Friends and family bid farewell to Les Blank in style.
Cary Grant receiving an Academy Honorary Award in 1970 (online here)
“Years ago, when Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon were getting divorced, a perhaps apocryphal story appeared in the scandal sheets: As an example of Grant’s supposed irrationality, Cannon cited to the judge Cary’s yearly habit of sitting in front of his television and sardonically abusing all the participants. This item, true or not, must have amused nearly everyone in Hollywood, since nearly everyone in Hollywood does pretty much the same thing.
The funny thing is that from all accounts, when the Academy Awards began in 1939, they were conducted in a similar spirit of irreverence, something that has practically disappeared from the event itself. “They used to have it down at the old Coconut Grove,” Jimmy Stewart told me in the late 70s. “You’d have dinner and alawta drinks - the whole thing was…it was just…it was a party. Nobody took it all that seriously. I mean, it was swell if ya won because your friends were givin’ it to you, but it didn’t mean anything at the bawx office or anything. It was just alawta friends gettin’ together and tellin’ some jokes and gettin’ loaded and givin’ out some little prizes. My gawsh, it was..there was no pressure or anything like that.”
Cary Grant corroborated this to me: ”It was a private affair, you see - no television, no radio, even - just a group of friends giving each other a party. Because, you know, there is something a little embarrassing about all these wealthy people publicly congratulating each other. When it began, we kidded ourselves: ‘All right, Freddie March,’ we’d say, ‘we know you’re making a million dollars - now come up and get your little medal for it!’”
-excerpted from Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Hell’s In It
“I’ve come to like the term ‘poetic film.’ Now there are dangers in it. Poetry is a totally different art than film. But it separates what my contemporaries and I do from the Hollywood movie, in a way that doesn’t assume that one is greater than the other. Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever. The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.”
Stan Brakhage
January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003
(Source: strangewood, via experimentalcinema)
Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith, 1963
Watch at the link.
Our Flaming Creatures print > the YouTube Flaming Creatures video.
(via experimentalcinema)
“When I saw The Seventh Seal for the first time I was in a pretty low state — he showed me a world where someone was worse off than me. And he showed me that art and beauty can come from the worst misery of the human experience.”
— Les Blank on the film that made him become a filmmaker
(Source: criterioncollection)
Splicing Motion Picture Film
Demonstrates in detail the basic procedures for making satisfactory splices in 16 mm. motion picture film.
Help us get more films like this online! This film was digitized and uploaded by the A/V Geeks thanks to contributions to this project: http://www.avgeeks.com/wp2/avgeeks100miles
(Source: youtube.com)
Will Hindle Preservations
Mark Toscano on preserving Will Hindle’s Pastorale D’Ete & Later That Same Night—both are recent Colorlab projects:
http://preservationinsanity.blogspot.com/2012/08/later-that-same-night-1971-and.html
UbuWeb is pleased to present hundreds of avant-garde films & videos for your viewing pleasure. However, it is important to us that you realize that what you will see is in no way comparable to the experience of seeing these gems as they were intended to be seen: in a dark room, on a large screen, with a good sound system and, most importantly, with a roomful of warm, like-minded bodies.
However, we realize that the real thing isn’t very easy to get to. Most of us don’t live anywhere near theatres that show this kind of fare and very few of us can afford the hefty rental fees, not to mention the cumbersome equipment, to show these films. Thankfully, there is the internet which allows you to get a whiff of these films regardless of your geographical location.
We realize that the films we are presenting are of poor quality. It’s not a bad thing; in fact, the best thing that can happen is that seeing a crummy shockwave file will make you want to make a trip to New York to the Anthology Film Archives or the Lux Cinema in London (or other places around the world showing similar fare). Next best case scenario will be that you will be enticed to purchase a high quality DVD from the noble folks trying to get these works out into the world. Believe me, they’re not doing it for the money.
Please support these filmmakers and their distributors by purchasing their films. Please support the presenters of these works by going to see them in theatres whenever you can.
(via experimentalcinema)
