By Nathan Kouri
Inspired by the social and curatorial magic of Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque Française, the Bijou Blog's Youtube ciné-club is a regular series gathering moving images marvels from across the internet, available for free, 10 minutes or less.
Second Edition / Perspective
Visual perspective, philosophical perspective, perspective of experience, cosmic perspective, perceptual perspective.
In order to see, hear, think, and feel outside of the extremely limited, self-regarding, TV-trained ways of looking (literally and figuratively), it helps to be shaken up by radical filmmaking. A cinema of ideas that feels the world more intensely, with more perspective. Focused mainly on the avant-garde, unlike the last entry. Program running time: 37 minutes.
Pans 0-1 (Hollis Frampton, 1973)
Lush hypnosis to clear the mind of preconceived, calculated consciousness. Two one-minute fragments from Frampton's massive project Magellan, intended to be a calendar of cinema, which he once described as a realization of "the notion of a hypothetically totally inclusive work of film art as epistemological model for the conscious human universe." Pan is a pun, a reference to the cinematic technique as well as short for "panopticon." Frampton is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century and those interested should seek out Zorns Lemma, (nostalgia), and Poetic Justice for starters. Some of his films are available on the Criterion Channel.
Venus (Takashi Ito, 1990)
I don't know why this animated short is uploaded to Russian social media site VK or why the title links it with psilocybin-advocate Terence McKenna, but it's a great film. As described by the filmmaker:
In the early afternoon, a mother holding her child stands still in the park of a housing project. The kind of sight that is a symbol of beauty and love. Be as that may be, they have no face. The camera is aimed persistently at the spot from which they have vanished as if to find something. A work that began out of the search to understand the relation between the family and the self.
The Big Swallow (James Williamson, 1901)
An elegant three-shot silent, self-reflexive and surreal. I would recommend watching with the sound off since the jaunty piano score takes away from the strangeness and complexity of the film.
Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999)
An HD upload of one of the most celebrated experimental films of all time. Footage of Barbara Hershey from The Entity is reworked and distorted into another kind of horror film, abstract, self-destructive, and always breaking down. May be disturbing to some viewers. Description from Isabelle Reicher of sixpack film:
A woman, terrorized by an invisible and aggressive force, is also exposed to the audience’s gaze, a prisoner in two senses. Outer Space agitates this construction, which is prototypical for gender hierarchies and classic cinema’s viewing regime, and allows the protagonist to turn them upside down. (…) The story ends in the woman’s resistant gaze.