tomwatchfilm

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Works in progress

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“There's no one like you left“

Mutation in Body Snatchers 

(DoP. Bojan Bazelli, Dir. Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Tonight I streamed Body Snatchers and it was so corrupted it had transformed its nuclear family industrial complex images into fabulous oily, fiery, fleshy echoes of what once was

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Could Be Proof, Could Be Nothing in The Clovehitch Killer

(cinem. Luke McCoubrey, Dir. Duncan Skiles, 2018)

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All the Colours of the Dark in Doctor X

(cinem. Ray Rennahan and Richard Towers, Dir. Michael Curtiz, 1932)

It’s impossible to overstate how important the colour is in this. Seductive in its texture, sickly in its hues, like oil pooling and coating a serious of archly presented corpses and artificial sets. The one daytime exterior scene on the beach feels like a violation of a pure thing.

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Textual Discourse in So Is This

(Auth. Michael Snow, 1982) 

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17|09|2018

Was in London again for a meeting with my co-director/-writer and producer (sounds more professional and less truthful than ‘friends’). Casting impending, location paid for, no backing out now, should probably make peace with the goddamn script...

But before the meeting I did my usual rounds: 

BFI Southbank

Producer in the cafe queue. Overheard snatches of discussion between two, one involved in the Mo’Wax doc, the other produced... something... and it’s doing well. He’s adopted a self-aggrandising pride disguised as self-effacing. 

Even from these limited fragments 

I bristle.

The shop opened, I found what I’d been hoping to get - The Edge Is Where The Centre Is: David Rudkin and Penda’s Fen: An Archaeology - it’s probably too late in our film’s process for the book to be significantly, impactfully useful, but it’s good to keep in the same headspace - and just look at it:

(a related note, I also found a copy of Peter Greenaway’s script for Prospero’s Books, which is a film that (similar to the Penda’s Fen book) employs dense, loaded images-on-images. Interesting to see how detailed the script is, and just how my favourite sequence in all film was originally articulated in written form by a man who hates film beholden to text)

Tate Modern

AIDS Room 

I get an intense, physical, visceral response to a lot of AIDS-related art (probably related: I got a dizzy deliriousness through sex-ed classes for about a year around age 13/14), but I could look at vintage photos of queer couples and collapse across time into myself forever.

A reputation in the cinema is transitory. Who cares for a well made film. What is a genre? I wouldn’t know what a genre was! Am I one?

Life is always more important than celluloid, where a reputation will last as long as aniline dye. All this will be forgotten as the mask and pageants of the renaissance, and for the most part thank god! Perhaps a couple of frames in some vault will lead the future to believe there was more than meets the eye.

- Unused V/O from the script to Derek Jarman’s Blue, as found in his Blueprint notebooks (1991-2)

The Clock (Christian Marclay, 2010)

I have no truck with elitism in culture so the fact a 24hr experimental art film can be so readily engageable and, eight years later, still as popular and intriguing to people as it obviously was fills me with joy. As does arriving on a clip from Live and Let Die. See as much as you can if you can.

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Glitch Art

El Sur (1983)

First Reformed (2018)

Slacker (1990)

Vampir-Cuadecuc (1971)

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Dreaming The Strings in Johanes Doktor Faust

(cam. Svatopluk Malý, Dir. Emil Radok, 1958)

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Tonight I found an essay on Chaplin’s The Kid I started last year and I’ll probably try and finish it soon but mucking about with the last two paragraphs was much more entertaining.

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Mummified cat in Badlands.

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diáspora | © víctor m. alonso

[maspalomas, gran canaria / septiembre, 2018]

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diáspora | © víctor m. alonso

[maspalomas, sept 2018]

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Bleak Workhouse in Oliver Twist

(DoP. Guy Green, Dir. David Lean, 1948)

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‘Wallpaper Shots’ in This Happy Breed

(DoP. Ronald Neame, Dir. David Lean, 1944)

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East Side of Eden in Force of Evil

(DoP. George Barnes, Dir. Abraham Polonsky, 1948)