Blog
Shamanism in Cinema
We surround our psyches with role models and heroes from stories we read, hear played on stage, watch inside our monitors, or up on the big screen because they expand territory for our hearts and souls to stretch out in.
A movie camera is simply a clock with a lens.
Here, a clockmaker turned himself into a ghost and, with the advent of a new kind of mass hypnosis, generated the first special effects blockbuster grosses.
Cooking Up a Surprise
In his 1958 dark comedy, “The Magician” Ingmar Bergman makes comparisons between his experiences as a movie maker, and the adventures of an itinerant magic troupe from the 1840’s headed by Dr. Albert Emmanuel Vogler. An interesting side note: from about the middle of the 19th century to the turn of the 20th, my family […]
Magic and Movies – Part 1
We reward the magician that can coax our mind to suspend disbelief, providing a new “obstacle course” for our brain. Like our bodies, our spirits want to jump the ruts and get some exercise too. Anything that allows new possibilities to bubble up, leaves us satisfied and in a good mood.
Comedy and Tragedy
Storytellers utilize comedy and tragedy to perform an ongoing autopsy on the culture. When we talk about comedy and tragedy as different things, we are talking about a singular reality we’ve pried apart for clues. They shed light on our preoccupations, conscious and unconscious.
Comedy and Tragedy
November’s blog post will be coupled with December’s post for a year end “double issue,” and will discuss the subjects of “Comedy and Tragedy”. Thank you for visiting Open Channel Content. (click here to read entire article)
Wake Up Call
For me, the film was an expose about what infantile fantasies secretly motivate the wealthy, power-obsessed male psyche and how nature, the feminine and all that is beautiful is shamelessly sacrificed to his insatiable appetite.
Imagination, Rapture, and the Waking Dream
One seemingly petty, little, foolish choice is all it takes for an ideal life to turn into a nightmare. (click here to read entire article)
Arab Spring
2011’s Arab Spring played in real-time on the Internet, with gloves off, like the Viet Nam War played on national television in the sixties and seventies. Not since those days has youth captured and held the attention of the world so impressively. (click here to read entire article.)
What if digital age folk are getting smarter, not dumber?
Here is proof that the political stage is not being managed by a secret cadre of money-grubbing fascists. If such a group existed, they would never have given us all these cameras. (click here to read entire article.)
Big Screens and the Teen Scene
My hometown did not offer teenagers much to do, so we often watched the same picture three nights in a row. We learned, from years of watching every movie that came through town, that there was occasionally something besides fleeting amusement to be found.
Storytelling, and particularly popular film, in this modern era, have done their best to warn us of the shapes of things to come.
It took a mere two and a half weeks for the events in “The China Syndrome” to come to pass in the near meltdown of Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, but we did not stand up then like we should have. Now, toxic nuclear byproducts have fouled the ocean and even come blowing to your hometown a result of negligence and corruption by the energy companies and the governments whom we have invested with the responsibility to watch over them. (click here to read full article)
Apocalypse? Revolution? Paradigm Shift?
The study of modern alienation on which Antonioni focused his lens in the 50’s and 60’s is generations deep now in the cinema, energized by global terrorism, industrial greed, and the abrupt crash of our eco-system. (click to see entire article)
Hope in a Handbasket
BILLY-“You know, unbelievers liked to make fun, but I ask you, believers and unbelievers alike, what more literal proof of a bona-fide hell does anyone need? As we live and breathe, the flaming bowels of the under world, swell with fires in which you, me and Mother Nature are slowly roasting.” (click to read entire article)
Stories Tell the Truth About Lies
Lies do not stand for truth. They do not change the facts. Lies are like gas, invisible, but among the most obvious things in the world. The air we breathe contains a variety of gases but a body requires oxygen. Truth is everywhere mingled with lies, but our survival depends on truth. We can tell pretty quickly when we’re breathing something else. (click here to read entire article)
The Official Story – Loading the Time Capsule of History
Just as no photographic image can encompass the total picture, no official, or their story can claim to have done all the necessary listening and thinking for us. We must fill in the missing gaps with our own story and the stories of those around us, particularly those with whom we differ most. Good listening requires at least a momentary suspension of prejudice.
Heaven and Hell
It was too long. So is hell. I looked around at the audience. No one was breathing. The movie theater felt like a Petri dish. (click to read full article).
Psychedelic Cinema
These days “outside the box” is a commonplace term for innovative thinking and drugs are by no means the only way to achieve it. Moviemakers keep on paving the way in popular culture. Whether or not you ever ingested hallucinogens, we have all experienced them through their influence in music, movies, fashion, advertising, games and so on. (click here to read full article)
Point of View
If every story combines three essential elements, plot, character and point of view, we must realize that the creators of these social websites that we are supplying with our character and plot are supplying the point of view.
It is tempting to conclude that religion and pornography are two sides of the same coin.
No matter which side of the spectrum we are drawn to, most of us have a desire to express ourselves freely, sexually or otherwise, and we are drawn to examples of free expression in the movies. It is this same natural curiosity that draws us to pornography. (click here to read article)
Sex and the Movies
Observing the actions of dating and lovemaking in movies becomes a sort of participation in the rites themselves, in which audience members are touched by characters and receive sensual gratification from them. (click here to read entire article)
Someone is Watching Over You
In his 1966 film “Fahrenheit 451”, Francois Truffaut illuminates ideas Ray Bradbury laid down in his 1953 science fiction novel of mass media, information control and personal privacy, thus anticipating our current debate on net neutrality by more than 50 years. In...
Toward a Unified Story
Toward a Unified Story
Over eons the first stories morphed and multiplied into a myriad of stories. Now, through motion pictures and the Internet, the myths, legends, and histories of all traditions will merge back together again. Through the universal language of image and song, motion pictures are presenting the world with its unified story. Click to view entire article.
Early Movie Theater Prototype
Gothic artisans that provided ornate alters for the great cathedrals, had offspring who adapted the same skills, in later periods, to provide scenic backdrops for opulent operas and romance plays. The legacy continues to the artists, craftsmen and tradesmen working on location and in soundstages for our limit-pushing entertainments of today. “Click” to read entire article.
Filmmakers are not making up new stories. They are embellishing old ones.
A camera is a filmmaker’s story embellisher. A photographer’s lens allows the artist to emphasize certain specific, meaningful, aspects of a moment in time. “Click” to read entire article.
Here in New Mexico ancient civilizations left behind superb examples of cyclical rituals in which storytelling was central.
This brief history of storytelling can be used as a road map into the human brain regarding which stimuli the mind is most apt to be open to and what priority the mind gives to a given stimulus. “Click” to read entire article.
The camera may still derive some authority from our age-old habit of perceiving God as an all-seeing eye.
Motion pictures, dreams and rituals share several artifices in that respect, such as plasticity of time and space, the occurrence of vivid, uncanny detail, and situations where unconscious fears and desires are expressed. “Click” to read entire article.
what do I want that eye to see?
I think of someone who may be illiterate, they may be deaf, mute, or all of the above. For that matter, they could have only one eye and still watch my movie. When I make films, that person is my audience. I ask myself, what do I want that eye to see? “Click” to read entire article.
1 January 2010
I am coming out on my digital front porch to say hello, take in the view, and tell my story. “Click” to read entire article.
Website Launch for OCC
Open Channel Content (OCC), a boutique film production company will be opening their virtual doors in November, 2009. Producing partners Phoenix and Stryder Simms join with you to help consciously define the digital revolution.
NM Film Expo
Screening Films from all over New Mexico for four days, the New Mexico Film Expo … Open Channel Content will have 2 films screening the weekend of September 26: “Bailout” and “Agnus Day”.