Jeremy Blake

Three videos by Jeremy Blake on UbuWeb (I love UbuWeb!). Thanks to lesmistons.

Harry Smith Colonoscopy

I knew Harry Smith was dead, but this headline caught my eye:

Harry Smith Colonoscopy to Air on 'Early Show'

Turns out one of the show's anchors is named Harry Smith, which I didn't know, since I find TV news repellent.

HOWEVER

This makes a great excuse to watch some animation by the real deal.

Black Lightning

On December 31, Timur Bekmambetov's Black Lightning opens in Russia. He's producing,

rather than directing, as he did with Day Watch and Night Watch, but his hyperrealist visual style is definitely imprinted on this film. It's probably not a good thing that the movie has two directors.

The plot involves a flying car—a Volga, the pride of Soviet Russia's car industry—that transforms a young man into a superhero so that he might ultimately protect Moscow from an evil force that seeks to mine the city's underground field of diamonds. The kid who stars certainly looks like Hayden Christensen's Anakin. It's also rather ironic that Russia's first superhero film, as Bekmambetov has described it, carries the same name as one of DC's first African-American superheroes. The latter

debuted in 1977 and seems much cooler. (This cover, by Eddy Newell, is from

1995).

The teaser trailer is pretty scant and doesn't whet my curiosity. The feature trailer has been pulled from the interwebs. The concept pictures do resemble Wanted (for what that's worth), or a modern-day Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as io9 observed, but I can't help but think of the Wachowski's Speed Racer meets Herbie the Love Bug.

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D.

All four episodes of Dash Shaw's The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. are available on IFC's website. The animation is fantastic. It manages to stay true to Shaw's style without looking like static drawings conferred with halting movement. I particularly like his use of abstract sequences of color and form, which are reminiscent of early twentieth century abstract film—Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger, for instance. There's also something of Viking Eggeling's Diagonal Symphony in the progression and formation of shapes (though in The Unclothed Man, these transformations are less articulated and more natural) and of Jeremy Blake's color gradations for Punch-Drunk Love, with certain sequences resembling animated Rothko paintings.