frames per second

papagaio by gusmão + paiva is worth seeing. (at the very nice camden arts centre until march 29. and while you're there, don't forget to look at ruth ewan's french republican calendar.)

odyssey

sweetgrass, by lucien castaing-taylor and ilisa barbash, documents an instance of the long-standing practice of grazing private livestock on public land: the summer pasturing of several herds of sheep in the montana mountains. in 2003, we trailed a sheep band during our poorly planned foray into the bridger-teton wilderness in wyoming's wind river mountains; for ten days, we walked through montane forests filled with crushed saplings and grassy bowls stripped of grass and roiled into mud. public land grazing is perhaps ill-suited to the scale of industrial ranching.

but this is incidental in sweetgrass. for much of the film, the camera is the stable lens into a world of sheep, dogs, and people running, walking, eating, and being frustrated at each other; it achieves the appearance of the true ethnographic eye—invisible to the participants and capturing the range of their daily experience.

remarkable and worthwhile.

teaching to see

edward tufte's film — about what inge druckrey (a swiss graphic designer on the faculty at the university of the arts in philadelphia) believes seeing is about and how she teaches her students to do it — is here. 30 minutes, and worth the time.

a rectangle of radiant simplicity

The finished product was a rectangle of radiant simplicity, an unfancy, richly hued blank presence that was the predictable result, Barrett insisted, of selecting proper materials, preparing them in patient, time-honored ways and approaching their manufacture with a spirit of total dedication. “This is pretty much how it was done for 1,800 years,” he remarked. “By hand. One sheet at a time.”

mark levine, on timothy barrett, in the new york times.
[thx ben]

barrett worked at twinrocker paper for a while. the mark of the maker is a short documentary about them, and is worthwhile.

triangles and their centres

when i was growing up, one of our tv stations was dedicated to public access and education. it often ran informational videos including one on the virtues of rice. this video, about the various centres of triangles, is of about the right vintage.



i love informational videos.

tampopo, tonight!

TONIGHT: Mon, Feb 8, 6pm. TAMPOPO, in the Adams Pool Theater in Harvard Square (map). Free and open to the public.

Introduced by Tom Levenson (MIT). The ultimate movie on food and sex. A struggling single mother, with the help of a cowboy truck driver, aims heroically high to make the best ramen noodles. Told in parallel, the story of an epicurean white-suited gangster and his girlfriend whose pursuit of pleasures involve doing interesting things with live shrimp in bed. Woven around this core are episodes turning social hierarchies and connoisseurship on their heads, culminating in triumphal noodles and a death speech about yam sausages. For more information, see IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.

IMPORTANT: If you do not have a Harvard undergraduate (College) ID card, you must arrive at the Pool Theater by 6.15pm to be admitted.

More details at www.food24fps.com