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Excellent drama on Stephen Hawking, starring Benedict Cumberbatch

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Before he struck mass market appeal as Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch proved his exceptional talents as Stephen Hawking in this classy BBC film from 2004. Written by Peter Moffatt, and directed by Philip Martin, Hawking tells the story of the scientist’s early years at university, examining his relationships, his work and the onset of the motor neurone disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Cumberbatch is wonderfully supported by John Sessions, Lisa Dillon and Peter Firth as a grumpy Sir Fred Hoyle, the renowned scientist and author of the classic sci-fi work The Black Cloud.
 

 
More Hawking, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.02.2011
05:39 pm
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Back to the future: Douglas Adams’s ‘Hyperland’

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In 1990, Douglas Adams wrote and presented a “fantasy documentary” called Hyperland for the BBC. In it Adams dreamt of a future where he would be able “to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest.” Adams throws away his TV and is met by:

[a] software agent, Tom (played by Tom Baker), [who] guides Douglas around a multimedia information landscape, examining (then) cuttting-edge research by the SF Multimedia Lab and NASA Ames research center, and encountering hypermedia visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. Looking back now, it’s interesting to see how much he got right and how much he didn’t: these days, no one’s heard of the SF Multimedia Lab, and his super-high-tech portrayal of VR in 2005 could be outdone by a modern PC with a 3D card. However, these are just minor niggles when you consider how much more popular the technologies in question have become than anyone could have predicted - for while Douglas was creating Hyperland, a student at CERN in Switzerland was working on a little hypertext project he called the World Wide Web…

Hyperland is an excellent film - prescient, fascinating and greatly entertaining.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.25.2011
07:29 pm
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The Transformation of Genesis P-Orridge

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A moving and intimate short film portrait of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: artist, musician, pandrogyne, by Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma.

“Because Genesis and Jaye were so obsessed with each other, they wanted to literally become each other. Plastic surgery seemed like the best way to accomplish this goal, but once Jaye passed on, their grand project was left unfinished. Still, Genesis’s body tells the tale of a love story that transcends gender and the limits of human flesh.”

 

 
Previously on DM

New QA with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge


Thee Psychick Bible: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge


 
With thanks to Robert Conroy
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.23.2011
07:46 pm
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Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film ‘La Cravate’

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Believed lost for fifty years, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film, La Cravate (aka Severed Heads) was found in an attic in Germany in 2006, and released on DVD in 2007. Adapted from Thomas Mann’s short story, “The Transposed Heads - A Legend of India in Paris”, La Cravate was made between 1953 and 1957 and starred Denise Brossot, Rolande Polya, Raymond Devos, Saul Gilbert and Jodorowsky.

The film tells of a young man’s desire to win the love of a woman. To do this, he visits a store which allows customers to switch their heads, and thus their personalities. The young man trades in his head for a variety of different models, and while his body continues to woo the woman of his dreams, the store’s proprietor, a young woman, takes a fancy to the man’s original head and takes it home. The moral is never to lose your head over unrequited love, but find someone who loves you as you are. It’s bizarre, amusing and charming, and an impressive first film.
 

 
 
Previously on DM
Exclusive Clip of Alejandro Jodorowsky for Dangerous MInds Readers
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Shamanic Funnies
 
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.13.2011
09:30 am
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John Butler’s superb animation ‘T.R.I.A.G.E.’

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John Butler’s superb latest animation T.R.I.A.G.E. is a speculative tale showing how:

A sick and failing area is swiftly restored to sound financial health

T.R.A.G.E. is an acronym for

Target
Respond
Identify
Administer
Globalize
Exit

Sound familiar?

Of course, triage is “the process of determining the priority of patients’ treatments based on the severity of their condition.” With this in mind, any similarities between actual events is purely intentional.
 

 
Bonus animations by John Butler ‘Unmanned’ and ‘Sub Optimal’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.19.2011
07:10 pm
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David Mach’s Incredible Sculptures
12.29.2010
06:36 pm
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I met the artist David Mach in 1995, when he was building an installation out of newspapers called Whirl, at the Summerlee Museum, in Coatbridge, Scotland. We met for a short documentary I was making about his work, and spent the day filming him as he ripped up old copies of the Daily Record and tiered them into undulating sweeps that slowly filled out the space. It was incredible to watch and the resulting work was breath-taking.

Mach’s always had that ability to make something beautiful out of the mundane - sculptures from matchsticks (Elvis), coat-hangers (Gorilla), magazines. Being a sculptor informs all Mach does, as he once said:

“Being a sculptor leads everything I do. Every project I take on starts from that point. I believe that an artist must be an ideasmonger responding to all kinds of physical location, social and political environments, to materials, to processes, to timescales and budgets. I also believe that sculpture just about encompasses everything - a painting can be a sculpture, a TV ad can be a sculpture, a dance, a performance, a film, a video - all of thse kinds of art and many more can be sculpture.

When I have ideas I want to make them, and not just some of them, but all of them. As a result of that my sculpture covers a multitude of sins. I like to work in as many different materials as possible. It’s no understatement to say I am a materials junkie - jumping from highly-painted realistic cast fibreglass pieces to sculpture with coathangers, to a thatched barn roof laced with fibre-optics to designs for camera obscures (or at least the buildings to house them) and layouts for parks.”

It was 1983 when he first came to national prominence with Polaris, a submarine constructed out of 6,000 tires, built on the South Bank of the River Thames, at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

Polaris proved highly controversial with some, as Mach described the work as a protest against the nuclear arms race, which was then a hot-love-in between Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan. It also led certain journalists, who really should have known better, feigning outrage and getting paid to write tedious column inches about “What is Art?”  Things reaced a tragic height, when one disgruntled (though arguably mentally ill) individual, decided to destroy Mach’s sculpture by setting fire to it. Unfortunately, he set fire to himself and later died in hospital.

In 2008, Mach reconstructed Polaris as part of his Size Doesn’t Matter show in Haarlem, Holland. This short film follows Mach through the construction process to the finished work.
 

 
Bonus pix, clips and interview with David Mach, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.29.2010
06:36 pm
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