ROLL FILM!

""GREATEST FILM EVER MADE!" Shared from AR newsfeeds to Public March 11, 2014! "Where have you been all this time?", that's what the archivists asked me. ***This post / text represents the "pre-final" editor's copy. After this, it goes into the web 'for eternity'. Can you handle it? "I SAID ROLL FILM!" Yes, it's the Academy Awards weekend! And on that note I present my own story about "THE GREATEST FILM EVER MADE!" by Carter Studios, Vancouver, 1971 or close to it. This will undoubtedly become the foundation of my next web essay on film subjects. There are only so many times that one can repeat oneself, without then committing it to writing, web essays, a book, or even on a wall of stone! Nothing to do with that perv Cecil B. deMille, obviously. Everything to do with what agitates every 'avant-garde', not so obviously. Go ahead, enjoy! FADE IN: ------------------------- WORKING TITLE: "Me and a guy named Carter and the greatest film ever made." Back in the very early 70's, which weren't much different from the late 60's, me and a guy I remember as "Carter" sat down and got stoned, really really stoned, at an artists place we worked out of called "Intermedia" which by then was on 4th Avenue, Vancouver. Then Carter showed me his 16mm film that he just made. He wanted to distribute it with our Intermedia underground film coop which me and my wife Kathy were running out of that place. "It was the greatest film ever made!" I said, after a few minutes of viewing, and I wanted more. So he showed me more. Hours of it. I asked him how he did it and he said "Simple! Just used some black or white or coloured leader and some sandpaper." I said, "How cool!" Later, other people started calling this 'materialist cinema', put some in a book, analyzed it, quoted others about it. But the day Carter showed me his film, which was the greatest film ever made, was the day the greatest story ever told was told but not by Carter. Did anyone agree with me? Well, one writer who I unfriended last year (for being lazy) called this phenomenon and another film like it   "without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object. It is the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which occupy modern painting and sculpture. It has rightly been described as a 'triumph of contemplative cinema.'" And to that, Carter could have replied, with an aw shucks,  "It's a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas. Nothing less. Nothing more." You read that right.   "Did Michael Snow say it?" Greatest film ever made. Like this one. Try it. (Illustrating this post is a 1 min. film I boosted from the web, great stand in, same idea.) URL for cool access: https://www.alchemists.com/visual_alchemy/video/carter.mp4 "   -- Al Razutis, May 2014 to April 2023

Or a film & topic like this?

'On the Problem of the Autonomy of Art in Bourgeois Society... or, SPLICE'



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