Eric Rondepierre, W189, tirage argentique sur aluminium, 47 x 70 cm, 1993-1995.

Eric Rondepierre finds frames eroded or defaced by time and the projector. find out more on him here

Françoise Ellong

Check out the making of the film DADE directed by Françoise Ellong and shot by David Wolfer, they use print outs of my latest Defacing works.

Wake up and smell Gomorra

Take a look at work of Nathalie Bibougou, an artist I have met here in paris that paints portraits of Melvin Van Peebles and other interesting subjects.

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Recently I saw This is England by Shane Meadows. I liked this film’s perspective so much… I sometimes get flashes from it… I always thought I had a punk attitude but not quite… before punk became white supremacist… it was for everyone who lived on the side of main stream everything… a rebellious attitude towards everything that was wrong… this days it seems that it is even more necessary… yet… this days we have the internet and the ideas go faster but do they really change anything? corporations rules us… even if we don’t want, my life experiences to go from Castro to Corpo seem funny now… mean while I am wondering if artbasel miami beach and my country are going to disappear thanks to the rising global water level.

My Blueberry Nights disappoints…, the latest film by Wong Kar Wai… his films have inspired some of my paintings in the past… even the ones I did not like… and this time the characters are weak, the music is too loud, the visual effects are over done and the film in general does not convey the strong feelings it tries to portrait… a bit like my work…

Recently (five months ago) I saw the movie Le Samourai by Director Jean-Pierre Melville recommended to me by a respected miami artist and seconded the same night by dig. So I eagerly put it on top of my netflix list. I saw it and made notes while I watch it in the hopes of making some comments about it here. Time passed and today I decided to do it with the music background of Cansei de Ser Sexy.

I have to say that these are the type of movies I need to see. It confirms the idea in my head that there is art cinema out there to be explored. Since, I have seen many other Melville movies, but none is as good as Le Samourai. The first thing I noticed about the first shot that lasted like an eternity, it was a movie painting without the moving. Little by little I notice someone on the right side of the frame. It was Alain Delon, other than being one of my mother’s idols, I always noticed that many talked about him as if he was a joke because he starts every sentence about himself with “Alain Delon thinks …” all in the third person sentences, and always about himself. At least that was the way he was portrayed by Les Guignols and it always made me laugh about Delon. Yet this movie changed all that. This movie is a Masterpiece.

I think Melville was influenced by Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and I can imagine movies by Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog and John Frankenheimer’s Ronin are influenced by this one. This movie definitely did not have any blah-blah. There was not dialog during the first 10 minutes. There was a very Japanese / American thing to this movie. Every car and the clothes were very Americana while the personality of the protagonist was very japanese Bushido style. He spoke with few words, filled with passion and straight to the point. He was detached from everything and everybody. A scene where he is stealing a car is so powerful it needed to be seeing many times. He seems lost, without hope, or future, suicidal… it ends with a suicide by cop scene. Every frame seems pure. There is an elegance of iconography that lets you know everything without words. A bit like a medieval church in film. It is 1966 but it feels like it happened at any time. The solitude feeling of this movie is universal and timeless. At one point during the movie I wrote in in my notes “he is me, I am him” I do not feel that now but apparently while I was watching I did. The formal beauty of this movie makes it a kind of cinema that I would like to shoot myself. It was in my opinion a controlled form of minimalism that we don’t see today in cinema, a very silent movie that focused on masculinity and the beauty of being a true gentleman. What can I say, I admire being gentile and true, as it is hard to do that these days where everybody is right and there is not need to have guilt or personal regret for anything we do.

As I just reached 2000 movies watched in netflix and I just watched my first Fassbinder movie Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder recommended to me by colleague Vince, I wonder, how many other great directors am I missing out on? Probably lots, but can anybody recommend me anything amazing like Fassbinder?

The following movie was recommended to me by David Leroi
In turn I recommend it to you, this movie is one of the best movies to come out in the past three years and it is a true visual experience… see it!