John Menick | Archive for September, 2006

My video The Disappearance ends with a passage discussing how factory locations are often used as the setting for the closing scenes of sci-fi films and thrillers. Most of the photographs in this portion of the video are of the coal mine in Essen, a site I learned about for the first time while researching the piece, and since then have seen in several other books and Web sites concerning the history of factory architecture and film.

Over at David Byrne’s blog (yes the David Byrne) there is an in-depth entry on the Essen site. Byrne scouted it for a film he was working on in the late 80s, and returned there recently for a concert. The site is the location for Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s “Palace of Projects” (pictured).

Also related to my video is Byrne’s discussion of the Essen site as a place where “two world wars were ‘made,’” making it an obvious target for allied bombing. Despite the assault, the factory recovered and operated until in the mid-1980s. And then?

Thomas W. tells us that the Chinese wanted to buy this entire site when it closed — their own coalfields are not entirely depleted — not just yet — so they can actually reanimate this creature. As this Essen colliery/cokery was the last one in the area to close the local government hesitated approving the sale, and decided instead that their glorious industrial past should be remembered, memorialized rather than obliterated and forgotten, so they declined that particular offer. They call them industruialkulture monuments. Cathedrals of Industry. Other nearby sites had been sold in entirety to the Chinese — in Dortmund a similar site was completely dismantled and shipped to China. Hundreds of workers were shipped in, housed in tents on site, meals and facilities provided, as they took the beasts apart. How did they do it? We gaze at the tangle of pipes around us, the huge metal machines that dwarf human scale. How could anyone keep track of the parts? Where would you begin? The scale is like ants taking a car apart and then reassembling it — and hoping it works.

JG Ballard interviewed about his new novel Kingdom Come:

“Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There’s a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?” asks Ballard. In the past he has predicted a future where boredom will be interrupted by violent, unpredictable acts. “Consumerism does have certain affinities with fascism,” he argues. “It’s a way of voting not at the ballet box but at the cash counter… The one civic activity we take part in is shopping, particularly in big malls. These are ceremonies of mass affirmation.”

Sadly, Anthony Kaufman reports that RES magazine, 10-year champion of alternative digital cinema, will stop print publication. His update hints “that the magazine isn’t exactly dead; it’s just dead in its current form.” Will RES go digital too?

If you don’t have four hours for Ric Burns, try a thousand words of Cronenberg.

Apple and Amazon will open their video download services this month, but the British Film Institute has done something better. The BBC reports:

Short films by Stephen Frears, the late John Schlesinger and brothers Tony and Ridley Scott can now be downloaded from the British Film Institute’s website.

The initiative allows users to watch rarely shown early works from some of Britain’s leading film-makers.

Six features are also available, among them 1974′s Pressure – regarded as one of Britain’s first black feature films.

There are 230,000 films and 675,000 TV programmes in the BFI archive. Download costs range from £5 to £12.50.

It appears that the service is only available to viewers in the UK, but as US World Cup fans know, a proxy server can probably fix that.

Via those brilliant archaeologists of the arcane over at WFMU. The Mr. T fights for Jesus trailer is a must.

The Times has a favorable review of David Friend’s recent study of the photography of September 11th, Watching the World Change. Besides being a well-written and impressively researched study of the images surrounding the event, I was happy to see that Friend foregrounds Wolfgang Staehle’s work, which I wrote about several years ago for Parachute magazine. Friend’s book is probably the first important study of 9/11 photography, and is a must for anyone interested in a critical and historical look at that day.

(I haven’t gotten a chance to listen to the audio interview posted with the review.)

Open Democracy has a short essay by Jason Orton about his photos taken in the abandoned underground UK bunker, Turnstile. Interestingly called a “cold war city” by the photographer, Turnstile was to server as a gigantic safe room for the UK government in the event of a nuclear war. (Via Subtopia.)