Featured Clips on Critical Commons

I recently finished another iteration of development on the Critical Commons website, with Andy Nicholson of Infinite Recursion. Critical Commons is an online resource for film educators that pushes the boundaries of fair use (copyright) legislation by making clips from films available with academic commentaries, in both text and audio format. The site, devised by the USC School of Cinematic Arts Institute for Multimedia Literacy, enables lecturers to organise collections of clips and commentaries as lectures for classroom delivery (such as this one on Deleuze and cinema). The website is built on the Plumi software, originally created by EngageMedia, a free open source software project to create a video sharing web application based on the Plone content management system. (more…)

Poster for Lizzie Borden's "Born in Flames"

We are off to a friend’s house tonight for a screening of Lizzie Borden’s “Born in Flames”, a 1983 film, about feminist activists 10 years after the United States has undergone a socialist revolution. We watched this the other day, but are up for another viewing already.

M forwarded me an article in The Independent film magazine, featuring an interview with the director which is definitely worth a read (linked to this article). It was particularly interesting to me in light of my recent thoughts about filmmaking. One of the reasons I started this blog was to help myself formulate my thoughts about my own film/video/art/activist practice, asking myself some fairly fundamental questions like “why make films?”. This question is particularly pertinent, given my ruminations in the last couple of months on the implausibility of a viable career in film/TV. As my friend Jean Poole asserted at Plug n Play the other night, independent filmmaking is “broken”. (more…)

Still from promo for NATO

This is one from the archives. A 35 second promo for the Northern Arts Tactical Offensive, to be used at screenings and events (obviously, or quacking for details may be somewhat less effective). NATO was a collective in Manchester who did various subversive and situationist-influenced performances and other artworks, including the March for Capitalism and a spoof tourist guide to Manchester for the Commonwealth Games (2002), directing tourists to the alternative Blitz Festival of international grassroots underground culture, in the form exhibitions, street theatre, outdoor music, film nights and presentations. (more…)