Famous first American film of Czech director Milos Forman. It tells the story of a group of parents whose children have run away from home. The parents take the opportunity to rediscover their youth.
It features a number of memorable set pieces, including an open-mic record label audition which is weaved throughout the film, featuring a number of female singers (including a young Carly Simon and a haunting acoustic ballad by a then-unknown Kathy Bates) performing old standards, folk ballads, and rock songs; a meeting in which a group of generally middle-class conservative parents are taught how to smoke marijuana; and a raucuous but sweet game of strip poker played by the adults.
Whether Taking Off is caricature or dead-on is, presumably, all a matter of perspective and distance. But it’s definitely hilarious: A deadpan Buck Henry effortlessly dominates as a milquetoast, and the supporting weirdos are all aces. (In his first on-screen appearance, Vincent Schiavelli leads a pot-smoking tutorial for concerned parents wanting to understand their runaways better: “That’s called ‘bogarting’ the joint, and it’s very rude.”) It’s also a true New York movie.
Perception is a recurring theme within my practice, and has become a foundation for me to explore ideas that reflect on notions of time, space, simultaneity and duration. As an artist, I am interested in the aspects of experience where the real, the known, and the imagined collide. Spatio-temporal relations, and visualizing the invisible are predominant subjects. My interpretations are informed in part by science, philosophy and fiction. Experimentation and process are at the forefront of much of my work, at times resulting in ambiguous narratives and hybrid exercises.
In my work I attempt to articulate something in between the freezing of time—that so often characterizes photography—and its constant passing. I allude to temporalities that are fluid, hypothetical, and imprecise. The photographs in Quantum Blink are composed of two exposures taken instants apart. Each photograph in the series holds a brief sense of continuity, almost like an animation, slightly cinematographic. However, though they provide a notion of movement and progression, their beginning and end is ambiguous and indistinguishable.
The story of this nanny who has now wowed the world with her photography, and who incidentally recorded some of the most interesting marvels and peculiarities of Urban America in the second half of the twentieth century is seemingly beyond belief.
An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, Vivian bounced between Europe and the United States before coming back to New York City in 1951.
Having picked up photography just two years earlier, she would comb the streets of the Big Apple refining her artistic craft. By 1956 Vivian left the East Coast for Chicago, where she’d spend most of the rest of her life working as a caregiver.
In her leisure Vivian would shoot photos that she zealously hid from the eyes of others. Taking snapshots into the late 1990′s, Maier would leave behind a body of work comprising over 100,000 negatives.
Additionally Vivian’s passion for documenting extended to a series of homemade documentary films and audio recordings.
Interesting bits of Americana, the demolition of historic landmarks for new development, the unseen lives of ethnics and the destitute, as well as some of Chicago’s most cherished sites were all meticulously catalogued by Vivian Maier.
A free spirit but also a proud soul, Vivian became poor and was ultimately saved by three of the children she had nannied earlier in her life.
Fondly remembering Maier as a second mother, they pooled together to pay for an apartment and took the best of care for her.
Unbeknownst to them, one of Vivian’s storage lockers was auctioned off due to delinquent payments. In those storage lockers lay the massive hoard of negatives Maier secretly stashed throughout her lifetime.
Maier’s massive body of work would come to light when in 2007 her work was discovered at a local thrift auction house on Chicago’s Northwest Side.
From there, it would eventually impact the world over and change the life of the man who championed her work and brought it to the public eye, John Maloof. Currently, Vivian Maier’s body of work is being archived and cataloged for the enjoyment of others and for future generations.
John Maloof is at the core of this project after reconstructing most of the archive, having been previously dispersed to the various buyers attending that auction.
Now, with roughly 90% of her archive reconstructed, Vivian’s work is part of a renaissance in interest in the art of Street Photography.
Glitch video/GIF artist Max Capacity work pushes the grainy VHS cut-ups and early home computer bit constraints of 1980s cyberpunk into the digital realm. Network Awesome and Radosaur Productions interviewed him for Tumblr’s Storyboard effort. “Max Capacity: Net Necromancer”
We love the work of artist Max Capacity. I will venture here to say that his animated GIFs are postmodern, combining in them glitch art, pixel art, movies and stuff I cannot even start to describe. The fact that he uses the name Max Capacity is probably not a coincidence as he has a lot of work to show up for. I can spend hours jumping from his Flickr site to his Tumblr site to his YouTube channel checking out his universe of prolific creation. You have to visit Max Capacity’s sites.
Sleeveface is an internet phenomenon wherein one or more persons cover body parts with record sleeve(s), causing an illusion and taking pictures of it. Though the precise origin of the concept is unknown the term ‘Sleeveface’ was coined in April 2007 by Cardiff resident Carl Morris after pictures were taken of him and his friends holding record sleeves to their faces whilst Djing in a Cardiff Bar.
His friend John Rostron posted them on the internet and created a group on Facebook. From here the craze became more widely known and it has fast become an internet phenomenon.
All it requires is a record sleeve, a camera and big imagination. There is a huge pool of examples on Flickr. John Rostron and Carl Morris authored the book ‘Sleeveface : Be The Vinyl’ published in 2008 by Artisan/Workman which compiles sleevefaces from the worldwide submissions to their website.
Put the sleeve in front of your face, strike the pose of the rock god you’ve chosen, and get yourself photographed. See the video below for more detailed instructions on how to do your own.
Prague-based Dany Peschl’s photographs are cut to the bone with social commentary.
These photographies are only fragment of a long time project called “disturbation”:
‘In the recent series I retell in pictures several stories that should never be seen. The photos capture different people during various intimate situations in a “caught in the act” way. It made us unwanted spectators of strange rituals and obscure moments as simply everyday routine. Because it is. But “disturbation” is not artless opening of locked or semi-closed doors to children’s rooms, toilets or massage salons. Forget voyeurism and fetishism cliché. These photos aspire to reflect not just actual social issues. Politics, pop icons, pope… Therefore to speak only about intimacy as an act is deficient. It is also about what people hide inside themselves. In their inner space full of opinions, attitudes, thoughts, dreams and taste.’
Although most of the visual stories are mockumentary or reconstruction of true and sometimes false memories, the rest remains truly authentic.
Satan s’amuse or (Satán se divierte in Spain) is a 1907 French — Spanish silent film directed by pioneer Segundo de Chomón.
In an unnamed place, Satan is bored. Despite his servants’ exertions, nothing can be found to cheer him up.
Segundo Víctor Aurelio Chomón y Ruiz was a pioneering Aragonese film director. He produced many short films in France while working for Pathé Frères and has been compared to Georges Méliès, due to his frequent camera tricks and optical illusions. He is regarded as the most significant Spanish silent film director in an international context.
Photographer Kerry Skarbakka creates frightening self-portraits in which he appears to be falling. The photos are created with the use of safety rigging, however the process is clearly not for the faint of heart. For more photos see his series “The Struggle to Right Oneself” and “Life Goes On.”
The images stand as ominous messages and reminders that we are all vulnerable to losing our footing and grasp. Moreover, they convey the primal qualities of the human condition as a precarious balancing act between the struggle against our desire to survive and our fantasy to transcend our humanness.
Stereo purports to be part of a “mosaic” of educational resources by the Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry. It documents an experiment by the unseen Dr. Luther Stringfellow. A young man (Ronald Mlodzik) in a black cloak is seen arriving at the Academy, where he joins a group of young volunteers who are being endowed with telepathic abilities which they are encouraged to develop through sexual exploration. It is hoped that telepathic groups, bonded in polymorphous sexual relationships, will form a socially stabilizing replacement for the “obsolescent family unit”.
One girl develops a secondary personality in order to cope with her new state of consciousness, which gradually ousts her original personality. As the volunteers’ abilities develop, the experimenters find themselves increasingly unable to control the progress of the experiment. They decide to separate the telepaths, which results in two suicides. The final sequence shows the young woman who developed an extra personality wearing the black cloak.
Stereo is more self-consciously avant-garde, and less visceral, than his later work. Nevertheless, many of the usual Cronenberg concerns are present: a futuristic setting, bizarre scientific experimentation, and an obsessive exploration of perverse forms of sexuality.
