Surreal? It's for real

 

China Girl (filmmaking)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia




A China Girl image, with explanatory labels.

In the motion picture industry a China Girl is an image of a woman accompanied by color bars that appears for a few frames (typically one to four) in the reel leader. A "China Girl" was used by the lab technician for calibration purposes when processing the film (with the still photography equivalent being a "Shirley Card")  The origin of the term is a matter of some dispute, but is usually accepted to be a reference to the models used to create the frames - either they were actually china (porcelain) mannequins, or the make-up worn by the live models made them appear to be mannequins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.

Directed by Owen Land (as George Landow)

Release date 1966

Running time 6 min
Country United States
Language English

Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.is a 1966 American experimental short film directed by Owen Land.

Film in Which There Appear... is a six-minute loop of the double-printed image of a blinking woman; her image is off-centre, making visible the sprocket holes and edge lettering on the film. According to Land, there is some slight variation in the image onscreen, but "no development in the dramatic or musical sense." Land's intention was to focus attention on the components that film viewers are not supposed to, and do not usually, notice, such as scratches, dirt particles, edge lettering, and sprocket holes. For this reason, Land often scheduled the film first in screenings of his work.

The film began life as a 16 mm loop film of "china girl" test leader of a woman blinking, originally used by the Kodak company to test colour reproduction. The loop was intended to be played continuously for 11 minutes, and then, following a commercial break, for another 11 minutes. However, its initial screening was stopped short by a hostile audience reaction.

Film in Which There Appear... is considered an important work in the structural film movement. Fred Camper described Film in Which There Appear... as "a kind of Duchampian found object, a looped test film that focuses attention on the medium and the viewer." J. Hoberman called the film "blandly presented." Juan A. Suárez noted the film's unique element of "indeterminacy and open-endedness," remarking that the more the film is projected, the more scratches and dust it will collect.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. This is not necessarily true. Except for a few curious viewings on YouTube, I don't think this film has been shown much since 1966, causing it to gather more dust than ever.

Ducklings in a storm drain

I love these kinds of videos. I've seen the protectiveness of mother ducks, and their urgency and distress when they're separated from their chicks. In this case, one duckling must have gone down the storm drain, and when one goes, they all go, one after the other. It's an instinctive thing that protects them in the wild, but not necessarily on the street. These cops are great guys to take the time to get these cheeping fluffballs out, and not only that, to return them with their mother to the water. Am I reassured about the human condition? I guess so!

Girl gang

As is usually the case, the trailer is much better than the movie. I especially love those captions: Today's Major Problem: Girl Gangs That Flout the Law! Most Daring Film of the Year! And note at 2:50 - the "doctor" seems to be implying that he needs money to perform an abortion. But maybe it's just an ingrown toenail.

Squid sex: this is how they do it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a set of diagrams that I found God-knows-where, God-knows-when, probably late at night. They look scientific, like something that would accompany a research paper, and have something to do with the reproductive cycle of squid. I have no idea if I have them in the right order. A couple of them don't work very well.

And that is all I have to say about them.

Milky Way: you are there

Melania hates Donald (TWICE!)

The slap seen around the world. . . 

. . . and the OTHER slap seen around the world. 
Respect for the First Lady is growing by leaps and bounds.

Mental health warriors: a different kind of sane

Why did it take me this long to post something about the death of Carrie Fisher? Actually, it took me half a bloody century, and I'm still not sure about it. But I have come to the conclusion after blogging for a while that people either read your stuff, or they don't. They watch your videos, or they don't. It's a capricious thing, so you might as well follow your heart and do what you feel like doing, what your conscience tells you to do at any given moment. And it is here that I find my satisfaction. Is there a "message" in all this? There probably is. It's something that each person will hear in a different way, according to their own prejudices. 

DRAGSTRIP GIRL - Film Trailer

                       

Creature from the Haunted Sea (trailer)

(Movie theme) "Oh there's a creature
From the haunted sea,
And he doesn't
Like you, and he doesn't like me
He bounces up and down in the water
(boing, boing, guitar riff)
And doesn't really do what he oughter"

Harold Lloyd in 12 takes

 

 

 

 

 

Harold Lloyd: cropped and chopped

The experiment: cropping some of my thousand or so Harold Lloyd gifs (most of which I made myself over the thousand or so years I've been in love with him). It was an interesting experiment to remove all the extraneous material from these tiny little ten-second movies, and some worked out better than others. I didn't even think I could crop gifs, in fact I probably couldn't, until the apps or programs or whatever-they-are became more versatile/easier to use. Things that aren't dead-easy aren't in my internet vocabulary.

I ended up with gifs that are extremely tiny, 1/4 the size of most of them. If you blow them up very much, they're too blurry to bother with. In some cases the effect is startling: Harold's face is zoomed in a little too close for comfort. We're not used to seeing him on a screen the size of a postage stamp, but neither are we accustomed to looking so deeply into those expressive and slightly haunted eyes.

Harold's director Hal Roach famously said, "Harold Lloyd was not a comedian. But he was the best actor playing a comedian the world has ever seen." It's true that Harold's was the humour of humiliation, social awkwardness, rejection and pain. How he made humour out of that is anybody's guess. But the other "big two", Chaplin and Keaton, also used pathos and struggle to good effect, and turned it all into laughs. I think it was Jerry Lewis - whom I hate - who said, "Comedy is a man in trouble." About that, I think he had a point.