Art/Film

The excellent Grey Lodge GPC got a mention in a Wall Street Journal piece on the role of services like YouTube and Google Video in distributing hard-to-find avant-garde films:

Increasingly, rare and avant-garde films are showing up on sites like these, best known for hosting homemade video spoofs. On YouTube, there are 1969 art videos by Nam June Paik, a 1967 student movie by George Lucas and an iconic 1930 film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, as well as a clip of Dalí in a chocolate commercial.

It’s the latest reflection of an online culture where fans can function as curators of digital entertainment, bypassing libraries and museums with their own collections of music or movies. In many cases, these rare film clips are posted by amateur film buffs who’ve scooped up film reels or rare VHS tapes from eBay or local sales, and then digitized them for online viewing.

You can read the remainder of the piece here, and get stuck into the Grey Lodge’s picks of the best art, music and avant-garde video content here. For yet more arty cinema, check UbuWeb’s fabulous Film section.

Talking of art films, my review of Henry Coombes’ Laddy And The Lady—now showing at the Tramway—will run in tomorrow’s Herald. It is about an unruly dog at a pheasant shoot, with nods to Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu¹, an odd undercurrent of sub-dom perversion, and a skew-whiff exploration of class. Highly recommended. (I’m not sure of the Herald’s policy on posting pieces written for them to the web—their online archive lives behind a paywall—but I’ve written about Coombes before.)

And (if you’ll excuse a tenuous segue) talking of Jean Renoir, his impressionist dad Pierre-Auguste’s The Painter’s Garden stopped me in my tracks at the newly-refurbished and wonderfully rehung Kelvingrove last week: don’t forget that the museum and gallery reopens in, at the time of writing, 1 day, 15 hrs, 36 mins and 35 seconds (ie, next Tuesday). Go see, it’ll knock your socks off.

Update: Looks like print versions are free, so here’s the review.

1. Thanks to top film lady H.J. McGill for pointing that out.↩

Posted at 6pm on 09/07/06 by Jack Mottram to the art and culture category.
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Tags: art, film, web