Haphazard travels of Sirman Deville across the Isles

[niminy-piminy]

hopefully one day, "Hand of Glory" gains the upper hand over Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_of_Glory

It must be cut from the body of a criminal on the gibbet; pickled in salt, and the urine of man, woman, dog, horse and mare; smoked with herbs and hay for a month; hung on an oak tree for three nights running, then laid at a crossroads, then hung on a church door for one night while the maker keeps watch in the porch-"and if it be that no fear hath driven you forth from the porch ... then the hand be true won, and it be yours"

[niminy-piminy]

1954 poll No15:
THURSDAY'S CHILDREN (Lindsay Anderson, Guy Brenton)

https://youtu.be/QCtfBeCs7XA

[niminy-piminy]

2007 poll No9:
A VERY BRITISH APOCALYPSE (Ned Parker)

You see, I had quite an amazing experience one Saturday morning, while i was washing up some dishes.
I heard a voice, quite definitely out of this world, saying to me, "Prepare yourself! You are to become the voice of the Interplanetary Parliament."

unfortunately, this flick was too reasonable and thus besides making me read a few entries in the dilettante encyclopedia (i.e. "Aetherius Society", "The Family International", or "Flirty Fishing"), it was not a very fruitful way of spending my last days before the ultimate universal deadline.

[niminy-piminy]

JIDFF 2021:
ULTRAMARINE (Marina Hendrychová, 2021)

https://www.ji-hlava.com/filmy/ultramarine

The audio-visual poem tells the story of the Scottish mythological figure - the selkie - driven from the depths of the ocean to land, from which she longs to return and merge once again with the sea. The juxtaposition of simple 2D animation, a digitally generated 3D world, an ambient soundtrack, and a mysterious voice-over creates an oppressive experience with a philosophical overlay dealing with the loss of identity and the impossibility of returning to nature.

[niminy-piminy]

1962 poll No13:
THE FLYING MAN (George Dunning)

story of a dandy who undresses and flies.
when a commoner (with a pet dog) tries the same (renouncing only his hat), he fails (and out of cheer frustration kicks his pet dog as a "happy end").

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x701eq

[niminy-piminy]

1986 pol No4:
LOOKING FOR THE MOON (Moira Sweeney) ... some databases 1987, other 1986, final credits 1986!

https://twitter.com/jirinvk/status/1467 ... 35493?s=20

besides watching LOOKING FOR THE MOON (for the poll),
watched also HIDE AND SEEK (1987) and IMAGINARY (1989, available online https://vimeo.com/91641938 ).

https://twitter.com/jirinvk/status/1467 ... 04256?s=20

https://twitter.com/jirinvk/status/1467 ... 30341?s=20

on MS's website, one can also find her photographs.
f.e. An Ukiyo-e inspired Meditation on Tree Life in the French Pyrenees (2008) http://www.moirasweeney.com/photography ... eatha.html

Moira Sweeney is a filmmaker, broadcaster, photographer and educator. Her films blend observational and poetic modes of storytelling

in her (early) experimental films (from the late 1980s) prevails (as far as i could see) "poetic mode", later (seems like) she turned more towards "observational" (while making documentaries for TV).

[rischka]

wonderful tree-life photos ♥

[sally]

yeah i never heard of her before!

[niminy-piminy]

photos are truly cool!

i like especially this one ↓
i am fond of a "rolling land" (not sure if it is a proper English phrase for this) that offers multiple horizons.
Bohemian-Moravian Highlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian- ... _Highlands are a bit like this — but far less spectacular than the landscape on the pic.

It forms a big region of rolling hills and low mountains ... whose lowlands are relatively densely settled ... The softly, rounded summits offer beautiful and stunning panoramic views of the surrounding countryside

also like this.


and this type of framing of landscape views — with the tree branches' lacework in the forefront (as the first plane).


coincidentally, i became more sensitive to this type of framing during my 2019 haphazard visit on the Isles.
because i visited (in Dulwich Picture Gallery) an exhibition of Norwegian neo-romantic symbolist landscape painter Harald Sohlberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Sohlberg
https://fika-online.com/2019/06/03/nati ... -sohlberg/
https://norwegianarts.org.uk/harald-soh ... -treasure/
(btw. maybe Gloede can enlighten us a bit about Harald Sohlberg! (if he notices this post.) i would be quite curious to hear to what degree Norwegians are still passionate about him — i was highly impressed!)

https://youtu.be/WkUC_r5dt_I

(based on what i saw at the exhibition) HS was a master in framing the landscape views by trees (standing in the forefront) and he was a true virtuoso in depicting tree branches' lacework.

phone snapshots i did on the exhibition ↓





and phone snapshots i did after the exhibition — when i exercised the aforementioned framing.

[niminy-piminy]

1986 poll No13:
BLOOD SKY (Michael Mazière)

https://youtu.be/Uhs6BCT6J7U?t=14

[niminy-piminy]

watched this some weeks ago already (for the previous poll).
had to save some pics.

https://twitter.com/jirinvk/status/1504 ... nQfE9JnH3Q

[sally]

1946 VIEWING

two uk road safety films

1st one is completely unorthodox cutesy-wootsy idiotic stop-motion aimed at children

Trouble in Toytown



2nd one is an absolutely classic terrifying public information film aimed at adults that offers no hope or explanation. feel so patriotic.

The Three Children

letterboxd reviews:

Drawing attention to the issue of road safety by portraying three kids meeting a sinister man and agreeing to go to the Shadowlands. Never change, British public information films.

Christ, that was bleak. A public information film in which 3 small children meet Death. About road safety, except it’s set away from the road, crossing the road isn’t mentioned and Death looks like a deeply creepy paedophile.

[sally]

some more 1946 parasympathetic response-shots

sheffield and bradford

[sally]

first watch of 1984

new poet laureate (news conference in a pub)

ted hughes! sexy sexy bastard

[niminy-piminy]

1984 poll:
SPIRIT MATTERS (Peter Rose)

SPIRIT MATTERS is a silent monologue on the simultaneous perception of space and time. The film was constructed without a camera by writing directly on clear celluloid, and then "translated" by refilming the resulting strips on a light table so that they appear as "subtitles" beneath the original inscription. The film functions as both process and object-an interactive experiment in reading, writing, and seeing.

https://vimeo.com/328429488

[niminy-piminy]

1995 poll (rewatch):

BACKCOMB (Sarah Pucill)

In Backcomb the demonic is unleashed on domestic space. It takes the form of two of femininity’s mildest tokens, hair and embroidery, that serve here in the creation of a sexualised surrealist experience. Within the claustrophobic space of a table-lay, a forceful and erectile mass of hair comes alive and slithers across its surface. The hair probes into vessels and punches through the cloth till finally order overturns and all smashes to the ground.

https://vimeo.com/21438491

[niminy-piminy]

1995 poll:
JAUNT (Andrew Kötting)

Developed and reduced from the treatment that I had already written for GALLIVANT (THE PILOT), this is a ‘psychogeographical’ derive conducted along the high ways, by ways and waterways of the River Thames. It begins at Southend-on-Sea and ends up by the Houses of Parliament next to Westminster Bridge.



https://vimeo.com/55220005

[sally]

well now, this sounds perfect!

[sally]

reminding myself i need to read this:

In his 1589 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Greene fictionalizes the career of the infamous medieval Franciscan (and precursor to a modern scientist) Roger Bacon and his attempts to build a massive, divinatory, conscious bronze head.

https://twitter.com/PublicDomainRev/sta ... 3210729475

[sally]

https://youtu.be/TnloFHin-K0

[sally]

i don't know what the fuck this is, apparently a british science journal that can commune with the dead, and well, the dead have some very specific interests

https://www.primescholars.com/archive/i ... -2022.html

[niminy-piminy]

WITHNAIL & I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)

Two out-of-work actors spend their days drifting between their squalid flat, the unemployment office and the pub.


When they take a holiday “by mistake”, they encounter the unpleasant side of the English countryside:
tedium, terrifying locals, and torrential rain.

BUT there is no bad weather only inappropriate clothing!
Hang out the stars in Indiana
Up in the sky of midnight blue
Hang out the stars in Indiana
To light my way back home to you
Have every robin sing a love song
A melody just meant for two
For in my heart there'll be a love song
A song I long to sing to you
How could I find the things I sought for?
No wonder they were all denied!
The very happiness I fought for
Was right bang by your side!
So wait for me in Indiana
And when the long, long day is through
Hang out the stars in Indiana
To light my way back home to you

https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3773829/
In my opinion, this is a pointless movie. I just don't get it. Am I missing something? I see other IMDb users are giving it favorable reviews.
I watched this on DVD at a weekly "movie night" gathering. Not one viewer laughed throughout this entire alleged comedy.
Being an American and unaccustomed to English accents, we had so much difficulty understanding the dialog, we had to turn on the closed captioning. Even that did not help. Could someone please explain the appeal of this film? I am baffled.

[rischka]

Could someone please explain the appeal of this film? I am baffled.

i feel this american person's pain

[sally]

classic english movie, innit.

[greennui]

That is an unfortunate political decision. Reflecting these times.

[niminy-piminy]

1903 poll:

THE CHEESE MITES (F. Martin Duncan, 1903)
→ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0828001/

https://youtu.be/wR2DystgByQ

BEWARE!
not to be mistaken with THE UNCLEAN WORLD (Percy Stow, 1903)
→ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1056139/

https://traumundexzess.com/2018/06/30/s ... icroscope/

“Cheese Mites was the sensation of the first public programme of scientific films in Britain shown at the Alhambra Music Hall in Leicester Square, London, in August 1903. Its claim to being scientific lay in its being shot through a microscope, revealing to a lay audience sights that would normally only have been available to owners of microscopes. The programme, billed as ‘The Unseen World’, also included the microcinematographic studies The Frog, His Webbed Foot, The Circulation of his Blood; The Fresh Water Hydra; and The Circulation of the Protoplasm of the Canadian Waterweed. (…)
But although promoted as scientific, these were not the products of the elite university laboratory-based science. Francis Martin Duncan, the ‘scientist’ behind the films, was an enthusiastic amateur natural historian who was making a living by taking still photographs through microscopes and publishing manuals and articles on the technique needed to do so.
Cheese mites as a species were very familiar to microscopists, frequently being included in beginners’ kits as first subjects to be examined when the instrument was brought home. Percy Smith, who made Mitey Atoms (Secrets of Nature, 1930), a later film on the same subject, joked that a father buying a microscope could defray the cost by putting his family off their dinner. Charles Urban, the entrepreneur behind ‘The Unseen World’, chose to emphasise the revulsion factor by adding shots of a man so revolted by studying his Stilton lunch that he threw it away. Cheese Mites was such a sensation that it led to the production of a spoof; Percy Stow and Cecil Hepworth‘s The Unclean World (1903), which featured clockwork bugs.”

[sally]

just idle sunday browsing and discovered a filmmaker (from yorkshire) who isn't even on imdb, just relegated to 'amateur film' section of archives and if this one short is anything to go by, he should really have more presence than that. (he's on mubi at least)

once described by Glenda Jackson as, “the Ken Russell of the amateur film world.”

Bill Davison started making films in his teens with his father’s 8mm camera, before receiving his own higher spec Bolex 8mm camera on his 21st birthday. Working all his life in local government finance, Bill made a series of award winning films, starting with Restless Sunday, and including The Terross Happening (1968), The Void (1970), Eclipse (1972), Zenith (1973), In God's Name (1974) and Sanctum (1975).

Bill’s later films often proved to be too innovative for other amateur filmmakers of an older generation: his 1975 ‘Sanctum’ was picketed.

restless sunday - bill davison (1966)

This is a film by Bill Davison of a young man wandering around the derelict areas of inner-city Leeds, passing billboards with Christian messages, before eventually returning to his flat. As he does so he reflects, through an inner monologue, on the boredom of Sundays and his disillusionment with religion. The film won the IAC best film of 1967.

familiar sights to me! (apart from the long demolished quarry hill flats, very cool to see) this is the most yorkshire version of the 'free cinema' movement i could possibly imagine a little miserable gem of a film.

view here: https://www.yfanefa.com/record/11189

[sally]

the watchers - richard foster (1969)

BFI produced short about crazy girl and UFOs in todmorden (nextdoor to hebden) so i wandered over in an approximate direction before watching the film. watching squared