* (restored)

 

‘Researchers into the history of scissors generally agree that scissors were invented in Egypt around 1500 B.C.E. and were first fashioned of bronze, spreading slowly through the rest of the ancient world through trade and exploration. These early scissors were, as best archeologists can determine, made of a single piece of metal. They were mechanically two levers joined by a loop which served as a fulcrum.

 

 

‘Each sharpened level was a scissor, and the pair was called, scissors. On about 100 A.D. Roman craftsmen developed cross-blade scissors. That is, the blade-edges crossed and slid past each other when cutting. The looping fulcrum remained. Even now, gardening catalogs in the U.S. and Britain offer grass-edging shears that demonstrated the cross-blade principle. Like the Roman model, these scissors rested in an open position after use.

 

 

‘As is the case with so many early tools, the question of modification and innovation remains in the dark. At some point, someone clearly realized that greater control with less hand strength could be obtained by separating the scissors into two pieces anchoring them with a screw or rivet and making loops for fingers.

 

 

‘Looking at old scissors suggests that for a number of centuries, depending on the country of origin, both designs coexisted with craftsmen and purchasers deciding which design served specific purposes: cutting grapevines, thin sheets of metal, paper, thread and cloth. The final step in creating modern scissors is documented. In London in 1761 Robert Hinchcliffe developed the method for steel-casting scissors. What he produced took the form we recognize today.

 

 

‘Early scissors, were, of course, sharpened. To denote and protect their sharpness, scissors were often encased in a leather cover, similar to the sheath for a knife. Like knives, over the years in many cultures scissors became the focus of folk superstitions, some of which exist in less fearful form today. The first is that scissors, like a knife, should never be given as a gift. Doing that will cut the relationship between giver and recipient. The usual evasion of the dangerous qualities of this gift was the playful purchase of the knife or scissors, and the amount was small ranging from an English half-penny to a shiny U.S. dime or quarter. To this day, those giving a gift of cutlery often tape a penny to the package in case the recipient does not know that sharp gifts must be bought.

 

 

‘In some cultures the cutting qualities of knives or scissors meant that they were not passed hand to hand but rather set down for a friend to pick up thus preserving the friendship. Old wives said that cutting worked more than one way: a pair of scissors placed under the pillow of a woman in labor or a person with a painful injury would cut the pain in half. And, whether given in a case or not, scissors were sometimes hung by one handle on a hook beside or over the door, their open position forming a crude cross and their exposed sharp blades threatening damage to any evil influences attempting to enter the house.

 

 

‘Clearly the history of scissors would not be the best choice for a factual sixth-grade report. As with many inventions, modifications and improvements on an original idea came, like the idea itself, from obscure people who were too busy working to realize they were becoming a part of history. There’s a certain pleasure in this obscurity. The history of scissors is the history of ordinary people making their way through the world and solving problems, very much the way we do.’ — Janet Beal, Info Guru

 

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Game piece

 

‘Throughout Japanese history there are frequent references to “sansukumi-ken” (三竦み拳), meaning “ken” (拳) [fist] games with a three-way [三] (san) deadlock [竦み] (sukumi), in the sense that A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. The games originated in China before being imported to Japan and subsequently becoming popular.

 

 

‘The earliest Japanese “sansukumi-ken” game was known as “mushi-ken” (虫拳), which was imported directly from China. In “Mushi-ken” the “frog” (represented by the thumb) is superseded by the “slug” (represented by the little finger), which, in turn is superseded by the “snake” (represented by the index finger), which is superseded by the “frog”. Although this game was imported from China the Japanese version differs in the animals represented. In adopting the game, the original Chinese characters for the poisonous centipede (蜈蜙) were apparently confused with the characters for the “slug” (蛞蝓). The most popular sansukumi-ken game in Japan was kitsune-ken (狐拳). In the game, a supernatural fox called a kitsune (狐) defeats the village head, the village head (庄屋) defeats the hunter, and the hunter (猟師) defeats the fox. Kitsune-ken, unlike mushi-ken or rock–paper–scissors, is played by making gestures with both hands.

 

 

‘Kitsune-ken was a popular Japanese rock–paper–scissors variant. From left to right: The hunter (ryōshi), village head (shōya) and fox (kitsune). Today, the best-known “sansukumi-ken” is called “jan-ken”, which is a variation of the Chinese games introduced in the 17th century. “Jan-ken” uses the rock, paper, and scissors signs and is the game that the modern version of rock–paper–scissors derives from directly. Hand-games using gestures to represent the three conflicting elements of rock, paper, and scissors have been most common since the modern version of the game was created in the late 19th century, between the Edo and Meiji periods.

 

 

‘By the early 20th century, rock–paper–scissors had spread beyond Asia, especially through increased Japanese contact with the west. Its English-language name is therefore taken from a translation of the names of the three Japanese hand-gestures for rock, paper and scissors: elsewhere in Asia the open-palm gesture represents “cloth” rather than “paper”. The shape of the scissors is also adopted from the Japanese style.

 

 

‘The Paper Scissors Stone Club was founded in London, England in 1842. The charter appeared in Edition 1, Volume 1, of the club’s publication, The Stone Scissors Paper. It read,”The club is dedicated to the exploration and dissemination of knowledge regarding the game of Paper Scissors Stone and providing a safe legal environment for the playing of said game.” In 1918, the club’s name was changed to World RPS Club. Soon after that, the club moved its headquarters to Toronto, Canada. In 1925, the club had more than 10,000 active members, changed its name the World RPS Society, and hosted its first annual championship.

 

 

‘In Britain in 1924 it was described in a letter to a newspaper as a hand game, possibly of Mediterranean origin, called “zhot”. A reader then wrote in to say that the game “zhot” referred to was evidently Jan-ken-pon, which she had often seen played throughout Japan. Although at this date the game appears to have been new enough to British readers to need explaining, the appearance by 1927 of a popular thriller with the title Scissors Cut Paper, followed by Stone Blunts Scissors (1929), suggests it quickly became popular.

 

 

‘In 1927, a children’s magazine in France described it in detail, referring to it as a “jeu japonais” (“Japanese game”). Its French name, “Chi-fou-mi”, is based on the Old Japanese words for “one, two, three” (“hi, fu, mi”).

 

 

‘A New York Times article of 1932 on the Tokyo rush hour describes the rules of the game for the benefit of American readers, suggesting it was not at that time widely known in the U.S. The 1933 edition of the Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia described it as a common method of settling disputes between children in its article on Japan; the name was given as “John Kem Po” and the article pointedly asserted, “This is such a good way of deciding an argument that American boys and girls might like to practice it too.”‘ — collaged

 

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Injurer

An angry dad chucked a pair of scissors at his ten-year-old daughter because she would not do her homework – and the point pierced more than an inch into her brain. Surgeons had to remove a section of her skull in a risky operation lasting several hours. Amazingly, the blade did not hit any major vessels in the brain and it could be successfully removed.

 

Curtis Francis, 12, who suffers from severe learning difficulties put nail scissors into his mouth handle-first, getting them stuck in his throat. Doctors took 90 minutes to remove them under general anaesthetic and miraculously Curtis suffered only minor cuts. The youngster’s learning difficulties have left him with no sense of danger, similar to a toddler. His mum Karon Edwards, 50, first thought he had swallowed a pen lid but became worried when he began coughing up blood. The mum-of-two, who lives in Bristol with Curtis and his elder brother Shane, 15, said: ”It was absolutely horrendous.”

 

On January 20th, a man with scissors lodged in his skull calmly walked into a hospital ER and said, “I have a small problem.” This happened after a bar patron in Mexico was stabbed in the skull with a pair of scissors. Jonas Acevedo Monroy, 32, received help from his friend Nandor Altamirano Carvajal, who drove bleeding Monroy to the hospital to save his life. “Jonas was as always full of high spirits and was being charming with everyone in the bar when one of the locals took umbrage,” said Altamirano Carvajal, Mirror reported. “Jonas offered to buy the man a drink, but the guy pulled out a pair of scissors from his jacket and stabbed him in the head. What he was doing with a pair of scissors in his pocket I don’t know. It was really shocking.”

 

69-year-old Pat Skinner of Sydney, Australia had an operation in May 2001, but continued to complain of intense pain. It wasn’t until she received this x-ray 18 months later that it was discovered the surgeon had accidentally sewed her up with his surgical scissors still inside.

 

Four-year-old Chinese boy Xiao Yu was helping his parents decorate their front door for spring festival in 2010 when he fell onto the scissors he was holding. You can only imagine the horror his parents must have felt when they saw that the scissors had pierced through their young son’s face.

 

In a freak accident, 86-year-old gardener Leroy Luetscher fell face-first onto a pair of pruning shears outside his Phoenix, AZ home in July 2012. And while medical staff were no doubt relieved to discover that Luetscher had not fallen on the garden tool’s blades, an X-ray revealed the true extent of the damage: the handle had passed through the man’s eye socket, penetrating all the way down to his neck, where it rested on his carotid artery.

 

Sasha Ulyanov, 3, was playing at home with his three sisters when he ran into a wall carrying a pair of nail scissors and stabbed himself in the heart. The children’s mother was out taking lunch to their father, who was working in the field. “Sasha is our youngest child. He was running with the scissors through the kitchen door and misjudged it, and ran into the door frame with the scissors in his hand. He fell to the floor screaming, and our oldest daughter, Diana, who is 15, picked him up and rushed him next door to our neighbor,” the children’s mother, Natalia Baltsyukevich, 35, told CEN. That neighbor, Liubov Mikhalchik, is an emergency paramedic in their village of Pashkovich in Eastern Belarus Voranava District. “I realized straightaway that it was a serious injury.” Mikhalchik said. “You could see the scissors vibrating to the beating of his heart.

 

Apparently someone in China borrowed a pair of scissors to clean their teeth after a meal and swallowed them by mistake when a friend told a joke and they laughed.

 

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Did you know?

Where did that sc in scissors come from? We used to spell it sissors or sizars. The classicizers of the 1500s thought the word went back to Latin scindere, to split, but it actually came to us (via French) from cisorium, “cutting implement.” The same assumption turned sithe into scythe.

The largest pair of functional scissors in the world measure 2.31m (7 ft 7 in) from tip to handle. They were manufactured by Neerja Roy Chowdhury (India) and unveiled on 16 August 2009. Neerja was inspired to make the scissors after writing her own comic book which she describes as ‘unconventional’.

Scissors were used in the arenas by the gladiators of the ancient Roman Empire. The gladiators who wielded the scissors in combat were also known as scissors. Made from hardened steel, the scissors measured up to one and a half feet long. They were surprisingly light, weighing in at an easy 5-7 pounds; this allowed the scissor to be wielded with a good amount of speed. The scissors’ unique shape and design at that time made them a crowd favorite.

The Scissors is great for intimate sex How does it work? Easy to do, complicated to explain. So you lie facing each other and put your top leg over his hip. He grabs your bum and then you out your arm round his waist and push your bottom leg against his leg. The turn-ons: You’ll be rubbing your clitoral area on his groin and you get to kiss each other. The turn-offs: A little boring and pedestrian for some. It’s not visually exciting but physically it’s amazing.

It is unlucky to give someone scissors for a present, as it will “cut the ties” of your friendship.

In Romania they believe that if you drop a pair scissors on the floor, it means your boyfriend/girlfriend cheated on you.

Tired of using a rolling pizza cutter that barely cuts? You can use an ingenious new invention called the “Pizza Scissors Spatula”. This brilliant kitchen tool merges scissors and a spatula so you can cut and pick up a pizza slice all in one quick motion without burning your hands or having any toppings fall off.

If you dip the pointed end of your scissors into a container of bubble solution, you will be able to push the scissors through the wall of ta bubble without popping it. When something wet touches a bubble, it doesn’t poke a hole in the wall of the bubble, it just slides through and the bubble forms right around it.

 

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Namesake

Liars Scissor

Hello Kitty Suicide Club Safety Scissor Death Squad

Slipknot Scissors

SCISSOR live @ The Time Machine

At the Drive In One Armed Scissor

Led Er Est Scissors

XTC Scissor Man

Stray from the Path Scissor Hands

 

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Movie star

X-CROSS (2008) comes from BATTLE ROYALE 2’s Kenta Fukasaku. DEATH NOTE’s Tetsuya Oishi penned the script based off the novel by Nobuyuki Joko. Here’s the synopsis: Still stinging from a bad break-up, Shiyori heads off on a girls-only weekend with her best friend Aiko. Unfortunately, the remote hot springs resort they go to isn’t exactly as promised; the brochure didn’t mention anything about bizarre locals, blood rituals, or crazed harajuku girls brandishing frightfully large pairs of scissors. Soon, each girl is running for her life—they’re just not running from the same things.

 

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List of deaths in Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet: Hit in lower jaw with hatchet, Scissors in eye, forehead hit with hatchet, Head twisted, Shot repeatedly with handguns, Double beheaded with hatchet in car, Impaled in back of neck through mouth/beheaded at jawline with scissors, Beheaded with hatchet(off-screen), body thrown through window, Scissors in head, eyes ripped out, Hit in face with hatchet, knocked into fuse box, Throat slit, Half of head cut off with pickaxe, Gutted out of back with pickaxe, Pickaxed in throat, Dragged into dark room, hacked apart with pickaxe, Hand cut off, dragged into dark room, hacked apart with pickaxe, Hit in face/groin pickaxed/4 more times, Strangled, Hit twice in head with fire hose nozzle, glass shard in arm, beheaded with hatchet.

 

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À l’intérieur (2007)

 

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In Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007) a disfigured woman with her mouth slit like Heath Ledger’s Joker kidnaps and kills children with big scissors.

 

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Any gore-hound will remember the suicide scene in The Night of the Hunted (1980) when the woman kills herself by stabbing a pair of scissors through her eyes into the brain.

 

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The Granny (1995): Great ballbusting / femdom scene where the granny pretends to be a hot young woman who wants to have sex with the guy. Then gradually she turns into the crazed granny who is holding a pair of scissors. She then cuts off his penis and says “now I’m going to cut off your big head!”

 

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You want to squirm in your seat? Just watch the moment in The Dead Zone when Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) is able to detect through his psychic abilities that Deputy Dodd is a murderer. Yes, watch as Deputy Dodd is cornered and makes that fateful decision to end his own life. But not with a gun. Not with a rope or by jumping out a window either. Deputy Dodd is creative everybody! He wants to go out like no one else ever has: by slamming his head into a sharp pair or scissors of course. Now even though they don’t show the scissors actually going into his skull, it’s the sheer brilliance of the set up and then seeing the aftermath that is so effective and cringe-worthy.

 

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Doghouse (2009): A group of friends take their friend Vince who is going through a divorce to a remote village of Moodley for a lads weekend but when they finally get there it turns out all the woman have turned into man hating zombie cannibals. Snipper, one of the zombie women in the town who was a hairdresser, is armed with scissors which she uses to slice and slaughter every man she sees.

 

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Trailer: I will rape you with this scissors (2008)

 

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The Boogey Man (1983): We are gifted with numerous stabbings, self-inflicted tracheostomy via scissors, pitchfork impalement, a twin human kebab, and even a little well-meaning child exploitation for good measure.

 

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When the blood begins to spill in Red, White, & Blue (2010) every slice of a knife, every stab of the scissors, and worse will hit you in the gut.

 

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Twisty’s scissors, American Horror Story: Freak Show (2014)

 

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How Melancholie der Engel (2009) attains an atmosphere of depression and dread from the beginning however, is truly cheap and distasteful. Insects and animals are crushed and tortured at intervals; a small lizard is crushed to death, in another moment a snails eyes are cut off with scissors – all real. I didn’t see (excuse the pun) any reason for this to happen, considering the movie has enough fictional violence and crazy debauchery on its own. For example, an old man who joins the group early on brings a girl in a wheelchair to the “party” who is openly abused and left lying around like an object. Later they cut this old man’s skin off with scissors (also for no reason) and he’s left to crawl home with his guts hanging out. The group burn him on a bonfire, at which point another character is that excited he gets someone to masturbate him to climax in explicit close-up. In addition, the movie contains people being defecated and urinated on, both alive and dead.

 

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Corpse Party: Tortured Souls (2013): A girl has a vision: she wakes up in a dark room lying on the floor and having her legs and hands tied. She finds herself lying among some children (a boy and two girls), who are tied as well. She gets her eyes tied by a man. After that, the children get themselves killed with scissors one after another. We see the boy’s tongue being cut off with scissors and thrown on the floor. Then, his body is stabbed multiple times again with scissors (not shown, but in the end of the scene we see the boy’s dead body with its entrails revealed). A little girl gets a half of her head cut off with scissors (not shown, but in the end, a part of her head is shown dropping on the floor and leaving a lot of blood). Then, a girl that has a vision, gets her eyes revealed. She finds a little girl standing in front of her with scissors in her hand. A few seconds later, we see the little girl stabbing another girl in her eye and pulling it out. A little girl is shown being tied to the table. Soon, a man that stands in front of her, stabs her in leg with scissors. Then, she gets her eye pulled out (not shown, but heard). We see her bloody eye socket and a wound on her leg later. After that, a man stabs a girl in chest with scissors (we see a blood spraying and hear a girl screaming). A boy is pierced in stomach from the back with scissors (his entrails are shown falling out of his body). Then, he gets his skull smashed graphically (we see a bloody hand sticking out of his mouth). We see a group of children (ghosts) joyfully killing other children by stabbing them with scissors in eyes, neck and head. A boy is stabbed in neck with scissors with bloody results. A boy is stabbed in eye with scissors off-screen. A man is stabbed in back with scissors. A little girl stabs a boy in hand with scissors. After that, she stabs him in stomach. A man cuts a dead girl’s tongue off with scissors. Afterwards, he stabs her in chest several times. Another scene of a man cutting a dead girl’s tongue off with scissors. It is thrown into a bucket, full of bloody tongues.

 

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Artists’ friend

Beili Liu The Mending Project (2011): The installation consists of hundreds of Chinese scissors suspended from the ceiling, pointing downwards. The hovering, massive cloud of scissors alludes to distant fear, looming violence and worrisome uncertainty. The performer sits beneath the countless sharp blades of the scissors, and performs an on-going simple task of mending. […] As each visitor enters the space, one is asked to cut off a piece of the white cloth hung near the entrance, and offer the cut section to the performer. She then continuously sews the cut pieces onto the previous ones. The mended fabric grows in size throughout the duration of the performance, and takes over the vast area of the floor beneath the scissors.

 

Richard Diebenkorn Scissors I (1959); Kelly Medford Scissors on the Table (2012); Lucinda Buscall Scissors I (2004); Charlene Murray Zatloukal Don’t Play With Scissors (2011); Kaveh Irani Lady & Scissors (2014); Henri Matisse with scissors (1948); Vladimir Kush Scissors (1941); Richard Diebenkorn Scissors XI (1959)

 

Regina José Galindo’s practice is the embodiment of Akira Kurosawa’s dictum, “To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes,” and she challenges the viewer to do the same. Much of her work deals with political violence, especially against women–and it’s not pretty. In one of her most graphic works, titled Himenoplastia (Hymenoplasty) she videotapes her own (botched) hymen reconstruction surgery.

 

Japanese artist Sachiko Abe sits in a white gown, cutting countless sheets of A4 paper into thin, wispy strips. For the performance piece known as Cut Paper, Abe sits for hours on end meticulously shredding paper whose cut feathery strands measure a mere 0.5mm in width. She first began this practice while in a mental institution over 15 years ago because it proved to be a calming activity.

 

In this performance Yoko Ono sat on a stage and invited the audience to approach her and cut away her clothing, so it gradually fell away from her body. Challenging the neutrality of the relationship between viewer and art object, Ono presented a situation in which the viewer was implicated in the potentially aggressive act of unveiling the female body, which served historically as one such ‘neutral’ and anonymous subject for art. Emphasizing the reciprocal way in which viewers and subjects become objects or each other, Cut Piece also demonstrates how viewing without responsibility has the potential to harm or even destroy the object of perception.

 

You are invited to join performance artist, Caroline Wright, in a presentation of Manicure at Ham House and Garden, Richmond, on Wed 15 August 2012, as part of Garden of Reason. We need around 100 volunteers to assist the artist in cutting a large area of grass into a pattern reflecting the black and white chequerboard floor of the Great Hall. We will attempt to do this in one day using only hairdressing scissors. Manicure recreates the past endeavour of the garden staff, creating a lawn by cutting the grass by hand. The artist takes this to an extreme by using scissors, symbolising the power of the aristocracy and the status in the 17th-century of a well-trimmed lawn.

 

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Misc.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dee Kilroy, Hi, Dee. Yeah, it’s a tough regulation to work around. Sneakiness becomes the byword. Thank you about the travails. We will figure it out. We’re starting to sort out how to do that already. xoxo. ** Misanthrope, Hey. Oh, he’s still on FB? Maybe he unfriended me. I’ll go try to barge through his door. We will. And thank you for the confidence, bud. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, good, I’m glad he broke through. How can I resist a track called ‘San Francisco Dance’, ha ha. I’ll hit it. Thank you, Ben. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I don’t think I’ve liked Fincher’s stuff more than just mildly since maybe ‘Zodiac’? Well, there’s also bank vaults and private safes and stuff. Although I guess you’d have to chloroform some security people, so maybe a constant supply of chloroform would be love’s next task. Well, and then I guess the power to give anyone amnesia. But that’s a lot to ask of anyone, even love. Three and half weeks of patience is a lot to ask too, ha ha. Love pulling the plug on the record player in my mind that has been playing one song (XTC’s ‘Rocket from a Bottle’) nonstop for three days now for absolutely unknown reasons (except that it seems to be brutally catchy), G. ** Tosh Berman, That’s probably true. Bad vs. good re: commitment. We storyboarded our film before we had the location or actors, and we changed our minds onset all the time, but it was still really helpful. Congrats on the new draft. So what is the plan? Do you have a producer on board or in mind, or how are you guys going to proceed from here? ** wolf, Wolf! Um, maybe a little less of a London disliker, but not hugely so. There was a thought of me coming over to do a few events for the ‘Closer’ reprint, but there was too much film work, so it wasn’t possible. But it’ll happen. In the meantime, let’s gawk and blab technologically. I saw your email. I’ll write to you today. xoxoxo. ** ellie, Hi. A friend of mine once lit votive candles for me when I was in a tough situation and it either worked or was a big coincidence, but I’ve been fond of them, or the metaphor of them at least, ever since. Happy your dude is feeling better. Freelancing and overworking at the same time is hard, yeah. I’ve been there a lot. Great, time for fun and boosting input. Love, me. ** Charalampos, Hi. Thank you. No, three of the five finalists were documentaries, and the winner was a documentary. Pym, cool. I should read another one by her. Noted. Oh, yes, sorry, I’m bad with checking things on Facebook. I’ll go find the pix today. Thank you again. Chronological on the Cycle is ideal, but, yeah, not prescriptive. Hi from me and my laptop from chilly but not extremely cold Paris. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. It’s a big mixed blessing because there are a lot of government funding options for films here. But, if you’re in a boat like ours, you have to be sneaky and creative and cross all your t’s. Yes, exactly, on the Melville. It’s really that strict. Oh, sure, comparatively France is still a place of adventuring filmmakers. It’s just that when you live here and see the massive majority of absolutely dreadful/cookie cutter French films that get made and released, the exciting ones seem more special and rare. Cool about the accumulating album. You’re in post-production like we are, but without the daunting costs we face. High five. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of that John Cassavetes TV film. Huh. Thank you, I’ll bookmark and get to that. ** Keith Mayerson, Hi! I have a message into Joel, who is, yes, the Westendorf Joel, and I’ll get that going. 30th anniversary, yikes! Dude, I’m way down for a related thing. I’m so proud of that sucker. Big love, me. ** Roo, You = Roo! Thought so. Thought I recognised your cadence. Cool, hope you like the Jude film. And hopefully you’ll feel the need to go rush out and buy yourself a pair of scissors after today. Love, me. ** Charlie, I kind of figured. No big. The thought that counts and all of that. Shit with the sunshine: yes, couldn’t have out it better myself. Enjoy the Tool show. I was supposed to see Playboy Carti this weekend, but he cancelled, the brat. ** Darbyy🐻, Thanks, pal. We’ll be okay. We’re sorting it out. I certainly highly and voraciously agree about the shocking paucity of home haunts in films, but maybe we’ll start a viral thing. Being a loose screw that fixes things is probably the ideal? Don’t stress yourself about the year end deadline. Just stay determined and excited. It’s almost your birthday? When? Mine’s in early January. You absolutely could make me that ornament, and I would even get a tree, real but probably flocked, just for it. Bears? Yes, absolutely. Don’t get sick, and receive anti-sickness-bearing love from me. ** Nick., I’ve always wanted to be immortal. I sort of half believed I would be. But it’s getting a little easy to not believe it. Fucking aging, it’s what it is, but it’s not the ring in Lord of the Rings. You dropped the boys? I trust you that that was the wise decision. Fun? I might go see some art today and wander through the Xmas Fun Fair in the Tuileries. I’m being interviewed via Zoom this evening. I think those might be the only fun parts? You? Major luck with the sleep stuff. Lack of sleep is the worst, or, okay, up there. ** Audrey, Hi, Audrey. Yes, it happened, and it would never have happened if it wasn’t for you, so thank you! I’ve never seen ‘Crimes of the Future’. Isn’t that weird? Just one of those flukes. But I think it’s accessible, so I will. I wonder if you’re happy to see today’s post or not. Don’t get any funny ideas, ha ha. Or do. Are you going to rejoin the message board, or does it feel historical? I have some Zoom stuff to do this  week, an interview today and I’m the ‘special guest’ at an experimental writing class tomorrow, which should be interesting. Mostly this week is just trying to figure out how to chase some money and trying set up a film work schedule. But you never know, do you? I hope the immediate future surprises you. Has it yet? Love, Dennis. ** Right. I decided to restore the blog’s ancient paean to those simple yet dangerous yet creativity-exacting implements: the scissors. Possibly a fun time for you guys? Hope so. See you tomorrow.

 

‘In the name of the popular, delighting in reduction and obviousness, a boring assertion: the common ground of every film movement christened a “new wave” over the last 70 years has tended toward revision, a self-conscious desire to provide a true image of the people in opposition to the distorted picture given by whatever relevant iterations of official culture. The banality of this claim can be measured by the volume of cant and platitude produced in support of it, often by the artists themselves. There is, I hope, little need to rehearse these arguments regarding realism, myth, and so on. Who today can help but squirm when faced with the phrase “true image of the people?” Still, that more slippery thing called film culture continues apace in discovering fresh waves or producing them, an inevitable response to a century—the 20th, which, despite all number of alterations in social and geopolitical alignment, refuses to end—in which control of images appears to comprise a substantial part of what it means to be in power.

‘Following a string of acclaimed shorts, Jude made his feature debut in 2009 with The Happiest Girl in the World, a minor comedy of deadpan repetition which staked out the concern with image production sustained across the first decade of his career. Unfolding from late morning through to sundown, it charts the excruciating attempt to film a promotional spot with the titular girl, Delia Cristina Fratina, the unhappy winner of a Dacia Logan through a beverage company’s mail-in-the-label contest. Her unhappiness derives from papa’s insistence on selling the station wagon to fund a family-run boarding house, his desire to enter into the financial comfort of rent collection at odds with the teenage freedom a car affords.

‘Sullen and unable to convincingly deliver the line that she’s “the luckiest, happiest girl in the world”—she reliably forgets the former adjective—poor Delia is run through take after take, forced to gulp down ludicrous quantities of cola-spiked artificial juice (added to improve its colour), while drawing the ire and annoyance of both the spot’s director and the on-set beverage executives as adequate light slowly slips away. If Jude risks tidiness in contrasting the new corporate Romania’s insistence on producing the image of an idiotically giddy consumerist subject with the subsistence-level reality of the individuals lucky enough to be picked to fill this role, his willingness to root comedy in the exhaustion and tedium of even a single afternoon’s effort in this failed process of low-grade social engineering makes clear that, from the first, he possessed a fine sense of the relationship between style and meaning.

‘Working across a dozen years marked by the widening demand that every artist maintain a consistent and coherent style-as-brand, Jude has instead progressed by sharp zigs and zags. Leaving aside a pair of still-image essays on Romania’s anti-Semitic pogroms, The Dead Nation (2017) and The Exit of the Trains (2020), his other seven features each take up a form all but entirely distinct from the rest. Following the repetitive naturalism of Happiest Girl, an approach plainly inflected by Lazarescu (though Jude’s repetition is more severe and his flat, fading daylight is far from Puiu’s sickly artificial interiors), he returned three years later with Everybody in Our Family, a domestic drama that spirals from bickering to manic derangement.

‘Having produced portraits of a Modern Man (brutal) and a Modern Girl (pitiable)—I wonder whether these both need be named as specifically Romanian instances—Jude turned in his next two features toward the past, continuing to leverage moments of masculinity in crisis as opportunities for historical revision on a national scale. Both Aferim! (2015) and Scarred Hearts (2016) pivot away from the allegorical possibilities of Happiest Girl and Everybody, presenting instead object lessons in social dynamics. The former—which marks a significant expansion of Jude’s visual scale into widescreen monochrome, full of broad horizons and light dense enough to grasp—is a kind of revisionist Eastern in the manner of Peckinpah or Hellman, following a father-son pair as they roam Wallachia circa 1835 in search of a runaway Romani slave on the lam after fucking the wife of his owner, the local Boyar. The latter, loosely adapted from the Romanian surrealist Max Blecher’s sanatorium-set autobiographical novel of the same name, details the blithe detachment of the country’s upper class on the eve of its Nazi alliance, told with appropriate preciousness in the recent International Style: 35mm in an Academy frame (complete with rounded corners), master-shot compositions full of hues as saturated as they are muted, and a general air of wistful irony at the fact of living through history.

‘For Jude, the audience, the crowd, the people, attain coherence through fiction. Nationalism, for example, is not a fiction, but it is built of them; such points are as close as art and politics come to one another. Of course, they never touch: the notion that art itself can “do politics” through mere reflection and representation is among the more pernicious of current liberal myths. And as “I Do Not Care” shows, while political forces may aim to censor or shape art to their preferences (in extremes, they may destroy it), art’s capacity for dissembling, its complicated and enervating relationship to truth, will lead it over, under, and around restraints.

‘So here we squirm: What to do with a true image of the people? Has Jude, across these seven films, produced one? (The eighth, last year’s Uppercase Print, is to my mind his only outright failure, an overly loose arrangement of case files presented in the deadpan public-address tones of Straub-Huillet against garish and minimal pop sets interspersed with disjunctive passages of found footage; though in showing the limits of certain kinds of self-conscious artifice, it contributes something to this constellation all the same.) I must, for now, leave this question open, though I’ll offer related questions in place of an answer. What is the standard by which we might judge this truth? What is the value in reflecting on the process of such image production? How do we conceive the audience for such work, and what does this desire betray?

‘This last question leads on, somewhat perversely, to Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, which carries a clarifying subtitle: sketch for a popular film. As I’ve shown, the first phase of Jude’s career orbits the production of images, whether directly (Happiest Girl, Aferim!, “I Do Not Care,” Uppercase Print, the still-image essays) or obliquely (Everybody, Scarred Hearts). If Bad Luck Banging—which, given its subject matter and its Berlin win, will surely become the director’s most visible title in North America—signals a new chapter in his career even as it sums up much of what came before, it is so to the extent that it shifts his focus from the production of images to their circulation and distribution.’ — Phil Coldiron

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Radu Jude @ IMDb
Radu Jude’s favorite films
The History of Cinema. Radu Jude
Radu Jude @ RogerEbert.com
Radu Jude Wows Locarno
Radu Jude @ Letterboxd
“Rules Stop Me from Daring”: Radu Jude
Guilty Pleasures: Radu Jude
Radu Jude and the joys of making a cinema masterpiece
An interview with Radu Jude
Radu Jude: “I’ve become more and more interested in the aesthetics of an unfinished product”
NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS BY GEOFF ANDREW: Radu Jude
“I don’t want to make cute things”: an interview with director Radu Jude.
A Study for a Popular Film: Radu Jude Interviewed by Joseph Pomp
“I’m Not Fond of Nostalgia.”
ATROCITY INHIBITION: THE (NEW) FILMS OF RADU JUDE
The Exquisite Corpse of History. Radu Jude and the Intermedial Collage
Signs of Life: A letter from Radu Jude

 

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Extras

A Message to Viewers of Radu Jude: Forget About These Films!

Filmmaker in Focus: Radu JUDE

Radu Jude Knows He’s Divisive, But He Loves It

 

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Interview
from jugend ohne film

 

You made quite a few short films and you still make them. Can you tell us a bit about how you treat the short form in comparison to a feature film? Is there any difference between the two for you? Did you make some films as part of a film education program or was it never like that for you?

Radu Jude: I am not making many short films now, I recently made one using some archive footage, it is called The Marshal’s Two Executions and it is just a simple comparison of images – images from the documentary of the execution of wartime fascist leader Ion Antonescu juxtaposed with the images of the same event as it was staged in a feature film which glorifies the Marshal. One can find a lot to think about after seeing this comparison, I hope. Otherwise, I don’t plan on making short films for the moment, not because I don’t consider them a serious form of filmmaking, but because my subjects (or how I think of them) need a little bit more screen time. Otherwise, for me, there’s no difference between the two forms and I consider a film like, let’s say, Un chien andalou as good as Out 1.

How was the creative process behind the scripts you co-wrote with Florin Lăzărescu different from when you wrote alone – and what did you learn from him as a collaborator?

Florin is not only a gifted writer (and speaking about short forms, I must say I consider his short stories to be the best in contemporary Romanian literature), but a good friend as well, despite the fact that he lives far, far away from me. As to what I learned from him, I am not sure I can put that into words, but it has to do with a special way of looking at things – he can notice a small event and see something much deeper in it. And he is a humanist, for sure, while I am a bit colder than he is. For the moment I write alone, I need to explore cinema in directions that don’t say much to him or I use other texts as a starting point (as was the case with Scarred Hearts, based on M. Blecher, or the way it is now with a film I am preparing, which is based on the play Tipografic majuscul by Gianina Cărbunariu).

Are there any “rules“ or principles that you believe one should take into account when filming history or putting history on film?

No, of course not, everyone can do this in his or her own way. The beauty of films is that there are no rules, apart from the ones imposed by others or self-imposed. As for me, I believe that this illusionist reconstruction of the past is not only impossible, but also questionable (after all, why would you want to give the viewers the illusion that “this is exactly how things were 200 years ago”), so I tried to at least find ways of representing the past in a manner that also shows the limits of this representation.

Do you feel that Romania’s treatment of its problematic past(s) has changed in recent times, and if so, in what way?

I think some progress has been made, but it is very fragile. For instance, when I was in high school at the beginning of the 90’s, nobody mentioned the Romanian participation in the mass murders of WW2, but there is some information on this now. On the other hand, in the last few years one can notice a revival of nationalism, put to use in many different ways. For instance, we just had a shameful referendum organized by the state hand in hand with the Romanian Orthodox Church. The referendum was about “the definition of the family,” but in fact it was just a hate referendum to prevent the possibility of equal rights for LGBTQ people. But not only that, the whole campaign in favour of that stupid referendum was filled with nationalism and conservatism in its most dubious forms (“let’s get back to our old Christian traditions,” “let’s not accept the fake values of Europe,” etc.) and all that in a frightening quantity. The fact that many people boycotted the referendum, which in the end was not successful, shows there’s some hope left.

When did you first become strongly aware of the extent of Romania’s historical antisemitism?

It was also while I was in high school, but not because of the school, but because of some books that appeared at that time. There was also a short documentary film, which now seems to be lost, so at least I can mention its name: The Last Jew by Florin Iepan. I still remember how impressed I was when I saw this film on TV.

You have noted in an interview that you don’t believe in the saying that history repeats itself. What do you mean by that?

I was referring to an idea that became some kind of a thinking cliché, the idea that “history repeats itself.” Because I think there are forms of thinking and behaviour that create similar events, but they also have different forms. I don’t think the Holocaust will happen again, but there are other horrible things, it is enough to see one image from Yemen to understand it is happening all the time.

Your films in some way escape typical “auteurist“ attributes. Here you employ intertitles, there you make a documentary with photographs, then you have male and female leads, filming in black and white as well as in colour, different aspect ratios, films about movement, films about being unable to move and so on. Maybe this is a silly question to ask, but how do you find the form for your films? How do you keep free from what already worked before?

Oh, this is (actually, was) one of my big frustrations, that I am not an auteur. I mean, I got over it, but I am still nostalgic for a personal style, a personal vision. I know I will never have it, I got used to this idea. I just make the films in a manner which I discover for each project at a time. That’s all.

Is it hard to get money for your films?

Well, my films are not very expensive and it was a little bit easier for my last project, but it is still very complicated. It helps that today one can make films without so much money. As Godard used to say, if I have only one dollar, I will make a one-dollar film.

 

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17 of Radu Jude’s 28 films

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Dimineata (2007)
‘Two characters, one taxi, a crisis and a compromise.’ — MUBI

Watch the trailer here

 

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The Happiest Girl in the World (2009)
‘Delia, an unworldly teenager from a small town in rural Romania, strikes it lucky in a competition run by a soft drink company—and wins a car. But when her family bring her to Bucharest to appear in a commercial for the company in question, luck becomes something of a relative term.’ — cinemascope

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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A Film for Friends (2011)
‘A disillusioned man is filming a farewell letter for his loved ones before committing suicide. From his sometimes furious, sometime tear-jerking confession, we get to know that he lost everything, but somehow one’s still never sure whether to cry, pity, laugh or cheer him up. This is a hell of a performance for actor Gabriel Spahiu (Everybody in Our Family and last year’s Adalbert’s Dream), who’s pretty much alone on the screen in what it seems to be one long, continuous take. The camera never moves, but director Radu Jude cruelly pushes the viewer along the thin line between comedy and horror, until we no longer know what to expect. There’s no cheating here: the guy shoots himself, the frame stays still and… well, we’d rather not tell you what happens in the last 20 minutes. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s gonna be a bumpy, noisy and twisted ride.’ — Film at Lincoln Center

the entire film

 

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Everybody in Our Family (2012)
‘”Everybody in Our Family,” a new film by Romanian director Radu Jude, is a violent, funny and disconcerting vision of a familial argument turned into actual slugfest. What makes the movie compelling is that even though the characters act in extreme ways, the whole thing doesn’t seem exaggerated in the least.’ — Michał Oleszczyk

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Shadow of a Cloud (2013)
‘In a torrid summer day in Bucharest, the priest Florin Florescu is called to a dying woman’s side for saying a prayer.’ — Letterboxd

Trailer

 

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It Can Pass Through the Wall (2014)
‘Radu Jude manages to capture in this short film a child’s innocent perception on death. A short but very intense story about death-awareness, a moment everybody is to face at some point in life.’ — cinepub

the entire film

 

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w/ Andrei Cretulescu, Luiza Pârvu, Iulia Rugina Scurt/4: Istorii de inimã neagrã (2014)
‘Directed by four different filmmakers and produced by different production companies, these four short films share a common theme – life and death – and a common origin – all four are independent productions made with a little help from all our friends.’ — Letterboxd

Trailer

 

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Aferim! (2015)
‘If I were to tell you that the new film “Aferim!” was set in the mid-1800s and followed a couple of bounty hunters as they roamed the countryside in pursuit of an escaped slave, there’s a pretty good chance you might assume it took place in America in those grim years before the Emancipation Proclamation and that this movie served as another expose of one of the most shameful aspects of our nation’s past. In fact, this smart and occasionally quite powerful drama is set in Romania. But while the location may seem remote, the horrors that arise from the decision of one group of people to treat another as little more than property—not to mention the twisted ways in which they attempt to justify these actions to themselves and those under their thumbs—remain depressingly universal and even more depressingly contemporary more than two centuries down the line.’ — Peter Sobczynski

Trailer

 

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Scarred Hearts (2016)
‘Set in 1937, Scarred Hearts, inspired by Romanian author Max Blecher’s novel, centers on Emanuel, a young intellectual with a penchant for poetry who spends his days at a sanatorium on the Black Sea coast, suffering from bone tuberculosis. Despite his physical condition, Emanuel falls in love, quotes literature, and encourages his fellow patients to live life fully, which includes listening to jazz and throwing the occasional drunken party. Meanwhile, outside the sanatorium walls, fascism is on the rise. Director Radu Jude’s richly detailed camerawork—shot on 35mm film in the full-screen, square Academy ratio—provides a master class in mise-en-scène.’ — Film at Lincoln Center

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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The Dead Nation (2017)
‘The Dead Nation is a documentary-essay, which shows a stunning collection of photographs from a Romanian small town in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The soundtrack, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, shows us what the photographs do not: the rising of the anti-Semitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust, a topic which is not very talked about in the contemporary Romanian society.’ — Tavskovski Films

Trailer

 

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I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018)
‘Jude’s self-reflexive, agonized attempt to evoke history—while musing on the dangers of uncritical historical reconstruction—reminds me in some ways of Atom Egoyan’s flawed but bracingly complex Ararat, which focused on the much-denied realities of the Armenian genocide and on the contradictions inherent in trying to make a realist movie about the subject. “I Don’t Care…” is at once more playful and more intense, denying us the lush imagistic pleasures of Egoyan’s film, instead offering a caustic, sometimes farcical humor that channels its maker’s rage. The general tone, however, is closer to early ’80s Godard films such as Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) (“Every Man for Himself, ” 1980) or Passion (1980), another film about the problem of making images that may be realistic, as opposed to true. Ioana Iacob, with her punchy, boomy voice and general don’t-give-a-fuck demeanor, makes a genially arresting center to the chaos as the beleaguered intellectual heroine who’s also a natural clown. There’s a lovely comic moment when Marin and a gaggle of helmeted mock-militia huddle under a table to shelter from a rain shower. It might just be a goofy sight gag, yet it reminds us that you can hide from the weather but you can’t hide from history.’ — Jonathan Romney

Trailer

 

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Uppercase Print (2020)
‘The anger and despair in this Romanian filmed theatre work are kept in check by its ice-cold manner: it is spoken throughout in the kind of deadened official style that Ceaușescu-era apparatchiks might have used for reports on wrongdoers and dissidents, and the style that these same people might have used to defend themselves, and convince their political masters that they had internalised the right kind of torpid, soulless submission.’ — Peter Bradshaw

Trailer

 

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The Exit of the Trains (2020)
‘On June 29, 1941, the Jewish residents of Iași, Romania—13,000 in total—were rounded up, shot, stuffed into trains, and asphyxiated in one of the first large-scale massacres of the Holocaust. This haunting cinematic memorial adopts a powerfully minimalistic approach—presenting archival photos of the victims, one by one, A to Z, along with voiceover testimonials from survivors and witnesses—to convey the unimaginable scale of the atrocity.’ — The Criterion Channel

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021)
‘Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is such a punch in the face. Trust me when I tell you that you’ve never seen a movie like it, and there’s a good chance you’ll not only hate Jude for making it, you’ll hate me, too, even though I’m telling you — no, ordering you — not to watch it. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn isn’t a movie so much as it is a Rorschach test. Not everyone has the intestinal fortitude to go spelunking inside their own psyches to find the creepy crawlies. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, or that every woman on the planet hasn’t felt those crawlies creeping all over her at one point or another.’ — Stacey K Eskelin

Trailer

Radu Jude discusses Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn with Dennis Lim

 

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Plastic Semiotic (2021)
‘Plastic Semiotic proposes an analysis of the innocent universe of toys made with the tools of cinema – camera, editing, mis-en-scene.’ — MUBI

Trailer

 

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Potemkinistii (2022)
‘Romanian director Radu Jude’s beautifully filmed political comedy short, in which a persuasive sculptor (Alexandru Dabija) tries to get funding from a cultural bureaucrat (Cristina Draghici) to restore a monument to the sailors from the Battleship Potemkin on the banks of the Danube-Black Sea canal. He explains how the ending to Eisenstein’s film was propaganda, and that the sailors had actually had to seek asylum in Romania. During the discussion he realises he’ll have to spin the story to fit modern ideology and geopolitical thinking, to have any chance of getting the project funded. Featuring numerous clips from Eisenstein’s classic to illustrate his pitch, “the sharp and sardonic discussion touches on Romania’s sufferings under Soviet rule, Russia’s latter-day aggression, and the contentious politics of official commemoration”.’ — williamfaeleith

Trailer

 

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Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World (2023)
‘It’s another skittery, jittery movie, an experimental adventure in which narrative is of merely incidental importance, compulsively testing the limits and textures of contemporary experience, always digressing and interrupting itself and intrigued by the world as filtered by the movie screen, the Zoom screen, 4K, 8K, livestream and TikTok and raising a continuous white noise of complaint about modern Romania: the degradation of its public space, the misery of its continuing infatuation with strong leaders, its racism and its incompetent embrace of capitalism and the free market. It’s also a movie about the production of the image: one of the characters dully ponders the fact of Jean-Luc Godard’s assisted death – though perhaps Godard’s spirit lives on here in Radu Jude.’ — Peter Bradshaw

Trailer

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Kettering, Hi. Thank you. Crowd funding would be a last ditch option. It takes an enormous amount of work and time to do that successfully, and Zac and I are already overly busy working on the film’s technical needs, not to mention that neither of us have real self-promotional skills. Also, I looked into it, and it’s actually not a very promising way to raise the amount of money we need. We’re also working on a tight deadline, and crowdfunding is not the quick solution we need. So, we’ll only go that route if it’s absolutely necessary. But thank you a lot for suggesting it. ** Roo, Wait, Roo, is that you? I’m guessing so. Dude, welcome to the fold. First impressions? Huh, mm, that he was very talented and amusingly deadpan. And that he was a really good writer, and the poet gang and I were very encouraging on that front because he was more geared to making art at that point as I recall. And, you know, he was nice. I can’t remember so well. It’s been too many ages. There’s another grant we’ve applied for, but it’s a much longer shot that the one we didn’t get, so no real hopes there. Thanks! ** Misanthrope, Thanks, pal. We’ll get there because we have to. Last I remember jonnism was living in Portland, I think. I should track him down. ** Kyler, Hi, Kyler. I’ll definitely check out Village Works Bookshop next time I’m in NYC. Look forward to the interview. Everyone, the author, magickal practitioner, and d.l. Kyler James is interviewed at Perseus Academy about what looks like all sorts of interesting things, and you can partake if you merely click this. Take care. ** Tosh Berman, Yep on all those fronts. It was fun to rewatch your talk with Benjamin and Amy when I was setting the post up. Well, we can’t legally forget about the producer, it’s far too late in the process for that, but a French producer who produced ‘Permanent Green Light’ has generously stepped into the void and is helping us tremendously, so we’re concentrating on working with him as fully as we can. We don’t need a massive amount of money relatively speaking, no, but we maxed out almost all the funding possibilities when raising the funds to shoot the film. As dire as it is, I’m confident we’ll find a way to get there. We’re in heavy thinking mode this week, and we’ll get there somehow, just hopefully not with too many more huge problem being created for ourselves. Thanks, Tosh, I really appreciate it. ** Jack Skelley, Yep, yep, yep. I explained why crowdfunding is a last ditch to Kettering up above, but thank you, man. Oh, I watched that Brian Jones/Stones doc. It’s not a brilliant doc or anything, but, if you’re still interested in Brian Jones, it’s well worth watching. xo. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thank you, big D. That Weissman book is total fun and joy if you ever feel jones-y for it. Yeah, no one seems very impressed with that Fincher thing. I feel like he kind of shot his wad as director about five films back in time. Money and cold sesame noodle?! I’m saved on every level. Love, you rule. Love giving you a skeleton key that opens every lock of every type in Vienna, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, I think you’d quite like Benjamin’s writing. Thanks about the non-grant. What does Cicciolina do on that record? Sing, I assume. I didn’t know she sung. Or maybe she recites? Or raps? Anyway, I’ll go track down a track and see/hear for myself. Enjoy. ** Steve Erickson, Thanks, Steve. Yeah, it’s hard. Even here in France. We all think of France as a font of wild, adventurous filmmaking, but in fact that’s mostly (not entirely, obviously) a thing of the past, and the people on the grant committees are pretty conventional in their tastes, or at least that’s what we’ve found. Easier here than there if you want/need to fund your films through the traditional methods. nonetheless. The rub with France is that there are all these rules and regulations for how much money you must have to shoot a feature and exactly how long it will take and exactly what everyone will be paid, so you can’t really make renegade or underground films here, or, if you do, you can’t release them officially. People do what we did with ‘Permanent Green Light’, which is get funding for a short film and then shoot the whole feature in the requisite short time frame that the short film funding allows and then enlarge it afterwards. You can’t make a feature film here for less than 1 million euros. It’s not legal to do that. It’s good in the sense that it assures that everyone working on the film is paid what they consider fairly, but it’s not an easy system to work in if you want to make low budget features. No, as I said above, it’s too late to jettison the problem causer. We just have to survive him, basically. We’re seeing what our funding options are right now and figuring out what we’ll do. Thanks, Steve. ** wolf, Wolf!!! Holy shit! It’s weird, or not weird actually, but I was thinking and talking about you with Zac yesterday, wishing you would come visit or vice versa or something and wondering how you are, etc. Yay! So not fair, indeed. We are post-fairness over here. Well, I don’t think the UK has been spared either. Dude, what’s going on? Let’s Zoom or Skype or whatever. What do you say? Miss you bigly, my friend. Love, me. ** tomk, Thanks, man. We’ll get there, hopefully not via wheelchairs. Yeah, ‘Fall of the heartless horse’ is so good. Amy Gerstler is in some kind of touch with Martha Kinney, and I think she just totally gave up writing entirely, which is sad because I really thought she was going to be major. I’m ok, and I trust you are. ** Dom Lyne, Thank you, pal and sir. Yes, my email is still the outlook one. Cool, thanks a lot in advance! Hug plus a back scrunch from me. ** Charlie, Hello, Charlie. We’re just meeting right this very moment, correct? Welcome, if I’m not wrong. And I certainly ‘pray’ you win the lottery, definitely for both of our sakes. How’s you and stuff? ** ellie, Hi, e! Thanks a lot. Yeah, you know, what can one do. We’re just figuring out how to go forward now and trying to shrug that loss off. Best possible wishes and lit imaginary votive candles and all of that kind of upwardly mobile vibes-type activity towards your boyfriend’s health and you. ‘Wittgenstein’, cool. I should rewatch that. Yeah, I hope the stress is heavily dissipating and that you have the most wonderful day. xo, me. ** Dr. Kosten Koper, Hi, Kosten. It’s a great and an honor to see you in this abode, sir. Gosh, sure, thank you, I’d love to do the interview. Thank you for wanting to. I should be here. My email is [email protected]. Let me know what’s best for you. It’ll be lovely to see you! ** Okay. I only recently discovered the excellent films of Radu Jude thanks to a hot tip from one of the great people commenting here. Maybe you know his stuff, or maybe you’re a newbie like me. In any case, enjoy the investigation, See you tomorrow.