography and comic books – which would all factor into Jodorowsky's later work. Together with absurdist playwright (and later filmmaker) Fernando Arrabal and writer/artist/animator Roland Topor, Jodorowsky founded the “Panic Movement” in 1962 as a way to go beyond surrealism by embracing irrationality, the mysterious and the absurd, emphasising an explosive sexuality, a fearless sense of rebellion, and a collapsing of all time into the present moment. Named after the god Pan (meaning “totality”), the concept of a “Panic” artist also meant someone whose output was “polyvalent”, traversing many different media in order to avoid simple categorisation; artists like Cocteau, Leonardo da Vinci and Pier Paolo Pasolini were inspirations in this sense. Despite their general aesthetic, Jodorowsky maintains that the idea of a “Panic Movement” was largely a tongue-in-cheek joke for its three founders; each person created independently, labelling their own work as “Panic”, while they secretly laughed at serious attempts made by critics and other artists to theorise or follow the invented “movement”.
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Speaking of El Topo (“The Mole”), he famously announced that “I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs. The difference being that when one creates a psychedelic film, he need not create a film that shows the visions of a person who has taken a pill; rather, he needs to manufacture the pill.” El Topo is thus intended to be read as less a product of Jodorowsky's own mind than a process of spiritual illumination akin to the religious sensations experienced by many countercultural drug users; of course, this was helped by the film's eventual reputation as a “head film” during which many audience members did partake of such substances. Nevertheless, El Topo is in many ways Jodorowsky's personal quest toward an enlightened identity that can transcend death. The film opens with the titular gunfighter and his nude son (played by Jodorowsky and his son Brontis, respectively) riding across the desert, where the son is instructed to bury his first toy and his mother's picture now to become a man. Over the opening credits, we are told that the mole lives underground and searches for the sun; sometimes its journey brings it to the surface where it is blinded. After this central metaphor, the film is divided into four biblical sections: Genesis, Prophets, Psalms and Apocalypse. El Topo and his son ride into a blood-drenched town where bandits have raped and massacred hundreds. He kills these lascivious bandits, then finds their Colonel and his men in a Franciscan mission. El Topo announces “I am God” before castrating the Colonel (who then kills himself) and killing the rest of the motley junta. He then abandons his son to the care of the mission's surviving monks and rides off with a young woman named Mara who he has rescued. El Topo can live in the desert by miraculously summoning food and water from the ground, but Mara cannot – at least until El Topo rapes her to unleash her first orgasm. Mara then makes El Topo prove his love for her by killing the four Masters of the desert and becoming the best gunfighter. El Topo cheats his way into killing the first three Masters, who are all far more spiritually enlightened than him and have progressively fewer worldly possessions. According to one of the Masters, El Topo is full of self-righteous hate instead of self-effacing love, and should be trying to disappear entirely rather than find himself through violence. The Fourth Master possesses only his own life and chooses to kill himself to prove to El Topo how little life means. Humiliated by his dishonorable victory, El Topo rushes through the desert, smashes his gun, and assumes a Christ-like pose of self-sacrifice as he is gunned down by a Woman in Black (representing El Topo's Jungian alter-ego) who has previously joined their journey and sadistically lusts after Mara. Unable to accept this emasculated man, Mara chooses to ride away with the Woman in Black while El Topo's body is hauled away by a group of deformed people.
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Jodorowsky brought El Topo to New York, where it played for over a year as allegedly the first “midnight movie”, garnering large profits and a considerable cult audience. (Still scandalised by Fando y Lis, Mexico refused to let El Topo represent them at the Cannes Film Festival). John Lennon was so impressed by the film that Beatles manager Allen Klein purchased the distribution rights and would finance much of the budget for Jodorowsky's next film. While some critics in the alternative press proclaimed El Topo as one of the greatest films ever made, more mainstream critics complained that it was an overly violent, pretentious, nonsensical mess of crude surreal imagery with little to say and no goal but exploiting the counterculture. Pauline Kael, for example, accused the film of being “commercialised surrealism” that is ultimately “sanctimonious” and reinforcing of “conventional pieties” in a way that Buñuel's films are not. However, while Buñuel's attacks on religion are primarily confined to Catholicism, Jodorowsky not only violates but de-centres Western religious traditions by creating a hybrid amalgamation of Western, non-Western and occult beliefs. A self-described “atheist mystic”, he has claimed to hate religion (for it “is killing the planet”), but he loves mysticism and occult practices like alchemy. What is important in Jodorowsky's films is not just that (organised) religion's discourses of political power and tradition are attacked and subverted – but also that a hybrid mysticism is elevated in their place, drawing upon a more universal sense of spirituality that underlies all religious and occult beliefs, evading issues of specific nationality and political culture. Interviews with him suggest that he mixes belief systems with a subversively playful attitude, as if constructing his own mythology from so much spiritual raw material.
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Although beyond the scope of this profile, Jodorowsky's work is deserving of further study within the context of Third Cinema, surrealism, magical realism and post-colonial studies. As is the case with many cult/counterculture/underground films, his works have been treated as the foreign/exotic and indefinable “Other” of both commercial and art cinema. While filmmakers of the same era – such as Glauber Rocha, whose Antonio das Mortes (1969) was praised by Jodorowsky and could be seen as an influence on El Topo – were championed by critics, others have remained largely neglected by generations of cultural tastemakers. The truly transgressive and politically viable qualities of Jodorowsky's films have been contained as carnivalesque and exploitative curiosities, almost dismissively relegated to midnight movie circuits and cult film catalogues. Only by re-evaluating these films both within and beyond their place in the cult tradition can we see them as a cohesive body of work evoking a continual spiritual journey and a sustained challenge to the political/religious climate of the Americas.
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by David Church in SENSES OF CINEMA
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Jean Cocteau edição de dois filmes fundamentais LE SANG D'UN POÈTE (1930) e ORPHÉE (1950).

(...) In 1929, at the age of 40, Cocteau made his first film. The Vicomte de Noailles, a frequenter of avant-garde salons, asked Cocteau and composer George Auric if they would be interested in collaborating on an animation. Cocteau suggested they make a live-action piece instead. The news that he was making a film must, at the time, have seemed like further evidence of Cocteau's dilettantism. In fact, the result was an avant-garde landmark.
Le Sang d'un poète (Blood of a Poet) is divided into episodes, some connected, some discrete. Perhaps the most famous of these features the eponymous poet moving along a corridor in a hotel, looking through the keyholes of bedroom doors. Through these keyholes, he spies a range of tableaux vivants. These include a bedroom in which a child annoys a governess by crawling up a wall, a Mexican firing squad in which the victim falls to the ground and then bounces back to life, and a dark space in which a couple write observations about each other while they embrace. The work is strongly indebted to (though in no way derivative of) Un Chien Andalou (1929). Its distinct similarity to Buñuel and Dali's film led mainstream commentators to label it as 'surrealistic'. This was of particular annoyance to André Breton, who was now running the Surrealists as if they were Communist cell. Cocteau himself pretended also to take offence at being labelled a Surrealist, though he probably quite enjoyed Breton's irritation. Le Sang d'un poète caused mild controversy, though this was as nothing compared to the controversy that was soon to be caused by Buñuel's L'Age d'or, the second and final film to benefit from the Vicomte de Noaille's artistic philanthropy. Le Sang d'un poète is both a recapitulation and a new beginning. Viewed in the context of Cocteau's previous work, it can be seen as an anthology of his favourite images and themes. These include: mirrors (narcissism), eyes (voyeurism), statues (classicism), doors (the borders between different worlds) and blood (the sufferings of the artist). It also contains numerous elements of autobiography and references to previous works, both overt (for example, the snowball fight from Les Enfants terribles) and coded (for example, the magical 'transportation' of the poet into parallel worlds). Viewed in the context of Cocteau's subsequent career, it can be seen as a sketchbook for future films. Many of the techniques that would later become Cocteau's trademarks were first tried out in Le Sang d'un poète. These include the use of slow and reverse motion, voice-over narration, and the film's most famous trick of building the walls of certain sets on the studio floor. By filming them from above and getting his actors to lie on the ground, Cocteau creates the impression that the walls in his fantasy world emanate a magnetic pull. This last is a startling effect, but Cocteau's liking for it gets the better of him, and he uses it too often. In the end, it is difficult not to agree with Cocteau's own judgement of the film as a theme “clumsily played with one finger” which he would later orchestrate in Orphée. However, despite the film's clumsiness, the child-like delight that Cocteau takes in the possibilities of the medium gives Le Sang d'un poète an energy and playfulness that at the time only Buñuel and Dali surpassed. Cocteau did not direct another film for the next sixteen years. By way of explanation, he later wrote:

The fact that I let twenty years [a typically casual ]exaggeration] elapse between that film, my first, and the others, shows that I regarded it as something rather like a drawing or a poem – a drawing or a poem so expensive that I couldn't contemplate making more than one.

Cocteau's implication that it did not occur to him to make another film is inadequate. Was he scared off by the controversy that his film generated? Did he consider another project but find himself unable to secure funding? Did he feel that he'd used up all his cinematic invention? Or was he still not that interested in film? In the absence of any clear evidence, one can only conjecture. Le Sang d'un poète was Cocteau's last 'controversial' work. As the diplomatic climate darkened in the 1930s and the avant-garde became ever more politicised, Cocteau moved inexorably towards the French literary establishment. He became a prolific columnist and wrote a number of classical stage melodramas including La Machine infernale, L'Aigle à deux têtes and the immensely successful Les Parents terribles.

By the end of the decade, Cocteau the avant-garde provocateur had become Cocteau the celebrity playwright. (...)

Richard Misek in SENSES OF CINEMA

ALLAN DWAN in IWO JIMA

Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) de Allan Dwan
SANDS OF IWO JIMA _ John Wayne catapulted from Hollywood leading man to All-American hero with his Oscar-nominated performance as Sgt. Sryker, a hard-nosed Marine sergeant who must mold a company of raw recruits into a combat-ready fighting machine. Feared by many and hated by all, Stryker's training is soon put to the test in a full-scale assault against the Japanese on Iwo Jima - an infamous battle that will live forever in one of cinema's most famous scenes, the flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi.

Excelente filme para rever agora que Clint Eastwood filmou a revisão deste mito americano nos recentes Letters from Iwo Jima e Flags of Our Fathers.