PC GONE MAD

Ghost In The Machine, d. Rachel Talalay (1993) 

Have you ever wondered what might happen if, at the point of his own death, a serial killer was absorbed into a powerful computer network and then continued his murderous career using microwave ovens, hand driers, dish washers and ATM machines? No, me neither, or no yo tampoco, as they say in Spanish. 

The main issue with this film* is that it is just so creaky and stilted, with the actors clearly being unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the 'state of the art' (see above) effects they were supposed to be reacting and responding to. Nowadays, of course, movies use CGI for even mundane things, so actors have got much  better at this sort of pretending. 

Ghost In The Machine cost $12m, made less than half of its budget back and would have been pretty much completely out of date before the credits finished rolling. Oh, well, mas que nada, as they say in Portugese.

* The dialogue is also awful, and the lead kid is annoying.

RINGS FROM AN EMPTY ROOM

Beam Weapons · Secret Ceremony

Last year, at Easter, I found myself alone in the house for a day. Before I set to my assigned task - decorating the spare room - I took advantage of the empty space to hold an impromptu recording session using some metal kitchenware, some wooden utensils, two desk lamps, and some old electronic devices.

I haven’t quite known what to do with the results, so I’m going to share some of them here. I know.

Secret Ceremony, which, I'm afraid, is ten minutes long, consists of me trying (and eventually succeeding) to get some nice sounding clangs out of a set of suspended steel bowls. The title references both the 1968 Joseph Losey film I re-watched the night before, and how it felt to be in an empty room in an empty house, banging stuff with a spoon and recording the reverberations.

Towards the end, it starts to rain, which was unplanned, but completes the ritual.

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

Edvard 'my whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm' Munch worked on this painting for three years (1932-1935) without ever finishing it. 

It's called Uninvited Guests and in it he makes a fairly unequivocal statement: alcohol has been consumed, the wallpaper is weird, and I have a firearm, so don't come around here ad hoc with your smiley balloon heads and expect your shrift to be anything but short.  

YOU'RE FADING IN AND OUT IV

Threshold Of The Void, d. Jean-Francois Davy (1972)

Young artist Wanda Leibovitz (Dominique Erlanger) travels from Strasbourg to Paris to escape an unhappy love affair, and moves into a large but antiquated room in an old apartment. Within the room is a locked door, and beyond the door is The Void - a formless, soundless, limitless black space which she is initially wary of, but eventually becomes addicted to. She finds that she paints better when working in the hallucinatory darkness of The Void, and although she becomes successful, things begin to fray within her. 

All Voids are inherently sinister, even the metaphorical ones, and they often want things: things to fill them, things that will stave off heartache and loneliness and existential dread, something to counter the depthless darkness. And this Void? This Void wants Wanda.

YOU'RE FADING IN AND OUT III

Julie Christie flits between dimensional barriers in the underrated Memoirs Of A Survivor, a 1981 film based on Doris Lessing's dystopian sci fi novel.

GLENN FALKENSTEIN

Glenn Falkenstein (1932-2010) was an American educator, a speech pathologist, a magician, and a mentalist. Here, in a clip from the documentary Age Of The Psychics, he covers his eyes with eight pieces of two inch adhesive tape which help hold in place two half dollar coins pressed over his closed eyes. The dark visor completes the sensory deprivation. 

Glenn doesn't need anything as basic as eyes to pick up on the vibrations of the audience, of course, and he's able to provide names, birth dates and even social security numbers astonishingly quickly and at will. I don't know how he does it, and neither do the people whose auras he's reading, so I'm going to stick my neck out and say that it's magic.

COSMIC MOTION

Disintegration Line 2 (d. Lawrence Janiak, 1970)

The constantly shifting, writhing shapes and colours shown here are the result of taking unprocessed strips of film and immersing them in tanks of very cold water before printing. The shock causes distress, which agitates the molecules to create abstract art, a familiar route to creation.

Director Janiak said: 'The abstract animation field textures subtly depict the infinitesimal nuclei of energy...a moving field of aggregates of atoms and cosmic motion'. Seems reasonable. 

ANNOUNCEMENT / PRONOUNCEMENT

 

I haven't updated this blog since the end of 2020. There were lots of reasons it fell into disuse, but I'm over most of them now so, if just for my own satisfaction, I'm going to ease my way back in. It will be gradual, organic, gentle. You can't reheat a souffle, I know, but most leftover meat pies are okay with a quick blast in the microwave.

See you shortly.