Film
from48 hills
3 days agoScreen Grabs: Aliens, witches, mermaids, and other swell company - 48 hills
Love can take unconventional forms, as seen in films featuring relationships with aliens, witches, and other offbeat characters.
The inquiry was like thousands of others. Somebody had potentially cool films they thought might interest the Library of Congress. But it was brand new for Jason Evans Groth... In September, he stepped outside the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to meet Bill and Mary McFarland, who had driven from Michigan with about 40 strips of celluloid that had once belonged to Bill's great-grandfather.
I recently gained a new obsession, and I'm ready to share it with the world: finding and analyzing rare vintage images. A picture speaks a thousand words, and these photographs tell us more about history than a textbook chapter ever could. So even if you think history is boring, I'm well-equipped to change your mind, and give you some delicious food for your brain to chew on today.
The event has its origins in, you guessed it, Burning Man, where a "dark cabaret" band called Rosin Coven built a martini bar in the middle of nowhere, playing sunset happy hour shows all week in the Black Rock Desert. Although some might assume the event is based on the opulence of the Edwardian era, it's actually inspired by costume designer, author and illustrator Edward Gorey, who became known in the 1950s for his black-and-white drawings of ghoulish characters in historical dress.
The newly discovered moving image work—totaling over an hour in length—includes eight new Screen Test portraits of Warhol collaborators and unused footage shot for his films Batman Dracula, Sleep, and Couch. The most significant find is several rolls of pornographic footage that shed new light on Warhol's ambitions in the 1960s. They prove that the artist had been capturing explicit scenes on the couch of his famous Factory studio long before making Blue Movie, the salacious 1969 feature that would inspire a "porno chic" phenomenon.
Through the tiny window of short clips on Instagram and TikTok, Mary's world seems enchanting and vast. Bree's work exudes melancholic emotion and ethereal femininity, painting the surfaces of Mary's world in the vibrating style of stop-motion animation, dappled with sparkling light and computer-generated surfaces so convincing it feels like you could pose the model with your own hands. O'Donnell sat down with us to talk a bit about her process creating textures and her life's work making magic real.
Inside NYC-based artist Mark Dorf's project Late Pastoral, the ecological world is trapped in a rear-illuminated print. It's real - but something is off, it's been digitally altered, data-noise clutters images of glowing plant life. Shaped by the pervasive influence of technology, design and the rhythms of digital connectivity, even nature becomes at one with the unreal. Non-human nature is the main thesis of Mark's wide-spanning digital art works, offering reflections on our digital age.
While Hopkina, who is based in New York and Massachusetts, has been included in many local group exhibitions and screenings, Basso dives deep into the artist's work with six films created over a nine-year period. As a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indian, Hopkina's use of poetry and atmospheric aesthetics is not only visually compelling, but mines the edges of linguistic, visual, and cultural legibility.