The Essentials: Art Video and Film #1
August 29th - September 13th, 2019
This is the first in a series of playlists featured on the Atkinson Gallery YouTube Channel highlighting important and historical art films and video. The Playlist will be screened in the gallery during gallery hours for students and the public to stop by and watch or they can be viewed at home or on remote devices at anytime.
Powers of Ten , 1977, Eames Office, 9 min.
La Jetée , 1962, Chris Marker, 26.38 min (Excerpt 1.24 min)
The Way Things Go , 1987, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, 31.16 min
Powers of Ten, 1977. Eames Office, 9 min
Powers of Ten is one of the best-known films by industrial design team Charles and Ray Eames. In this 1977 film, the couple employed the system of exponential powers to visualize the importance of scale. When the Eameses came across the 1957 book Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps by Dutch reformist educator Kees Boeke, they decided to use it as the basis of a film investigating the relative size of things and the significance of adding a zero to any number. Powers of Ten illustrates the universe as an arena of both continuity and change, of everyday picnics and cosmic mystery. It begins with a close-up shot of a man sleeping near the lakeside in Chicago, viewed from one meter away. The landscape steadily moves out until it reveals the edge of the known universe. Then, at a rate of 10-to-the-tenth meters per second, the film takes us towards Earth again, continuing back to the sleeping man’s hand and eventually down to the level of a carbon atom. Powers of Ten © 1977 Eames Office LLC
La Jetée, 1962. Chris Marker, 28.00 min (Excerpt 1.24 min Whitechapel Gallery)*
The movie that inspired Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys , Chris Marker's La Jetée is a landmark of science-fiction filmmaking, a 28-minute masterpiece told almost entirely in still frames. Set in a post-apocalyptic near-future, it tells the story of an unnamed man whose vivid childhood recollections make him the perfect guinea pig for an experiment in time travel. After a lengthy and nightmarish period of conditioning, he is sent into the past, where he falls in love with a woman whom he once saw on a pier. At the experiment's conclusion, he is visited by an advanced race, who offer him the opportunity to journey into their future world, but he instead requests that they send him permanently into the past, where he can remain with the woman of his dreams. A singular experience. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi
* Full versions of La Jetèe are available for purchase on iTunes and Amazon Prime for as low as $2.99 or watch a live performance at Pineapple Lab in Makati, Philippines from October 13, 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsLCOMX6v_c&t=354s
The Way Things Go, 1987. Peter Fischli and David Weiss, 31.16 min
Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss have collaborated on kinetic installations since
1979. All of their work to date, whether in photography, film, drawing, or sculpture, has
demonstrated a deep interest in the mechanisms that animate the universe of objects. Fischli
and Weiss remove these things that surround us from their contexts in our daily lives, and then
restructure their relationships to one another. The artists aim neither to glorify nor to alienate
these common objects, but merely to create new references in which they might be considered.
The Way Things Go - without narration or interviews - simply records the self-destructing
performance of Fischli's and Weiss' most ambitious construction: 100 feet of physical
interactions, chemical reactions, and precisely crafted chaos worthy of Rube Goldberg or Alfred
Hitchcock. The Way Things Go - Icarus Films. http://icarusflms.com
August 29th - September 13th, 2019
This is the first in a series of playlists featured on the Atkinson Gallery YouTube Channel highlighting important and historical art films and video. The Playlist will be screened in the gallery during gallery hours for students and the public to stop by and watch or they can be viewed at home or on remote devices at anytime.
Powers of Ten , 1977, Eames Office, 9 min.
La Jetée , 1962, Chris Marker, 26.38 min (Excerpt 1.24 min)
The Way Things Go , 1987, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, 31.16 min
Powers of Ten, 1977. Eames Office, 9 min
Powers of Ten is one of the best-known films by industrial design team Charles and Ray Eames. In this 1977 film, the couple employed the system of exponential powers to visualize the importance of scale. When the Eameses came across the 1957 book Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps by Dutch reformist educator Kees Boeke, they decided to use it as the basis of a film investigating the relative size of things and the significance of adding a zero to any number. Powers of Ten illustrates the universe as an arena of both continuity and change, of everyday picnics and cosmic mystery. It begins with a close-up shot of a man sleeping near the lakeside in Chicago, viewed from one meter away. The landscape steadily moves out until it reveals the edge of the known universe. Then, at a rate of 10-to-the-tenth meters per second, the film takes us towards Earth again, continuing back to the sleeping man’s hand and eventually down to the level of a carbon atom. Powers of Ten © 1977 Eames Office LLC
La Jetée, 1962. Chris Marker, 28.00 min (Excerpt 1.24 min Whitechapel Gallery)*
The movie that inspired Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys , Chris Marker's La Jetée is a landmark of science-fiction filmmaking, a 28-minute masterpiece told almost entirely in still frames. Set in a post-apocalyptic near-future, it tells the story of an unnamed man whose vivid childhood recollections make him the perfect guinea pig for an experiment in time travel. After a lengthy and nightmarish period of conditioning, he is sent into the past, where he falls in love with a woman whom he once saw on a pier. At the experiment's conclusion, he is visited by an advanced race, who offer him the opportunity to journey into their future world, but he instead requests that they send him permanently into the past, where he can remain with the woman of his dreams. A singular experience. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi
* Full versions of La Jetèe are available for purchase on iTunes and Amazon Prime for as low as $2.99 or watch a live performance at Pineapple Lab in Makati, Philippines from October 13, 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsLCOMX6v_c&t=354s
The Way Things Go, 1987. Peter Fischli and David Weiss, 31.16 min
Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss have collaborated on kinetic installations since
1979. All of their work to date, whether in photography, film, drawing, or sculpture, has
demonstrated a deep interest in the mechanisms that animate the universe of objects. Fischli
and Weiss remove these things that surround us from their contexts in our daily lives, and then
restructure their relationships to one another. The artists aim neither to glorify nor to alienate
these common objects, but merely to create new references in which they might be considered.
The Way Things Go - without narration or interviews - simply records the self-destructing
performance of Fischli's and Weiss' most ambitious construction: 100 feet of physical
interactions, chemical reactions, and precisely crafted chaos worthy of Rube Goldberg or Alfred
Hitchcock. The Way Things Go - Icarus Films. http://icarusflms.com