Benches & Binoculars, Photo by Cameron Wittig

1. Event Horizon and Benches & Binoculars: The much anticipated  reinstallation of the permanent collection opens on Saturday.  Previews of the exhibition are in the local media today, but I suggest reading them after visiting the exhibition…it’s more fun that way, personally.  You can get a jump on general public tonight at the always fun (and packed) Walker After Hours party.  Lookbook will be playing upstairs in Gallery 8, screenings of Scorpio Rising in the Lecture Room, special performances at 10 pm and 11 pm by Dafnis Prieto and Judith Sanchez Ruiz in the Burnet Gallery  and I will be DJing in Cargill (shameless plug).  I plan on a mix of Mos Def, The XX, Carl Sagen and T.I. for my set….it should be a great night.  

2. Susannah Bielak at Bethel University: Bethel University continues a string of strong exhibitions with new work by Susannah Bielak titled Quake/Temblor: A Forensics of Interior Life and Natural Disaster.  The work combines formica table engravings, text, sound and videos of conceptual experiments conducted on seismic shake tables to explore ideas of unpredictability and social systems. The exhibition is up through January 16, 2010.  

Michael Kareken "Compressed Oil Drums" 2009

3. Michael Kareken: Scrap and Tetsuya Yamada: Commuter at the MAEP:  This is a very interesting pairing of  Micheal Karekan’s huge paintings of industrial recycling plants and an installation by Tetsuya Yamada that explores commuting by train in his native Tokyo.  The two exhibitions make for combined commentary on issues of craft, repetition and industry.  The exhibition is open through January 24, 2010 and is free and open to the public.

4. MCAD Annual Art Sale: Do you think you can scout emerging art talent or do you just want to add to your collection…or maybe both.  This annual event at MCAD features students and recent graduates offering their work for sale. According to MCAD more than  7,000 pieces will be hung. Everything is under $1000 and most are under $100.  The preview party and sale begins Friday, Nov. 20 at 6pm and I would suggest arriving early. The sale continues (for free) on Saturday, Nov. 21.  All the proceeds go to benefit the artists. Also new this year you can preview the works available for sale by becoming a fan of the event on Facebook. Very cool.

5. 2010 Fringe Festival Applications are now being accepted.  You have until January 29th to submit your project.  The 2010 festival takes place Thursday, August 5, 2010 through Sunday, August 15, 2010.

6. ArtORG Projects: OnSaturday November 14, 2009 ArtOrg opened its biggest show ever “Going to California (Building) with a Boatload of Art” at the expanded California Building Gallery in Northeast in Minneapolis. The event features a showcase of five years of ArtOrg’s work including 58 artists from five ArtOrg projects, 2000 printing blocks from kids the Minneapolis premier of nine steamroller prints from Plains Art Museum Day of Dead Project and a celebration of recent “Twenty Views of Dundas” accession to Weisman Permanent Collection. A lot to see and but is limited as everthing comes down on November 29th.  Also check out local artist Aldo Moroni’s event in collaboration  titled ”ART BAR”. Located just 20 feet from the ArtOrg Gallery Exhibit is the Mill City Cafe, location for the ART BAR gathering of all artists and patron, great and small.  The ART BAR is open Friday, November 20 from 5pm to 1am. 

http://www.vimeo.com/7242858

7. Artist Jeanne-Claude dies: Best know for work with her husband Christo, including the 2005 Central Park installation The Gates and other large scale “wrapping” projects around the globe. She was 74.

8.  Lightsey Darst: Writes about dance for mnartists.org and does so in such an engaging and eloquent manner. We are really lucky to have her as part of our roster.  Check out her most recent piece about The Good Dance: Dakar/Brooklyn, a Walker commissioned collaboration between Brooklyn’s Reggie Wilson and Senegal’s Andréya Ouamba. 

9. Gallery Gray: is an new Minneapolis based online gallery founded by Dustin M Price who serves as Curator/Director. The goal of Gallery Gray is to have international online juried competitions, supplemented by group and solo shows for emerging to mid career artists interested in utilizing a digital gallery format. The current exhibition titled Tilting at Windmills opens at 11.23.09 7:30 MST.  According to the gallery website “We can all agree that viewing art is at its finest in the presence of the artwork itself. Gallery Gray in no way wants to eliminate or discourage the tactile gallery or museum space experience, only to accompany and encourage it. The digital format of Gallery Gray allows for a number of interesting opportunities that might not be available otherwise.” Interesting idea and project to watch or virtually patron. 

10. And finally here is the greatest thing I have found on You Tube in months.  And yes its in my DJ set.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

Last Saturday (Nov. 14^th) I had the pleasure of working with the Walker to develop and teach MyNet: Google SketchUp, a course designed to introduce the amazing world of 3d computer modeling to both kids and their parents (as well as older siblings and mentors). Computer modeling and rendering has long been a staple of architectural education and practice, but the software involved was, more often than not, exorbitantly expensive and frustratingly difficult to learn. The combination of these two factors ensured that such amazing technology was only accessible to those at the advanced stages of their design education or those already working in the field.

Then came SketchUp…

With its simple interface and simple tools, SketchUp was an instant hit. It was intuitive and inexpensive, making it accessible to just about anyone. While this was certainly a great development for grad students and professionals, its greatest potential lies with the introduction of this software as an educational tool for K-12 children!

That belief was validated and solidified by our class on Saturday. Students and parents not only learned the basics of the software, but also got the opportunity to apply this new knowledge to an actual project of their own design. The focus of the class was to design an ideal “fort” or “hang-out.” Before we jumped into SketchUp, though, everyone first made physical, scale “study models.” This hands-on process, allowed everyone to first focus on the design of the project before getting caught up in the excitement of trying to learn how to use a new computer program.

Building a prototype together

By using this process, students and parents were actually following the real-life, organic process used by designers of all disciplines! Once everyone had tested out their ideas with scale models, we then moved into the digital world and covered the basics of SketchUp. Thanks to its simple, user friendly interface, most were able to pick it up right away! We then shifted focus back to the forts and hang-outs, learning how to translate from the miniature scale models everyone had made to full scale digital models in SketchUp that allowed them to “get inside” their projects.

Adam Jarvi leading a family through the 3D modeling process

I was absolutely amazed by everyone’s work! Not only were the original models recreated in SketchUp with remarkable accuracy, they were also edited, refined, and personalized with colors, materials, people, and even furniture. The sense of ownership, engagement, and empowerment that comes along with the ability to create something that is uniquely your own was clear for all to see. As a designer myself, seeing others become engaged by the same things that excite me was extremely rewarding!

A final SketchUp project: one family's hideout

Thanks to all who attended! And thanks to the Walker for making this event possible!

Adam Jarvi

Designer and Assistant Director at DEMO, a non-profit focused on spreading the power of design to K-12 students and teachers throughout the Twin Cities.

It’s not too early to get a start on next year’s Halloween costume: Take inspiration from this paper-crafted self-portrait-as-helmet by 3D artist Eric Testroete, inspired by “big-head mode seen in videogames” See more pictures here. (via printeresting.org)

NYC Mayor Bloomberg only narrowly won re-election — and now this. After 66 years in Manhattan, the nonprofit American Craft Council has had it with the cost of doing business there. It is quitting the New York — and following a long trail of artists to greener, more fertile, and far cheaper pastures of Minneapolis, where it will take up residence next summer.

Minneapolis artist David Rathman, who showed here in 2003, has branched out from paintings and drawings to video, with stunning results. See below — best viewed in full screen!

The Quick and the Dead lives on. Three works from the highly regarded exhibition were recently acquired by the Walker for its collection. Probably the most familiar is Pierre Huyghe’s Wind Chime (After “Dream”) (left), which became a favorite in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden over the summer. We’ll All Go Together, a sound piece by Susan Philipsz, was an oddly comforting yet slightly eery presence in the underground parking garage (where it kept company with a battered, oil-leaking Buick — a surprise artwork by Trisha Donnelly that appeared the day before the show opened). And Mark Manders’ Life-size Scene with Revealed Figure is an enigmatic work that suggests any number of functions – an alterpiece, an obsolete projector, a stationary puppet — though its ultimate purpose remains mysterious.

What do you go to dance for—and to what extent did this dance give you that?

And I’ll give a partial answer. One of the things I go to dance for is kinesthetic pleasure—the feeling of the imagined body, the mental map of the body, moving along with the performers on stage. You’d think after five years of being a dance critic, not to mention twenty-five years of dancing, my system would be jaded, responsive only to the most unusual or extreme movements. But as far as I can tell, the kinesthetic sense doesn’t work like that. It’s one of the basic, inexhaustible pleasures of life, like sex or eating. Any time I see an arm reaching to the sky, urge spreading out through the ribcage, I feel the same thrill. Even the minute, waving permutations of a hand are magic.

The Good Dance definitely gave me that—all those sweeps and reaches, plus tiny engines of fine-grained coordination. But the pleasure wasn’t unadulterated. Wilson and Ouamba intentionally (I believe) cut through that pleasure in order to find another aspect of the dance.

I’ll stop there. But what other aspects were you looking for? And what did you find?

Getty has sponsored nine art museums[i] to lead the pilot stage of what has been termed the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (you’ll hear it referred to around here as OSCI). Through innovative web-based architectures, each awarded institution will present visitors prodigious access to artists’ works in the permanent collections.

At the Walker, we’re conceptualizing our own interpretation of what this new online space could be.

Considering that technology has enabled institutions to digitally preserve and activate a greater fraction of the 85% of its history that is otherwise considered ephemeral, buried, or disappeared, collection catalogues are up against a new set of expectations these days. There is a colossal amount of uncovered content to work with, not to mention the mega quantities of incoming material produced by still living contemporary artists that make up the greater part of our collection. So the traditional implication of “collections catalogue” has become a tenuous one. They can no longer be as delimited, static, impervious, finite. They shouldn’t be outdated before being published.  And this is where the OSCI takes up its task of archive mining and creative programming: thinking up appropriate ways to select from and to dynamically assemble unprecedented amounts of available information into a viable user interface.

Though the Getty Initiative is only in its planning stages over the next year, what is certain at the moment is that this next idea for the catalogue will be flexible, interactive, sensorial, and host a variety of media. It will invite visitors to experience works in the collection on significantly new levels of amplitude and proximity, while making visible the Walker’s relationships with artists over time, and emphasize courses of invention, adaptation, mutation, reanimation, and even erasure.

Tomás Saraceno, 32SW Stay Green/Flying Garden/Air-Port-City, 2007. Pillows with pressurized air, webbing, covered with black felt, grass, solar flexible panels, electrical cables, battery, solar pump, water supply system. 192-15/16 in. diameter. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

What is less certain is what it’s going to look like. Rethinking the potential of communicating the Walker’s collection of contemporary art to the public raises some good questions: how does an arts organization that is known for accessioning work from outside of the traditional artistic canon (Japanese Gutai, Viennese Actionism, Brazilian Neoconcretism), from artists who cross disciplines (Pierre Huyghe, Trisha Donnelly) and use ever-advanced, ever-bizarre, or ever-decaying technologies (Cao Fei, Kris Martin, Tomás Saraceno, Bruce Conner), and from collaborative and community-based projects (Sam Durant, Nari Ward), suitably reflect these energies through the OSCI? Rather than exist as antithetical to or stifle the content it encompasses, the new catalogue project has to appropriately sync its identity with the distinct creativities that compose the Walker’s collection. Talked about issues include indeterminateness, multiplicity, scale, totality, decentralization, temporality, motion, means of entry, hierarchies, authorship, and translation. These conversations are crucially influential to forming a proper vision for the OSCI catalogue’s design and functionality.

Elucidative to the development of this project are the larger art historical discussions on the topic of the archive. Of late, institutions have been in a tizzy over what an archive of contemporary art even is, and how can one rationalize the typologies output by cataloguing and using database structures to represent content that often exists only to repel such “normalizing” devices. Essential questions recently raised by Tate Modern’s Archiving the Artist symposium  (September 2009); Monash University’s Archive/Counter Archive conference (July 2009); CAA’s panel on What is Contemporary Art History (February 2009); Berkeley’s Archiving the Avant Garde consortium (2001), and by exhibitions such as Every Version Belongs to the Myth (Project Arts Centre, 2009); Working Title: Archive (Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, 2008); The Order of Things (MuHKA, Ghent, 2008), and artist projects including Helke Bayrle’s Portikus Under Construction film (2001-2008); Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group Archive (1999-present); Armin Linke’s Book on Demand (2003-present); Lev Manovich’s Soft Cinema (2000-2005); Carlos Amorales’ Liquid Archive (1999-present) continue to shape OSCI project, albeit through bouts of both illumination and bewilderment. But invaluable to the sensible and sensitive making (and unending tweaking) of this collections site is the exchange of insights from partner art spaces, people at the Walker who have worked with artists in our collection for decades, and from the artists themselves.

Nari Ward with members of the Lao Family Community of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 2000

During Phase 1 of the project, with a year or so for us to all meet, mull and experiment on how this new collection catalogue will turn out (and in trying to ultimately find a nice balance between idealism and practicality), there is much exciting work to be done…

I’m Brooke, by the way, new here as the Getty fellow for the OSCI project. I flew in last week from San Francisco and arrive to the project with a recent Master’s degree in Exhibition and Museum Studies from San Francisco Art Institute. The past few years I’ve spent working on the theorization of contemporary art archives. It’s superb to be at the Walker, working with the Visual Arts and New Media departments, and to take part in this initiative where I can shift momentum from a world of mostly thinking/talking/writing to one that welcomes the fun of creating.

More updates soon.

A few weeks ago, Google announced support for analytics inside mobile apps and some cursory support for mobile sites:

Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can better measure your mobile marketing efforts. If you’re optimizing content for mobile users and have created a mobile website, Google Analytics can track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript. This is made possible by adding a server side code snippet to your mobile website which will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks (download snippet instructions). We will be supporting PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites in this release. Of course, you can still track visits to your regular website coming from high-end, Javascript enabled phones.

And that is the extent of the documentation you will find anywhere on Google on how to run analytics without javascript. The code included is handy if you happen to run one of their platforms, but the Walker’s mobile site runs on the python side of AppEngine, so their code doesn’t do us much good. Thankfully, since they provide us with the source, we can without too much trouble, translate the php or perl into python and make it AppEngine friendly.

How it works

Regular Google Analytics works by serving some javascript and a small 1px x 1px gif file to your site from Google. The gif lets Google learn many things from the HTTP request your browser makes, such as your browser, OS, where you came from, your rough geo location, etc. The javascript lets them learn all kinds of nifty things about your screen, flash versions, event that fire, etc. And Google tracks you through a site by setting some cookies on that gif they serve you.

To use GA without javascript, we can still do most of that, and we do it by generating our own gif file and passing some information back to Google through our server. That is, we generate a gif, assign and track our own cookie, and then gather that information as you move through the site, and use a HTTP request with the appropriate query strings and pass it back to Google, which they then compile and treat as regular old analytics.

The Code

To make this work in appeinge, we create a  URL in our webapp that we’ll serve the gif from. I’m using “/ga/”:

[python]
def main():
application = webapp.WSGIApplication(
[('/', home.MainHandler),
# edited out extra lines here
('/ga/', ga.GaHandler),
],
debug=False)
wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(application)
[/python]

And here’s the big handler for /ga/. I based it mostly off the php and some of the perl (click to expand the full code):

[code lang="python" collapse="true"]
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from google.appengine.api import urlfetch
import re, hashlib, random, time, datetime, cgi, urllib, uuid

# google analytics stuff
VERSION = "4.4sh"
COOKIE_NAME = "__utmmobile"

# The path the cookie will be available to, edit this to use a different cookie path.
COOKIE_PATH = "/"

# Two years in seconds.
COOKIE_USER_PERSISTENCE = 63072000

GIF_DATA = [
chr(0x47), chr(0x49), chr(0x46), chr(0x38), chr(0x39), chr(0x61),
chr(0x01), chr(0x00), chr(0x01), chr(0x00), chr(0x80), chr(0xff),
chr(0x00), chr(0xff), chr(0xff), chr(0xff), chr(0x00), chr(0x00),
chr(0x00), chr(0x2c), chr(0x00), chr(0x00), chr(0x00), chr(0x00),
chr(0x01), chr(0x00), chr(0x01), chr(0x00), chr(0x00), chr(0x02),
chr(0x02), chr(0x44), chr(0x01), chr(0x00), chr(0x3b)
]

class GaHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
def getIP(self,remoteAddress):
if remoteAddress == '' or remoteAddress == None:
return ''

#Capture the first three octects of the IP address and replace the forth
#with 0, e.g. 124.455.3.123 becomes 124.455.3.0
res = re.findall(r'\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.', remoteAddress)
if res:
return res[0] + "0"
else:
return ""

def getVisitorId(self, guid, account, userAgent, cookie):
#If there is a value in the cookie, don't change it.
if type(cookie).__name__ != 'NoneType': # or len(cookie)!=0:
return cookie

message = ""

if type(guid).__name__ != 'NoneType': # or len(guid)!=0:
#Create the visitor id using the guid.
message = guid + account
else:
#otherwise this is a new user, create a new random id.
message = userAgent + uuid.uuid1(self.getRandomNumber()).__str__()

m = hashlib.md5()
m.update(message)
md5String = m.hexdigest()

return str("0x" + md5String[0:16])

def getRandomNumber(self):
return random.randrange(0, 0x7fffffff)

def sendRequestToGoogleAnalytics(self,utmUrl):
'''
Make a tracking request to Google Analytics from this server.
Copies the headers from the original request to the new one.
If request containg utmdebug parameter, exceptions encountered
communicating with Google Analytics are thown.
'''
headers = {
"user_agent": self.request.headers.get('user_agent'),
"Accepts-Language": self.request.headers.get('http_accept_language'),
}
if len(self.request.get("utmdebug"))!=0:
data = urlfetch.fetch(utmUrl, headers=headers)
else:
try:
data = urlfetch.fetch(utmUrl, headers=headers)
except:
pass

def get(self):
'''
Track a page view, updates all the cookies and campaign tracker,
makes a server side request to Google Analytics and writes the transparent
gif byte data to the response.
'''
timeStamp = time.time()

domainName = self.request.headers.get('host')
domainName = domainName.partition(':')[0]

if len(domainName) == 0:
domainName = "m.walkerart.org";

#Get the referrer from the utmr parameter, this is the referrer to the
#page that contains the tracking pixel, not the referrer for tracking
#pixel.
documentReferer = self.request.get("utmr")

if len(documentReferer) == 0 or documentReferer != "0":
documentReferer = "-"
else:
documentReferer = urllib.unquote_plus(documentReferer)

documentPath = self.request.get("utmp")
if len(documentPath)==0:
documentPath = ""
else:
documentPath = urllib.unquote_plus(documentPath)

account = self.request.get("utmac")
userAgent = self.request.headers.get("user_agent")
if len(userAgent)==0:
userAgent = ""

#Try and get visitor cookie from the request.
cookie = self.request.cookies.get(COOKIE_NAME)

visitorId = str(self.getVisitorId(self.request.headers.get("HTTP_X_DCMGUID"), account, userAgent, cookie))

#Always try and add the cookie to the response.
d = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(timeStamp + COOKIE_USER_PERSISTENCE)
expireDate = d.strftime('%a,%d-%b-%Y %H:%M:%S GMT')

self.response.headers.add_header('Set-Cookie', COOKIE_NAME+'='+visitorId +'; path='+COOKIE_PATH+'; expires='+expireDate+';' )
utmGifLocation = "http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif"

myIP = self.getIP(self.request.remote_addr)

#Construct the gif hit url.
utmUrl = utmGifLocation + "?" + "utmwv=" + VERSION + \
"&utmn=" + str(self.getRandomNumber()) + \
"&utmhn=" + urllib.pathname2url(domainName) + \
"&utmr=" + urllib.pathname2url(documentReferer) + \
"&utmp=" + urllib.pathname2url(documentPath) + \
"&utmac=" + account + \
"&utmcc=__utma%3D999.999.999.999.999.1%3B" + \
"&utmvid=" + str(visitorId) + \
"&utmip=" + str(myIP)

# we dont send requests when we're developing
if domainName != 'localhost':
self.sendRequestToGoogleAnalytics(utmUrl)

#If the debug parameter is on, add a header to the response that contains
#the url that was used to contact Google Analytics.
if len(self.request.get("utmdebug")) != 0:
self.response.headers.add_header("X-GA-MOBILE-URL" , utmUrl)

#Finally write the gif data to the response.
self.response.headers.add_header('Content-Type', 'image/gif' )
self.response.headers.add_header('Cache-Control', 'private, no-cache, no-cache=Set-Cookie, proxy-revalidate' )
self.response.headers.add_header('Pragma', 'no-cache' )
self.response.headers.add_header('Expires', 'Wed, 17 Sep 1975 21:32:10 GMT' )
self.response.out.write(''.join(GIF_DATA))

[/code]

So now we know what to do with our requests at /ga/ when we get them, we just need to make the proper requests to that URL in the first place. So we need to generate the URL we’re going to have the visitor’s browser request in the first place. With normal django, we would be able to use template_context to automatically insert it into the page’s template values. But, since AppEngine doesn’t use that, we have our own helper functions to do that, which I showed some of in my last post. Here’s the updated helper functions, with the GoogleAnalyticsGetImageUrl function included:

[code lang="python"]
import settings

def googleAnalyticsGetImageUrl(request):
url = ""
url += '/ga/' + "?"
url += "utmac=" + settings.GA_ACCOUNT
url += "&utmn=" + str(random.randrange(0, 0x7fffffff))

referer = request.referrer
query = urllib.urlencode(request.GET) #$_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"];
path = request.path #$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];

if len(referer) == 0:
referer = "-"

url += "&utmr=" + urllib.pathname2url(referer)

if len(path)!=0:
url += "&utmp=" + urllib.pathname2url(path)

url += "&guid=ON";

return {'gaImgUrl':url}

def getTempalteValues(request):
myDict = {}
myDict.update(ua_test(request))
myDict.update(googleAnalyticsGetImageUrl(request))
return myDict

[/code]

Assuming we use getTemplateValues to set up our inital template_values dict, we should have a variable named ‘gaImgUrl’ in our page. To use it, all we need to do is put this at the bottom of every page on the site:

[code lang="html"]
<img src="{{ gaImgUrl }}" alt="analytics" />
[/code]

My settings file contains the GA_ACCOUNT variable, but replaces the standard GA-XXXXXX-X setup with MO-XXXXXX-X. I’m assuming the MO- tells google that it’s a mobile so accept the proxied requests.

One thing to keep in mind with this technique is that you cannot cache your rendered templates. The image you server will necessarily have a different query string every time, and if you cached it, you would ruin your analytics. Instead, you should cache nearly everything from your view functions, except the gaImgUrl variable.

As the person charged with the task of seeking out prints for films screened in the Walker Cinema, I’ve found historically that 35mm prints from the 1980s are the hardest to find. Why this is is anyone’s guess; perhaps films from the 80s aren’t old enough to be considered “classic,” but aren’t recent enough to be still lying around archives. This black-hole-of-a-decade rule has certainly been true of the last several Walker film retrospectives: for the Mike Leigh Regis Dialogue and Retrospective, it was High Hopes (1988) that proved exceeding difficult to locate, and for Joel and Ethan Coen, Blood Simple (1984). For the current series The People’s Republic of Cinema: 60 Years of China on Film, it was the 1984 Chen Kaige film Yellow Earth.

By no means an obscure filmmaker, Chen Kaige is probably best known for his 1993 Oscar-nominated film Farewell My Concubine.  His earlier Yellow Earth announced the arrival of the so-called Fifth Generation Filmmakers in China, and is typically listed in the top five on “Best of” lists for Chinese films ever made. I did not predict that this major work by this well-known filmmaker would be so difficult to secure for the series—but it was.

To give a glimpse into the process by which film exhibitors can go through to screen films, and provide a sense of the rarity of the 35mm medium, I present to you my epic battle for Yellow Earth—in timeline form. My search began on July 1.

• 7/1: I always start with the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). The company credits section for Yellow Earth lists International Film Circuit as the distribution company for the film. I send an inquiry to them. A general Google search for “Yellow Earth” and “screening” lets me know that Harvard Film Archive screened it last spring, so I also email a colleague there and await a response.
• 7/2: International Film Circuit no longer holds the rights or prints of the film, and suggests I contact the British Film Institute (BFI).
• 7/7: BFI informs me that they only have a 16mm print of Yellow Earth.
• 7/14: I retrieve an archived file from the 1993 Regis Dialogue and Retrospective with Chen Kaige, for which we screened Yellow Earth. At that time, we dealt with an L.A-based company called China Film Import & Export Inc. for the print. I shoot off an email to them.
• 7/22: Second email to China Film Import & Export. No response. When I try to phone them, I find the number disconnected.
• 7/25: I email the China Film Archive (in Beijing), inquiring about several titles for the film series.
• 7/28: The China Film Archive indeed has a print! They will look into its availability.
• 7/30: The Harvard Film Archives replies to the Walker Associate Curator that they got the 35mm print from the China Film Archive, but have also heard of a print in Scotland and will inquire on our behalf.
• 7/31: Harvard reports that the Scotland venue is in the process of sending the print to an archive.
• 8/8: Still no word from the China Film Archive. I send a prodding email.
• 8/11: As was suggested by the BFI, I inquire with the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA)  in England. They ask for a written request.
• 8/17: Bad news. The China Film Archive finally gets back in touch to say that the film is already booked elsewhere–-with the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China looming, many film series are planned around the world.
• I step up my efforts and send a follow up email to the ICA.
• 8/31: Another follow up email to the ICA.
• 9/2: ICA replies to say they no longer have the rights to the film. I call her directly and get a disgruntled response that in the past ICA has had to pay fees when other sites screened the film. I assure her that this would not be the case with us, and finally get her to agree to let me know who now holds the print so we can contact them directly.
• 9/8: More nudging and she sends me to Perivale.
• 9/9: The response: “We do not have a print at Perivale. The only copy on our system is out since Feb 2007 at Filmhouse Edinburgh!” At this point, I have forgotten that Harvard had referred us to Filmhouse Cinema in Edinburgh back in July. I call Edinburgh only to find out that the print had been sitting at their Cinema for a long time, and when Harvard called them on our behalf it made them think it really should be sent to a European archive for proper storage. It seems that our very inquiry may have made screening the film impossible, as the process of the new archive accepting it, inspecting it and sorting out rights issues will take more time than we have at this point.
• 9/11: Shot-in-the dark query to the Chinese Taipei Film Archive. No dice.
• 9/18: I’m starting to panic. I look up Chen Kaige’s agent on IMDB. The agency refers me to a Moonstone Entertainment, which produced Chen’s The Promise. They tell to contact the director of the company, “Etchie,” to whom I send a rambling email about Yellow Earth. No response.
• 9/24: It’s gut-check time. The brochure for the People’s Republic of Cinema program is due at the printers. We scramble for a screening backup, and the best we can find is a DVD with both English and Japanese subtitles. I cross my fingers, and optimistically keep the 35mm listing in the brochure’s Yellow Earth description.
• 10/8: Our University of Minnesota co-presentation partner Jason McGrath inquires on our behalf on several international listserves (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and the Chinese Cinema List). A response comes in from someone who had previously worked at the USC School of Cinematic Arts archive, who says they had a print in the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive. A 35mm print inside the country??? Hurrah! But, this news proves too good to be true. Upon inspection it’s discovered that the print is in such bad shape it’s unscreenable.
• Another response to the listserve: “Have they tried the BFI and the National Film Archive in the UK, or its equivalent in Canberra, Australia?” Well, this was interesting. I looked up the Australian archive and found The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. I send an email.
• 10/9: Success! The NFSA agreed to allow us to screen their print. Finding a print can be only half the battle, as rights must be cleared, and several more frantic emails to the China Film Archive to ascertain the rights holder ensued. In the midst of this, as our screening date creeped closer and closer, I receive a call that an overseas package has arrived…Yellow Earth.

I hope you have the opportunity to enjoy Yellow Earth in glorious 35mm….

Now, on to the next series!

Special thanks to the British Film Institute, Contemporary Films (London), Fortissimo Films (Amsterdam), Celluloid Dreams (Paris), XStream Pictures (Beijing), and filmmaker Ying Liang for providing the films in this series. Very, very special thanks to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Stills selected from Pierrot le fou, 1965 ↑

Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the most radical of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, is an artist whose imaginative typographic title sequences, intertitles, still and animated imagery inspires me as a designer. Posted here, are stills selected from four of his films from the mid- to late 1960s.

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Godard inserts text and image into a variety of contexts, including, but not limited to: handwritten letters, neon signs, shop signage, book and magazine covers, collages, grafitti, posters, cinema marquees, corporate logos, the pages of comic books, advertisements, newspapers, children’s books and political pamphlets. Pierrot le fou (above) is rich with contextualized text. Its narrative is reinforced by the images of handwritten letters between protagonists, signs from the places they travel, and a book called, “La bande des pied nickelés,” a cartoon about a group of ne’re-do-wells who make their living scamming the bourgeois. Cropped and blinking neon signs highlight specific words, or segments thereof (e.g. “Riviera” becomes “vie), a mercurial device well-suited to Pierrot le fou. Overall, the embedded texts add meaning and beauty to the film, with patterns of live action and still text reminiscent of a graphic novel. There are few purely typographic titles in this film, but all have dotted upper case “I”s and capital letters centered on black backgrounds—the default Godardian style—set in Antique Olive, a face newly developed in the early ’60s by Fonderie Olive.

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Stills selected from Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis, 1966  ↑

In Masculin féminin, Godard begins to use purely typographic intertitles, a break from earlier films’ embedded texts (e.g. the book cover argument between lovers in Une femme est une femme, 1961), or alternating texts and titles (e.g. Les Carabiniers, 1963 and Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, 1965). Devoid of imagery, these intertitles look like “title cards” from the silent film era. Unlike silent film titles—which provide dialog and narration—the content both reflects the thoughts of the protagonists and comments on the culture-at-large, addressing film, politics, and commercialism. Like previous films, Godard continues to play with language. Letters drop in and out to reveal new words, as in the the closing title, when “Féminin” becomes “Fin.” Formally, the titles are consistent: dotted upper case “I”s and centered justified text on black backgrounds, likely set in a custom version of Futura with a shortened “M” centre vertex. The film, shot in flat black and white, manages beautifully with white text.

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Stills selected from La Chinoise, 1967  ↑

Though stylistically more similar to Pierrot le fou than to Masculin féminin, the intertitles in La Chinoise continue Godard’s move toward the politicized texts he continues to use into the ’70s and ’80s. His presentation of images and titles reads like a manifesto, eerily predicting the political unrest of May 1968. The inclusion of embedded texts (e.g. color swatches, pages from comic books and political publications) reduces the contrast between mise en scène and intertitle. The contrast is also blurred as texts are altered, presumably by narrator or protagonist: 1) colored markers decorate a Karl Marx caricature, 2) suction cup arrows attack a collage of French thinkers and revolutionaries, and 3) “défendre” is crossed-out in favor of “trahir.” Large, cropped portions of books and newspapers highlight specific words, and function both as embedded text and typographic intertitle.

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Stills selected from Le Weekend, 1967 ↑

In Le Weekend, Godard returns to the purely typographic titles last seen in Masculin féminin. He inserts line breaks, shifts color, repeats titles and uses graphic elements (e.g. the crossed-out “Front de Libération de Seine at Oise”) to play with words, numbers, and their meanings. “Analyse,” broken into two lines, serves as the chapter title for an explicit pseudo-psychoanalytic scene in the beginning of the film. “Photographie” is cleverly renamed “Fauxtographie,” and is made more striking by strictly justifying the text letter-for-letter, achievable with an H/I hybrid letterform. There is even a speedometer, tracking the protagonists’ km/h throughout the film. Blue, white and red text is a common Godardian palette, usually referring to American cultural hegemony and aggression, in addition to rising tide of nationalism in France. In this film, the color scheme may also refer to the titles’ gradual shift from Gregorian calendar dates to French Revolution events. Formally, the colors highlight specific characters or words, and contrast nicely with the black backgrounds and the warm, sunny style of the live-action sequences. The mostly-justified, all-cap titles are again set in Antique Olive.

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Godard’s style developed from various influences in his life and career: 1) He came from a well-to-do Franco-Swiss family where poetry and philosophical texts were regularly recited. The reading and recitation of text is a common thread in his films, often represented typographically. 2) Godard has a reverence for, and an encyclopedic knowledge of film, including the works of F.W. Murnau, Jean Cocteau, and Alfred Hitchcock, all known for the style of their embedded text and imagery. Murnau, as a silent film director, used intertitles as they were first intended—to deliver dialog and narration—though he experimented with contextualization, using pages from old books and letters between characters. Cocteau, inserted his own untranslated handwriting into The Blood of a Poet. The film is not silent, and the writing is not necessary, though it adds texture and meaning to his work. Godard uses intertitles the same way, as vehicles for content and style not always immediately relevant to his narrative. Hitchcock, began his film career as a writer of intertitles. As a director he embedded texts into everyday cultural displays such as street signs, posters, bilboards and newspapers, a practice Godard repeats in films like Le Mépris, 1963, and Une femme mariée, 1964. 3) Godard was a film critic and a contributor to Cahiers du cinéma. Via intertitles and embedded texts, he continues to write, peppering his films with homages, critiques and references.

Stills from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (updated), 1992, and Sunrise, 1927 ↑

Still from Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, 1930 ↑

Still from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Farmer’s Wife, 1928 ↑

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A: See? I’ve been reviewing some of Godard’s films to write this post. I’m thinking of a followup entry to add and discuss more stills from other films.
<silence>
A: Are you still there? Is this thing on?
<crickets chirp>