Untitled, 2011.

A film created by Alexandra Ruiz and Sandro Santoro for the exhibit

“An Evocation of Japan” at Ra, Antwerp.

Bojangles of Harlem from Swing Time (1936)

Swing Time is considered to be Astaire and Rogers’ best dance musical, featuring four dance routines that are each regarded as masterpieces of their kind. “Bojangles of Harlem” features a two-minute solo of Astaire dancing with his shadows which took three days to shoot. (via wiki)

Excerpt from a scene of Le far west, a movie by Jacques Brel where Brel himself excels at what he is best known for. The movie was selected at the Cannes festival in the year 1973. Archive from INA.

Life (1993)

Artavazd Ashoti Peleshyan (born November 22, 1938, Leninakan) is an Armenian director of film-essays, a documentarian in the history of film art and a film theorist. However his work unlike Maya Deren’s is not avant-garde nor tries to explore the absurd, is not really art for the art’s sake like Stan Brakhage’s but should be rather acknowledged as a poetic view on life embedded on film. In the words of the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, his is “one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema”. Renowned Master of the Armenian SSR arts title (1979).

He is renowned for developing a style of cinematographic perspective known as distance montage, combining perception of depth with oncoming entities, such as running packs of antelope or hordes of humans. Characteristic to him is also the use of archive footage alongside with his own shots and, especially, fast intercutting between these two. Telephoto lens are often used to get “candid camera” shots of people engaging in mundane tasks.

His films are on the border between documentary and feature, rather reminding of the work of such avant-garde filmmakers as Bruce Connor than of any kind of conventional documentaries. Most of his films are short, the longest being 60 minutes and the shortest 6 minutes long. His films feature no dialogue; however, music and sound effects play nearly as important a role in his films as the visual images in contributing towards the artistic whole. Nearly all of his films were shot in black and white.

Already his student films he made while he was studying at VGIK were awarded several prizes. As for now, 12 films by Peleshyan are known to exist. The Beginning (Skizbe) (1967) is a cinematographical essay about the October Revolution of 1917. One of the unique visual effects used in this film is achieved by holding snippets of film still on one frame, then advancing only for a second or two until again pausing on another, resulting in a stuttering visual effect. Other important films by him are We (Menq) (1967, a poetically told history of Armenia and its people and Inhabitant (Obitateli) (1970), a reflection on the relationship between wildlife and humans. Artavazd Peleshian’s most brilliant film is “The Seasons” (1975), exquisitely cinematographed by another great Armenian documentarian Mikhail Vartanov (Vardanov) – it is an outstanding look at the contradiction and harmony between the humans and nature. http://www.parajanov.com/seasons.html

Peleshyan is also the author of a range of theoretical works, such as his 1988 book Moyo kino (My Cinema).

Being from a country far away from internationally significant cinema circles, Peleshyan’s efforts were never been properly recognized by world cinema until very recently. After the fall of Soviet Union, he has been able to make two more short films, Life (1993) and The End (1994). He is now living in Moscow. His most recent film was edited at the ZKM | Karlsruhe Film Institute in 2005-2006 and has not yet been released.(source wiki)

The complete Artavazd Peleshian’s filmography can be seen on UbuWeb.

The 12-storey, 250 room Chelsea Hotel – originally built in 1883 as Manhattan’s first cooperative apartment, and the tallest building in New York until 1902 – was converted into a hotel and residence in 1905. Once considered an untouchable, impenetrable tower for writers, artists, musicians and mavericks, it has recently been claimed as a boutique hotel venture for a management company who shows blatant disregard for its formidable history.

Photography dp.

The officially landmarked building is recognized as an American cultural icon and renowned for those who have lived and created there, including Sir Arthur Clarke, Bob Dylan, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Miller, Joni Mitchell, Dee Dee Ramone, Larry Rivers, Dylan Thomas, Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Milos Forman, Janis Joplin, Donald Sutherland, Patti Smith, Philip Taaffe, Dennis Hopper, Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Eugene O’Neill, Jane Fonda, Larry Rivers, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Tom Waits, Courtney Love, Sam Shepard, Charles Bukowski, Julian Schnabel, Jasper Johns, Viva, Quentin Crisp, Jimi Hendrix and many others (some of whom will appear in this film).

Beyond the famous are the little known who have made this their refuge in New York – countless writers, painters, directors, costume and lighting designers, gallerists and curators, and those who are just always there with no visible means of support. And then there are those – most famously Sid Vicious’ girlfriend Nancy Spungen – who died there.

Each of these characters fills out a cast that makes this story come together with the best of New York architecture, history, art, comedy and tragedy, all through the eyes and passion of acclaimed auteur Abel Ferrara. Interviewing current tenants, recreating scenes of events that occurred at the Chelsea and intertwining archival footage with different formats of film and video, Ferrara creates a film that breaks through the documentary mould into something that captures the essence of the Chelsea Hotel.

From the genesis of LA’s gang culture to the shocking, war-zone reality of daily life in the South L.A., the film chronicles the rise of the Crips and Bloods, tracing the origins of their bloody four-decades long feud.  Contemporary and former gang members offer their street-level testimony that provides the film with a stark portrait of modern-day gang life: the turf wars and territorialism, the inter-gang hierarchy and family structure, the rules of behavior, the culture of guns, death and dishonor.

Throughout the film ex-gang members, gang intervention experts, writers, activists and academics analyze many of the issues that contribute to South LA’s malaise: the erosion of identity that fuels the self-perpetuating legacy of black self-hatred, the disappearance of the African-American father and an almost pervasive prison culture in which today one out of every four black men will be imprisoned at some point in his life.