the phantoms came to meet him...

Drawing by Matt Bray http://www.facebook.com/mattbrayart

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 08:28:00 -0400

Drawing by Matt Bray

http://www.facebook.com/mattbrayart

“The Monster” by Odilonvert Shot with: Lomokino,...

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 07:57:13 -0400

“The Monster”

by Odilonvert

Shot with: Lomokino, Nikon Coolpix S8100 and S620, Canon Vixia HFS200. Edited with: iMovie.

This is a video which evokes the spirit Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The dark magic of Frankenstein’s creation of his Monster, its unexpectedly grotesque imperfection, and the resulting pain and isolation of both creator and creation.

Submitted for consideration to The Phantoms Came To Meet Him, Issue 2, Dr. Frankenstein And The Monster (borgopass.tumblr.com/).

Starring Mario Mentrup Pascale Schiller Branka Prlic Claudia...

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 17:46:00 -0400

Starring

Mario Mentrup
Pascale Schiller
Branka Prlic
Claudia Basrawi
Haymon Maria Buttinger
Katja Fouquet
Viviane Bartsch
Tamer Yigit
Rainer Knepperges
Soner Arsl

Writer

Mario Mentrup

Directors

Mario Mentrup

Volker Sattel

Editors

Volker Sattel
Branka Prlic

Camera

Volker Sattel

Sound

Nikolaus Woemle

Music

Soffy O
Pasadena Projekt
Gina d’Orio
Angie Reed

Music video by Mario Mentrup & Volker Sattel 2012 for...

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 17:00:11 -0400

Music video by Mario Mentrup & Volker Sattel 2012 for
Tarwater: Photographed (from album: Inside the ships) (bureau b)

starring Olympia Spanou & Sonchai Körner
Directed by Mario Mentrup
Camera and Edit by Volker Sattel
Vakantfilm 2012

THE PASSING OF MOTHER PRUDENCE (Chris Marsh / UK / 2011/HD)...

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:31:13 -0400

THE PASSING OF MOTHER PRUDENCE (Chris Marsh / UK / 2011/HD)

Ffresh, The Student Moving Image Festival of Wales / Newport, UK (2012) nominated ‘Best Fiction’ and won ‘Best of Show’ sponsored by NAHEMI

Cardiff Mini Film Festival / Cardiff, UK (2012) showcased

During a funeral wake a mothers bereavement leads her child to explore her grandmothers room. Only to find that there is something waiting for her, in the wardrobe.

CREW

Director - Chris Marsh

Camera Op - Chris Grindley

Make Up - Claire Purse

Writer(s) - Chris Marsh & Liz Chesters

Editor - Chris Marsh

Music - Adriana Daza Uhia

CAST

Lucy - Eliza Harrison-Dine

The Mother - Julie Parton

The Lady - Jakki Clarke

The Monster - David V Barron

WORM: an alternative short (Chris Marsh / UK / 2012/VHS) A...

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:28:17 -0400

WORM: an alternative short (Chris Marsh / UK / 2012/VHS)

A look into the mind of an unbalanced man in an unbalanced city.

CREW

Director - Chris Marsh

Writer - Chris Marsh

VFX - Laurynas Taunys

Make Up - Meg Button

Sound - Laurence Hall

Music - Ant Dickinson

Editor - Chris Marsh

DIT - Loz Easterbrook / Jason Marsh

CAST

The Man - Gavin Sims

The Woman - Katie Moore

The Seductress - Nicola Rodgers

The Creature / Lady with the Red Hair - Rose Alford

SPECIAL THANKS

Milkwood Gallery

The Coal Exchange

Hywel Jones

Gail Howard

DRY MOUTH (Chris Marsh / UK / 2012/HD) When a pandemic spreads...

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:25:21 -0400

DRY MOUTH (Chris Marsh / UK / 2012/HD)

When a pandemic spreads across the globe all hope is lost.

On day zero, to sleep is to dream.

On day one, to sleep is to die.

On day ten, to sleep is madness.

CREW

Director - Chris Marsh

Writer(s) - Chris Marsh & Ivy Alvarez

Runner - Laurynas Taunys

Make Up - Meg Button

Music - Lesbian Horse

Editor - Chris Marsh

CAST

The Man - Richard Highgate

The Woman - Marilyn Anne Winters

The Man (2) - Gavin Sims

The Radio DJ - Hywel Jones

"We went to the movies and I knew this sequel would be terrible, but hindsight is never without..."

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:32:39 -0400

“

We went to the movies and I knew this sequel would be terrible, but hindsight is never without hindsight. This is not the time for feeling yet, but even now in the instant before you speak, when your pulse has that quiet sound of dread in the infinite category, I can hear the start of your leaving - can hear all your reasons hovering in front of billboards like mosquitoes drunk on light.

These actors, they know who we are, our story, they know what constitutes a good performance as they watch this same movie unfold night after night…but this is not the time for feeling yet.

”

- The Movie by Seth Fragomen

requiem for a vampire iPhone, 2012 Jesse Richards

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:31:00 -0400

requiem for a vampire

iPhone, 2012

Jesse Richards

Remodernist Adventures in the Uncanny Valley by John A. Riley

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:28:17 -0400

Remodernist Adventures in the Uncanny Valley

John A. Riley

Remodernist aesthetics seek to return us to a more earnest, honest artistic experience (for both creator and spectator) through a focus on chance, asymmetry, imperfection and entropy.[i] Remodernist aesthetics have been associated with traditional Japanese aesthetics, as espoused by Junichiro Tanizaki in his book In Praise of Shadows, and with the saturated, long-take maximalism of filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky.

It may seem at first that genre material such as horror are then anathema to the Remodernist movement because returning to and rehabilitating genres that have fallen from favour is so much a part of the aesthetic of information overload that remodernism seeks to avoid. However, rather than merely reveling in the recycling of images, signifiers of the genre, Remodernism seeks to find the lost poetic heart of gothic horror by dwelling on the small details, the textures, the mood… and above all by concentrating on film’s ability to capture and preserve moments of time. When we return to the German horror films of the 1920s, isn’t it less the audacious, angular production design that fascinate us, and more the capture of temporal fragments from long ago: Nosferatu’s claw-like fingers, twitching as he approaches his victim. The narrator’s betrothed, walking gracefully in the garden, an insane expression on her face, in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

Some two decades later, Jacques Tourneur wanted to exclude monsters from his films Cat People and Night of the Demon, but was encouraged to by the studio he worked for. Tourneur wanted to explore the mindset of people who believed in the supernatural. In the mind of the person who believes they are cursed, or being followed by a monstrous entity, the mere rustle of shrubbery, or movement in the shadows, take on a whole new, chilling significance. Tourneur’s horror films are full of such near-sublime details, moments where atmosphere descends thick and fast, taking precedence over storytelling like a soaring descant.

Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon is rarely seen as a horror film, almost always as an avant-garde work. It is certainly surreal, but isn’t a good deal of horror? And furthermore, isn’t everything filmed in Hollywood, possibly the most surreal place on earth, tinged with madness? In Meshes of the Afternoon, the knife-wielding spectre that the woman must confront has a mirror for a face. A sinister version of one’s self as villain or spectre.

Implicit in The Remodernist Film Manifesto is the uncanny nature of film; it stresses a Bazinian ontology whereby the profilmic object leaves an indelible mark on the filmic material. Film is lifelike, but in reproducing life, life becomes dreamlike.

The Uncanny, the subject of this issue, is a word associated with the nineteenth and early twentieth century intellectual and artistic ferment that produced E.T.A Hoffmann, Sigmund Freud and of course Edgar Allen Poe. Like Dostoevsky, Poe tapped into the nineteenth century interest in the doppelganger; the ineffable unease, the sense of identity theft caused by discovering that one has a double. The consolidation of the bourgeois individual that continued apace with that great theorist of the uncanny, Freud, finds its expression and an expression of its limits in Poe’s story The Man of The Crowd. On the one hand, it’s individuality one craves, separation and distinction from the crowd, from the great unwashed. But on the other, finding someone who cannot be categorized according to the then popular desire for taxonomy produces only feelings of unfathomable terror. Paradoxically, as the story goes on, the narrator comes to understand that this man seems to have no interiority… he exists only within the crowd, almost as if he is created by it. When the crowds disperse he becomes desperate to rejoin them, and yet he never interacts with the crowd, remains somehow aloof from it.

The only option is to consider this man “the type of the genius of deep crime” and to conclude that we will know no more about him. Reading and re-reading this story, I’m convinced that Poe wasn’t sure how to end it himself.

What I’m trying to get at by dragging the lake and dredging up the corpses of Murnau, Poe and others, is that there’s a need for a sensitive, committed understanding of what horror is, because this tension between the individual and the crowd has been increasing, spurred on by new technology, the jargon of self-help, social network crazes, and too many other chimeras of our present age to list without launching into a bitter diatribe. Even subcultures, so prized as countercultural activity, can be seen as merely divisive dandyism, already-co-opted adolescent navel-gazing.

Poe’s story plays on two great fears of our modern age: firstly, that you might not have your individuality, that your individuality is taken from you and you become a shuffling apparition in grey, with no means of expressing yourself. Secondly, that you might have too much individuality; that you might stray from the comfort of the crowd and become a wild, untamable primitive.

A conception of horror, of the uncanny, that takes into account the remodernist aesthetics discussed here will help us to learn more about this man of the crowd who we all - male and female - resemble when seen from a certain angle.

[i] It goes almost without saying that Remodernist aesthetics can be applied to numerous forms of artistic practice, but here my chief focus will be on film.

“Based on Decay” 13min 50 sec, 2012, Shot on Nokia...

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:13:12 -0400

“Based on Decay”

13min 50 sec, 2012, Shot on Nokia Lumia 800 HD Video

Directed by Jason Marsh

Vimeo: Rubber Cripple

Vimeo Channel: Rubber Cripple

“Forum Boy_Boy Forum” Year: 2011 Directed by Jason...

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:02:00 -0400

“Forum Boy_Boy Forum”

Year: 2011

Directed by Jason Marsh

Medium: Web Cam/Video. Original footage (Found Footage) manipulated with Vegas

Movie Studio 10 HD Platinum

Run Time: 02.48

Vimeo: Rubber Cripple

Vimeo Channel: Rubber Cripple

"Selections from Thoughtography" by Seth Fragomen

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:00:14 -0400

The Room

One by one, they walked towards the room. Cleared of furniture it had a dank, musty smell. Its walls, floor, and ceiling were painted a matte black. Being an interior room, there was no danger of daylight entering, and perfect darkness had been achieved. Staring into the darkness, they saw incredible things. Then one of them opened his mouth, and the silence, infinite and black, filled it.

Early Drive

From the kitchen window, I could see the sun rising over the hills. The lights in the house were still off, and in the dawn’s sun, the sink’s shadow decreased incrementally. I got dressed in a blue button down and a pair of khakis, and while tying my shoes, became fixated on the restored tissue that some mistakenly call “forearm.” “Forearm” offers nothing new by way of explanation.

At 7:30 A.M., I left for work, and driving toward the Golden Gate Bridge, the city’s white buildings blinded me, so I put on sunglasses. The moon was still visible, but fading. As I got closer to downtown, the phrase, “a theory of everything has yet to be configured properly” rattled around in what I call my “cyclotron”, but others incorrectly refer to as my “brain.”

As I approached work, there was an increase in my stomach acid levels. “This could be a problem,” I said to myself. I almost entered the parking lot, but knew I shouldn’t go into work today. It would be more productive to take the day off and drive to L.A. instead. I needed to think, to study this acid build-up problem with all its complications and qualifications. The further south I drove, the more my stomach acid levels decreased. In the valley, walnuts waited for burlap. At some point, I switched to the coast road, and listened to the Pacific churning below. It was already 9:00 A.M, and the staff and other researchers would be in our morning meeting by now. To my left, uniform rows of broccoli and spinach flourished. Few general principles can account for what happened next. It requires an entirely new mode of explanation that hasn’t been developed yet. On a shoulder of Route 1, I made a U-turn and headed back to work. There was no reason for doing this, no hypothesis to account for it. As the car finished out the circumference of its turn, my thoughts made no motion. Driving north, my ability to think returned in fragments. After twenty minutes had passed, my mind fixated on a drawing of the elementary building blocks of matter that was in a biochemistry textbook I co-authored. Twenty minutes more and I could envision one of the large superstrings used to account for dimension theory. Pulling into the parking lot, I saw my coworkers returning from lunch. They were staring at me, wondering where I had been, but I would explain it all in detail, the acid build-up, the locked mind, the building blocks, and the superstring. I knew that they would agree with my considered decision not to go to the A.M. staff meeting. They might be concerned, but once I gave my reasons, they would understand. They’d see that my reasons were part of a set of fractals derived from the same equation, an equation that endlessly flaps its altering answer.

The Couch

You sat on the couch just saying my name while I sifted through the lines of the room. Let’s examine it now: the room is a rectangle with probabilities everywhere, and if we follow the lines diverging from memory, we discover a table. It is made of wood and proceeds to leave off at some point - a station following. On the table, there are a few magazines, oblong and ready. The couch, not fluffed up, is where you sit. The planes of the floor and ceiling balance a tension between repetition and despair. Interdicts keep mounting. The room is so fragile, and you are sullen, the shoulders indicating mourning. You’re not aware that I am there, standing behind you.

You look at me while the room goes dark around you and blink three times. You were beginning to disappear from the past (your history is showing.) Pour a glass of wine. Am I listing to the right?

“The Exterminator” Digital, 6min. Directed by Seth...

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 21:59:01 -0400

“The Exterminator”

Digital, 6min. Directed by Seth Fragomen.

Seth Fragomen on Vimeo