UrbanicaBlog
by Israel Baumgartner
Maries Georges Jean Méliès was born in Paris in 1861 and from a very early age he showed a particular interest in the arts which led, as a boy, to a place at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris where Méliès showed particular interest in stage design and puppetry.
Méliès’ principle contribution to cinema was the combination of traditional theatrical elements to motion pictures – he sought to present spectacles of a kind not possible in live theatre.
In the Autumn of 1896, an event occurred which has since passed into film folklore and changed the way Méliès looked at filmmaking. Whilst filming a simple street scene, Méliès camera jammed and it took him a few seconds to rectify the problem. Thinking no more about the incident, Méliès processed the film and was struck by the effect such a incident had on the scene – objects suddenly appeared, disappeared or were transformed into other objects.
Méliès discovered from this incident that cinema had the capacity for manipulating and distorting time and space. He expanded upon his initial ideas and devised some complex special effects.
He pioneered the first double exposure (La caverne Maudite, 1898), the first split screen with performers acting opposite themselves (Un Homme de tete, 1898), and the first dissolve (Cendrillon, 1899).
Méliès tackled a wide range of subjects as well as the fantasy films usually associated with him, including advertising films and serious dramas. He was also one of the first filmmakers to present nudity on screen with “Apres le Bal”.
Faced with a shrinking market once the novelty of his films began to wear off, Méliès abandoned film production in 1912. In 1915 he was forced to turn his innovative studio into a Variety Theatre and resumed his pre-film career as a Showman.
In 1923 he was declared bankrupt and his beloved Theatre Robert Houdin was demolished. Méliès almost disappeared into obscurity until the late 1920’s when his substantial contribution to cinema was recognised by the French and he was presented with the Legion of Honour and given a rent free apartment where he spent the remaining years of his life.
Georges Méliès died in 1938 after making over five hundred films in total – financing, directing, photographing and starring in nearly every one.
“Postiche” the adorning of one’s manly jowls with patchwork or quilted beards (often handed down through the generations!) “Postichery” is actually the invention of Julian Wolkenstein, who teamed up with Paul Sharp to stage this act of bold fakery – presenting their “historical findings” in a faux-exhibition catalogue from the imaginary Museum of Helsinki. Julian calls his work a “metafiction…sitting on the knife’s edge of believable/unbelievable.”
The geographic coordinates ”69.13 ° N 51.06 ° W” mean on the globe the exact position ofthe fjord Sermeq Kujalleq west Greenland. Along the bay, where men live, the houses andwooden churches decline their facades red or brown, the boats waiting to be repaired, theplants have settled.
Facing the sea, man contemplates the ice blocks that slide slowly to the surface during the melting of the ice. It’s summer. Around him, in the silence of the North, the space is hugecrack in the blocks that break off and sink into the water. Only the man to dream this white desert where the heart of an endless sky rightful echo a thousand times repeated falls. The summer is ending soon. Beneath the surface of the gray horizon, where sea and sky merge, water noise may be ice begins to form again, the elements that continue their slow evolution. In the distance, behind the facade of the houses, the man looks his ships breakthe ice and get lost on the horizon.
Facing the sea, man contemplates the ice blocks that slide slowly to the surface during the melting of the ice. It’s summer. Around him, in the silence of the North, the space is hugecrack in the blocks that break off and sink into the water. Only the man to dream this white desert where the heart of an endless sky rightful echo a thousand times repeated falls. The summer is ending soon. Beneath the surface of the gray horizon, where sea and sky merge, water noise may be ice begins to form again, the elements that continue their slow evolution. In the distance, behind the facade of the houses, the man looks his ships breakthe ice and get lost on the horizon.
In this series, I see the decay of the Arctic world: in a soft light, diffused and virginal, thetraditional ways of life give way to a consumer society. The sketch of shapes and colorsthen puts highlight a dazzling show the irreparable damage that result: the living mute, climate change, the ice break up. In a slow torpor, Earth and Man crack, it’s a white deathannounced.
Vitus Saloshanka:
Every time I thought more in my country, I pass a border. A boundary that separates two worlds have long been. Previously she was a part of the Iron Curtain and now a unified force barrier between Europe and the East. It must be mentioned that the next checkpoint is located further east at the first Russian-Japanese border. Why should I not be surprised that in conversations about my background, the ”white” before “Russian” is often ignored.
The urban landscapes that form the core of my book ”Dreamland”, are a variety of old andnewly created habitats, and describe new social structures and contradictions in what is now Belarus - a country that is due to the tense political External Relations for the Western media largely closed.
The focus of my analysis is a conflict with the often bizarre architecture of the suburbanlandscape. These newly-trained aesthetic of private living space bears the traces of time of rapid socio-economic development of the country in recent Jahrzennten and in search of lost cultural identity in today’s Belarus.
Ansonia, Connecticut – 1884
Cincinnati, Ohio – 1904
Charlottesville, Virginia – October, 1907
Washington DC – 1903
Indianapolis, Indiana – 1914
Spartanburg, South Carolina – 1923
Manhattan, New York – 1911
Springfield, Missouri – 1910
Allentown, Pennsylvania – March 1885
Allentown, Pennsylvania – 1911
The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Wednesday that its spring 2012 exhibition, set to open on May 10, will be “Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada: On Fashion,” a fascinating exploration of these two Italian designers from two very different eras, in a format inspired by Miguel Covarrubias’s “Impossible Interviews” published in Vanity Fair in the 1930s. This exhibition celebrates the extraordinary creativity of the Italian-born designer, Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) who, together with Coco Chanel, dominated fashion between the two world wars. Schiaparelli designed for the modern woman and had a close relationship with the Parisian artistic community of the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to over 150 dresses, the exhibition will include shoes, hats, jewelry and other accessories, drawings and fashion illustrations, works by the period’s leading fashion photographers, paintings and sculpture by Man Ray, Salvador Dali and others, archival news reels and movie stills and clips from some of the many American, British, and French productions with which she was associated.
Monographie der Spinnen / Monographia Aranearum’ (Monograph of Spiders) by Carl Wilhelm Hahn (1786-1835), a German zoologist and artist. The book was issued in installments between 1820 and 1836. you can see the whole thing on the University of Heidelberg’s website, here.
Working with common themes such as transition, aging, isolation, and loss, I am interested in the fragility of relationships and people’s awkwardness in trying to coexist and relate to one another. To that end I create miniature 3D models to serve as evolving still lifes from which I paint detailed narrative paintings. Using cardboard, foam, wood, paint, glue, and model railroad miniatures, I construct various fictional, scale models. Recent models have included a neighborhood, lake, theater, doctor’s office, church, and numerous domestic interiors. The models become a stage on which I develop narratives. They offer me complete control over lighting, composition, and vantage point to achieve a certain dramatic effect.
While working with tiny pieces that often slip frustratingly from my fingers, I am reminded of the delicacy and vulnerability of the world I am creating, and this summons empathy for my subject. The clumsy inadequacies of miniatures help me to convey a sense of artifice and distance. I try to paint the scenes in a way that feels like a believable world, but an alternate, fabricated world.
The paintings are glimpses of a scene or fragments of a narrative. Similar to a memory, they are fictional constructions of significant moments meant to elicit specific feelings and to provoke the viewer to consider the moment before or after the one presented in the painting. I am interested in storytelling over time through repeated depictions of the same house or car or person, seasonal changes, and shifting vantage points. Like the disturbing difficulty of trying to put rolls of film in order several years after the pictures have been taken, my aim is for the collective images to suggest a known past that is just beyond reach.
