Tag: The Residents

1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies

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Via Ballardian:

In 1984 J.G. Ballard called for a ‘Festival of Home Movies’ and 24 years on we’re happy to oblige: announcing our latest competition, to promote JGB’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life. Presented by ballardian.com and HarperCollins UK, the competition will utilise ‘modern electronics’ as specified above, of an especial type that Ballard with his prodigious clairvoyant powers came close to envisaging: the mobile phone (or cell phone, for our North American cousins).

The requirement is that you shoot a one-minute film on a Ballardian theme using your mobile phone’s video camera only, no post-production allowed. That’s too much for my Motorola (above) which has never proved itself able to record more than a few seconds of continuous video for reasons unknown. The competition prize is a copy of Miracles of Life along with the forthcoming HarperCollins reissues of Ballard’s Millennium People, The Drought, The Crystal World, The Drowned World and The Unlimited Dream Company.

The constraints for this are pretty tough if all the editing has to be done in camera. I anticipate a lot of entries showing static shots of motorway traffic, windswept concrete vistas or imitations of CCTV. Anyone wishing for some offbeat inspiration can go and watch the One Minute Movies made by The Residents to accompany their Commercial Album in 1980.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• JG Ballard book covers

Thomas Pynchon – A Journey into the Mind of [P.]

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Thomas Pynchon – A Journey into the Mind of [P.] (2001)
Written and directed by Fosco Dubini
and Donatello Dubini
Music by The Residents
Language: English
Runtime: 96mins

“Things are not as they seem.” In US writer Thomas Pynchon’s case, this is a mantra, cornerstone to a life and labyrinthine oeuvre freighted with ceaseless speculation. In books like V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, the covert arenas of the contemporary order (the military-industrial complex, governmental conspiracy, the sinister reaches of science) mesh with counter-cultural values, permeating paranoia, arcane knowledge-systems and profoundly ironic humour in an encyclopaedic investigation of modernity. Central to this is a (doomed) quest for some singular explanation of things, a motif taken up by the Dubini duo in their intriguing derive that takes in his biography, times and obsessive supporters.

On the surface it’s a tall order: Pynchon is one of the great cultural recluses, unphotographed for 40 years, his absence from the flashgun glare now an inseparable part of his “project.” So the film offers an atmospheric collage, chaptered around varying recollections and his synchronicity with resonant aspects of post-war US society. Apposite newsreel and found-footage of missile experiments and Agency psychedelics tests mix with talking heads, spoken extracts and Pynchon’s articulate fans. Stand-ins, doubles, lookalike contestants populate a shifting reality, scored to a trippy, fragmented soundscape care of The Residents, that builds towards a compelling final act, searching for the grail of a new image of the writer. Reflecting the hall of mirrors in which the novels, history, the novelist and his “researchers” move, this documentary, while uneven and occasionally over-extended, provides required viewing for devotees, and should reward those keen to explore the mysterious dynamics of the age via one of their definitive surveillants.

Gareth Evans, Time Out.

The Grey Lodge is torrenting a 632MB avi version. Buy the DVD here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A literary event: new Thomas Pynchon