Luis Buñuel documentary from French TV series, Cinéastes de Notre Temps (1964)

The French documentary series, Cinéastes de Notre Temps aired this episode on April 4, 1964 which focuses on the early career of exiled surrealist filmmaker, Luis Bunuel.

Approx. 37:25

L'Âge d'Or (1930) directed by Luis Buñuel and written by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali

L'Âge d'Or (French pronunciation: [lɑʒ dɔʁ], English: The Golden Age) is a 1930 surrealist film directed by Luis Buñuel and written by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, who was also credited as co-creator of Luis Buñuel's surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou.
L’age d’or was performed at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930 and is partly based on the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. The film became Buñuel's solo project after a falling-out he had with Dali before filming began. During this film, he worked around his technical ignorance by filming mostly in sequence and using nearly every foot of film that he shot. L'Âge d'or was read to be an attack on Catholicism, and thus, precipitated an even larger scandal than Un chien andalou. The right-wing press criticized the film and the police placed a ban on it that lasted 50 years.
Fascist and anti-Semitic groups staged a stink bomb and ink-throwing riot in the Paris theater where it was shown. Although negative aspects of society were being thrown into the life of Dalí and obviously affecting the success of his artwork, it did not hold him back from expressing his own ideas and beliefs in his art and Buñuel eventually would come to be regarded as one of the finest directors in the history of cinema. Both of these films, Un Chien Andalou and L’age d’or, have had a tremendous impact on the independent surrealist film movement.

"If Un Chien Andalou stands as the supreme record of Surrealism's adventures into the realm of the unconscious, then L'Âge d'or is perhaps the most trenchant and implacable expression of its revolutionary intent."

-Robert Short
"The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema, Persistence of Vision" Vol. 3, 2002

The film cost a million francs to produce and was financed by the nobleman Vicomte Charles de Noailles, who beginning in 1928 commissioned a film every year for the birthday of his wife Marie-Laure de Noailles. When it was first released, there was a storm of protest. The film premiered at Studio 28 in Paris on 29 November 1930 after receiving its permit from the Board of Censors. In order to get the permit, Buñuel had to present the film to the Board as the dream of a madman.

On 3 December 1930, a group of incensed members of the fascist League of Patriots threw ink at the screen, assaulted members of the audience, and destroyed art works by Dalí, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy and others on display in the lobby.

On 10 December, the Prefect of Police of Paris, Jean Chiappe, arranged to have the film banned after the Board of Censors reviewed the film. A contemporary Spanish newspaper condemned the film as “...the most repulsive corruption of our age... the new poison which Judaism, masonry, and rabid, revolutionary sectarianism want to use in order to corrupt the people.”

The Noailles family pulled the film from distribution for nearly 50 years. In 1933, it was screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, but the film did not have its official United States premiere until 1–15 November 1979 at the Roxie Cinema in San Francisco.

The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general. In one notable scene, the young girl passionately fellates the toe of a religious statue.

In the final vignette, the place card narration tells of an orgy of 120 days of depraved acts (a reference to the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom) and tells us that the survivors of the orgy are ready to emerge. From the door of a castle emerges the Duc de Blangis, who strongly resembles Christ, with his long robes and beard. When a young girl runs out of the castle, the Duc comforts the girl, before taking her back into the castle. A scream is heard and the Duc emerges again, his beard mysteriously vanished. The film suddenly cuts to its final image, with the scalps of the women flapping in the wind on a crucifix, accompanied by jovial music. It has been suggested that this, along with scenes of violent expression earlier in the film as the lovestruck protagonist is manhandled along by two enforcers, may suggest that the film's message is that sexual repression, whether propagated by civil bourgeois society or by the church, breeds violence. This scene is alluded to in the opening sequence, which is an excerpt from a short science film about a scorpion. There we are informed that scorpions have five prismatic articulations, culminating in a sting.

CAST:
* Gaston Modot as The Man
* Lya Lys as the Young Girl
* Caridad de Laberdesque as a Chambermaid and Little Girl
* Max Ernst as the Leader of men in cottage
* Josep Llorens Artigas as (Governor)
* Lionel Salem as Duke of Blangis
* Germaine Noizet as Marquise
* Duchange as Conductor

The film's illustrations were created by Luis Ortiz Rosales.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%82ge_d%27Or
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%AD
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Bunuel

There are two sources below from which you can watch the film. The first window below offers the full film uncut. The rest of the windows below that feature the film cut into segments. The segmented version appears to be higher resolution. Enjoy!

Antonio Sant'Elia (April 30, 1888 - October 10, 1916)

Photo#1 : A perspective drawing by Sant'Elia, 1914

Photo#2 : Perspective drawing from La Citta Nuova, 1914.

Photo#3 : Example of Futurist architecture












Antonio Sant'Elia (April 30, 1888 - October 10, 1916) was an extremely influential Italian architect.

Antonio Sant'Elia was born in Como, Lombardy. A builder by training, he opened a design office in Milan in 1912 and became involved with the Futurist movement. Between 1912 and 1914, influenced by industrial cities of the United States and the Viennese architects Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, he began a series of design drawings for a futurist Città Nuova and the ("New City") that was conceived as symbolic of a new age.

Many of these drawings were displayed at the only exhibition of the Nuove Tendenze group (of which he was a member) exhibition in May/June 1914 at the "Famiglia Artistica" gallery. Today, some of these drawings are on permanent display at Como's art gallery (Pinacoteca). (They used to be in the Villa Olmo)

The manifesto Futurist Architecture was published in August 1914, supposedly by Sant'Elia, though this is subject to debate. In it the author stated that "the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare or violently colored materials". As described in this manifesto, his designs featured bold groupings and large-scale disposition of planes and masses creating a heroic industrial expressionism. His vision was for a highly industrialised and mechanized city of the future, which he saw not as a mass of individual buildings but a vast, multi-level, interconnected and integrated urban conurbation designed around the "life" of the city. His extremely influential designs featured vast monolithic skyscraper buildings with terraces, bridges and aerial walkways that embodied the sheer excitement of modern architecture and technology.

A nationalist as well as an irredentist, Sant'Elia joined the Italian army as Italy entered World War I in 1915. He was killed during the Battles of the Isonzo, near Monfalcone. Most of his designs were never built, but his futurist vision has influenced many architects, artists and designers.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Sant%27Elia

Max Vernon Mathews - Computer Music Pioneer

PHOTO: Max Mathews playing and sampling the violin connected to an IBM 7040 computer

Max Vernon Mathews (* November 13, 1926, in Columbus, Nebraska) is a pioneer in the world of computer music. He studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a Sc.D. in 1954. Working at Bell Labs, Mathews wrote MUSIC, the first widely-used program for sound generation, in 1957. For the rest of the century, he continued as a leader in digital audio research, synthesis, and human-computer interaction as it pertains to music performance.

Although he was not the first to generate sound with a computer (an Australian CSIRAC computer played tunes as early as 1951), Mathews fathered generations of digital music tools. He describes his work in parental terms in this excerpt from "Horizons in Computer Music," March 8-9, 1997, Indiana University:

"Computer performance of music was born in 1957 when an IBM 704 in NYC played a 17 second composition on the Music I program which I wrote. The timbres and notes were not inspiring, but the technical breakthrough is still reverberating. Music I led me to Music II through V. A host of others wrote Music 10, Music 360, Music 15, Csound and Cmix. Many exciting pieces are now performed digitally. The IBM 704 and its siblings were strictly studio machines--they were far too slow to synthesize music in real-time. Chowning's FM algorithms and the advent of fast, inexpensive, digital chips made real-time possible, and equally important, made it affordable."

"Starting with the Groove program in 1970, my interests have focused on live performance and what a computer can do to aid a performer. I made a controller, the radio-baton, plus a program, the conductor program, to provide new ways for interpreting and performing traditional scores. In addition to contemporary composers, these proved attractive to soloists as a way of playing orchestral accompaniments. Singers often prefer to play their own accompaniments. Recently I have added improvisational options which make it easy to write compositional algorithms. These can involve precomposed sequences, random functions, and live performance gestures. The algorithms are written in the C language. We have taught a course in this area to Stanford undergraduates for two years. To our happy surprise, the students liked learning and using C. Primarily I believe it gives them a feeling of complete power to command the computer to do anything it is capable of doing."

In 1961, Mathews arranged the accompaniment of the song Daisy Bell for an uncanny performance by computer-synthesized human voice, using technology developed by John Kelly of Bell Laboratories and others. Author Arthur C. Clarke was coincidentally visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility at the time of this remarkable speech synthesis demonstration and was so impressed that he later told Stanley Kubrick to use it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the climactic scene where the HAL 9000 computer sings while his cognitive functions are disabled.

Mathews directed the Acoustical and Behavioral Research Center at Bell Laboratories from 1962 to 1985, which carried out research in speech communication, visual communication, human memory and learning, programmed instruction, analysis of subjective opinions, physical acoustics, and industrial robotics. From 1974 to 1980 he was the Scientific Advisor to the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), Paris, France, and since 1987 has been Professor of Music (Research) at Stanford University. He served as the Master of Ceremonies for the concert program of NIME-01, the inaugural conference on New interfaces for musical expression.

Mathews is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Acoustical Society of America, the IEEE, and the Audio Engineering Society. He holds a Silver Medal in Musical Acoustics from the Acoustical Society of America, and the Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et Lettres, Republique Francaise.

The Max portion of the software package Max/MSP is named after him (the MSP portion is named for Miller Puckette, currently teaching at UC- San Diego).

Reference: http://www.answers.com/topic/max-mathews

"Daisy Bell" (1961) by John Kelly, Carol Lockbaum, and Max Mathews for IBM

"Daisy Bell" was composed by Harry Dacre in 1892. In 1961, the IBM 7094 became the first computer to sing, singing the song Daisy Bell. Vocals were programmed by John Kelly and Carol Lockbaum and the accompaniment was programmed by Max Mathews. This performance was the inspiration for a similar scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Below the pictures there is a video clip you can play with the audio recording. Enjoy.
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do
I'm half crazy all for the love of you
It won't be a stylish marriage
I can't afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two.

PHOTO #1: IBM 7094 Emergency Power Off Switch
PHOTO #2: IBM 7094 with operator, John Szallasi
PHOTO #3: IBM 7094 tape room
PHOTO #4: IBM 7094 console
PHOTO #5: Bob Sparks with IBM 7094
PHOTOS #6-10: Various Pictures of the IBM 7094

Warhol's Cinema - A Mirror for the Sixties (1989) by Keith Griffiths

64 min documentary on Andy Warhol's (1928-1987) cinema of the sixties, made for Channel 4 in association with THE FACTORY, MOMA and the Whitney Museum of Art and in collaboration with Simon Field. Directed & Produced Keith Griffiths.
Recorded from a VHS video tape recording from the Channel 4 documentary.

Click on either link below to watch Warhol's Cinema, a documentary focusing on Andy Warhol as a film-maker.

http://ubu.artmob.ca/video/WarholsCinema.mp4

http://www.ubu.com/film/warhol_cinema.html

Pistol Poem (1960) by Brion Gysin

Brion Gysin was a close friend of the beat generation author, William Burroughs. He was also involved in much experimentation with audio, the written word, and visual poetry. In 1960 he recorded his “Pistol Poem” in London for the BBC which had commissioned him to produce some work for broadcast. The recording engineer reportedly almost left the recording session because he said he could feel 'evil' coming from the bizarre “poem” which inter-spliced audio samples of Gysin reciting number counts with gunshots.