ArtSake

The trend toward non-communal film viewing continues.

YouTube (owned by Google, Inc) has created a virtual screening room specifically for short, independent films. The idea is to bring indie shorts to a wider, global viewing audience via desktop computers and portable devises. The films are curated by YouTube and indie filmmakers are encouraged to submit work. Click here for more info on the YouTube Screening Room and contact information for submission requirements. To read more: Washington Post article

“I am big. It’s the picture’s that got small.” Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, from Sunset Boulevard (1950), written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder.

And Norma Desmond was right. The pictures did get small. So small that movies can now be viewed on a 2″ iPod Video screen. If the thought of viewing 2″ videos makes your head spin, well the techno geeks have solved that problem by creating special eyeglasses called the i-Theater. Apparently if you wear the glasses, it changes the viewing experience to replicate a 50″ inch video screen seen from a distance of 8.5 feet. Call me old fashioned, but there’s nothing like going out into the real world, to an actual, independent movie theater, buying some lightly salted, non-genetically modified popcorn, and watching a projected moving image with other primates. Shh! Down in front! Please shut off your cellphone!

For a trip back in time, check out the Lost Theatres Project. Lost Theatres of Somerville commissioned seven photographers to document 14 theatre locations as they are today. Beam me up Lieutenant Ohura.

Image of The Capitol Theater, Somerville, MA from The Lost Theatres Project.

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The Dickson Experimental Sound Film is believed to be the first film recorded with live sound. At about 1:05 into the film, the sound begins. I wonder what William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, the man who created this film, would think of YouTube.

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At Home in Utopia, directed by Michal Goldman (MCC Film/Video fellow ‘07) is a new documentary film showing at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in June and July. It tells the story of immigrant Jewish garment workers who created four cooperatively owned housing developments in the Bronx in the 1920’s. Think of all the thimbles! And luckily for the tenants, George Steinbrenner never owned the deed to this housing development, otherwise Goldman would have had to make a very different film. Let’s see what she has to say about the film:

“When the architect Andrew Hazelton and Ellen Brodsky came to me with an idea for a film about the Bronx Jewish labor housing cooperatives, I was immediately fascinated. The story of these visionary workers’ communities was completely new to me. Somehow, immigrant garment workers had managed to build big, beautiful, cooperatively owned apartment complexes in the 1920s. How did they pull it off? What inspired them? I wanted to know partly for personal reasons. I had grown up hearing tales of the labor movement from my father, a union lawyer. My immigrant Jewish grandparents had been socialists at heart.”

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