John Menick | Archive for August, 2006

Since Universal Studios gave The Last Movie a limited, two-week-long theatrical run, and it is almost never shown by revival houses since, I suspect most American fans of Hopper’s Godardian freak-out have, like me, only seen the buried film on low-quality VHS tapes. The movie’s rarity has unintentionally helped its reputation a bit, contributing in no small way to its cultish charm. If Easy Rider very visibly summed up the 1960s, The Last Movie anticipated the 70s: defeated, washed-up, apocalyptic, and like most of the decade’s counterculture, driven underground.

J. Hoberman recounts a little of the common lore surrounding The Last Movies‘ disastrous release in his book, The Dream Life:

Universal smelled catastrophe. A test screening at the University of Iowa was inauspicious. When Hopper took the stage after the movie, the audience hurled garbage and abuse…. A teenage girl working the popcorn concession asked him if he’d made this movie. When Hopper answered in the affirmative, she busted him in the nose.

After an award at Venice, and a huge opening day in New York, the film tanked, and in two weeks, disappeared. The moral of the story, as every documentary, film book, and lecturer has pointed out, was that Hopper went too far. Not only did mainstream America reject the film (a given), but counterculture did too. Audiences were expected Easy Rider II and got served the world’s worst acid trip.

In an interview with Time Out New York on the occasion of a recent screening at Anthology, Hopper challenges that a bit:

It’s never really gotten a proper release, right?

[Studio head Lew] Wasserman released it for two weeks in New York, two weeks in Los Angeles and three days in San Francisco and shelved it. And it played to full houses. Honestly, I don’t know how it would have done. Because, you know, it was very way-out for its time. But I saw recently in Amsterdam—they gave me a retrospective in 2000—and they were laughing and really getting it. Maybe with MTV and all the things we have now, it’s a little easier to take than it was in 1971.

More from Hoberman.

From the FAQ:

Jamais vu is a temporary sensation of unfamiliarity – it may include a sensation that something is new to you even though you’ve known it for a long time, it may include feelings of unreality, novelty or merely a lack of fluency. By far the commonest example is not knowing how to spell a very familiar word, or reading a word which you know very well, but finding it looks strange or it has lost its meaning (this is called word alienation). But other examples are common – getting very briefly lost in a very familiar place, a loved one looking different or like a stranger, losing your way in a very familiiar musical piece if you’re a musician, or forgetting what pedal does what when you’re driving.

My past three months have been mostly consumed with finishing a new video for a show at the CCA Wattis in San Francisco called The Prophets of Deceit. The group exhibition, opening September 12, is curated by Magali Arriola, and is comprised of work having to do with the apocalypse. (Magali was one of the three curators behind The Backroom, a research-based gallery I participated in a few months ago.) My contribution to the show, a video essay titled The Secret Life of Things, concerns “last person on earth” films, a sci-fi sub-genre in which a person wakes up to find he or she is the last person alive in a given city. These kinds of movies have all sorts of variations, including zombie films, anti-nuclear films, amnesiac films, vampire films, etc. The project comes out of a blog entry I wrote several months ago having to do with René Clair’s 1924 silent short, Paris qui dort, which is probably the first naive prototype for the genre. (I see now that the title says “Part I,” I guess the video is part II. ) Right now I’m finishing up the final picture edit and moving on to mixing the sound. More updates in the next few weeks.

This morning while researching ham radio Web sites I happened across ClandestineRadio.com…

…the only online portal dedicated to the study of clandestine and subversive radio – a field where politics, diplomacy, espionage and broadcast media collide. Clandestine broadcasting is a highly effective weapon in the arsenal of psychological warfare, which, when analyzed, can assist observers to cut through the fog of war and ascertain the strength and capabilities of opposition groups as well as actual on-the-ground military strategies. For the casual Web surfer this site may seem exotic and, at times, conspiratorial. Regular and “professional” users, however, will find an intelligence bonanza.

I can’t wait until they get their “Sound Library” up and running.

Something to do this Labor Day weekend. From Art in General:

Help launch the eteam’s departing flight from a historic and fully operational, but dormant airfield in Brooklyn. Play a role in an eteam film- be the passenger, the pilot, the engine, or the fuselage of a plane as it exits from the gates of historic Hanger B. Learn the history of Floyd Bennett Field, New York’s first airport and now a Gateway National Recreation Area by participating in a guided tour by Linc Hallowell, a historian and park ranger of the National Park Service, who will introduce you to the airfield’s peek moments, its decline, and the process of renovation that is underway. The afternoon winds down with a BBQ.

Admission fees:
$10 (includes tour, transportation not provided)
$20 Art in General members (tour and transportation on shuttle bus from AiG to FBF)
$25 (tour and transportation on shuttle bus from AiG to FBF)

Shuttle departs from Art in General, 1:00pm

RSVP to 212.219.0473 x29 or anthony AT artingeneral DOT org

Organized by Art in General in collaboration with Floyd Bennett Field

This program is presented in conjunction with:International Airport Montello

One of four.

Greencine has just published another primer, this time on Mockumentaries. Worth a look, although I wish it included William Greaves Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.

Blogger and architect Raed Jarrar was flying to California through JFK wearing an Artists Against the War t-shirt that said “We will not be silent” in both Arabic and English. JetBlue’ response?

One of the two men who approached me first, Inspector Harris, asked for my id card and boarding pass. I gave him my boarding pass and driver’s license. He said “people are feeling offended because of your t-shirt”. I looked at my t-shirt: I was wearing my shirt which states in both Arabic and English “we will not be silent”. You can take a look at it in this picture taken during our Jordan meetings with Iraqi MPs. I said “I am very sorry if I offended anyone, I didnt know that this t-shirt will be offensive”. He asked me if I had any other T-shirts to put on, and I told him that I had checked in all of my bags and I asked him “why do you want me to take off my t-shirt? Isn’t it my constitutional right to express myself in this way?” The second man in a greenish suit interfered and said “people here in the US don’t understand these things about constitutional rights”. So I answered him “I live in the US, and I understand it is my right to wear this t-shirt”.

More from Raed Jarrar and Democracy Now.

New York magazine notes the 83-year-young auteur’s move (back?) to Greenpoint, and onto your iPod:

For Apple’s video iPod, he’ll be filming 365 short videos and releasing one a day, beginning September 15. Plus, he’ll be curating a downloadable series of classic shorts by experimental filmmakers and videos by the likes of Martin Scorsese, John Waters, Jim Jarmusch, and Abel Ferrara. “Life is beautifully, beautifully busy.”

More at http://www.jonasmekas.com/.

It’s quite striking that when workers are interviewed… these people are given a brief 15 seconds when they haven’t opened their mouths all year. We give them 15 seconds or even three minutes to speak, “What do you think of this strike?” … Who can answer when he’s had his mouth sewn shut?