Hasta La Ideas

Few places garner the type of awe and admiration for the abundance of nature like the great Northwest. While its cities continue to produce an impressive crop of creativity, its wilderness remains in part uncharted but ever-enchanting. To keep the heavily wooded region…

Continue Reading…

Documenting filmmaker Jørgen Leth in a cycling film by Brendt Barbur

Turning the camera on famed sports documentarian Jørgen Leth, Bicycle Film Festival founder Brendt Barbur embarked on the film project “The Commentator” to trace the backstory to his groundbreaking 1976 film “A Sunday in Hell“. Barbur follows Leth through the grueling course at the Paris-Roubaix cycling race, along with several crews led by revered director Albert Maysles—whom Barbur calls the greatest living cinematographer—surf-world documentarian Patrick Trefz, photographer and artist Brian Vernor and photographer Stefan Ruiz. The Commentator lives as a Kickstarter campaign, so you can help make it happen by donating—$3,000 will get you a private dinner for six with the Barbur, Maysles, the film crew and Blonde Redhead (who created the film’s score), among others.

We caught up with Barbur to discuss the project—which will shoot on race day, 8 April 2012—his relationship with cycling greats and subtlety in filmmaking.

How did this all get started?

The first year of the Bicycle Film Festival, we played “A Sunday in Hell”, which was a very old print and all ripped up. We had a sold-out show, people couldn’t get in and I was really excited. Jorgen called me and thanked me for screening his film. He’s a man who shares three passions with me: movies, art and bicycles.

What do see as Jørgen Leth’s contribution to sports documentaries and film in general?

I interviewed Jørgen in 2003 at Sundance, and he said that cycling “deserved better than lousy sports journalism…It deserved to be sung about.” I think that “A Sunday in Hell” sings about it. They had about 30 cameras—this is 1976, mind you—and they didn’t talk just about who’s going to win. They went and showed you the subtleties of things.

There’s a really great scene in “A Sunday in Hell” where Eddie Merckx—he’s probably the greatest cyclist ever—gets off his bike and asks one of the rival team car mechanics if he could have a tool to fix his saddle. He sits there right next to the car, adjusting his saddle really slowly as he’s casually chatting with them. All those subtle things Jørgen has a knack for finding. He has a kind of “listening” camera.

Albert Maysles is a major name in film. Tell us a bit about his involvement.

Albert Maysles is the spiritual leader of this project, and maybe documentary film and film in general. The other night we had a dinner here, and Albert held court for a little bit and said the reason he makes films is to make friends. This is the director of Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens—some of the most iconic documentary films ever made. When we shoot The Commentator he’s going to be following Jørgen along with our producer and a camera assist.

What will you be looking for at Paris-Roubaix?

I don’t even want to just get the race. If we don’t get the race at all, I’m okay. I want to get the bar—there are bars full of people watching it, and they’re drinking Belgian beer, and they have their flags. There’s a whole scene for miles and miles of people. There’s a big forest, there’s this cafe. The motorcycle riders are taking these back roads, and they’re going 100mph on the side roads to get ahead of the race and capture it with still photography.

What’s it like to work with these big names?

It’s an honor of mine to direct this film—in fact it’s a little bit nerve-wracking. But it’s not because everyone’s so into this project. We’re all doing this out of passion for the project itself. An Oscar-nominated filmmaker emailed me and asked if they could meet up with us and shoot with us. It’s kind of like the spirit of the Bicycle Film Festival. People just want to make it happen.

Watch the video to find out more about the project.

The U.S. Open of art: Rauschenberg’s 1966 performance pairing tennis and technology

Think branded interdisciplinary content is a recent phenomenon? In 1966 a unique project was hatched when conceptual artists and Bell Labs engineers collaborated on a series of live installations inside a National Guard Armory in New York City. One of those, “Open Score” by Robert Rauschenberg, pitted artists—including minimalist painter Frank Stella—against each other in a live game of tennis with rackets wired to switch the stage lights on and off and produce an aural musical score. Their movements were projected on large screens by infrared camera, giving the performers and the assembled crowd of 300 a ghoulish glow inside the cavernous armory

By all accounts electrifying, now 45 years later an exhibit at Seventeen gallery in London will showcase Swedish documentary maker Barbro Schultz Lundestam’s reexamination of the seminal moment in conceptual art history. She takes the audience back to those evenings in NYC with the principles involved explaining how they pulled it off and the effect they had on the actors and spectators. Check out a trailer for the 34-minute film here.

The 1997 documentary is also available for sale on DVD, but for those near London, the installation runs through 8 October 2011.

A new clip showing Danny MacAskill’s unbelievable bike skills

As part of the U.K.’s Channel 4 series on urban action sports, Concrete Circus, Scotsman Danny MacAskill weaves, winds, hops, flips and otherwise impressively maneuvers his way through an abandoned ironworks factory in his native land. The entire collection of documentaries showcases specialized athletes in and out of their natural urban element, but few demand such widespread attention as MacAskill—as this clip proves.

Thanks to our friend Joey Lasley for the heads up, story via Pinkbike.

Exploring undiscovered art scenes in small towns around the globe

The first in a series of shows exposing smaller towns as undiscovered creative hubs, “My Winnipeg” highlights noteworthy artists inhabiting the world’s coldest city. Put on by Paris’ Maison Rouge Gallery, each exhibit is twofold, serving as both broad studies of the selected city’s overall culture and as work relevant to the international contemporary art scene.

My Winnipeg raises questions about how Winnipeg, Canada may have influenced each artist, in terms of climate, geography and history. Could its impossible weather— comprised of harsh, long winters, floods and mosquito-invaded summers—be behind the sleepy state-of-mind imprinting some of the work? Is its location in the middle of an Indian territory the key to many of the artists’ relationships with mythical spirits? Does the city’s former post as a cosmopolitan trading center influence its current surge of dynamic creativity?

Challenged with how to turn this ethnological approach into an art show, the gallery supplys meaningful background information while allowing the works to speak for themselves, devoid of local particularities. In the end, the artists appear to share similar concerns about society as their peers do in bigger metropolises.

Works by artists like Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Wanda Koop, Kent Monkman, Bonnie Marin and Diana Thorneycroft span all mediums—from painting to performance art—to create a definitive visual statement about their native town. Standing out among them is Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin’s 2007 documentary, also dubbed “My Winnipeg.” The film taps Winnipeg’s folkloric history, featuring beautifully hallucinatory images, speaking to Maddin’s sentiment that cinema is a haunted media since it shows people and things which are not really present.

“My Winnipeg” is currently on view at Maison Rouge and runs through 25 September 2011.