Re-Contextualized

+ re-mixed for your reading pleasure:

collage by Patrick Kennelly

Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen is the beginning and end of circle that connects this cinematic rendering of the epic (and since "Nazi-ized") German myth with Achim Freyer's own Gesatheumneskraht-ready production of Wagner's operatic remake.  The standoff between the Nibelungen's and the Huns was transmuted to feudal Japan by Akira Kurosawa as the climax for a feudal pageant of Shakepseare's King Lear.  The Kurosawa homages and direct lifts of George Lucas via his Star Wars films is well-documented.  In his LA Opera commission, Freyer paid homage to Lucas and his ILM (who were originally commissioned for a sci-fi heavy production) with his obscure, hypnotic transference of myth both ancient, future, and the magical. 

Art really only exists as a re-contextualization.  Either by investigating, illuminating, condensing, or expanding does it find its ground.  Origins existed to be obscured - Only then can they truly see the light of day.

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The Tumblr blog, Movie Barcode compresses every frame of a film into a single image.

Rear Window

Speed Racer

As these two examples testify, this work bridges the supposed divide which popular belief would set between the world of visual art and the cinema.  The movie-going experience is best taken in fragments.  Narrative tableux set in visual motion, we overlook the individual components which give it life.  There is poetry in it all _ whether in the form of a stanza or a lyric series.  Speed Racer is an example of this, pulsing with the "aliveness" missing from the Wachowski's canonical (at least in the pop sense) Matrix triptych.

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And then there's this wonderful occurence which took place a few weeks back.  For some unfathomable reason Duran Duran decided to hire David Lynch to direct a Los Angeles concert for live broadcast via the VEVO service.  What at first seems another hipster gimmick (as when The Arcade Fire tapped Terry Gilliam to direct the live broadcast of their Madison Square Garden concert) falls down the rabbit hole into an obscene backwards absurd landscape.  This "Stranger in a Strange Land" scenario ends up being fairly logical on a second pass.  The idea of a dinosaur attempting to re-invent itself to increasingly desperate lengths at the mercy of an artist constantly in a trickster form of de-evolution evolution, is the type of relevance no artist branding firm could ever even begin to conceptualize.  The smoky layers of superimposition upon superimposition conjures the Miami Vice dream recall better than album producer Mark Ronson's ineffective vintage star worship.  There's some elegant cool breeze on the new album, but it's 90% due to the sexiest voice of the 80s.  Simon Le Bon's croon IS the pink suit.

Here's Kelis voiced by a chorus of groundhogs.

Lynch's artistic voice is one perpetually in a state of "re-contextualization," so this old school YouTube homage is apropos.