For those who’ve missed it Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide (2005) has been claimed to be one of the most important Chinese films of the past decade. It is a slow art house feature film with an intimate feeling that does offer a reward if you sit through it. Still a film school student, Jiayin was 23 when she made it and last year Oxhide II was presented. She has received several awards for the movies including including the Fipresci Prize at the 55th Berlin International Film Festival for the first one. The films feature herself, her mother and her father playing their respective characters as we follow a piece of time in the middle-class life of a Chinese family through a small number of shots with no camera movements whatsoever. Both stories are being played out in their actual apartment in Beijing. Above a clip from the first scene of Oxhide.
Curious Displays is a product proposal for a new platform for display technology. Instead of a fixed form factor screen, the display surface is instead broken up into hundreds of ½ inch display blocks. Each block operates independently as a self-contained unit, and has full mobility, allowing movement across any physical surface.
Despite having worked on older projects including the music video for “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley (with director Robert Hales), Mothership has only recently established themselves as an official transmedia studio representing sunny Venice, California. The young collective has hit the ground running partly due to its affiliation to the Academy Award-winning powerhouse Digital Domain, whose visual sorcery you may have experienced in films such as Titanic and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Through their work, Executive Creative Director Alejandro Lopez says Mothership will demonstrate how “transmedia offers brands the opportunity to integrate directly with entertainment properties instead of standing alongside them.”
They are numerous but do not come across that often, those utterly fascinating works, persons and instances from gone times that you did not have a clue about. When you suddenly stumble upon them it’s like a gem from the past reveals itself. Jean Painleve (1902-1989) and his hard-to-classify films feel like a treasure like that. Inspired by surrealism this French filmmaker-scientist-inventor created a scientific-poetic kind of cinema. The Criterion Collection has put together a DVD with a selection of his work. You can also have a peek here.
We can’t but be grateful for these little peeks into peculiar worlds that Fever Ray’s music and videos offer. Directed by Johan Renck and styled by Ellen Af Geierstam.
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