REEL – UNREEL

Francis Alÿs, REEL-UNREEL

Kabul, Afghanistan 2011

In collaboration with Julien Devaux and Ajmal Maiwandi

20:00 min.

Francis Alÿs

Stranded in Canton

William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton
Book and DVD, Twin Palms

William Eggleston’s pioneering video work, “Stranded In Canton,” has been restored and is finally available, almost thirty-five years after it was made. The book contains forty frame enlargements from the digital re-master, a brief appreciation from filmmaker Gus Van Sant, and a DVD of the 77-minute film itself, along with more than thirty minutes of bonus footage and an interview with Mr. Eggleston conducted at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.

“Shot in 1974 with a Sony Porta-Pak, the crazily careering Stranded in Canton documents a cast of hard-drinking Southerners with the intimacy, ease and instability of a seasoned participants. Whiffs of Southern Gothic are not new to Mr. Eggleston’s work, but here they rise to the surface-fierce, tragic and proud.” The New York Times

Stranded in Canton, de William Eggleston et Robert Gordon, inédit en salle en Europe, avec des images du photographe lui-même de 1973, tournées avec une Sony Porta-Pak, montées en 2005, mélangeant de tendres images de ses enfants à la maison avec celles de soirées bien arrosées, d’urination publiques et d’un homme arrachant la tête d’un poulet devant une foule en délires à la Nouvelle Orléans.

Interview Magazine currently has an interesting exchange between William Eggleston & Harmony Korine on their website. Although Korine addresses the same territory as every other interviewer (Eggleston’s landmark use of color, his relationship with Szarkowski and MOMA, his interest in the American vernacular landscape, etc.) there are some engaging insights.

Bright, bright day

Cold snaps
The Soviet film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky always carried a Polaroid camera with him. His son, Andrei A Tarkovsky, explains the background to some of the pictures

Myasnoye
This is in Myasnoye, Russia, where my family had a holiday home.
© Andrei A Tarkovsky. All rights reserved

Boat
This is my father’s boat near our house in Myasnoye. He was greatly attached to that place, where he could isolate himself and work on his scripts – the first drafts of Stalker and The Sacrifice were written there. He used to take long walks and these pictures are the memories of those promenades.
© Andrei A Tarkovsky. All rights reserved

Mother
My mother, Larissa Tarkovsky, and Dak in Myasnoye. You may find a lot of similarities of these pictures with Gorkachov’s dreams in Nostalgia.
© Andrei A Tarkovsky. All rights reserved

Myasnoye
This is the view from my father’s room in the country house in Myasnoye.
© Andrei A Tarkovsky. All rights reserved

“…Any artist in any genre is striving to reflect as deep as possible a person’s inner world… I realized, quite unexpectedly for myself, that all these years I was doing one and the same thing and in essence I’m always interested in the same problems. Though I was making different types of films, all of them came to life for one reason — they had to tell about the inner duality of a human being. About his contradictory position between spirit and substance, between spiritual ideals and the necessity to exist in this material world.”

Andrei Tarkovsky, About Andrei Tarkovsky, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1990

Bright, Bright Day: Andrey Tarkovsky’s Polaroids. Edited by Stephen Gill
by Andrei Arsenevich Tarkovskii, Professor Stephen Gill (Editor), Andrey Tarkovsky (Photographer)

Andrey Tarkovsky is widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers in history. This beautifully produced, gem-like volume collects his extremely evocative and personal Polaroids, most of which feature his family and their most cherished settings-at home and in nature. Edited by Stephen Gill, who also contributes a text, this volume contains essays by leading critics; poems by Arseniy Tarkovsky; a text by Andrey A. Tarkovsky, his son; Andrey Tarkovsky’s own essay on photography; and a series of intimate Tarkovsky family photographs made during the 1930s by the Moscow poet Lev Gornung. In his text, Gill writes, “The images seem to dance between reality, the very being of their subject, and the photographer’s feeling for them. These images are descriptive documents, but they also speak for themselves, conveying something of Tarkovsky’s emotions. Tarkovsky’s photographs are wonderfully measured; his feet seem to be firmly on the ground, and yet he leaves space for his subjects to breathe, so he does not mute the essence.”

http://www.brightbrightday.com/

By the Ways

A Journey with William Eggleston
A film by Vincent Gerard and Cedric Laty (2007)