Author: Ferguson Ulrich

Eli Elliott’s “SUMMER POLITIKO”

Celebrating his 100th YouTubian video art upload, with a new masterpiece (which could possibly turn the celebration into a suspension of his entire YouTube channel), absurdist Eli Elliott presents SUMMER POLITIKO, “a political thriller which hoiks back up the most important politiko events of the previous summer, with brief homage to a summer years prior, where a Culture Jammer billionaire almost took the wheel and set sail to what knows what.”

Multiple character performances, suspense and romance, wrapped up in heavily laced political insight, SUMMER POLITIKO dazzles as one of the years most important political shorts.

George Kuchar RIP

One of the earliest cinema underground absurdists were the Kuchar brothers. Low budget and truly underground, they pumped out film after film using friends, non actors and plots, or non plots, that played off of and seemed to mock both mainstream Hollywood and the B-movie industry.

Unlike some of their more educated fellows, their careers began in 1954 when they tore the wrapping paper off an 8-mm camera on their 12th birthday. They quickly taught themselves to use it and set about shooting brilliant, exotic, absurd features starring their friends, inspired by the Hollywood blockbusters and B movies they obsessed over at their local theaters in the Bronx.

Read the rest at Vice Magazine: GEORGE & MIKE KUCHAR – Vice Magazine

 

George Kuchar is one of the few filmmakers who get’s tagged with all the alternative cinema labels available: “experimental filmmaker” “underground” “avant garde” “absurdist”, etc.  His work covered it all and was a huge inspiration for opening up the floodgates of realization that cinema could be homegrown, backyard, uniquely creative and still respected. Many now well known filmmakers took this inspiration and used it to go forth and create their own work.

George Kuchar has directed over 200 films and videos (including over 15 with his twin brother Mike), many of them short films by students in his courses at San Francisco Art Institute. His work is archived at the Video Data Bank. In the Critics’ Poll of the 100 best films of the 20th century, appearing originally in the January 4, 2000 edition of The Village Voice, Hold Me While I’m Nakedwas ranked 52nd.

 

Yoshua Okon – OCTOPUS

A new video piece by Yoshua Okon called OCTOPUS involves a performance with day laborers who act out their Guatemalan soldier past in a Home Depot parking lot. No permission was asked and Okon shot freely as Home Depot business as usual took place.

Yoshua Okon’s OCTOPUS is currently screening at the Hammer museum in Los Angeles.

Here is a video of the making of OCTOPUS –
http://p.castfire.com/ezVNG/video/699545/699545_2011-08-18-195545.1327.m4v

http://hammer.ucla.edu/watchlisten/watchlisten/show_id/699545

And a write up about the Yoshua Okon piece in the LA Weekly can be found here – http://www.laweekly.com/2011-09-01/art-books/yoshua-okon-at-the-hammer-museum/

GOAT WORSHIP RE-BOOT 2011

GOAT WORSHIP has been a bitch to track. A prolific video making experimental absurdist outfit, they used to have nearly all their work on YouTube and then in some sort of fit of rage or frustration they would take down their whole channel, delete all their videos. Then months later it would re-surface under another channel, then, once again it would be gone; either again self inflicted or YouTube inflicted.

In their hometown in Canada they apparently have been banned from various venues.

In 2010, in the U.S., they were featured as part of the Absurdist Film Festival.

And then, some sort of inner turmoil disbanded the whole Goat Worship acting troupe.

But the ringleader has returned, and has turned to animation (SIMS characters) to further spread the hive mind goat gospel.

The animation approach works great. I sat through 35 minutes of the “first dream” no problem and eager to get into the second dream series.

The incredible new website offers new work, plus all the classic GOAT WORSHIP videos, and also music.

Check the site out at http://sentimentalcorp.org/

Here’s the new work on the site –  http://sentimentalcorp.org/parasitedreams/

And here’s the classic Goat Worship – http://sentimentalcorp.org/goat/index.php