Radio Bikini (1988)

Kubrick at 2001 premiere, New York, NY

Herzog, Fata Morgana

Leviathan (2012)

Leviathan Trailer July 2012 from Sensory Ethnography Lab on Vimeo.

Lee Ann Schmitt, California Company Town (2008)

California Company Town from Lee Anne Schmitt on Vimeo.

Wurlitzer 4: Candy Mountain

Wurlitzer 3: Reads from Nog

Wurlitzer 2: Two Lane Blacktop

Wurlitzer 1: William Walker

 

 

• T.J. Stiles, 'The Filibuster King: The Strange Career of William Walker, the Most Dangerous International Criminal of the Nineteenth Century'
• Brady Harrison, Agent of Empire: William Walker and the Imperial Self in American Literature (2004)
• William Walker, The War in Nicaragua (1860) [Google books]

Swandown

Swandown Artefacts
Swandown website

London -- The Modern Babylon

On July 16th 2012 the BBC decided not to screen Julien Temple’s latest documentary, London - The Modern Babylon, which had been scheduled as part of a season of films about the capital in the run up to the Olympic Games. The film, pieced together from footage from the British Film Institute archives, is an attempt to articulate a century of London life up to and including the 2011 riots. One scene culled from British gangster film The Long Good Friday (1980) imagines a UK Olympic bid for the derelict Docklands area. Whether the BBC decided that images of looting and street-fighting were not the best way to represent London days before the Olympic torch reached the city is unclear, though the broadcaster might have blanched after British Airways thought using The Clash’s London Calling for the soundtrack to an upbeat Olympic themed TV commercial was a good idea: ice age, heat death, famine, nuclear error, zombies of death. Here the apocalyptic punk imaginary returns to haunt an affirmative display of corporate engineering designed, presumably, to celebrate British efficiency and London as a global destination. The sheer wrongness of the soundtrack is a thrilling act of self-immolation at least as pointed as anything Temple has assembled and also opens up a dream-space where punk nostalgia refuses to capitulate to the restorative logic of the heritage sector and insinuates itself instead into the marketing DNA of the corporation as a mode of auto-détournement.

Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Videograms of a Revolution

The overthrow of Ceausescu in 1989: over 125 hours of footage compiled by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica.

Ian Nairn

Test Site

Test Site - trailer from Solarisfilm on Vimeo.

New documentary. Strapline: LOVE, SURVIVAL, MYTH, RITUAL, MUSIC, SPEED AND DEATH IN THE NORTH AMERICAN DESERT
Website

Atomic Filmmakers

Allan Sekula

Hour of the Furnaces (1968)

Burn (2012)

Burn website

Deforce (2012)

New York Times: A Battered City, Through Local Lenses

Junktopia (1981)