An Invitation from Lars Von Trier

Controversial film director (pictured above with his Fuck tattoo) is challenging artists around the world "to reinterpret six great works of art through the lens of their camera or recording of sound." The project, entitled Gesamt (which comes from the German word for whole or cumulative) is supported by Danish Agency for Culture and has a set of strict rules to abide by as stated on the official Gesamt website. Works of art include Irish writer James Joyce's Ulysses and rat pack member Sammy Davis Jr's Choreography.

Taste It

London based Daniel Brereton has directed the brilliant new music video for Daniel Avery's track Taste It off his EP Need Electric. Brereton says, "I don't want reveal how this is done before you watch it, so watch it first. It might be easy to tell but this was all done an an everyday scanner, I just had the idea to do a video full of scanned images. So i just got the girls to move scan by scan, like in stop-frame animation. They didn't really "get" what was going on at times, but that is cool as it creates mistakes, and i often asked them what they thought would look good."

Harmony Korine's Caput in Los Angeles

caput_harmony_korine_los_angeles_diletantte_io_echo_joanna_ginko

LA-based duo Io Echo is playing tomorrow, August 9 at Dilettante - featuring a special screening of the new short film by Harmony Korine Caput. Caput is scored in part by Io Echo.  RSVP to io.echo.la@gmail.com, Dilettante 120 North Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles

David Lynch's Eraserhead Soundtrack to Be Released

eraserhead_packagingsmall_vinyl_david_lynch

Sacred Bones Records is is set to release a deluxe vinyl reissue of David Lynch’s Eraserhead soundtrack on August 7, 2012. The soundtrack will be released in a limited edition of 1500 and will feature a 16-page booklet, three 11-inch prints, a digital download, and a 7-inch single of Peter Ivers’ “In Heaven” with the previously unreleased “Pete’s Boogie”.

Mauricio Guillén: Avenida Progreso

The work of the Mexican-born artist Mauricio Guillén (b. 1971) encompasses film, photography, text works and objects. Guillén combines personal experience with the conceptual strategies he uses to explore how images and language influence our understanding of culture and history. The chief focus of the exhibition at the MMK Zollamt will be Guillén’s most recent 16-mm black-and-white film "Avenida Progreso", for which he returned to Mexico City, where he spent his childhood and teenage years. The film story leads the viewer through the districts of Polanco, Irrigación and Oceanía to the end of the Avenida Progreso. A professor of philosophy and aesthetics is the main protagonist in this anachronistic journey along streets of which many bear the names of such European philosophers and literary figures as Goethe, Byron, Marx, Tolstoi and Aristoteles. In this film, Guillén investigates social and cultural differences within a society that is undergoing a process of change but nevertheless still reflects the impact of the cultural import brought about by colonization. Questions about the emergence and distribution of knowledge and education in society are of key importance to the artist’s work. The film will be supplemented by photographs and text works.
 Opening Friday July 27 at the MMK Zollamt, Domstraße 10 60311 Frankfurt, Germany, 

[AUTRE TV] Vanishing Point by Augustin Doublet

Of his six-minute black-and-white short Vanishing Point, French director and writer Augustin Doublet says, “It’s all about creating a maze of memories and fancies out of this endless labyrinth that you find in Brooklyn. I refer to the subway tracks, to the shades...I was trying to get behind the skin of the city, and to explore this kind of dynamic between dream and reality. So to do that, I thought that to make a portrait of an artist, a woman, was the right way to do it. I tend to like to tell stories about women. And so this kind of descent into her own broken relationships, her broken dreams, was dynamic. I think that was the concept behind it. And one could say that there is something about masochism, which has a very strong link with the practice of art... the practice of painting... I think we take inspiration from our scars. I was interested in the remains of the ink, the remains of internal scars, psychological scars... how the trauma manifests itself into shadows of ink."

Vanishing Point paints a darkly stunning portrait of an artist living in Brooklyn. The film is bleak, discordant, smacking with violent urgency—and yet there is, at the same time, a certain fragility, a delicate quietness underneath its rough exterior. Perhaps this is borne out of Doublet’s own experience living in the ever-growing and changing neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn; watching the juxtaposition between the grittier, rougher “low-life reality,” as he calls it, and the burgeoning artist’s community that has begun to emerge in past years.

Since his arrival in New York, Doublet has written, directed and produced several of his own short films. Initially fascinated by the “harshness, dirtiness, and loose eroticism” of the New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s, he says, “My imagination and my desire are very related to the location and environment I’m in.” Originally from the Belleville area of Paris, Doublet has been living for three years in The Schoolhouse (the interior of which is shown in Vanishing Point), a unique three-story red brick building in Bushwick that has worn multiple hats since its establishment in 1883—it functioned as an elementary school until 1945, when it was sold and used as a manufacturing space; then it was abandoned and finally converted into artists’ living and working spaces in the 1990s. Now, each floor houses an array of creative individuals—musicians, painters, poets, filmmakers and photographers who often collaborate together (Vanishing Point is set to the spoken words of Mariette Papic, a poet and fellow Schoolhouse resident who Doublet commissioned for the project). About New York, he says, “…if you’re able to project yourself, your energy and your ideas on the city and break through the glass, [it] gives you back so much…”

Text by Annabel Graham for Pas Un Autre

Love Is A State of Mind by Luci Schroder

Alongside the 2012 SHOWstudio Shop exhibition 'Selling Sex', SHOWstudio launches 'Fashion Fetish,' a series of fashion films, performances, multi-media pieces and accompanying essays by women in fashion - including Ruth Hogben, Daphne Guinness, Liberty Ross, Aimee Mullins, Asia Argento and Dasha Zhukova - that comment on the contentious and provocative fusion of fashion with fetish. SHOWstudio's newest installment is a film by Luci Schroder called Love Is A State of Mind.

Sigur Rós Mystery Film Project

This haunting and beautiful short film, which is much more than a music video, is for the Sigur Rós track Fjögur Píanó off their current album Valtari is directed by Alma Har'el and stars Shia LaBeouf and Denna Thomsen. The acclaimed Icelandic band Sigur Rós recently asked a dozen filmmakers to each choose a song from its new album, Valtari, and shoot a video inspired by the music as part of their Mystery Film Project. All the directors received the same $10,000 budget and zero instructions from the band.

Richard Phillips: First Point

Premiering today as part of Art Unlimited at Art Basel 2012, pop artist Richard Phillips’ short film entitled First Point featuring Lindsay Lohan. Richard Phillips has been exploring the production of film and photographic media as a means of expanding beyond the appropriation strategies that have defined his work in the past by painting unique portraits from his own films which he stages and shoots himself.  He completed his first two films, Lindsay Lohanand Sasha Grey, in the spring of 2011 for the Commercial Break film project presented concurrently to the Venice Biennale. First Point–Phillips' third film—is a collaboration between the artist, Lindsay Lohan, and the legendary surf filmmaker Taylor Steele. The film visits two locations: a private beach surf compound and Malibu's iconic Surfrider Beach, accessible to the public, which boasts some of California's most perfect waves. First Point presents a postmodern take on the surf film genre through an abstract framework of imagery in which the actress engages in cinema performance tropes inspired by contemporary film noir. Presented by Gagosian Gallery, First Point will premier as part of Art Basel's Art Unlimited which will see its invitation only, VIP release today and a public opening on June 14 until June 17.