Microcinema DVDs - Up In Smoke

Catalog Number: MC-236	Type: Shorts Compilation	Genre: Mixed Genre
Copyright: 2004	Length: 55 minutes	Format: DVD Region: All regions
TV System: NTSC	ISBN:	UPC:
Label: Blackchair Collection

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Films In Compilation

Current directed by Brian Doyle USA, Experimental, 2001, DV, Color, Magnetic Stereo, 00:03:00 In the vacated downtown of a metropolis a storm approaches and envelops – except this is no ordinary meteorological phenomenon. A digital wind blows the debris from an overflow of information – the city is now occupied by a rushing whirlwind carrying a tangled mass of communication. currentdocuments the path of this storm blowing through an abandoned city like tumbleweed through a ghost town. As devices of technology hovering in enclaves between the skyscrapers seem to monitor or perhaps even cause the storm, the city is consumed, erased by a blanket of information.
Golden Mean directed by Mark Keane USA, Animation, 1994, Color, Optical Monaural, 00:03:28 The Golden Mean is a timeless proportional system governed by the natural rules of mathematical progressions. It can be found in countless aspects of the natural world and the built environment. Our auditory senses can perceive harmonies at birth in music and our mother's voice. But our visual senses are clouded by overload of sensory information. The Golden Mean holds a key to the visually harmonious, so we can see in tune.
A Closer Look at Parking Lots directed by Rob Tyler USA, Experimental, 2002, Color, Magnetic Stereo, 00:02:54 Rolling through a quiet parking structure in that moment of transition from late night to early morning, familiar hieroglyphics guide a car through layers of empty parking spaces.
Whizeewhig directed by Chihcheng Peng USA, Experimental, 2002, digital video, Color, Magnetic Stereo, 00:03:00 A brisk jaunt around downtown San Francisco reveals a few new sights. What you see is what you get.
Feeling My Way directed by Jonathan Hodgson United Kingdom, Experimental, 1997, Hi-8, Painted Animation, Color, Magnetic Stereo, 00:05:32 A journey from home to work as seen through the filter of the conscious and subconscious mind. Through the use of moving collages and painterly animation laid over Hi-8 footage, we area able to share in the sum total of the traveller's journey through London.
Homeland directed by Jacob Bricca USA, Documentary, 2003, DVCAM, Color, Magnetic Stereo, 00:05:27 Documentary footage and clips from prime-time TV are mixed ingeniously in this moody short film about the empty architecture of modern life. *** The mythology of present-day Corporate America can be experienced in its most concentrated form on television. As commercials promise diversion through consumption and news anchors blandly reinforce Administration position, the good life would seem as close as the nearest mall. But where does myth end and reality begin? Homeland is a provocative mix of images drawn from documentary and 'found footage' sources that raises more questions in five minutes than the average film attempts in 90. Set to a hypnotic, moody score by the band Seaworthy, Homeland wonders aloud what kind of life we are exporting to the rest of the world.
God Mode directed by Karolina Kowalska Poland, Experimental, 2004, DV, Color, 00:02:37 9 short animations played looped. The remote-control, a wonderfull magic tool has teleportation power. By using it I delate or change places in the city. Buildings falling apart, and dirty ugly places, by pushing one of remote-control buttons, becoming nice green spaces, helpfull for psychical condition of a man living in a city.
Premonition directed by Dominic Angerame USA, Experimental, 1995, B&W, 00:09:00 The San Francisco Embarcadero Freeway comes to life in this elegy for modernity. The Freeway was deemed a triumph of engineering, a monument for human inventiveness. With the 1989 earthquake, however, the freeway was severely damaged and with it all the industrial-technological promises it held. Premonition shows the situation before the crisis, a deceptive moment of industrial harmony. "And when the illusion disappears, that is to say when we see the being or fact as it really exists outside ourselves, we experience a strange feeling, complicated half with regret for the vanquished phantom, half with agreeable surprise for the novelty, for the actual fact."—Charles Baudelaire "There’s an exquisite despair and a dooming ambiguity suspended in the cool morning clarity of Dominic Angerame’s new film, Premonition. It’s short and bittersweet, like a prelude by Debussy, and promises a broad integration of the aesthetic elements of his work, now full-fledged and ascendant. But with the widening view and depth of field and new heights, there’s also a painful consciousness of the vanity of all things human and of their transience...Trans fixed if not much further along the road, we feel like those wide-eyed and well- intended Akkadian stargazers teetering on the edge of a vast new knowledge hovering overs...revealing...revealing...what? "Premonition, despite its sadness, does not judge modernity and its Gargantuan feats of engineering, but, on the contrary, admires them, in the fullest aesthetic sense of the word, like a traveler turning a bend in the road whereby an enormity of landscape is revealed, overwhelming his ego, freeing him up toward a larger question while simultaneously diminishing his particularity in the very grandeur of it all...Angerame even loves the works of man, as he loves work itself, but there’s something awestruck before these very works that recalls the child’s wonder before the suddenness of natural disaster, like a five year old staring into a friend’s gaping wound... "Modernity, what happened to your highway? You tower over us, then you disappear. The arch and ribs of the guardrails seemed so very real to us, like the backbone of a stegosaurus. Gone. The casually defiant smoked cigarettes upon you. The sincerely healthy played tennis in your shadows. You were close to our places of work downtown. The seagulls’ cries echoed in your ribcage. Gone. Submerged in the rising waters of time. One more atlanta vanity. "The illusion looms high, but passes like the ships you could see from those heights...The frozen freighter at anchor beneath the endlessly (?) spanning bridge, is haunted, and somehow recalls the ghostship from Nosferatu, even in its perfect otherworldly calm. The film hides its meaning, comes in like the tide but still disappears...A fragment of a circle, abstracted. Near the bridge. The highway snakes along. Adolescents tagged it. A jogger likes a flea on its back. And emptied of cars it’s its own worst indictment: now that we’re not busy with it, what can it mean? "The staunch Ferry Building, the swift ferry and its charms, the blimp, the helicopter. ---All of them toys when it cast its cool morning shadow their way. We were heading out toward our favorite cafe, unknowing it would come down, like rain... "Premonition is not just about a defunct highway to have done with, it’s the painful inventory of a desired and questionable relationship gone down."—Ronald F. Sauer "The concrete world of the American infra-structure and its demise are made strangely poetic in this expressionist documentary which shows the vacant San Francisco Embarcedero Freeway after it has outlived its usefulness, before its destruction. In an atmosphere of daylight, mystery, Angerame sows inklings and reveals the past encircled by the future. Lyrical, ominous, comic, PREMONITION works on the attentive viewer like a remembrance of something that is yet tohappen, silent, telling daydream."—Barbara Jaspersen Voorhees. "Roads, bridges, street lamps and underpasses are all harbingers of an untold urban tale, set in the vacant San Francisco Embarcadero Freeway before its’ destruction. We are led through a desolate cityscape as if we were actually penetrating it. A bridge covered with graffitied sperms heading towards downtown, is a metaphor for the man-made womb that is the city. PREMONITION’S approach is as lucid as it is perplexing."—Images Film Festival, Toronto, 1997
Going Back Home directed by Louise Bourque Canada, Experimental, 2000, 35mm, Color, Optical Stereo, 00:01:00 Turmoil of unsheltered childhood: the dwelling as self. “The disasters of life can make it hard to go home. Bourque’s brief, beautiful, and affecting film goes by so quickly it’s printed twice on the reel, so you can get a second look.” —Program notes, Images Film Festival Catalogue, Toronto, 2001 “Louise Bourque’s Going Back Home conveys a sense of loss and upheaval with just a few images” —Steve Anker and Kathy Geritz, Program notes, San Francisco International Film Festival, 2002
Stereolove directed by Daniel KLEIN France, Animation, 2003, Color, 00:03:20 Lunch at the Agora goes terribly wrong. Mega autoroute overpasses crumble and smash over too much escargot in this music video.
Still Moving directed by Aaron Valdez USA, Experimental, 2002, 16mm, B&W, Silent, 00:02:30 Zooming in on the mundane.
House of the Century directed by Laura Harrison USA, Experimental, 2001, super 8, Color, 00:02:22 A film by Laura Harrison, Elizabeth Federici and Doug Michels. Hildegard of Bingen meets Mojo Lake in this conscious "feminization" of Ant Farm's phallic, automobile-inspired House of the Century, built in 1972 for Marilyn and Alvin Lubetkin in Angleton, Texas.
Strip Mall Trilogy - Part 1 directed by Roger Beebe USA, Experimental, 2001, 16 mm, Color, 00:03:00 Part 1 in a series of city symphonies that attempt to liberate form and color from the sprawling consumerist landscape of postmodern America.
Century's End directed by Martin Pickles United Kingdom, Experimental, 2004, 16mm, B&W, Optical Monaural, 00:06:00 A film-poem about London in the last hours of the 20th century. It was shot between midday and midnight on 31st December 1999 and includes the exact moment of the beginning of the year 2000. I shot it in black and white at 16 fps and teleciné-ed it at 25 fps in order to give it the jerky look of an old Edwardian film. This creates a deliberate tension between the antique look of the film and the recognisably modern setting. The film starts with Trafalgar Square and The Mall - views which have scarcely changed in a hundred and twenty years - before moving on to the ultra-modern Docklands redevelopment around Canary Wharf, which resembles the set from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. From there we move to the South Bank with its Sixties and Seventies 'Brutalist' architecture to find it swamped by people, whose sheer numbers suggest the anticipated visitation of a prophet. We see the London Eye, the quintessential icon of the New Millennium in London, bathed in lasers and almost eclipsing Big Ben, an icon of old London. The film ends on the moment of the beginning of the new century and the image is blotted out by fireworks.