Tag: artist

Categories
Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Eric Ravilious:
Drawn To War

Director – Margy Kinmonth – 2022 – UK – Cert. PG – 87m

***1/2

The career of the British watercolour artist tragically killed while serving as an official war artist in World War Two – now available to watch online following UK cinema release on Friday, July 1st 2022

The first official war artist to be commissioned in World War Two, Eric Ravilious was on an aircraft which set out from Iceland in 1942 and never came back. There is no exact record of what took place, covered by the phrase “missing in action”, but in all likelihood the plane went down in the sea. Kinmonth finds simple images to convey the incident, which appears in both her opening introduction to Ravilious’ life and her closing reel representing his passing – a warplane descending, our viewpoint falling towards the surface of the sea, an indistinct body moving in water filled with bubbles. At the end, the cold blue of the water contrasts with the gentler, rural green of the family house and surroundings back home.

After his death, Ravilious’ art was largely ignored. Alan Bennett, an admirer of the artist’s work, puts this down to the work’s cheerful and unthreatening nature and a prevailing view that art should grapple with dark and foreboding subject matter.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

All My Friends Hate Me

Director – Andrew Gaynord – 2021 – UK – Cert. 15 – 93m

***

A thirtysomething charity worker’s birthday weekend at the country house of rich friends from his student days turns into a nightmare – out in cinemas on Friday, June 10th

Pete (Tom Stourton, who co-wrote this with Tom Palmer, with both of them producers here) heads off to the house of rich friends in Devon he hasn’t seen since university days for a weekend celebrating his 31st birthday. He doesn’t know the area well and gets lost en route. He’s a bit shocked to find a dog tied up in a field and far more shocked when he disturbs a man sleeping in a parked car who goes berserk and pursues him like a madman, causing the panicking Pete to rapidly flee in his car.

He parks by a gate and a local comes over. “Do you know the way to the manor?”, he asks. “Yes,” comes the reply. “Could you tell it me then,” he asks again. “Yes, I can,” comes the reply. Eventually, he gets the address out of the man. He later relays this story to his friends at the manor, unaware that the man, Norman (Christopher Fairbank), the local who looks after the grounds, has just come in the door behind him.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies Series Shorts Television

Greenaway
By Numbers

How Peter Greenaway’s obsession with various numeric and other cataloguing systems has led to the creation of highly complex, multi-layered film pieces that joyfully play with audiences

If ever anyone were to make a film about the Dewey Decimal System, it would be Peter Greenaway. He is obsessed with ways and means to classify the world in which he finds himself, systems to organise and make sense of that peculiar world, people’s relationship networks with one another and their movement and actions within that world and those networks.

I first came across him on the theatrical release in Hammersmith of his three hours plus epic The Falls (1980), made in between his early, self-financed short films of the 1960s and 1970s and his first, more conventional in length feature The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982). The Falls takes its name from entries in the section of a directory beginning with the letters F A L L e.g. Orchard Falla, Constance Ortuist Fallaburr, Melorder Fallaburr. The directory chronicles survivors of a Violent Unknown Event, VUE for short… [read more]

Full article at DMovies.org in association with Doesn’t Exist Magazine – purchase your copy now.

Categories
Animation Art Movies Shorts

Memorable
(Mémorable)

Director – Bruno Collet – 2019 – France – 12m

*****

The techniques used in this remarkable short include both computer and puppet animation, with all the surfaces of both the puppets and the sets resembling that of a canvas painted with oils. It’s the perfect artistic form in which to express the story the film wishes to tell.

Louis is a painter suffering from dementia. Neither he nor his wife and model Michelle are coping well. He struggles to recognise different items of food by name at the dinner table – a bit of a problem when Michelle asks him to pass the pepper – and attempts to eat a banana without taking the skin off it first… [read more]

Nominated for Best Animated Short at the 2019 (92nd) Oscars.

As part of my Annecy 2019 coverage, I review Memorable (Mémorable) for DMovies.org.