Streetwise
Martha Colburn has posted two clips of remarkable Super 8 footage of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, with an assist from Tom Carter’s soaring guitar. Colburn’s sharp eye for iconography and pageantry, readily apparent in her animations, is a valuable asset in framing the march and its attendant police presence. These brief clips are very much in the midst of action, but that description fails the camera’s electricity: the jolt of waking to a precipitous use of public space, one in which political speech registers as an external stimulus. The Super 8 camera is a practical tool to this ends, not nostalgic in the least.
They make for a fascinating comparison with the grave still lives of individual street demonstrators posted by “sandor krasna” (one of Chris Marker’s signatures) a couple of years back.
On a not completely unrelated note, San Francisco Cinematheque has launched a blog. I have a piece of writing up about a few of the films on tonight’s program at ATA, “Radical Adults Lick God Head Style: New Weird Urbanism and the Rapture of Decay.”
