Taupe Beats

Interesting viewing weekend. Went to the theater and saw the new 4k restoration of Nina Menkes's "Queen of Diamonds". Some of the best sound design I've ever heard in a film. Reminded me quite a bit of Eraserhead where there were constant drones (things like Air Conditioners, engines, wind, etc.) that would add a palpable feeling of claustrophobia. Along with that, the imagery was striking and set in long takes. If you let yourself immerse in what you were seeing, it became quite hypnotic. Highly recommend this film for the more adventurous. Sunday night, against my own sanity, I decided to put my soul to the test and rewatch "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days". Spoiler alert for those who have only seen it once, it doesn't get any easier. Mungiu films are wonderful for how they play against a viewers sympathies/logic, by suppressing the environment that you're witnessing, but then suddenly pulling the perspective out wider and you realize that there's not as much subjectivity in judging the actions of the characters as you may want. His film "Beyond the Hills" is esp. brilliant for this.

Will check this out. Thanks! I've been reading a book of Robert Bresson interviews. Anything Bresson-related is worth a read, imo. Also highly recommend "Neither God Nor Master" by Brian Price. Argues Bresson's ouvre is based in "Radical politics", rather than religion.

Finished this last Thursday. Holy shit! Even though it was originally intended as a single-viewing experience, somehow the 3rd part really stood out. Between the interview with the Cadre (there is a scene from Shoah that begs a very long, detailed compare-and-contrast), the escapee, and the revisits to those still alive (most interviews were shot in 2005-2006), absolutely devastating. Very thankful I got to see this. Turns out it's also on youtube. Very highly recommended.

🤨 Melville has a ton of films, and frankly I have at least 3 that I'd rank higher than those 2 (Le Silence du la Mer, Les Enfants Terribles, and Le Samourai, in no particular order). Real tempted to add Leon Morin, Priest to that list, too. With that said, yeah Army of Shadows and Le Cercle Rouge are both great. I think the latter's far better than the former. Something about Army of Shadows feels a bit too showy and theatrical (exactly Melville's forte) for the subject matter. Lino Ventura is all-time great though.

yeah Patch Base is great and the developer is a very nice person! Have used that editor a bit but not enough (yet), been using the editor for the DX200 a lot lately

Agreed. The "wine dregs" festival is a real thing and a lot of that scene wasn't acting. Supposedly Sandrine Bonnaire was terrified. I always liked the structure of the film, with the tracking shots as a narrative framing device. Varda always had a knack for creative and interesting framing devices (time markers in Cleo from 5 to 7, color markers in La Bonheur, etc.).

I own one. It's one of the all-time great ROMPLER's for synth tones. Monster patch design capabilities. If you have the patience to work with it, you can get some ridiculously cool stuff. Effects are unfortunately a bit light (no COSM weirdness, just standard Roland Chorus/Phaser, Reverb/Delays of the era), and the drums are hilariously bad. It sounds like someone sampled the exact same sound and layered it about 6 times over and not doing anything about the aliasing. So yeah, for what you want, it will more than fill that role. Just avoid the drums 🙂 edit: And long shot but I'll ask 'cause I'm curious. Has anyone here used both an XV-5080 and an Integra-7 and have any comparisons?

I got lucky that Austin's showing this. Saw the first portion of Wang Bing's "Dead Souls" last week, catching the rest in weekly installments. So far, it's a masterpiece (I doubt the rest will change that status), and a necessary document about a piece of history woefully unknown. Not an easy watch by any means, but certainly a rewarding one. Specifically, this film deals with the internment of "rightists" at the Jiabiangou and Mingshui labor camps in Northwestern China in the late 50's. Comparable to Lanzmann's "Shoah", or books such as Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" series or Dostoevsky's "The House of the Dead".

This thread has given me some unexpected thoughts: Namely that a lot of my favorite movies that I'd classify as "human-caused" horror films. Things such as: Come and See, Salo, Jeanne Dielman, etc. edit: I wrote "human-made" at first, lol

RIP Bibi

Lars Von Trier's "The Kingdom", although it's a tv miniseries rather than a film Carl th. Dreyer's "Vampyr". And anyone who tries to claim this isn't supernatural horror can fight me. And a bit of a leftfield suggestion but I'd consider Pasolini's "Teorema" to be a supernatural horror film (of sorts). It's just not presented in this way, but I'd def. argue that the intended goal.

The Entity: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082334/ And then by extension, Peter Tscherkassky's "Outer Space": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219964/

No More Dreams 03 is one of my favorite records from last year. No nonsense really good hard techno.

You can hear it in my radio show from this past Friday which I posted in my mix thread ;)

Oh, and the shocker...Gantz Graf can work in this context. For the record, Bronchuseven and I have done quite a bit of research on this subject