The Playlist passes along word that MVD is gearing up to release a new DVD set featuring previously unreleased film and video work by photographer/experimental filmmaker Richard Kern. The disc includes six “bonus” shorts, which might be enough for any Kern fan, but here they’re ancillary to the main event, called Extra Action. The official synopsis of Extra Action reads like Girls Gone Wild with hipster cred:

Photographer Richard Kern likes real women: unpretentious, unadorned, and definitely undressed. Those who love Kern’s books know each is an invitation to join him as he follows them through their homes-or his New York apartment-from backyard to kitchen to bathroom to bedroom, capturing every sexy and embarrassing moment. Whenever Kern photographs one of these energetic, clothes-dropping exhibitionists, he brings out a video camera and asks them to “roll around and do something interesting for a few minutes”. Extra Action documents 60 of these innocent amateur incidents set to an original musical score by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.

I wonder if this is just marketing copy, or if Extra Action is as cheesy as it sounds. I’m a fan of the Kern shorts that I’ve seen, because even when they’re grotesquely sleazy (or, in the case of Straw Dogs, mostly just grotesque), they’re also funny and even witty. And Money Love (which I think is the same think as Scooter & Jinx, which is included as a bonus on this DVD) actually plays like punk critique of pornography. In the hopes that Extra Action is something along the same lines, I’ve embedded it above.

Above: a video for Sonic Youth’s “Jams Run Free”, from their Rather Ripped album, shot by French cinema bad girl Claire Denis. Daniel Stuyck writes about this, and the four other videos Denis has made for the band, in the new issue of Film Comment:

The antecedent to these pieces is not so much Denis’s previous films as Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray. Conner’s 1961 short, an essential demonstration of the maxim that pop songs are teenage symphonies to God, reads like a list of chemical ingredients for any of these videos: rock and roll; erotic tension (as P. Adams Sitney is at pains to point out, Cosmic Ray predominantly features the “irreverent dance of a naked woman, which he [Conner] photographed himself”); bland images of daily life and consumer culture (Mickey Mouse, hitchhiking Indians, neon signs, the H-bomb) transformed into something surreal. In other words, a strange alchemy—an area where science and religion meet, not unlike drugs. And that ultimate drug state—ecstasy—is what Conner and Denis are ultimately fixed on: Denis’s unfocused whip pans as Sonic Youth slams into its chorus create the same sensation as Conner’s image of skulls birthing from crotches in an instant between two shots, a revelation of new meanings created by a strange combination of elements.

[Via Vinyl is Heavy]

At once playfully ecstatic objects and cultural time pieces, avant-garde classics and foundation texts for queer cinema, the nearly two dozen Warhol films I’ve seen (out of some 160 nonscreen-test titles) enliven and excite. They also underscore just how calcified much of cinema is, including work made under the generally meaningless rubric of independence. To watch most commercially produced movies is to watch the same endlessly recycled three acts and cautiously modified visual tics again and again. The names change from product to product, country to country, but little else. To watch a Warhol film is to rediscover cinema’s plasticity, boundlessness, mystery and possibility.

That’s an excerpt from a long Manohla Dargis essay that appeared in the New York Times this weekend, in advance of the November 11 opening of a 33-title retrospective of Andy Warhol’s films at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Whether or not you plan on attending the retrospective, the Dargis essay is a must read. Above that, you’ll find a fair illustration of what she’s talking about: a clip from Warhol’s Vinyl (1965).

This weekend in Telluride, I recorded an audio interview with experimental filmmaker George Kuchar. We talked about YouTube, the trickle down economics of DIY filmmaking, and Telluride’s history as a haven for criminals and whores. Somehow, someway, the audio file got corrupted and the interview is unusable. Which is really depressing, because this interview was kind of a big deal to me. When I was 20 years old, I moved from Chicago to San Francisco, and I did it for George Kuchar.

(That’s not entirely true, but it might as well be. Years later the other factors that led to the move–petty relationship problems, an intolerance for Midwest winters, a foolish youthful faith in the power of geographical change to correct deep-seated emotional issues–seem far less significant.)

I was already skipping classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to watch George Kuchar’s movies at the Video Data Bank. Shot first on Super 8mm, then 16mm, then prosumer video, sometimes aided by his brother Mike, the Kuchar films were cheap and intentionally schlocky, but the best of them were somehow funny, poignant, and even beautiful. They were exactly the kind of movies I wanted to make! The idea of finishing my final three semesters of art school in a sunny clime, where I would take classes with Kuchar and surely in no time convince him to take me under his wing–it was like an actionable fantasy.

Of course, the reality of it was nothing like I fantasized. …Read more

I got so excited about the news that of a George Kuchar program at Telluride that I immediately searched YouTube for his shorts. I found I couple that I had never seen, including A Reason to Live and Wild Night in El Reno (both of which, according to this essay, seem to predate The Weather Diaries, although El Reno is essentially a portrait of a storm set to a vintage bongo-heavy Kuchar score). But does anyone ever get tired of Hold Me When I’m Naked? I don’t. I’ve embedded the second half above, because it’s sexier; click here to watch the first part.

Over the weekend, Ray Pride posted a long interview with Chicago music scene stallwart/budding filmmaker Tim Kinsella. I’ve been a fan of Kinsella since discovering his first band, Cap’n Jazz, when I was in high school. By the time I moved to Kinsella’s home base of Chicago in the late 90s to go to art school, Kinsella was on his second album of experimental quasi-electronic indie rock with Joan of Arc. He’s since released half a dozen records under the Joan of Arc name, and countless more with tangential side projects such as Make Believe and Friend/Enemy.

Frustrated with what he calls the “lousy cost/benefit ratio” of life as a semi-well-known indie musician, Kinsella also recently wrote and directed his first feature film, titled Orchard Vale. It’s set to open the Chicago Underground Film Festival on Wednesday.

It’s a logical transition, as much of the Joan of Arc output has been infused with clear cinematic elements. The cover art for Joan of Arc’s 1999 album Live in Chicago 1999 (which was not a live album) featured recreations of scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend; on one of that record’s tracks, Kinsella lamented that he’d “only want to make a film if it was in French/and I don’t speak French.” Later JoA records like the The Gap and In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust sounded like self-contained soundtracks for neo-realist disaster films. So I guess it’s no surprise that Orchard Vale is, as described by Pride, a “claustrophobic experimental feature about a band of outsiders after an off-screen collapse of civilization.”

…Read more