Two clips of the same song from different movies: the first is from Air Hostess(1959) starring Grace Chang. The second is Tsai Ming Liang’s 2000 film The Hole. If you haven’t seen Tsai Ming Liang’s movies, I highly recommend them.
This is the archive of bits published on March 2009
I grew up listening to the blues. My mom in particular was a serious fan, and Koko Taylor was a favorite in our house. As a kid I had a difficult time imagining the context for this music. Unlike rock and pop, which are culturally ubiquitous, the extent of the varied histories and idioms of the blues haven’t been assimilated as readily. Naturally I had seen pictures of BB King and Buddy guy, but until we moved to Chicago when I was 9 there was no image to accompany Koko Taylor.
Ever since I started to put the pieces together, I had a hard time matching up differences between so many fans of the blues and the performers themselves. How could Eric Clapton see how cool Muddy Waters was and decide that bell bottoms would work for him? Maybe he’d never seen a film. My parents and their friends certainly had nothing in common with this. Little Walter and Koko Taylor are immeasurably cool in this clip, whereas my parents were not.
Big Bang Love, Juvenile A
I’m a big fan of Neo-Realist films, and Nil By Mouth was among the first I ever saw. When I first saw it it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, specifically in that it seemed credibly real without exposing the intrusive gaze of the filmmaker. It was like a documentary, but more. I’ve been hooked on this style ever since.
This clip of Ray Winstone is shocking: there’s no cartoony violence, nothing visceral, just a raw expression of the sort of anger that real people occasionally exhibit. Its scary precisely because of its plausibility.
A few weeks ago I watched Vertigo for the first time since I was a kid. When I’d first seen it I had no way of critiquing it, it seemed like a surprisingly good Hardy Boys for grown ups. This time I was astonished by the sophisticated mess of gender, identity, and class politics. The specific crime in the movie seemed incidental when weighed against the symbolic abuses perpetrated in society. I began to wonder if you could make a short ten minute film out of Hitchcock’s masterpiece that eliminated the sensational details of murder and brought what I consider to be a more interesting subject to the front.
Someone else had a similar idea, editing Vertigo into a new “trailer”. The clip is compelling and haunting, but isn’t specifically addressing the themes I’m interested in for my version, instead creating a version more like a fever dream. Enjoy!
As a final note, I can’t find info about the author of this video anywhere. If you have contact information or a source of more work, please let me know!
From the first time I saw Puce Moment, about eight years ago, I was haven’t been able to get it out of my head. Its the cinematic equivalent to recurrently having the same great song stuck in your head (song wise, for me its “Cheek to Cheek”). The opening sequence is mesmerizing to me, its as if I was hypnotized by the dresses. I often think of recreating the effect but looping it so that I can have an endless film of it. Maybe this summer.
If I remember correctly, being a kid is like being on acid all the time. Apparently Ingmar Bergman agreed. The beginning sequence is a perfect piece of magical realism.
