From: Jack Sargeant (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Mar 25 2007 - 19:01:32 PDT
didn't they shoot the 1977 sci-fi movie DAMNATION ALLEY on old stock,
or the stock got damaged or something, and this resulted in having
the sky look a weird colour. they then wrote a sequence that
explained this as a result of the earth moving off its access...(i'm
not making this up)
jack
On 26 Mar 2007, at 11:55, zryd wrote:
> Phil Hoffman's _The Road Ended at the Beach_ is about (among other
> things) the failure of trying to recreate the spirit of the Beats
> and the 'on the road' aesthetics, which includes a nice scene w
> Robert Frank in Nova Scotia. It 'dramatizes' the reversion to what
> Vera calls "Plan B" in interesting ways.
>
> It's available from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre:
> http://www.cfmdc.org/content.php?page=catalogue
>
>
> Road Ended at the Beach, The
>
>
> (Hoffman, Phil, 1983, 33 minutes, colour, sound)
>
>
> SYNOPSIS
>
>
> In making this film I collected images and sound over six years of
> travel (not continuous) through Canada. Keeping daily both filmic
> and written records, I focused on people and places, my
> relationships to them, and the changes that occurred between each
> visit. I would collect these images freely: later to examine and
> make meaning of during the editing process. In this film I started
> to consciously pursue the relationship between a formal chronicle
> of events and my memory of those events. (PH)
>
> “The film is a series of ‘telling’ incidents in which events, which
> fall short of expectations, are confronted by more ‘vibrant’
> memories of the past. The subject, the filmmaker /diarist, whose
> consciousness encompasses this flow or passage of time, uses
> failure to make his strongest points about the convergence and
> intermingling of anticipation and event, experience and memory. On
> the road, he and his friends spend time with an old buddy who makes
> his own music at home but has to play in a military band to earn a
> living, forcing them to come to terms with their own diminished
> expectations on the trip they are undertaking as compared to trips
> in the past. The story of a woodcarver who lives with his family in
> rural Nova Scotia seems idyllic until we find that he must also
> work in a fish cannery to survive.
>
> “The film itself is an account of failure. Spurred on by the
> mythology of Jack Kerouac and his life on the road, the travelers
> visit Robert Frank in order to learn more about the Beats. Frank
> matter-of-factly dismisses their quest by noting that Kerouac is
> dead and the Beat era is over. In a partial response to this
> shattering myth, the filmmaker goes over the ground of the journey
> once again, only this time he includes the frustrations, the dead-
> ends and the low spots. The smooth, linearly developing narrative
> that we earlier understood to be the product of the filmmakers’
> consciousness is now questioned and replaced by a series of stops
> and starts, memories and reveries.
>
> “The final sequence of the film marks this re-evaluation and change
> most emphatically. The sequence shows a beach in Newfoundland on a
> bright clear day, children and dogs crossing in front of the
> camera. Yet each time someone disappears off-frame the filmmaker
> jump-cuts to a new action. On the beach where the roads ends
> discontinuity becomes a virtue, a form of concentration that
> validates exceptional experience, just as recollection and
> anticipation validate certain memories and fantasies.” - David Poole
>
> “Phil Hoffman’s work is very much work about what it is to take a
> picture of some incident, of what happens to the relationship
> between the camera and the subject: it’s very much concerned with
> the nature of photography, and with questions of time that one
> would expect people who are interested in photography to deal with.
> I mean a photograph is always from the past and one of his films is
> about trying to go back to the Beat period and resurrect it, so he
> can turn back to a photograph and resurrect the past, in a sense,
> and what he finds out, of course, is that the past is
> unrecoverable.” - Bruce Elder, Cinema Canada
>
> --
> Michael Zryd
> Associate Professor
> Department of Film, CFT 223
> York University
> 4700 Keele St.
> Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, CANADA
> tel: 416-736-5149
> fax: 416-736-5710
> email suppressed
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.