chris cunningham

Started by cowboykurtis, April 06, 2003, 11:34:51 AM

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Stefen

no, but when he doesn't make anything, people forget about him. And then he becomes underrated.
Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

cowboykurtis

Quote from: Stefenno, but when he doesn't make anything, people forget about him. And then he becomes underrated.

or not rated at all
...your excuses are your own...

Stefen

yeah. okay. whatever.
Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

Stefen

So I got a copy of rubber johnny and ripped it to my computer but im not showing any of you losers cause you never come into this thread. lets just say it's probably going to knock the filmmaking world on it's ass.

also, there is a website up for it www.rubberjohnny.tv
Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

cowboykurtis

i started the thread - you can show me - eventhough you hate me and I'm a loser.

if been waiting for him to do a feature for years. How's the short? is the whole film shot in that "nightvision" style?
...your excuses are your own...

Stefen

Quote from: cowboykurtisi started the thread - you can show me - eventhough you hate me and I'm a loser.

if been waiting for him to do a feature for years. How's the short? is the whole film shot in that "nightvision" style?

Yes, you are right. Okay, pm me your aim or msn name and I will show you the secret spot.
Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

Pubrick

Quote from: flagpolespeciali'm gonna get a beating now aren't i?
yeah cos ur not making sense.

"how much talent he has" is not determined by the length of his work. u can tell instantly how much potential genius there is in any artist from their best stuff in whatever medium. anyone who saw the Bachelorette video wouldn't deny that gondry is a relentlessly stimulating artist.

so in much the same way anyone who saw windowlicker or come to daddy cannot deny that they display an intense, profound creative force not found in 99% of feature films. he proved his ownership of the music video and that's enuff justification for that format.

what ur saying is he has to make a great feature film in order to prove he is the best video director, and that makes no sense whatsoever.
under the paving stones.

cron

cinema "good storytelling"

think about sculpture
context, context, context.

Pubrick

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=61108&item=7519134136&rd=1



"Features typically bizarre anatomical images to impress visitors to your home."
under the paving stones.

SiliasRuby

Looking at that poster makes me a bit nautious. I can't spell.
The Beatles know Jesus Christ has returned to Earth and is in Los Angeles.

When you are getting fucked by the big corporations remember to use a condom.

There was a FISH in the perkalater!!!

My Collection

Pubrick

click on thumbnails for bigger pic, camera-phone quality:






yes, i own this baby. review pending.
under the paving stones.

cowboykurtis

very excited to hear what you think abou this

I've been waiting for this - i dont think it ships to the US until july.

what exactly is the content of the book?
...your excuses are your own...

cowboykurtis

this article tells a little about Rubber Johnny and implies Ranx (Ran Xerox) may not be happening after all:

Time Out London .. 15-22.06.2005 ..

Warped Mind by Ben Walters
80 Spasming mutants, inside-out heads, deformed physiognomies that couldn't, and certainly shouldn't, exist - just another day at the orifice for Chris Cunningham. Best known for his videos for Portishead, Madonna, Björk and, most notoriously, Aphex Twin (a demonic version of whose face was plastered on to council estate kids in 'Come to Daddy' and bootylicious babes in 'Windowlicker'). Cunningham has now made 'Rubber Johnny', a six-minute film released by Warp on DVD.
Set in a dank basement-like room and shot in grainy-green night vision, it's an all-out audiovisual assault in which a shape-shifting mutant child in a wheelchair throws the mother of all fits. Like much of Cunningham's work, its power comes from the clash between the mundane and the monstrous, between a setting coded as 'authentic' (in this case the CCTV-style footage of a concrete room) and grotesque subject matter that often revolves around the collapsing body (here a kid with an outsized head and the apparent ability to expose its contents).
The disturbingly real feel is partly a result of Cunningham's reliance on plastic prosthetics rather than digital effects. 'To me, cinema is about photographing reality,' he insists, affable and engaged behind his shades. 'I don't think computer graphics look real enough yet - they sacrifice the psychological effect of something looking genuine.' Accordingly, 'Rubber Johnny' is 'pretty lo-fi. It's just me and a couple of friends with foam rubber, Sellotape, fake hair and an old wheelchair. All the pictures in the book were taken on my bathroom floor.'
'Rubber Johnny' also marks another - and perhaps final - collaboration with Aphex Twin's Richard James, featuring a mix of his music and Cunningham's own. 'I think I've taken that as far as I want to,' the director says. 'I've got to the point now where I'd quite like to do the music to my own film.'
A move into features is his next step, though he's been saying that for a while: planned adaptations of William Gibson's 'Neuromancer', Italian punk comic 'RanXerox' and Philip K Dick's 'A Scanner Darkly' (now filmed by Richard Linklater) came to nothing after Cunningham's enthusiasm waned despite substantial preparatory work. 'It's just embarrassing,' he admits. 'All I ever do is talk about films and then not make them. As a result I thought: just shut up about it - make a film then talk about it when it's done. But it's got to be something that I'm absolutely frothing about. After three or four years tinkering with other people's material I came to the conclusion that I just had to develop my own material from scratch.'
'Rubber Johnny' itself took far longer to realise than anticipated - four years of snatched weekends. It was initially conceived as one of ten Cunningham shorts to be issued collectively as a 'DVD album'; the production time prompted the decision to release 'Johnny' into the community on his own for the time being, packaged in a 42-page illustrated hardback sleeve ('more of a book with a bonus DVD, really').
Even this release was delayed when the Italian printers balked at the grotesque photographs, like the one on this page of deformed bodyshapes composed of limbs, arseholes, bollocks, and the occasional gaping gob. Unlike the film's fast, grainy images, these are flatly, brightly lit with an objective feel, like something out of a medical textbook: 'In my mind they were photos of [the character] as a baby,' Cunningham explains, 'being photographed in hospital and changing shape each time they took a photograph.' Hardly every mother's dream. There are also dozens of sketches that hark back to the character's origins as a doodle in the margins of Cunningham's schoolbooks.
It adds up to an impressive and unusual package - one that's typical of Warp Films' ambitious new reach. Founded in 1989, Warp Records nurtured the likes of Aphex Twin, LFO and Autechre (for whom Cunningham made his first video ten years ago); the label moved into film with Chris Morris's BAFTA-winning 2002 short 'My Wrongs #8245-8249 & 117', which sold well on disc, and last year produced its first feature, Shane Meadows' 'Dead Man's Shoes'. DVD distribution remains key to Warp's approach. It hopes to develop a loyal record label or film club-type audience for a varied diet of material. A week after 'Rubber Johnny', the disturbing 'Paradise Lost' documentaries are released; future titles could range from music-based content to vintage television.
Warp's Mark Herbert says the company has taken its cue from its track record in music. 'The director's vision is so important. Our thing is developing a body of work with people rather than one-hit-wonders, and finding an audience for it. With our own distribution, films don't have to be on 300 prints across the country.'
Feature production also continues: Meadows' skinhead memoir 'Oi! This Is England' is due to shoot in September and talks are underway with Lynne Ramsay, for whose 'Morvern Callar' Warp produced the soundtrack. Other projects include 'Harvest', a story by Frank Cottrell Boyce about allotments and asylum-seekers and eventually, perhaps, a Chris Cunningham feature. At any rate, he has no plans to return to promo work.
'Music videos are fundamentally wrong anyway,' he asserts. 'They're just wrong. Someone's individual interpretation of a song shouldn't be denied them by seeing some video. All of the tracks I loved as a kid, if I saw the videos, I'd be pissed off 'cos it would be like, "Now I've got that fucking thing in my head".'
Not that anyone would think such a thing after seeing any of Cunningham's work...
...your excuses are your own...

Fernando

Quote from: cowboykurtis
'To me, cinema is about photographing reality,'

Good article, I think once Kubrick said something similar, Nicholson quoted him in the a life doc.

Quote from: cowboykurtis
'It's just embarrassing,' he admits. 'All I ever do is talk about films and then not make them. As a result I thought: just shut up about it - make a film then talk about it when it's done.

Yep, that's the best instead of endlessly teasing us.

The more I read about him the more I'm convinced he's a genius, what first impressed me (aside the fact he work with SK at very young age) is the way he express his ideas, then I saw some of his videos; he better start working on something like right now.

cowboykurtis

i think the quote nocholson said (paraphrasing Kubrick):

"You don't photograph reality, you photograph the photograph of reality."

I agree with your opinon on cunnigham. I've said this before, I think he's the most talented filmmaker of his generation, period. He's the most brilliant visual director working.

I can't wait for his next endeavor.
...your excuses are your own...