Сolorful animation expressions

The ten new releases that either impressed me the most or stayed with me the longest in no particular order:

"Berlin Alexanderplatz" in one word. For the TV Dictionary Collection by Ariel Avissar: TV Dictionary Collection

Silence in The Passionate Friends from Oswald Iten on Vimeo.

Audiovisual soundtrack analysis. [Spoiler alert: reveals important plot points and ending]

David Lean's 1949 melodrama THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS never gained the same popularity as its similarly themed predecessor BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945). Had it not been restored and re-released in 2008*, it might have been all but forgotten by now. And yet, there is a lot to cherish and enjoy within these 90 minutes.

Despite its overall unevenness and unsatisfying ending**... Читать дальше...

Despite their obvious differences in story, theme and era, in my mind, Todd Haynes‘ [SAFE] and Nicolas Winding Refn’s THE NEON DEMON have somehow become tethered to each other. And I still do not know why, exactly.

Video essay about George Bruns and the craft of transparent underscoring within Walt Disney's music department during the Wolfgang Reitherman era (Sleeping Beauty 1959, Goliath II 1960, One Hundred and One Dalmatians 1961, The Sword in the Stone 1963, The Jungle Book 1967, Aristocats 1970, Robin Hood 1973). Made as part of the audiovisual section of the NECSUS Autumn 2020 issue #Method​, curated by Liz Green.  

In 2020, a lot of things were different. And so was my end of year review of films. Instead of the usual lengthy blog post, I did a series of instagram posts (reproduced here more or less unchanged) beginning with this here: "film of the year", only this year it is a collection of five films by Steve McQueen. Even before 2020, they were designed to blur the line between tv and film, as McQueen submitted them to festivals (some filmed in 35mm and 16mm) but wanted them to be as easily accessible as possible through the BBC and Amazon. Читать дальше...

When Christian Renaut (author of „Les héroïnes Disney“) asked me for a comment on color in the stag fight scene in BAMBI (Hand, 1942), I felt the need to illustrate it with screenshots. Hence, my first color analysis post in years... 

Since I've never managed to commit to challenges like Inktober for more than three or four drawings, I challenged myself to post a double feature movie recommendation (available on VOD in Switzerland) accompanied by a digitally painted mashup of the two films for 33 consecutive days on instagram. Needless to say that this limited my own time for watching movies to a bare minimum.

Not everything turned out the way I imagined it, but overall, it was a satisfying exercise/project. So here are the 33 pictures in order of appearance. Читать дальше...

My contribution to lockdown culture:

The Age Of Emptiness - Video Essay from Oswald Iten on Vimeo.

Video essay based on Martin Scorsese's 1993 adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel "The Age Of Innocence" and Bernard Herrmann's score for TAXI DRIVER (Scorsese, 1976).

"The Age Of Emptiness" takes a look at how we might also read Scorsese's film in our current situation of "Social Distancing". After all, the voice-over narration mentions people ("even young people") dying from pneumonia. Читать дальше...

As I wrote before, this end of year post serves primarily to organize the glorious mess of cinematic impressions inside my head. The usual list of favorite films (those that impressed me the most) is followed by "general observations" which is basically a euphemism for cramming a whole year of cinematic cross reactions into one long monologue about songs, cinematography, nostalgia, horror and realism. Inevitably, certain films pop up in different contexts. [All images from films I studied in 2019]. Читать дальше...