50 Greatest Trailers of All Time

IFC (the Independent Film Channel) posted their list of the 50 greatest movie trailers of all time. Interestingly, the top three are all horror films: Alien, Psycho, Cloverfield (number four is Miracle on 34th Street). Perhaps horror films, where the excitement comes from the unknown and the implied, are particularly suited to the short, trailer format.

The list's compilers seem to like meta-trailers (where the trailer talks about the movie as a movie)... Psycho, Miracle on 34th Street, The Comedian (#5 in the list), Citizen Kane (#6) are all self-referencing trailers. I'm surprised that This Is Spinal Tap's teaser didn't make the cut:



(There is another, longer version of the teaser that seems geared towards movie theater operators).


Alien's trailer:



IFC says about Alien's trailer:

Masterfully cut and artful to boot, the first glimpse of Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-horror classic features not a single word of dialogue and begins in abstract: a ride through a star field, a hover above some sort of moon rock, blocky shapes that slowly materialize into the letters of the title, craggy landscape traversed with a macro lens before pulling back to clarify what lies on that cratered surface -- the egg of an alien life form. It cracks open, releasing an ill-omened white light and the high-pitched alarm (an animalistic squeal?) that unnerves throughout the rest of the trailer.

Astronauts tiptoe into an extraterrestrial ship, crosscut with Sigourney Weaver inexplicably running through corridors, with confounding/enticing images flashing almost subliminally in between (a space crew awakening from hyper-sleep, Harry Dean Stanton's bewildered close-up) before all hell breaks loose (an obscured Ian Holm spurting milky blood, a cat hissing, a never-before-seen "face hugger" in a frenzy). From above the planet, an onscreen title ultimately seals the deal, seeming all the more foreboding for the vaccuum of diegetic sound that came before it: "In space, no one can hear you scream." It's one of the most famous taglines of all time, though I'm quite partial to the far less effective "Alien3" slogan that ambiguously referenced either a breeding alien or Weaver's Lt. Ripley, believe it or not ("In case you haven't noticed, the bitch is back"). --Aaron Hillis

[via kottke]

Mungo Thomson: The Varieties Of Experience

From the description at John Connelly Presents:

Thomson’s 16mm film, The Varieties Of Experience, was made by using Nam Jun Paik’s Zen For Film (1962-64) as a negative. Zen for Film consists of a length of clear 16mm film leader projecting a rectangle of pure white. Over time, the celluloid collects dust from the space of its exhibition; this dust is projected as brown and black smudges on the otherwise white image. Dust is largely composed of human cells, and in this way the audience of Paik's work has literally become embedded in it over several decades. Thomson worked with the NJP estate to procure a "dirty" copy of the film and to use it as a negative from which to make a new print. The new film is an inversion of the original: a black film with the dust printed as white specks and clouds--a moving starscape, where the stars are composed of dust (and people) instead of the other way around.

Visit my earlier posting to see Nam Jun Paik's Zen For Film


[via John Michael Boling at Rhizome]

Heidi Kumao: Misbehaving

I recently came across Heidi Kumao's very interesting (and poetic) kinetic and cinematic machines. From Kumao's Misbehaving: Media Machines Act Out, 2002-2008 statement:

Misbehaving is a series of three female "performers" for intimate installations. In each tableau, a hybrid machine "being" performs: a kinetic, electronically controlled machine speaks with a visual voice of erratic physical gestures and video imagery. As a combination of performance and robotics, they represent girls and women who disobey or resist expectations. Unlike machines designed for perfect job performance, these machines will declare their fallibility, impatience, approval, and disapproval through small gestural acts and embedded video sequences. In contrast to the precise technique and tireless efforts of a robot that plays chess or constructs automobiles, my robotic performers "act out" and misbehave. In these tableaus of protest and transformation, the machine is spirited, emotional, thoughtful, yet irregular.

From Kumao's website:


Translator, 2008, Heidi Kumao
Aluminum legs, plastic bowl, half-scale chairs with video projector heads, wooden table, parts from garage door opener and bicycles, 82 x 168 x 36 inches.

Viewers hand-crank a garage door opener to move the girl between opposing armchairs that have video projector heads. As she moves from one projector to the other, two different sets of imagery appear on her bowl-shaped torso. Like a child caught between two feuding parents, a political mediator, or a mind that alternates between two thoughts, the body of the "translator" switches identities from chair to chair. On one side, the "go-between" unzips her clothes to reveal herself, and on the other side, she closes her torso to conceal whatever information might have been visible.

Resist, 2002-2004, Heidi Kumao
Girl's shoes, aluminum, motors, customized electronics, microphone, wood and plexiglass platform.

A machine portrait: audio-activated 6-year-old girl's legs. As viewers speak to this character, the legs begin a series of random behaviors from imperceptible movement to violent and fast kicking. Her actions leave permanent marks on the floor.

See more work by Kumao

2 works by Olafur Eliasson & 1 by me

1m3 light is a box that's defined by light in a mist-filled room. Just as I was leaving the gallery, I realized that none of the 15 or so people who entered the room while I was there had walked through the work, even though it has no physical presence. I turned around and walked through the cube... it felt very transgressive.

I only see things when they move (2004) is a roomful of shifting colors created by a chandelier of slowly moving prisms. It strongly reminded of Sublime Zips (see below), which is part of my Frames installation.

Zips was created using a modified 16mm film projector. Film projectors work by constantly (and very speedily) pausing on a single frame of film, covering it with shutter, moving to the next frame, pausing, and uncovering the shutter. Despite the common impression, film does not move through the projector at a constant speed--instead it moves in a jerky, start/stop motion.

Zips has its shutter and intermittent device disabled, which causes the film to be projected in one continuous motion and eliminates viewers' persistence of vision. The projected image becomes a field of shifting colors.

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For a broader perspective of Eliasson's work, Rhizome has a nice write-up of his shows at MoMA and PS1. Also Tyler Green had an interesting series of posts (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) earlier in the year that compared Eliasson to other artists.

Jingoism redux

The Boston Globe's Braniac blog has a posting that explores whether Black Sabbath's classic "Iron Man" was inspired by the Marvel superhero of that name.

What strikes me most about the upcoming Iron Man movie is that it recycles a Vietnam-era story of capitalism, individualism, and military might (in the face of an ill-fated war) and sets it in the present-day Afghanistan.

Braniac describes Iron Man's origin:

Marvel Comics introduced Tony Stark in the March 1963 issue of Tales of Suspense. Stark is a brilliant, wealthy inventor of high-tech weaponry who, while doing some field testing with US military advisers in South Vietnam, gets critically wounded by a booby-trap and is forced into the service of Wong-Chu, a "red guerrilla tyrant." Making do with low-tech materials, and with the help of a captured Vietnamese physicist, Stark inters himself in a gadget-laden suit of iron armor whose electrified chestplate keeps his shrapnel-damaged heart beating.

Barely able to operate his new legs, Stark nevertheless confronts his nemesis: "Have you never seen an iron man before?" he taunts. Wong-Chu (a stand-in for Ho Chi Minh, not to mention the Viet Minh insurgency in South Vietnam generally) stammers, "You -- you are not human! You are machine!" Pow! The "metallic hulk who once was Anthony Stark,” as the comic's scriptwriter, Larry Lieber, has Stark put it in the origin story's final panel, knocks Asian communism for a loop.

The new film looks to be a pretty little confection of propaganda. Not to say I won't watch it, but I will be a little disgusted with myself. Note the Black Sabbath guitar riffs towards the end of the trailer.