Photography – Page 14

June 6, 2003

Drive-ins and SARS

I saw a news story on Japanese tv the other day about makeshift drive-in movie theaters that have started to spring up in China, on account of SARS and the fear of enclosed spaces (many indoor theaters have been closed by government order). The story reminded me of the above photo I took in 1994 (September 11, 1994 to be exact), in Santa Cruz, California. This theater, which I believe is (or was?) Skyline Drive-in on Soquel Drive, was showing Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers on this day. I wonder if this theater is still around, 9 years later?

May 16, 2003

The right impression: Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s website moves

I find this utterly amazing, in this age of closely-guarded copyrights, that if one is so inclined, one can watch Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s entire 7 1/2-hour film opus, Hitler – ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler, a film from Germany, 1977), on the web, for free. The film is divided up into 4 parts so you don’t have to watch the whole thing in one sitting. (At the moment, the film is only available in its original German. However, there are indications on the site that an English-subtitled version will be available soon.)

I have never seen this film, but it has been oft-written about (most famously by Susan Sontag; her essay on the film is available in her book Under the Sign of Saturn), and was released in the United States in 1979 (as Our Hitler) through the efforts of Francis Ford-Coppola. Syberberg was part of the “German New Wave” of cinema artists to appear in Germany during the late 60’s, though his works were too experimental and inaccessible to achieve anything near the level of popular renown that Fassbinder or Wenders or Herzog did.

This film, along with a 60-minute piece from 2000 called Nietzsche Ecce Homo (Schleef), is available on Syberberg’s website Syberberg.de, a site divided into 4 parts, and well worth checking out even if your German is limited to “Ich bin ein Berliner” like mine is.

Of particular note is part 4, Syberberg’s quasi-weblog (“Web-Tagebuch: Daily Currency”), which dates back to January 2001, and which has been updated everyday, as far as I can tell, from December 2001 through to today. While there is some writing, for the most part it’s a visual diary, each day a “collage” of images. On any given day, you can find photographs both old and new (those taken by Syberberg as well as found images), magazine and newspaper clippings, video captures of his various films, or stuff he has shot on video, or off the tv, and scans of various ephemera. I could spend hours in his archives, for each day feels like you’re walking into an installation or standing in front of a collage in a gallery, forced by the absence of language to make your own associations and meaning. Absolutely wonderful.

By all means check out the remainder of the site as well. The “autobiography” page has clips from a lot of his various works, as well as old home movies, and images of the various ephemera of Syberberg’s career, like old 8mm cameras and film boxes, and old family snapshots as well.

At the moment, there is an Syberberg exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris called Nossendorf Syberberg Paris, which includes a retrospective of some of his films. On his site, there are web cams set up in Nossendorf (Syberberg’s birthplace) and at the Pompidou, though as Syberberg writes, “Paris Webcams dont move. Therefore wrong impression.”

March 8, 2003

Burma portraits No. 1

Two boys, Pyin u Lwin, Burma (Myanmar), June, 2001: click for larger image (84K)

Two boys, Pyin u Lwin (formerly Maymyo), Burma (now Myanmar) (June, 2001). 35mm, Kodak Ektachrome slide film, PhotoCD, Photoshop.

This was taken in the countryside on the outskirts of Pyin u Lwin, a former British hill station established and coined Maymyo by the British, who would retreat to there from the heat of Mandalay in central Burma (now Myanmar). I was walking back from a local Shan village when I came upon these two boys. No doubt they were startled, though I can’t remember exactly their reaction. And I must have asked them to stop and allow me to take their photo, though I don’t remember that either. Why is it that I have forgotten such things?

I didn’t notice until much later, when looking at the developed slide, the younger boy’s t-shirt, which reads “Patience, My Ass” and underneath that, “I’m Gonna Kill Something.” This kind of discordance is common enough in Southeast Asian countries, where bales of used clothes are commonly imported from Western countries and sold very cheaply. The irony isn’t so much that local residents end up obliviously wearing statements so at odds with their disposition, but that more often than not, the used clothes that have been imported into a region like Southeast Asia, are in fact re-exported clothes that were originally produced by that very same region.