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Old 08-11-2006, 04:33 PM
pryor15 pryor15 is offline
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Default Re: 5 things that may or may not be about avant-garde cinema

[ QUOTE ]
(Excellent piece, sir.)

Has anyone actually sat through an Andy Warhol film such as "Empire"? That's a static shot of the Empire State building lasting some 4 hours, which I understand is edited end to start, in order to last twice that. Has anyone seen it?

I don't suppose anyone actually has. Neither have I. But not so fast. Have we not watched a reality show where we watch other people sitting around "doing nothing"? Or a live immobile camera shot from the scene of a crime "as it happens"? A bank robbery is televised and we are glued watching a white blob in a dark background for two hours, because it's the bank's besieged entrance. I'm saying Warhol's films made a lot of what followed in our visual universe, not in the sense that Warhol created techniques which were copied, but that he, genius that he was, foresaw the zeitgeist of mass consumerism and mass culture and threw it to us before its time as some kind of sardonic flash-forward.

That's being there first. Avant garde.

Mickey Brausch

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i saw part of "Empire", but i didn't really care to see much more.

an interesting play on the whole bank robbery footage was Andrew Horbal's entry where he talks about a NCAA tourney game where they zoom in on a guy's foot and how that relates to the famous "back, and to the left" line in "JFK"

there's a ton of interesting stuff out there.
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