Kosmograd

Tower Bawher

I know it's been around for a while now, but I couldn't mention Tatlin's tower without referencing the amazing animation Tower Bawher by Theodore Ushev. In a hyperkinetic homage to Soviet Constructivism, a tower is built, set to the strident score of "Time, Forward', by Georgy Sviridov.

While there are clips of the animation available on YouTube, the best quality version can be found on the Canadian National Film Board Animation Day site.

There's also a great interview with Ushev here.

City of Signs 4

The recent advert for Sky Movies is beautifully shot across the Brazilian city of São Paulo, that recently decreed to remove all billboards. It is inspired by Tony de Marco's São Paulo No Logo photographs, (Flickr set here), as previously written about here.

It is an advert celebrating non-advertising.

The imagery of the city scape presented is depicted as a purer, simpler urban realm, a rather surreal landscape of blank spaces and empty billboards.

As Ads without products points out, this could be the opening sequence to a psychological thriller much more interesting than 90% of the films Sky Movies show.

"And even better, way better, is that the damned thing looks like the opening sequence of an absolutely incredible (and a good deal more horrifying, to many in the wider audience, than Cloverfields, which isn’t very horrifying at all) of a very different sort of speculative fiction, one about a specter lurching back from the place where dismissed specters go in order to decapitate the idols of the era, break open the walls of the buildings in the expensive neighborhoods, and leave most bedazzled and exhilarated at the sweep of violence that has rubbled so many things we thought could never go, that we believed, despite ourselves, that the world simply couldn't live without."

Previously:
City of Signs 3
City of Signs 2
City of Signs

Flood London

A new film, The Flood, offers an apocalyptic vision of Britain's capital city under a huge surge of water coming along the Thames.

In what appears, from the trailer, to be a fairly typical example of the British disaster movie genre, the surge overwhelms the Thames Barrier, and causes mass flooding to central London. Westminister is turned into a huge lake, the Millennium Eye becomes a giant water wheel.

All good hokum, of course, and according to this BBC article, with little truth to it. A storm surge, tsunami or tidal wave big enough to overtop the Thames Barrier, as the film sugggests, would also be enough to flood large parts of Kent and Essex, and go around the barrier.

Indeed, it is the Thames Estuary, further downstream from the Thames Barrier (at Woolwich Reach), to the east of Central London, that would be the most likely victim of any rising water levels or flood events. The real devastation would not be around the City of London, but the towns of Gillingham and Chatham, Dartford, Gravesend, Canvey Island, Southend, the Isle of Sheppey, and the proposed Thames Gateway development.

It was the floods of 1953, which cost the lives of 300 people, with extensive flooding to the east of London, such as Canvey Island, that was the impetus for building of the Thames Barrier, though ironically the Thames Barrier is only designed to save central London. Now, plans are being made to construct a flood defence mechanism that might serve the whole of the Thames Estuary.

More, inevitably, to follow.

Thunder Perfect Mind

These photographs by Brigitte Lacombe are of a short film by Ridley Scott and daughter Jordan Scott to advertise Prada Perfumes, viewable online

The short film is shot was shot in Berlin, featuring Daria Werbowy in a number of roles, and reciting the ancient text, Thunder Perfect Mind.

These photographs by Lacombe and the vision of Ridley Scott combine perfectly, the contrast in colours, textures of model Werbowy against the cold hard architecture of a Berlin night.

There's also behind the scenes footage by AMO, who also created the web site.
[via dezain.net]

Pripyat: City of the Future

Pripyat: City of the Future is a short film by David Bickerstaff about the Ukranian city of Pripyat, built in the 1970s for workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. As the reactor explodes in 1986, the dangers are kept secret from the population, who continue their daily lives, captured in this chilling film. Shops and business carrying on regardless, children play in the street, a couple get married.

Eventually the entire population of 50,000 are evacuated in a single day, leaving a ghost town of epic propotions, a monument to the futility of a nuclear future, and an area the size of England contiminated with nuclear dust.

The film can be found on issue 14 of Specialten DVD magazine, and there's also more information at:

http://www.atomictv.com/pripyat.html

Every time Tony Blair talks about our need for nuclear power he should be forced to sit with his eyelids taped open and forced to watch this film.