Frankly, have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?

Thanks to Hungry Wilcox, I now own a copy of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, which might be the most amazing film I have ever seen.

The film, unlike any other film I've seen, is able to capture the associative intentionality of a lyric poem. It skips from scene to scene, continent to continent via a logic derived from the emotional & relational as much as the intellectual. The image, however, is the concrete thing. The voiceover, which is a kind of meandering essay, attempts to run guidance for the images, but does not define them. (you can read the entire voice over text here) It only attempts to make clear the importance of them. The images are not correlate to the emotional experience, they are the experience.

Here's the intro to the film, in French.

But here's another thing. The Predator wrote this poem with a Spicer quote for a title, apparently as a response to Marker's film. And it was reading this poem of his that first wowed me about his work. I'd really liked The Frequencies, but when I read this I was all "oh... oh... damn..."

And here's another thing. A drawing of a bat on a couch, drawn by Elisabeth:



And another thing. Barbasol:



Untitled from natenatenate and Vimeo.

And another thing. This restaurant, suspiciously close to where I used to live, is run by people with the surname Svalina.