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Adalbert is a forum for me, to post ephemera, photography, poetry, occasional travel notes, and various spontaneous motions. Cover photo: Parsonage where my great-grandfather spent his early years. Taken near Liegnitz, Silesia, ca. 1870. The "xothique" portion of the web address is a nod to Clark Ashton Smith's fictional continent of Zothique.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Assembled Films

The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), Rain (1929), Apocalypse Pooh (1987)









The past couple weeks I watched these three films, all new to me.  The first and third are examples of found film (Apocalypse Pooh includes found audio as well);  all are examples of film montage.  Esfir Shub 's The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty requires some patience but creates a dialectic momentum as it proceeds.  For me the artifact film clips produce fascination with a vanished past more than they work as propaganda.  This version is subtitled in English and Esperanto (Esperanto, as if it weren't already arcane enough).  It's also completely silent, so I opened up a track of Tchaikovsky's greatest hits as accompaniment, which serves the movie well (although the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy didn't work as a soundtrack for WWI, had to jump to another piece).   Joris Iven's and Mannus Franken's Rain conjures fleeting moods and tones in a prewar Amsterdam. Todd Graham's  Apocalypse Pooh is a funny and well-crafted mashup.





2 comments:

  1. Apocalypse Pooh is fun and put together well.
    Rain is marvellous, a real piece of art. Very beautiful...mesmerising, thanks for the introduction. I will seek out further work by them

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  2. Ray, I really like some of the shots in Rain toward the end, with reflections rippling in water and rain-covered windows. I agree that it's mesmerising.

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