* (rerun)

 

from Intense Vocalization: Marguerite Duras
by David Ehrenstein

‘ The Marguerite Duras retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center this month—18 years after the celebrated auteur’s death—presents an ideal opportunity to contemplate her place in the history of cinema. For while Hiroshima Mon Amour, the screenplay she wrote for Alain Resnais to direct, became an international success in 1960 (and remains a touchstone of “art cinema” to this day), the films she subsequently created on her own, beginning in 1969 with Destroy, She Said, have been alas, for the happy few. …

‘Destroy, She Said unfolds in the garden of a country hotel adjoining a forest that threatens the soigné guests (Michael Lonsdale, Henri Garcin, Nicole Hiss, Catherine Sellers) in some strange, difficult-to-define way comparable to to the “something” that so unsettles the upper-crust swells in Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance. Low-key in tone, it does not seem like the sort of “art film” designed to break new ground. But it does so, and by explicit intention: Duras described her text as “a book that could either be read or acted or filmed or, I always add, simply thrown away.” The key word in this is “book,” as literature is always primary for Duras—even in the midst of the seemingly resolutely “cinematic.” It’s not by accident that Lonsdale—soon to emerge as a key Duras interpreter—plays a character called “Stein.” His name is derived from Duras’s novel The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, the most crucial work of her entire oeuvre. …

‘Duras had no hope of replacing “real movies” with her conditionally tensed ones, but she went on making her sui generis works anyway—aided by a curious “real-life” character named Yann Andrea. A fan of India Song, Andrea entered Duras’s world in 1980 when he helped her through a “rest cure” designed to stem her alcoholism. His account of this, in a 1983 book entitled M.D., was met with some degree of critical interest. Duras’s own interest in Andrea quickly became an obsession. He appears with Bulle Ogier in Agatha et les lectures illimitées her 1981 reworking of elements that first appeared in her early biographical novel Un barrage contre le Pacifique (aka The Sea Wall), filmed by René Clément as This Angry Age in 1957. While Anthony Perkins and Sylvana Mangano play characters based on Duras and her brother in Clement’s version, their emotional conflict doesn’t go so far as incest, which is frankly discussed in Agatha. As nothing in the film is conventionally dramatized (Andrea and Ogier are seen wandering about the lobby of a hotel on the Normandy coast that also served as a setting for her India Song variation avant la lettre, La Femme du Gange, in 1974), no acting in the conventional sense was required. …

‘Curiously, Duras ended her filmmaking career with something resembling the conventional. Les Enfants began life as a 1970 book she wrote for children entitled Ah! Ernesto, later filmed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet in 1982 as En rachâchant (a rendition Duras disliked; also part of the retrospective’s shorts program). The story concerns a little boy who doesn’t want to go to school lest he learn things that he doesn’t already know. Les Enfants expands this slim tale to feature length with the novelty of having Ernesto played by an adult actor, Axel Bogousslavsky. It’s wryly amusing in a way quite unusual for Duras. More importantly, it’s shot in a more or less ordinary style, with actors playing actual characters and speaking words on screen in the usual manner.

‘That Duras would conclude her filmmaking career in this manner must be regarded in the context of a career that was devoted to textual elucidation. One suspects that the success of her novel The Lover in 1984—an overwhelming hit with both critics and the general public—put her off from filmmaking. Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1992 adaptation of this tale, which was another derivation from the Un barrage contre le Pacifique cycle and which related how her family pimped her out to a wealthy Chinese man, was served up in the plush “high-class” erotic style of the Emmanuelle films. In what you might call anticipatory retaliation, Duras in 1991 wrote The North China Lover, a “remake” of The Lover adding details that the first version of Duras’s original novel didn’t include, all folded into an explicit critique of the film she suspected (with good reason) Annaud was putting together.’

(read the entirety)

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Marguerite Duras @ IMDb
Association Marguerite Duras
Société Internationale Marguerite Duras
Les Écrits de Marguerite Duras
‘La petite cuisine de Marguerite’
‘In Love with Duras’ by Edmund White
‘The obsessions of Marguerite Duras’
‘The Art of Fugue: on Marguerite Duras’s Film Aesthetics’
Interview avec Marguerite Duras
‘Yann Andréa, la dernière énigme de Marguerite Duras’
‘Initiales M.D. (Marguerite Duras) (+ DVD)’
‘Marguerite Duras, l’éternel retour’
Lettre de Marguerite Duras à Alain Resnais
Film: ‘Marguerite, A Reflection of Herself’
‘NOUVEAU ROMAN CINEMA: MARGUERITE DURAS’
‘The Film Society to Fete Marguerite Duras with October Retrospective’

 

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Extras

Worn Out With Desire To Write (1985)

Marguerite Duras – “Écrire” (ARTE)

MARGUERITE DURAS À PROPOS DE L’AN 2000

Jean Luc Godard – Marguerite Duras

 

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L’interview imaginaire
from Versatile Mag

 

En 1996, vous décidez de tout arrêter, de ne plus écrire une ligne. Avez-vous l’impression d’avoir fait le tour de la question, de ne plus rien avoir à raconter ?

Marguerite Duras : Des fois, on se laisse prendre au jeu. Juste avant 1996, j’avais écrit un livre qui s’appelait C’est tout. Voilà, il y a des événements dans la vie, un peu comme la passion à laquelle on ne peut pas échapper et j’aurais pu continuer à écrire, j’aurais pu continuer à faire des reprises, à faire des modulations de mes œuvres, à l’infini.

Peu de voix se sont élevées concernant vos écrits, regrettez-vous cette absence de polémique ?

M. D. : Foutaises ! Conneries ! J’ai passé ma vie à être l’objet de polémiques. J’ai toujours divisé ce qu’ils appellent « le monde littéraire », j’ai soi-disant eu trop de casquettes alors que la seule qui me convient, c’est celle d’écrivain. Écrivain, mais pas de littérature. Écrivain.

En 2014… 2014, la Pléiade… Et sinon, on m’a toujours taxée de charabia complaisant, toujours jugé un vocabulaire limité, qu’on ne comprenait pas pourquoi Gallimard permettait qu’on sorte un de mes livres en y laissant autant de fautes de grammaire !

Et mon passage dans le journalisme, pour Libération, ça, ça a fait polémique. Sur l’affaire du Petit Grégory, par exemple. Donc, des polémiques : tout le temps.

Ces critiques concernent surtout vos adaptations sur scène, au cinéma qui, en revanche se sont vues mises à mal…

M. D. : Alors, il y a deux choses. Il y a les films que j’ai fait moi. Que j’ai écrits et réalisés moi. Ça, ce sont des films que l’on pourrait qualifier maintenant de films d’art et d’essai. C’est ma manière à moi de parler de l’écriture cinématographique, de dire qu’elle n’était pas forcément narrative, qu’on pouvait faire du cinéma autrement. Après, j’ai quand même collaboré avec le cinéma et ça s’est très bien passé : Hiroshima mon amour d’Alain Resnais, c’est un « classique », tout de même. Après, il y a eu certaines adaptation dont on est tous au courant , comme l’Amant qui a été adapté par Jean-Jacques Annaud. On n’était pas d’accord, mais il avait obtenu les droits… Mais ça m’a permis de faire un livre, et un bon livre, de reprendre après quelques années l’Amant et de sortir un livre qui s’appelle l’Amant de la Chine du nord. Un livre où j’ai écrit mon film, c’est-à-dire que l’Amant de la Chine du nord, c’est le film écrit de l’Amant… qui a eu beaucoup plus de succès que l’amant, son film.

L’essentiel de vos récits sont extraits de votre vie, au temps de la gloire du colonialisme français. Est-ce une sorte de nostalgie ?

M. D. : Pas du tout une nostalgie, c’est un décor. Il y a eu le décor de l’Indochine, de ce qu’on a appelé le cycle indochinois, mais après, il y eu d’autres décors, d’autres cycles dans mon œuvre. Il n’y a aucune question de nostalgie. J’y explique plutôt les tares du colonialisme. Et sinon les thèmes de mon œuvre, les thèmes que soi-disant, je reprends, je module et j’étire, le rapport à la mère, la mère qui forcément est toute puissante, mais qui forcément n’est pas à la hauteur. Et puis il y a la rencontre amoureuse, les femmes, des déclinaisons de femmes. Je parle aussi beaucoup dans mes livres des saisons uniques et humides et chaudes. Je parle de transgression sociale. Je parle souvent de colonialisme, mais pas le colonialisme clinquant : je parle souvent de Blancs, les petits Blancs moyens et comment ils se situaient, eux, dans le colonialisme.

Mais je parle aussi beaucoup de la Shoah.

Contrairement à vos écrits résolument tournés vers la passé, vous semblez apprécier la jeunesse, du moins dans le choix de vos compagnons, est-ce une manière de se tourner vers l’avenir ?

M. D. : L’avenir, je n’en ai rien à foutre. Enfin, c’est facile de dire cela quand on est édité dans la Pléiade, mais je suis plutôt – et c’est pour ça que vous me parlez de l’âge de mes compagnons – quelqu’un qui est dans le présent. Ce n’est pas du tout une question d’avenir, c’est une question d’être dans le présent et d’absorber tout ce que peut contenir le présent.

Que cherchez-vous à oublier ?

M. D. : J’écris, donc forcément quand on écrit, on n’oublie pas, on convoque. C’est prétentieux de dire qu’on est seul devant sa feuille. Moi, je convoque et à la limite, on peut dire que je retranscrits ce que j’ai convoqué, donc je n’essaie pas d’oublier : je bois plutôt pour faire face à tous ceux que je convoque, tous ceux que je ne peux pas oublier.

Selon vous, qui pourrait reprendre votre flambeau ?

M. D. : Grand silence

Un flambeau pour éclairer quoi ?

Beaucoup de gens se disent mes héritiers, mais je pense qu’il y a plein de gens qui croient écrire, qui croient écrire des livres, alors qu’ils n’écrivent rien.

Il faut écrire comme une nécessité absolue, dans l’urgence : oui, pourquoi pas ?

Mais le flambeau, non. Je ne suis pas un chef de file, contrairement à ce qu’on a dit, je n’ai pas appartenu au Nouveau roman, je suis juste Marguerite Duras, M.D.

Quelles seraient les qualités essentielles et éternelles de la littérature ?

M. D. : Comme je l’ai dit avant, écrire, écrire avec un but, avec une générosité, ne pas faire semblant d’écrire, mais écrire, se dire que ce qu’on écrit est essentiel.

Pour vous, qu’est-ce qu’un bon livre ?

M. D. : Je ne sais pas.

Si l’on devait vous inviter à dîner, quel serait le menu idéal ?

M. D. : Avant de parler du fond, on va parler de la forme.

Ce serait manger en Normandie, au bord de la mer, dans mon hôtel des Roches noires. Ou alors en-bas de chez moi, à Paris, à Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

De la cuisine paysanne. Je cuisine moi-même comme une paysanne. A Saint-Germain-des-Prés, ça pourrait être aux Prés aux Claires ou au Petit Saint-Benoît. J’aime la cuisine paysannes à Neauphle, dans la maison que j’ai achetée avec l’agent gagné avec Barrages contre le Pacifique… Moi, là-bas, j’aimais bien faire la cuisine, ça prenait du temps. Je la faisais quand mes amis étaient soit en train de dormir, soit en train de se promener. J’avais tout l’après-midi, je faisais la cuisine, je faisais des listes de courses. Des listes de courses qu’on a même retrouvées publiées dans la Pléiade. ‘Faut pas déconner.

Voilà, de la cuisine qui cuit beaucoup, qui mijote, comme on dit. S’il n’y a pas de citron dans la cuisine, il n’y a rien.

Et puis, il y a l’omelette vietnamienne. L’omelette vietnamienne, avec la cuisine paysanne est ce que j’aime le plus.

Mon fils a fait publier après ma mort, un livre de cuisine : La cuisine de Marguerite Duras. Bon, Yann Andréa l’a fait interdire. C’est vrai que ce n’était pas très littéraire.

Avec François Mitterrand, on parlait beaucoup cuisine, même si je ne l’ai jamais vu manger des ortolans, caché sous sa serviette.

Lors de ce repas, quels seraient les sujets de discussion à éviter ?

M. D. : Aucun. Aucun, à part, peut-être la littérature ou la critique littéraire, mais sinon, il faut parler. Il faut brasser les idées.

Quel fond sonore souhaitez-vous entendre ?

M. D. : Moderato Cantabile. Modéré et chantant. Une musique toujours reliée à la passion. J’aime surtout dans ces repas – et c’est peut-être ce qui pourrait être intéressant dans ces repas -, j’aime la musique quand elle perturbe le développement narratif, quand il faut s’arrêter tellement on est intrigué ou subjugué par la musique et qu’il faut reprendre l’histoire. C’est ça qui est intéressant. J’aime les chansonnettes : Quand le lilas fleurira, Mon amour… Voilà, toutes ces choses-là d’avant-guerre, ou même des choses plus classiques comme l’Art de la fugue de Jean-Sébastien Bach que j’ai beaucoup écouté quand mon fils prenait des cours de piano. Vous êtes au courant. Au courant de ces histoires où les petits garçons prennent des leçons de piano pendant que les mères tombent amoureuses.

 

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14 of Marguerite Duras’ 19 films

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La musica (1967)
‘Marguerite Duras’ La Musica, which she adapted from her own short two-character play, is about a husband and wife who meet three years after their formal separation, when they return to the provincial town where they once lived to pick up their divorce decree. In the film’s longest sequence, which I suspect is pretty much the total of the play, He (Robert Hossein) and She (Delphine Seyrig) come together in the lobby of their hotel, at first acting like anxious, rueful ghosts. They circle each other in carefully choreographed movements; alternately each literally frames the other by his own person and by his mirror image. (Miss Duras loves to see things in and through glass—mirrors, windshields, windows). The revelations, though obliquely made, are quite specific. She was unfaithful. He once planned to murder her, She, unknown to him, once tried to commit suicide. La Musica is intellectually chic moviemaking of the sort that is quite entertaining while it is going on but practically ceases to exist, even as a memory, when it’s over. Hossein and Miss Seyrig read their lines with style and look marvelously unhappy, she, especially, in blond bob that evokes the 1930’s and the image of Lilyan Tashman.’ — New York Times

Trailer

 

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Destroy She Said (Détruire dit-elle, 1969)
‘In a secluded hotel circumscribed by a dense forest Max and Alissa Thor meet Stein and Elisabeth. Max, a professor of future history and an aspiring author, is immediately attracted to the brooding wife of industrialist Bernard Alione, Elisabeth, who is recovering from a miscarriage. Stein, a German Jew and potential writer, is infatuated by Alissa, Max’s young wife and former student. During their sojourn the guests’ identities gradually meld. While playing cards, for example, each guest anticipates the others’ observations. Although her friends remain at the resort, the insecure Elisabeth leaves upon the arrival of her worldly husband. Destroy, She Said is a madhouse in its narrative and dialogue with contradictions within sentences. A triumph performance from Catherine Sellers sells the crazy with wonderful panics and confusion wayward bursts.’ — collaged

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Nathalie Granger (1972)
‘Nathalie Granger is aesthetico-philosophical opus-film. The strictest logic of its visual images step by step moves us, the viewers, to the feeling that we, while observing the still and harmonious life in a quiet and prosperous household, never expected to get – the feeling of the incompatibility between traditional (over-worldly) spirituality (as it exists and flowers in religious and/or ideological beliefs) and… children’s psychological needs. It is the one of the miracles of this film that the concept of traditional (above-worldly) spirituality is not defined but is impersonated by two profoundly intelligent actresses: Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bose. They both incarnate over-worldliness with miraculous naturalness of complete immanency. They live eternity as if it is possible to breath when you are inside it. To watch Nathalie Granger is challenging as well as a stimulating and rewarding experience for all those who in their life and thinking don’t follow the authoritarian clichés and seductive songs of entertaining ads but are prone to try to make up their own minds about life and the world.’ — actingoutpolitics.com

the entire film

 

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India Song (1975)
‘Marguerite Duras creates a sensual, yet abstract and enigmatic exposition on longing, isolation, haunted memory, and obsolescence in India Song. Duras integrates highly stylized, yet integrally personal (and relevant) impressionistic images of her youth in then-French Indochina and the radical nouveau roman structure that has come to define the novelist turned filmmaker’s mid-century avant-garde literature within the classical framework of tableaux imagery that redefines the syntax of traditional (and particularly cinematic) narrative. From the opening sequence of ambiguous, (but implicitly colonial) foreign landscapes, Duras establishes the dissociation between the visual and the aural through incongruous and aesthetically formalized tableaux juxtapositions that, in turn, reflect the film’s overarching themes of alienation and estrangement: exclusive use of non-diegetic sound to serve as a surrogate contextual (anti) narrative; visually distanced, non-confronting dialogue through mirrored angles (a technique similarly implemented in Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad); pervasive musicality through a slow rhythm waltz that conveys the film’s paradoxical sense of displacement and stasis through its languid pacing, recursiveness, and melancholic tone; repeated references to leprosy that ingeniously evoke an implicit association between isolation (through disease quarantining) and colonies (lepers and imperialism). Inextricably bound in the performance of the empty social rituals of their class, these aimless, privileged colonialists embody the adrift and inutile fleeting vestiges of a crumbling empire, reduced to the imperceptible glow of an anecdotal setting sun against an inherently sovereignless – and unconquerable – eternal landscape.’ — Strictly Film School

Excerpt

Excerpt

Marguerite Duras à propos de India song (27 avril 1975)

 

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Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976)
‘The film is a sequel to her 1975 film India Song and features Delphine Seyrig reprising her role as Anne-Marie Stretter. The film premiered at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival in Directors’ Fortnight. Duras demonstrates that the disease and suffering of the Indians symbolically infects the Europeans as well. Thus, she asserts: One of the external signs of the fissuring of the seemingly watertight compartmentalized colonial society is the deep sense of malaise and maladjustment which is wearing out its white inhabitants. In spite of the vast paraphernalia of protective artifices, the Europeans find their presence in the colony quite intolerable.’ — collaged

Compression “Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert” (2016) de Gérard Courant

 

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Entire Days Among the Trees (1976)
‘Des journées entières dans les arbres is a 1976 French film directed by Marguerite Duras, based on her novel. Prior to directing a film version of the novel, Duras had already modified it into a stageplay that had enjoyed a theatrical run.’ — found

The Making of Marguerite Duras’s ‘Entire Days Among the Trees’

 

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Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977)
‘Images of the seaside again at the beginning of the film, when Carlos d’Alessio’s music starts playing. This song will continue to play the entire 90 minutes of the film. It’s maddening! It’s exhilarating. Especially given the contrast between the catchy nature of the relentless music and the lethargy of the main character, a woman deciding whether to rent a very expensive villa with her cheating husband’s money. It’s supposedly the neighbours who are playing the music. But we never see them. A troubled testament to the eternity of love. Whatever happens, however many times we end affairs, we leave each other, we cheat, we lie, we abuse, love never ends. Part of us can never stop loving. Even if the rest of us is ill equipped to deal with it. And it is ultimately this discrepancy that causes us to hurt each other. Not the lack of love. But its eternal presence.’ — Tale of Tales

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Les mains négatives (1978)
‘The images of the film are Paris at dusk. A city far too great to comprehend on any level other than the superficial, a city that leaves one reeling in Stendhalism. It’s a blank Paris, before the stories of the day play out, it mirrors the “mains negatives” of the title, presence by absence, the hand-print revealed by the blank left when the area round it is covered in paint. The beauty of the city is revealed by the traces that people have left behind, murals, avenues of trees, monuments. Marguerite spoke of these images as images passe-partout, images that allow the narration to infuse them with meaning. It’s good to watch the film without sound first to understand how fully the perception of the images is informed by the narration. The parallel images you don’t see are of pre-historic petroglyphs, stencilled scuplted hand-prints which Duras describes as being in a cave by the sea. These were, in her interpretation, people simply recording their existence, in front of the immutability of the sea and the granite. What they have in common is that all the hands look the same, there’s an equality to each person’s existence implied.’ — oOgiandujaOo, IMDb

the entire film

 

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Cesarée (1979)
‘Made up of stills of the Tuileries gardens and its statues by Maillol, Césarée is stamped with the memory of Berenice, queen of the Jews, and of her city of which nothing remains but the name, abandoned following her repudiation. There is this same confusion of time periods and resurgence of narratives in Les Mains négatives. Its dolly shots trace a slow advance through Paris, which is deepened by the reference to the drawings of hands found in many caves dating from the Magdalenian age. Thus comes to a head an ode to humanity, and to all its excluded ones, that daylight, only just risen over the city, has not yet forced into extinction. Its murmur resounds for a long time: “Everything is being crushed, I love you farther than you. I would love anyone hearing me shout that I love you.”‘ — Frac Lorraine

the entire film

 

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Le Navire Night (1979)
‘A huge let-down to audiences at the time, Marguerite Duras’ follow-up to her lush and flamboyant India Song is a very different film indeed. Telling the story of two tragic lovers who never meet (the girl is dying of leukemia and daren’t risk face-to-face contact) Duras sets out to communicate this ‘faceless’ relationship to her audience by – and you really won’t believe this unless you see it – barely even photographing the glamorous trio of actors she has hired to star. So if your notion of sheer cinematic bliss is gazing raptly at Mathieu Carriere or Dominique Sanda (OK, I admit it, mine is) then be warned that Le Navire Night may give you a nasty shock. Long motionless takes of the three actors having their make-up put on or wandering – barely visible – round shadowy rooms. For most of the film, the camera pans along deserted Parisian boulevards, or pores over a luscious red dress hanging on a wall. At the end, Duras announces in voiceover that “the story was never shot.” True, on a purely literal level. Yet the sense of frustrated longing that sustains both non-lovers through their passionate non-affair…if we don’t experience that through the methods Duras uses here, why not? Are we incapable of feeling unless we are prompted by the prescribed visual image? Or are we (as Susan Sontag feared) so saturated by images that we can no longer feel at all? To try and put it more simply, why is Marguerite Duras’ way of telling this story any less valid than the conventional techniques that we, as a film audience, expect and demand? Our answer to that question says little about Duras and her film, and everything about us. Why do we feel the need to reduce an emotional tragedy to a visual image? Is it morally acceptable for a film to do that? At once a negation of cinema as it is, and a reaffirmation of what cinema might be, Le Navire Night is a film to be watched with heart and mind and senses wide open. Or not watched at all.’ — David Melville

Excerpt

Apropos LE NAVIRE NIGHT DE Marguerite DURAS

 

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Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver & Melbourne) (1979)
‘As is the case with other experimental shorts by Marguerite Duras, the images, although beautiful are almost mood-setters, the main images are evoked in the mind of the viewer by the words of Aurelia Steiner, sometimes, though by no means always, synchronising with the images. For example the shot traverses Notre Dame de Paris, which is actually a white building, but here the stone is yellowed by the late-evening sun, and Aurelia talks about voices (“they’re speaking”) telling her of palaces by streams with thickets of nettles and brambles between them, of island temples, and for a moment Notre Dame is on the Ganges. This reminded me the ideas of writer Italo Calvino and his book The Castle Of Crossed Destinies, in which stories are almost exclusively narrated by the placing of Tarot cards in sequences, the evocative symbols (forest, castle, well, mountain, gibbet) being generators of images that are particular to each reader, Calvino accepting how very much of the story rests in just these small kernels. Aurelia Steiner then, will be a unique experience for whoever watches it. In this way it’s almost anti-cinematic, the viewer isn’t forced to see the fixed images that make up the fantasies of standard commercial cinema. In a special edition of Cahiers du Cinema Duras wrote that she was aiming for an ideal, which was of the “image passe-partout”, to use shots that were neither beautiful nor ugly, which would be exchangeable between a series of texts, images that would take their direction from the narration. If she was aiming for images without beauty she would have been better off not using cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, who shot Army of Shadows, and worked with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant. The collaborators do however create a sense of vacuum with the images on-screen, a cavern that Aurelia’s words fill.’ — IMDb

 the entire film

 

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Agatha et les lectures illimitées (1981)
‘This film was recorded in Trouville-sur-Mer, in the lobby of the building where Duras lived. She reads the female part of the text and her much younger lover, Yann Andréa, reads the male part. The dry way of saying the words that express such passionate feelings has inspired much of the tone of Bientôt l’été. Not to mention the views of the sea, and the atmosphere of an abandoned resort town.’ — Tale of Tales

the entire film

 

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L’homme atlantique (1981)
‘An autonomy of the soundtrack, giving back to writing and to the voice of the writer its importance. A black screen with few images from rushes of the previous “Agathe”.’ — MUBI

the entire film

 

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Les enfants (1985)
‘7 year-old boy Ernesto intrigues people around him for several reasons. Despite such a young age, he looks like a man on his 40’s and also seems a little more intelligent than any of his peers – and the latter fact is what causes him to quit school, refusing to attend it because he doesn’t want to learn the things he does not know. His family is very supportive of his actions, even though they don’t have any clue of what’s to become of him; at the same time the school headmaster and a journalist are concerned about Ernesto’s real motivations for leaving school.’ — IMDb

the entire film

 

 

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p.s. Hey. I’m still away from the blog doing other stuff, but I’ll be back here tomorrow. Today you get another rerun post from five or so years ago that lays out the films of the great Marguerite Duras. Dig in please. And I will see you and catch up with you tomorrow.

* (rerun)
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Turntablist and artist Christian Marclay created an album — using a 4-track in New York City, March 1985 — composed of other records. All seems pretty normal, but the thing is, Recycled Records’ Record Without a Cover was sold without a jacket or cover, and it even came with the instructions “Do not store in a protective package.” Marclay’s concept was to let the natural ageing process make each individual record unique. Through scratches, and dust caught in the grooves, the record’s deterioration make it constantly evolve. If it could be described, think: a warped history of the universe.

 

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German genius Peter Lardong came up with the idea to create records out of chocolate and, believe it or not, they can be played on a standard phonograph. He creates the records by pouring his time-tested recipe of melted chocolate into a silicon mold of his favorite vinyl. He places it in the refrigerator to set and voila. Each disc can be played up to 12 times before it’s too worn out, and that’s when you eat it.

 

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Robot with record player brain

 

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Buried in the midst of a load of LPs I recently bought was a clear virgin vinyl LP in a plain white jacket. The odd thing about it is there are grooves cut both sides with nothing on them. The dead wax on side one has inscribed NITTY GRITTY and BP 360 LP1 along with NW RTI 19724. Side two dead wax has 13875 and BP 000. Any ideas what this is and what it was for….we’d be interested to find out.

 

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These are not a direct substitute for pressed records. These are 100% hand-made, in real time. If the record is 10 minutes long, it took 10 minutes to cut plus setup time. This labor, coupled with the maintenance and knowledge required makes these lathe-cuts more expensive (per piece) than a larger pressing of vinyl.

 

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Jeroen Diepenmaat ‘Pour des dents d’un blanc éclatant et saines’ (2005), Record players, vinyl records, stuffed birds, sound. Dimensions variable.

 

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Music lovers can now be immortalised when they die by having their ashes baked into vinyl records to leave behind for loved ones. A UK company called And Vinyly is offering people the chance to press their ashes in a vinyl recording of their own voice, their favourite tunes or their last will and testament. Minimalist audiophiles might want to go for the simple option of having no tunes or voiceover, and simply pressing the ashes into the vinyl to result in pops and crackles.

 

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In 1967, the BBC created its own record label, designed to exploit the demand for commercially released TV tunes, comedy shows and, finding an unlikely niche in the market, sound effects, the best remembered being their three horror-related collections. Volume 1, Essential Death & Horror, appeared in 1977 and offers a dizzying collection of 91 different effects. Particular favourites of my own include an actually rather disturbing electronic workout, ‘Monsters Roaring’, and ‘neck twisted and broken’. Such was the success of Volume 1, a follow-up album arrived in 1978 – Volume 2: More Death and Horror. Rather more ragged than the first release, we are treated to even more inclement weather and death rattles – of particular note is ‘death by garrotting’. There was one final outing, the paltry twenty-five minutes of Volume 3: Even More Death and Horror. Easily the most startling record of the three, the methods of torture are truly imaginative; ‘self immolation’, ‘female falling from great height’ and ‘tongue pulled out’.

 

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Knowing how easy it is to scratch records or make them skip with the slightest bump, it might seem counter-intuitive to put a record player into a moving car. But the automobile record player, first introduced by Chrysler in 1956, contained a number of features that would keep the music going even when there were bumps in the road. Part of its downfall can be attributed to the fact that the Highway Hi-Fi required special records; you couldn’t simply pull a record off of the shelf and play it on your road trip. Rather, drivers had to purchase all of their music again in the new proprietary format. Since the machine was only available on new vehicles and not as an aftermarket accessory, there wasn’t a huge commercial demand for it. Moreover, the devices had the nasty habit of breaking often and Chrysler wasn’t thrilled with the cost of fixing all of those under-warranty units. By 1957, just one year after their initial introduction, Chrysler withdrew support for the ill-fated gadgets.

 

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Glass disc recordings, produced photographically in the 1880’s by Volta Laboratory Associates – Alexander Bell, his cousin Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. Smithsonian officials unsealed them in the presence of Bell’s daughters and a grandson in 1937.

 

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Chris Supranowitz has made some images of a record’s grooves using an electron scanning microscope. For the vinyl record sample, he simply cut a small section of a record and attached it to a sample stub via carbon tape. He then sputter coated approximately 90 Angstroms of gold onto the grooves. Since the sample was relatively thick (2-3 mm) carbon tape was applied along the side to ensure good conductivity. It’s finally clear what the grooves actually look like!

 

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Jacques Tati with record player

 

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In 1973, the Kingdom of Bhutan issued several unusual postage stamps that are playable miniature phonograph records. These thin plastic single-sided adhesive-backed 331⁄3 RPM discs feature folk music and tourism information. Not very practical for actual postal use and rarely seen canceled, they were designed as revenue-generating novelties and were initially scorned as such by most stamp collectors. They are now fairly scarce and valuable and are sought after by both stamp and novelty record collectors. Their small diameters (approximately 7 and 10 cm or 2.75 and 4 inches) make them unplayable on turntables with automatic return tonearms.

 

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Nam June Paik ‘Listening to Music Through the Mouth’ (1962)

 

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NON’s Pagan Muzak (Gray Beat, 1978) is a one-sided 7-inch with 17 locked grooves and two center holes, meaning each locked groove can be played at two different trajectories as well as any number of speeds. The original release came with instructions for the listener to drill more holes in the record as they saw appropriate.

 

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The Hi-Fi murders were the killings of three people during an armed robbery at a home audio and record store called the Hi-Fi Shop in Ogden, Utah. On April 22, 1974, three enlisted United States Air Force airmen, named Dale Pierre Selby, William Andrews, and Keith Roberts drove in two vans to a Hi-Fi store on Washington Boulevard, Ogden, just before closing time. They entered the shop brandishing handguns. Two employees, Stanley Walker, age 20, and Michelle Ansley, age 18, were in the store at the time and were taken hostage. Pierre and Andrews took the two into the store’s basement and bound them. Later, a 16-year-old boy named Cortney Naisbitt arrived to thank Walker for allowing him to park his car in the store’s parking lot as he ran an errand next door; he was also taken hostage and tied up in the basement with Walker and Ansley. Later that evening, Orren Walker, Stanley’s 43-year-old father, became worried that his son had not returned home. Cortney Naisbitt’s mother, Carol Naisbitt, also arrived at the shop later that evening looking for her son, who was late getting home. Both Orren Walker and Carol Naisbitt were taken hostage and tied up in the basement. With five people now held hostage in the basement, Pierre told Andrews to get something from their van. Andrews returned with a bottle in a brown paper bag, from which Pierre poured a cup of blue liquid. Pierre ordered Orren to administer the liquid to the other hostages, but he refused, and was bound, gagged, and left face-down on the basement floor. Pierre and Andrews then propped each of the victims into sitting positions and forced them to drink the liquid, telling them it was vodka laced with sleeping pills. Rather, it was liquid Drano. The moment it touched the hostages’ lips, enormous blisters rose, and it began to burn their tongues and throats and peel away the flesh around their mouths. Ansley, still begging for her life, was forced to drink the drain cleaner too, although she was reported (by Orren Walker) to have coughed less than the other victims. Pierre and Andrews tried to duct-tape the hostages’ mouths shut to hold quantities of drain cleaner in and to silence their screams, but pus oozing from the blisters prevented the adhesive from sticking. Orren Walker was the last to be given the drain cleaner, but seeing what was happening to the other hostages, he allowed it to pour out of his mouth and then mimicked the convulsions and screams of his son and fellow hostages. Pierre became angry because the deaths were taking too long and were too loud and messy, so he shot both Carol and Cortney Naisbitt in the backs of their heads, proving fatal for Carol but leaving Cortney alive. Pierre then shot at Orren Walker but missed. He then fatally shot Stanley before again shooting at Orren, this time grazing the back of his head. Pierre then took Ansley to the far corner of the basement, forced her at gunpoint to remove her clothes, then repeatedly and brutally raped her after telling Andrews to clear out for 30 minutes. When he was done, he allowed her to use the bathroom while he watched, then dragged her, still naked, back to the other hostages, threw her on her face, and fatally shot her in the back of the head. Andrews and Pierre noted that Orren was still alive, so Pierre mounted him, wrapped a wire around his throat, and tried to strangle him. When this failed, Pierre and Andrews inserted a ballpoint pen into Orren’s ear, and Pierre stomped it until it punctured his eardrum, broke, and exited the side of his throat.

 

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Gregor Hildebrandt’s ‘Kassettenschallplatte (Cassette Record)’ (2008) is a sculptural work composed of hundreds of feet of wrapped cassette tape, a fetish object for which one medium has been rendered useless to embody the equally nonfunctioning image of another.

 

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Record player ring

 

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In the late 1920s and early 1930s the Vitaphone sound system used large 33 1/3 rpm records to provide the soundtrack for motion pictures. The record rotated in the usual clockwise direction but the groove was cut and played starting at the inside of the recorded area and proceeding outward. This inside start was dictated by the unusually long playing time of the records and the rapid wearing down of the single-use disposable metal needles which were standard for playing lateral-cut shellac records at that time. The signal degradation caused by a worn needle point was most audible when playing the innermost turns of the groove, where the undulations were most closely packed and tortuous, but fairly negligible when playing the outermost turns where they were much more widely spaced and easily traced. With an inside start the needle point was freshest where it mattered most. Almost all analog disc records were recorded at a constant angular speed, resulting in a decreasing linear speed toward the disc’s center. The result was a maximum level of signal distortion due to low groove velocity nearest the center of the disc, called “end-groove distortion”. Loud musical passages were most audibly affected. Since some music, especially classical music, tends to start quietly and mount to a loud climax, such distortion could be minimized if the disc was recorded to play beginning at the inner end of the groove. A few such records were issued, but the domination of automatic record changers, and the fact that symphony movements, for example, varied greatly in length and could be difficult to arrange appropriately on 20-minute disc sides, made them no more than curiosities.

 

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For their single “Blue Ice”, Swedish indie group Shout Out Louds came up with the idea of making a functional record on ice. 10 press kits consisting of silicon mold, a bottle of distilled water, and complete instructions were sent to select media and fans. Of course the record would only last in one play, and your needle is most likely to be ruined after, but the less-than-perfect crackling sounds have their own lo-fi DIY charms.

 

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Performance artist and experimental musician Laurie Anderson invented the Viophonograph in 1976. Its violin body turns a custom 7-inch vinyl record which is played by a needle mounted to a bow, all fed into an amplifier.

 

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Artist Pieterjan Grandry has broken a major barrier between the unreality of the Internet and the rest of the real world. Grandry has successfully taken animated GIFs and made them analog. His device, based on a pre-film form of entertainment called a phenakistoscope, uses frames from a GIF printed onto transparent material as individual frames and placed on a wheel. Once spun and illuminated, the images form a single moving picture — in this case, a head bobbing cat.

 

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A record album is stuck in record 3 of the 5 record changer in my Sharp Audio Disc A4 Player. How do I get it out? Record changer not responding. Disassembly may be required to get access to the stuck record and remove it.

 

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In the 1946-1961 era, some ingenious Russians began recording banned bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X-ray film. The thick radiographs would be cut into discs of 23 to 25 centimeters in diameter; sometimes the records weren’t circular. But the exact shape didn’t matter so much, as long as the thing played. “Usually it was the Western music they wanted to copy,” says Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev. “Before the tape recorders they used the X-ray film of bones and recorded music on the bones, bone music.” As author Anya von Bremzen elaborates: “They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole. … You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan—forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”

 

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Ottawa band, Hilotrons are releasing nuggets of their music on plastic records that only work for an all-but forgotten children’s toy. The Fisher Price record player is actually a simple wind-up music box, and each indestructible little plastic record is a spool that triggers different notes. What you get is the creepy, tinkling tones featured in the video below.

 

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Jasper Johns’ ‘Scott Fagan Record’ (1970) is a lithograph of Scott Fagan’s ‘South Atlantic Blues’ record, released in 1968. Fagan is the father of The Magnetic Fields singer and songwriter, Stephin Merritt. Although they had not met, John’s ‘Scott Fagan Record’ was instrumental in reuniting Merrit with his estranged father. Writer Mark Swartz had posted an image of John’s lithograph on his Tumblr, which Fagan found while searching for himself on Google. He contacted Swartz, and a relationship eventually created an opportunity for Merrit and Fagan to reunite, along with Merrit’s mother, Alix. Fagan and Swartz created a Kickstarter to fund a tribute album of a man interpreting his son’s (Merrit’s) songs, to which Jasper Johns contributed. The sentimental nature of the work is also present in the imagery, recalling Johns’ early “Target” paintings.

 

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Evan Holm: There will be a time when all tracings of human culture will dissolve back into the soil under the slow crush of the unfolding universe. The pool, black and depthless, represents loss, represents mystery and represents the collective subconscious of the human race. By placing these records underneath the dark and obscure surface of the pool, I am enacting a small moment of remorse towards this loss. In the end however this is an optimistic sculpture, for just after that moment of submergence; tone, melody and ultimately song is pulled back out of the pool, past the veil of the subconscious, out from under the crush of time, and back into a living and breathing realm. When I perform with this sculpture, I am honoring and celebrating all the musicians, all the artists that have helped to build our human culture.

 

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Imagine a turntable but instead of a needle, you have a pizza sauce spout, and instead of a record, you have pizza crust spinning so the red sauce can cover every inch. Imagine no more. That’s how pizzas get made at Costco. Workers put the dough on the turntable and the pizzas gets expertly covered in a controlled flow of sauce from the machines.

 

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WOW is a vinyl record containing a single ultra-low frequency which will alter slightly depending on the mechanical components of your record player. Use more than one system to play several records simultaneously and the air around you will start pulsating. Play 33 ⅓ Hz on 33 ⅓ rpm or 45 Hz on 45 rpm. Feel free to use the pitch wheel or even touch the record to control the sub-sonic wave field. Your choice of record players, the number of records and the character of your room create your individual listening experience.

 

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In over fifty new paintings depicting the circular labels of assorted vinyl albums and singles, Dave Muller draws upon his endless fascination and encyclopedic knowledge of music and its capacity to shape both individual and cultural identities. He culls resonant records from the ‘20s through the ‘90s, some familiar and others forgotten, tapping into shared poetic moments and a collective dialogue.

 

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A record player sits on the floor, shown from above. Slightly off-centre in the corner of a room, it lies surrounded by cables and a power strip. Through a transparent lid, the white label of a black vinyl disc catches the eye. This painting by German artist Gerhard Richter depicts the record player of Andreas Baader, member of the German terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF), inside Baader’s cell at Stuttgart-Stammheim prison, and was painted after a police photograph.

 

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Many might say it is impossible for a tortoise to survive three decades living in a record player inside a filthy storage room. Those people would also be wrong. One fateful day 30 years ago, a pleasant Brazilian family lost their tortoise named Manuela. Manuela apparently got trapped in the storage room where the man of the house, Leonel Almedia, stored a variety of worthless junk, including electronic devices. Inside a record player is where Manuela the tortoise would call home for 30 years.

 

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22 picture discs

Anti-Flag ‘Bacon’

Skid Row ‘Youth Gone Wild’

Rev Jim Jones ‘Thee Last Supper’ WSNS 1984-PSYCHIC TV/TG

Metallica Interview LP

Fat Boys ‘Pizza Box Set’

Trick ‘r Treat Soundtrack Album

Urine Junkies ‘Abscess’

MF Doom ‘Rhymes Like Dimes’

J Dilla ‘Fuck the Police’

Sebadoh ‘Limelight’, ltd. ed. released to ‘honor’ Rush’s 40th anniversary

Revolting Cocks ‘Beers, Steers & Queers’

Uriah Heep ‘Backstage Girl’

Acid King ‘Busse Woods’

NZI 490004G605

David Bowie ‘Valentines Day’

Erika’s Hot Food to Go

Ozzy Osbourne ‘Miracle Man’

Guns n’ Roses ‘Nightrain’

Danny Brown ‘The OD’

Malcom McLaren ‘Madame Butterfly’

Queen ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’

Lord Finesse ‘E-mu EP’

 

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One of Afro-Peruvian artist William Cordova’s recent sculptures, “Greatest Hits (para Micaela Bastidas, Tom Wilson y Anna Mae Aquash),” is a 13-foot tower of 3,000 stacked records accented with pieces of broken discs. Inspired by historical movements such as Dada and Arte Povera, Cordova created the tower to recognize those who have been overlooked in mainstream music. He wanted the piece to acknowledge past artists who added to the genre even if they had not produced a “greatest hit.”

 

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New five pound note plays vinyl records

 

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Rutherford Chang has a unique vinyl collection. He only collects the Beatles first pressing of The White Album. I interviewed him: Q: Did you grow up in a house of Beatles fans? When did you first hear about the Beatles? and about the white album? A: My parents are from Taiwan and didn’t listen to the Beatles, so I didn’t grow up with the music. I bought my first White Album at a garage sale in Palo Alto for $1 when I was 15 years old. Q: So how did you get familiar with the Beatles? A: They are the biggest band. Q: Are you a vinyl collector? A: Yes, I collect White Albums. Q: Do you collect anything other than that? A: I own some vinyl and occasionally buy other albums, but nothing in multiples like the White Album. Q: Why just White Album? why not Abbey road? or Rubber Soul? A: The White Album has the best cover. I have a few copies of Abbey Road and Rubber Soul, but I keep those in my “junk bin”. Q: Why do you find it so great? It’s a white, blank cover. Q: Are you a minimalist? A: I’m most interested in the albums as objects and observing how they have aged. So for me, a Beatles album with an all white cover is perfect. Q: Do you care about the album’s condition? A: I collect numbered copies of the White Album in any condition. In fact I often find the “poorer” condition albums more interesting.

 

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50 Locked Grooves by Audio-Visual artist Haroon Mirza made from cardboard, tape, glass amongst other things. Double pack contains 2 identical 12″s designed to be played together. Play any loop with any loop to unlock the music inside.

 

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Aphrodisiacal record

 

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In Dario Robleto’s ‘Sometimes Billie Is All That Holds Me Together’ (1998), several new buttons were crafted from melted Billie Holiday records to replace missing buttons on found, abandoned or thrift store clothing. After the discarded clothing was made whole again, it was re-donated to the thrift stores or placed back where it was originally found.

 

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C.C. Records (2013), an installation work by Duto Hardono is inspired by the city of Cairo & the most popular icon at the moment General Abdel Fattah Sisi himself, hence the title–if you’re an Egyptian, you might get it–the work stands as a satire comedy of the recent political life & situation of the country. The audiences create their own combination of the broken-into-half C-shaped Egyptian records & make their own mix of composition. Sometimes it creates a unique locked grooves that plays a loop over & over again. The audiences also choose their own speed whether it’s a 45 or 33 revolution per minute.

 

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For ‘Years, artist Bartholomaus Traubeck fashions a slice of tree trunk into the form of a vinyl record, with the tree-trunk’s rings resembling the spiral groove of the now-outdated audio format. Using a record player with a special sensor, computer software is used to translate the trunk rings into notes and then “play” them as melodies.

 

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Making a comment on Christian Marclay ‘Record Without a Cover’ João Paulo Feliciano, together with the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, is releasing ‘Cover without a Record’. The object, a gate-fold album cover, is produced on a standard record plant on edition of 1000 copies.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. I’m away from the blog today doing my IRL thing in the city of Rennes. Here’s a rerun post from the early days of this latest incarnation of my blog. Please enjoy or re-enjoy.