Re: perfect films

From: Scott Stark (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Jul 29 2008 - 08:39:04 PDT


At 07:51 PM 07/28/2008 -0400, Tom B Whiteside wrote:
>This has been a good thread. My vote for the most perfect perfect film
>goes to the eponymous, "Perfect Film" by Ken Jacobs. It is truly amazing -
>not only for the story of its existence (cool enough), but what it is on
>screen. Unsettling, profound, real.

One thing that's particularly fascinating about that film is that, as I
understand it, it was a reel of outtakes, spliced together by some editor
as a convenience without any particular structure in mind. So what we're
seeing becomes an inadvertent record of what was not shown, which in many
ways reveals more than the public version probably did. I think that's part
of the irony of Ken's title.

I remember Jeanne Liotta showing a Hollis Frampton ready-made in San
Francisco a few years ago, with a man and woman tending to a small produce
garden. It was beautiful, simple, and has stuck in my mind since then.
Don't recall the title though.

Some long-time frameworkers may remember a discussion I started back in the
mid-90s (yes, frameworks is going on 13 years old!) about a group of
amateur films by a guy named Fred McLeod who made a charming little 16mm
opus about his golf swing. The Orgone Cinema folks were showing it as an
art film. There was an interesting discussion about artistic intentionality
and transplanting things from their original context. The discussion's no
longer in the archive but digest versions of all archives are available on
request from the site (http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/).

Scott

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