Though not coming from a musical background, as a child Cipriani was fascinated by his church’s organ. His priest gave him his first music lessons and encouraged Cipriani and his family. Cipriani passed his examinations and studied at Santa Cecilia Conservatory from the age of 14, then played on cruise ship bands,[1] that enabled him to meet Dave Brubeck. Upon return to Italy he accompanied Rita Pavone on piano.[2]
His first soundtrack was the spaghetti westernEl Precio de un Hombre/The Bounty Killer (1966) followed by a well known score for Un Uomo, uno caballo, una pistola/The Stranger Returns/Shoot First Laugh Last (1967) starring Tony Anthony; Cipriani later composed other spaghetti western scores with Anthony.
In a 2007 interview, Cipriani said that he had composed music for Pope John Paul II and was currently working with Pope Benedict XVI.[1]
One of Cipriani’s most famous scores is from “La Polizia Sta a Guardare“. The main theme was recycled by Cipriani for the score for Tentacoli and was brought to the public’s attention again in 2007 when it was featured in Quentin Tarantino‘s Death Proof.
Cipriani’s scores for the films of the “La Polizia…” series were different arrangements over the same theme. Some of those themes were used in the soundtrack of the couple Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani‘s first feature Amer.”
Space Is the Place is an 82-minute film made in 1972 and released in 1974. [1] [2] It was produced by Jim Newman, directed by John Coney, written by Sun Ra, Joshua Smith and features Sun Ra and his Arkestra. A soundtrack for the film was released on Evidence Records.
Originally released in 1974, Sun Ra’s odd neoblaxploitation sci-fi semirockumentary, Space is the Place, is a film about time, history, and black America. It is the cinematic realization of Ra’s cosmic harmonic consciousness linked to a searing indictment of the political and social realities of the African American urban experience.
The film opens on a spaceship moving slowly through the cosmos, while the soundtrack repeatedly intones, “It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?” We then see the time-travelling Sun Ra wandering through a dense psychedelic forest of bizarre flora and fauna on a new and distant planet that, he decides, is the perfect place for the relocation of black America. In order to effect the dramatic transformation, Ra says: “the first thing to do is to consider time as officially ended. We’ll work on the other side of time.” Arriving in present-day (early-1970s) Oakland, Ra begins this work. Framed by apocalyptic notions of the end of times and, indeed, the end of history, the basic premise of the film is that the mystic trickster Sun Ra (playing himself) must battle with his malevolent counterpart, the white-suited Overseer (Ray Johnson), to win the soul of black America. It is a card game played in a desert wasteland that will decide the fate of the negro. Ra must simultaneously convince young African Americans that they should abandon earth and leave with him for the new planet. Having been kidnapped and tortured by the FBI and then dramatically rescued, Ra performs a special concert in the film’s climax from which the black audience members vanish one by one only to then reappear on Ra’s spaceship. As the ship takes off and disappears into space, the prophesied destruction of earth is relayed on video monitors to its occupants.
Characteristic of much of Sun Ra’s work, this mélange of genre and style locates music at the center of the black cultural experience as it offers a combination of critical social analysis and programmatic utopianism. Though characterized by the relatively low production values of independent film, Space is the Place also articulates many of the countercultural narratives and aesthetics of a number of mainstream films and TV series of the period such as Barbarella (1968), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Performance (1970), and NBC’s Star Trek (1966–69). There is, as well, an undeniably cartoonish element that gestures just as surely towards the Beatles’s Yellow Submarine (1968) and Sid and Marty Kroft’s H.R. Pufnstuf (1970). However, a much closer aesthetic and narrative analog is Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo which similarly collapses time and history as it locates the origins of black American culture in pharaonic Egypt. Indeed, Afrocentric tropes dominate Space is the Place visually and ideologically, as ancient Egyptian motifs are merged with Aquarian notions of rebirth, a Garveyite desire to return African Americans to the “homeland,” and extant black nationalist politics embodied in the Black Panthers and the radical politics of late-1960s Oakland.
Within Space is the Place, blacks are victims not only of white racist power structures (as embodied in two government agents and their employment of surveillance, coercion, and violence), but also of black-on-black exploitation as embodied in the Overseer, a kind of cosmic über-pimp who drives the Oakland streets in a bright red Cadillac supplying drugs, prostitutes and—most crucially—false consciousness. Arriving at a youth club Sun Ra tries to impress upon the kids that they are “not real” because, notwithstanding the images of Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X that cover the walls of the club, they “have no music that is in coordination with their spirits.” Though liberation can come only from the disruption of white time and history, it is music that will function as the principal medium through which consciousness will be raised. However, this utopian future will never be realized on earth. It is from space where Sun Ra has arrived and it is to space he will return bearing those he has rescued […]
“Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1939), a four-minute, hand-painted Dufaycolor film ‘with a colour accompaniment by Len Lye‘, matches visual motifs to musical instruments: diagonals introduce piano phrases, circles express drum beats, wavy horizontals represent guitars licks, vertical lines map base parts, etc. Primary red, blue and deep green colour fields are rendered frameless by upwardly cascading kite shapes, luminous tapered stripes, and batik-like patterns.” (Brett Kashmere http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/great-directors/lye/)
In THE UNKNOWN KNOWN, Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris (THE FOG OF WAR) offers a mesmerizing portrait of Donald Rumsfeld, the larger-than-life figure who served as George W. Bush’s secretary of defense and as the principal architect of the Iraq War.
Rather than conducting a conventional interview, Morris has Rumsfeld perform and explain his “snowflakes” — the enormous archive of memos he wrote across almost fifty years in Congress, the White House, in business, and twice at the Pentagon. The memos provide a window into history — not as it actually happened, but as Rumsfeld wants us to see it.
By focusing on the “snowflakes,” with their conundrums and their contradictions, Morris takes us where few have ever been — beyond the web of words into the unfamiliar terrain of Rumsfeld’s mind. THE UNKNOWN KNOWN presents history from the inside out. It shows how the ideas, the fears, and the certainties of one man, written out on paper, transformed America, changed the course of history — and led to war.
Live visuals have become a pervasive component of our contemporary lives; either as visible interfaces that re-connect citizens and buildings overlaying new contextual meaning or as invisible ubiquitous narratives that are discovered through interactive actions and mediating screens.The contemporary re-design of the environment we live in is in terms of visuals and visualizations, software interfaces and new modes of engagement and consumption. This LEA volume presents a series of seminal papers in the field, offering the reader a new perspective on the future role of Live Visuals.
First video clip made for Zombie Zombie, the electrifying French duo of Etienne Jaumet and Cosmic Neman. Directed by Simon Gesrel and Xavier Ehretsmann thanks to their favourite toys… the GI Joes ! The video is an hommage to the director AND soundtrack composer John Carpenter, especially one of his masterpieces : THE THING.
Best Photography Award – GI Joe Fest 2008, 2nd GI Joe stop motion film Festival, Denver, CO. USA
Audience Award & Best Technical Quality Award – Protoclip 2008, 4th Sevres’ international independent video clip Festival, France.
Directed by Kenneth Anger.
US 1954, 16mm, color, 38 min.
Anger’s astonishing masterpiece unfolds a constellation of imagined gods choreographed by Anger and drawn from one of the legendary “Come As Your Madness” costume galas hosted by the silent film actor and reclusive impresario Samson De Brier in his Hollywood mansion. Featuring Anais Nin, Curtis Harrington and De Brier himself among the self-fashioned deities and demons, Inauguration was reworked several times by Anger, once as a dazzling three screen version which he then condensed to the Sacred Mushroom version seen here by brilliantly using superimposition to create complex mandala-like images.
For more information:
Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle
“Just Ancient Loops”combines the genius of three people and three mediums for a truly unique experience. Israeli-born American Maya Beiser, dubbed the “cello goddess” by The New Yorker, creates radical works for the cello, re-imagining her instrument’s boundaries. To celebrating the release of her latest album, Time Loops (a collaboration with composer Michael Harrison) Maya Beiser will perform “Just Ancient Loops,” the epic and meditative centerpiece of the album combined with a film created by Bill Morrison. Bill Morrison has built a filmography of more than thirty projects that have been presented in theaters, museums, galleries and concert halls worldwide. His work often makes use of rare archival footage in which forgotten film imagery is reframed as part of our collective mythology. Morrison’s films are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, The Nederlands Filmmuseum, and The Library of Congress. He is a Guggenheim fellow and has received the Alpert Award for the Arts, an NEA Creativity Grant, a Creative Capital grant, and a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. His work with Ridge Theater has been recognized with two Bessie awards and an Obie Award. Michael Harrison, who wrote the music performed by Maya Beiser, is a composer and pianist influenced by Western classical music as well as North Indian classical music.
Set during Boom Festival 2012 the documentary THE ALCHEMY OF SPIRIT tells the story of thousands of people from across the world, that come together every 2 years in the August full moon. Together they share the dream of a reality within and beyond this reality, where we can live in harmony with our planet and with each other.
A documentary about the exile of Futaba’s residents, the region housing the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Since the 1960s, Futaba had been promised prosperity with tax breaks and major subsidies to compensate for the presence of the power plant. The town’s people have now lost their homeland. Through their agonies and frustrations, the film questions the real cost of capitalism and nuclear energy.
The day after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake on March 11, 2011, Futaba locals heard the hydrogen explosion at Reactor Number 1 and were showered with nuclear fallout. In response, the Japanese government designated the whole town as an “exclusion zone” and 1,400 of the town’s residents fled to an abandoned high school 250 kilometers away. The entire community, including the Town Hall office, was moved into the four-story building, making the residents nuclear refugees.
The film portrays the evacuees as the nuclear disaster situation changes over time. One of them is Ichiro Nakai, a farmer who lost his wife, his home, and his rice fields in the massive tsunami. Doing his best to cope with the monotony of life at the evacuation center, he struggles to wipe away the haunting memories and start a new life with his son. The two finally get an official permit to enter the exclusion zone to visit their hometown. There, they see that their worst fears have become reality…
The other is Katsutaka Idogawa, Futaba’s mayor, a former active supporter of the government’s nuclear policy, who was lobbying to build two additional reactors. After realizing his constituents were exposed to significant amounts of radiation and that the situation at the TEPCO plant is still unstable, his beliefs begin to change.
Named after the Len Lye‘s landmark experimental film of dancing lines and marks scratched into the emulsion, “Free Radicals” gives an informative and accessible introduction into the world of avant-garde cinema. Unlike the MTV-ADD montage barrage that characterizes so many contemporary documentaries, the film does not hesitate to show extended clips of the actual films by the artists, immersing the viewer in their unique visual worlds and perspectives.
Filmmaker and film activist Pip Chodorov studied film semiotics at the University of Paris. In 1994, he founded the distribution company Re:Voir for the edition of historical and contemporary experimental films. In 2005, he also founded The Film Gallery — the only gallery devoted exclusively to experimental film artists. He is a co-founder of L’Abominable, a cooperative do-it-yourself film lab in Paris. His own films range from animation to film diary.
Anwar Congo and his friends have been dancing their way through musical numbers, twisting arms in film noir gangster scenes, and galloping across prairies as yodelling cowboys. Their foray into filmmaking is being celebrated in the media and debated on television, even though Anwar Congo and his friends are mass murderers.
Medan,Indonesia. When the government of Indonesia was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets on the black market to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals in less than a year. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city, Anwar himself killed hundreds of people with his own hands.
Today, Anwar is revered as a founding father of a right-wing paramilitary organization that grew out of the death squads. The organization is so powerful that its leaders include government ministers, and they are happy to boast about everything from corruption and election rigging to acts of genocide.
TheActofKilling is about killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built. Unlike ageing Nazis or Rwandan génocidaires, Anwar and his friends have not been forced by history to admit they participated in crimes against humanity. Instead, they have written their own triumphant history, becoming role models for millions of young paramilitaries. TheActofKilling is a journey into the memories and imaginations of the perpetrators, offering insight into the minds of mass killers. And TheAct of Killing is a nightmarish vision of a frighteningly banal culture of impunity in which killers can joke about crimes against humanity on television chat shows, and celebrate moral disaster with the ease and grace of a soft shoe dance number.
ALove ofCinema. In their youth, Anwar and his friends spent their lives at the movies, for they were “movie theatre gangsters”: they controlled a black market in tickets, while using the cinema as a base of operations for more serious crimes. In 1965, the army recruited them to form death squads because they had a proven capacity for violence, and they hated the communists for boycotting American films – the most popular (and profitable) in the cinemas. Anwar and his friends were devoted fans of James Dean, John Wayne, and Victor Mature. They explicitly fashioned themselves and their methods of murder after their Hollywood idols. And coming out of the midnight show, they felt “just like gangsters who stepped off the screen”. In this heady mood, they strolled across the boulevard to their office and killed their nightly quota of prisoners. Borrowing his technique from a mafia movie, Anwar preferred to strangle his victims with wire.
In TheActofKilling, Anwar and his friends agree to tell us the story of the killings. But their idea of being in a movie is not to provide testimony for a documentary: they want to star in the kind of films they most love from their days scalping tickets at the cinemas. We seize this opportunity to expose how a regime that was founded on crimes against humanity, yet has never been held accountable, would project itself into history.
And so we challenge Anwar and his friends to develop fiction scenes about their experience of the killings, adapted to their favorite film genres – gangster, western, musical. They write the scripts. They play themselves. And they play their victims.
Their fiction filmmaking process provides the film’s dramatic arc, and their film sets become safe spaces to challenge them about what they did. Some of Anwar’s friends realize that the killings were wrong. Others worry about the consequence of the story on their public image. Younger members of the paramilitary movement argue that they should boast about the horror of the massacres, because their terrifying and threatening force is the basis of their power today. As opinions diverge, the atmosphere on set grows tense. The edifice of genocide as a “patriotic struggle”, with Anwar and his friends as its heroes, begins to sway and crack.
Most dramatically, the filmmaking process catalyzes an unexpected emotional journey for Anwar, from arrogance to regret as he confronts, for the first time in his life, the full implications of what he’s done. As Anwar’s fragile conscience is threatened by the pressure to remain a hero, TheAct of Killing presents a gripping conflict between moral imagination and moral catastrophe.
Italian Spiderman is a film parody of Italian action–adventure films of the 60s and 70s, first released on YouTube in 2007. The parody purports to be a “lost Italian film” by Alrugo Entertainment, an Australian film-making collective formed by Dario Russo, Tait Wilson, David Ashby, Will Spartalis and Boris Repasky.
NuFormer presents Mocap Mapping, a brand-new innovative combination of 3D video mapping projection and live motion capture. This mix allows for engaging interaction between the audience and a 3D character projected onto the building.
Credits
For this production NuFormer joined forces with Motek Entertainment. The technical production was a collaboration between NuFormer, Motek and Creative Technology Holland.
SamsungPortugal produced this eye-popping clip which features some of the coolest projection mapping we’ve seen – using a human being as the projection surface instead of a building or screens (It was no simple task – in order to get the right effect, the actor had remain still for up to three straight hours.)
Digital Agency: Excentric
Projection Mapping: Oskar e Gaspar
Video Production: DROID I.D.
Music: Timecoders
The veneer of American democracy twitches in its final death throes as the Church of Bush Rove Cheney, Inc. relentlessly jam their flag-waving religious sloganeering and invocation of god-like superiority down the throats of an uneducated, uninsured, uninformed public.
“We are the supreme race! We have the supreme weapons!”
Street protesters wishing to demonstrate against the zealotry of the Masters of Mendacity and Manipulation are confined – literally – to caged areas, euphemistically named “free speech zones” out of sight and earshot of average Americans who are “guarded” from the truth by the state controlled media.
“They won’t win. They cannot win against the symbol of Christ!”
With ruthless calculation and Machiavellian logic, the Republican Princes of Power and Privilege have crafted a permanent war economy in order to provide welfare for the wealthy.
“It is the one and only way to maintain the supreme race!”
A fusion of multi-layered polyphonic sampling, heavy, relentless beats, and scorching satire, “The Free Speech Zone”, a psychedelic Dada/techno opera, is a scathing condemnation of the American government’s quest for world domination through unrelenting mind control.
“Thank you, and welcome to the apocalypse.” santacruz.bside.com/2008/films/thefreespeechzone_santacruz2008 splitfilmfestival.hr/arhive/2007/shorts/kasumi.htm
On DVD: splitfilmfestival.hr/arhive/2007/shorts/kasumi.htm
FSZ is part of the permanent collection of the House of Peace and Human Rights (sansebastian.org/casadelapaz)
San Sebastian, Spain
kasumifilms.com
MUSIC:
Song Title: The Free Speech Zone
Music Artist: Kasumi
Completion and Release Year: 2004
Song Title: 5 Star Murder
Label: High Five Metal Records
Music Artist: At Wit’s End
Completion and Release Year: 2003
Song Title: Bring It On
Music Artist: Jerry Miller
Label: Zone Music, Inc.
Completion and Release Date: 2003
Director: Kasumi
Production Company: Kasumifilms
Editorial and Post Production: Kasumifilms
SELECTED SCREENINGS
Sapporo International Short Film Festival: First Prize Best Experimental, 2006
Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival
VideoLisboa
Nemo Festival, Paris, France – organised by Thecif – Region Ile de France, in association with le Forum des Images (Paris 1er) and Reperages magazine. 2004
Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris, 2004
Rome International Film Festival 2004
Athens International Film Festival, 2004
12th International Art Film Festival, Bratislava, Slovak Republic, June, 2004
Seoul Net & Film Festival, Seoul, South Korea, July 2004
AFO (Academia Film Olomouc) Czech Republic, October 2004
Antimatter Festival of Underground Short Film and Video, Victoria, BC 2005
Madcat, San Francisco 2004
International Experimental Film Festival “Carbunari 2004”, MUZEUL FLOREAN, Baia Mare, ROMANIA
Continental Drift Film Festival, Canada
Kinofilm International Film and Video festival, Manchester, UK
When an unidentified object is spotted in space, observers immediately alert the government, now in the hands of the Illegal Party, puts the country on red alert: vast profits can be made from this unknown enemy. The propaganda machine generates fear in the public. Mesmerized by the righteous glories of war, people fall into step with the military drumbeat, and drift into total complacency to the lilt of a free market bandwagon. Many lose the power to question their government and cannot recognize the looming breakdown of their world. Others, moved by the government’s disdain for its impoverished citizens, foment resistance. People march out to vote, but rigged voting booths open onto a worse fate. The smallest protest becomes a treasonous act and citizens are rounded up, imprisoned for interrogation, and ultimately tortured by a vindictive and triumphalist government.
WINNER at SLAMDANCE 2012 of the Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short
Cast Featuring: Mary Elise Hayden, Marissa Merrill & Dustin Edward
Executive Producers: David Lyons & Andrew Huang
Producers: Laura Merians & Stephanie Marshall
Cinematographer: Laura Merians
Production Designer: Hugh Zeigler
Costume Designer: Lindsey Mortensen
Hair & Makeup Designer: Jennifer Cunningham
Sound Design & Original Score: Andrew Huang
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