... A bit of Len Lye in Dufay color and Biguine D'Amour by Don Baretto and his Cuban Orchestra to add Kaleidoscope colors and sound to your last week of the year...
As a student, Lye became convinced that motion could be part of the language of art, leading him to early (and now lost) experiments with kinetic sculpture, as well as a desire to make film. Lye was also one of the first Pakeha artists to appreciate the art of Māori, Australian Aboriginal, Pacific Island and African cultures, and this had great influence on his work. In the early 1920s Lye travelled widely in the South Pacific. He spent extended periods in Australia and Samoa, where he was expelled by the New Zealand colonial administration for living within an indigenous community.
Working his way as a coal trimmer aboard a steam ship, Lye moved to London in 1926. There he joined the Seven and Five Society, exhibited in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition and began to make experimental films. Following his first animated film Tusalava, Lye began to make films in association with the British General Post Office, for the GPO Film Unit. His 1935 film A Colour Box, an advertisement for "cheaper parcel post", was the first direct film screened to a general audience. It was made by painting vibrant abstract patterns on the film itself, synchronizing them to a popular dance tune by Don Baretto and His Cuban Orchestra. A panel of animation experts convened in 2005 by the Annecy film festival put this film among the top ten most significant works in the history of animation... more on Len Lye { http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Lye }
Dear Friends ~ Thank You for helping me preserve the Musée with all of your ideas, collaborations, art, time, performances, donations, volunteering and more.. I'm Very much looking forward to another year of stupendous, unusual and marvelous~ness. Happy Holidays from Noëlle at the Musée.
the Russian-Polish filmmaker/director, who pioneered the art of stop-motion animation in 1910 with his film Lucanus Cervus, and who spent the next 50 years creating nearly 100 shorts and feature-length films that comprise one of the most inventive and influential bodies of work in the history of cinema. But despite all of his technical and artistic achievements, even as we celebrate the centenary of his first triumph, in the West his name remains almost completely unknown to all but the most esoteric animation buffs.
Like all of the greatest filmmakers, Starewicz did more than just create films; he used the craft of cinema to invent an utterly unique, self-contained world, one that reflected his own unadulterated artistic vision. His films could be bizarre, surreal, funny, disturbing, and deeply touching, sometimes all within the same scene. It was sometimes unclear if they were intended for children or adults. Like the filmmakers who carry his influence (Terry Gilliam, Jan Svankmajer, the Quay brothers, Tim Burton, and Wes Anderson among them), his films exist somewhere in between the realms of disturbing adult darkness and innocent childlike whimsy.
The place is Melbourne, Australia 1978. The punk phenomenon is sweeping the country and Dogs In Space, a punk group, are part of it. In a squat, in a dodgy suburb, live a ragtag collection of outcasts and don't-wanna-be's who survive on a diet of old TV space films, drugs and good music. And the satellite SKYLAB could crash through their roof at any moment...
In 1927, on the occasion of a several-months-long visit to Paris, Walter Benjamin began taking notes on the Parisian Arcades for his most ambitious book project, which remained unfinished because of the repeatedly interrupted work process and, ultimately, his suicide in Portbou in 1940 when fleeing the German occupation. It was published posthumously as The Arcades Project. ...
Although pigeons nowadays are largely regarded as grubby urban pests, bumblers for bread crumbs, and unwelcome statuary redecorators -- in the not-too-distant past, their service to mankind was much loftier indeed. Not only were these hardy birds used to swiftly carry important messages and materials across great distances, for a brief stint at the turn of the last century, an elite group of camera-wielding pigeons also became early pioneers of a then burgeoning field: aerial photography.
In 1903, a German pharmacist named Julius Neubronner started employing carrier pigeons to receive and fulfill emergency prescriptions from a hospital in the region. One day, after a bird of his mysteriously returned after being lost a month late, Julius began to devise a way to track their flights.
Shortly after, the avid tinkerer and amateur photographer developed a lightweight, timer camera rig that his pigeons could wear in flight to snap rare aerial photos, the likes of which, at the time, could only be captured via balloons or kites.
According to Neubronner, there were a dozen different models of his camera. In 1907 he had sufficient success to apply for a patent. Initially his invention "Method of and Means for Taking Photographs of Landscapes from Above" was rejected by the German patent office as impossible, but after presentation of authenticated photographs the patent was granted in December 1908.
read the complete story and see the photos that were taken by the pigeons here-
