Computer Animation Arts

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is a 2009 German language film shot in surgically precise black and white. The time is 1913, the place is a small, isolated German village named Eichwald, and the narrative evolves around a series of unexplained acts of cruelty and malice perpetrated against the remote, rural community. The mark left by a trip-wire used in a booby-trap. A mysterious fire. The Baron's son is thrown in the river. In common with Haneke's Hidden (2005), The White Ribbon is purposefully ambiguous. Motives are never laid bare and pointed fingers fail to skewer definitive targets.  In this way, the film refuses easy categorisation, but for this viewer, at least, Haneke's menacing exploration of shame, reprisal and complicity continues a fine cinematic tradition of paedophobia : stories that evince or seek to evoke a visceral distrust or dislike of children.   While The White Ribbon determines for its audience neither moti...

David Cronenberg has announced that he is developing a sequel to The Fly for Fox. Not a massively elaborate post, but it seemed like a good idea to let everyone know they're probably in for more vomit-saturated dining and less Eric Stoltz. The original io9 post is here   and the original Total Film article is here . Steven Payne

Summary: Not so much a remake of Kurt Neumann's 1958 film of the same name but rather a re-telling of George Langalaan’s original short story. Horror master David Cronenberg strips away the murder-mystery aspect of the original, instead choosing to create an intense character study of scientist Seth Brundle – who, after an experiment goes drastically wrong, is slowly and gruesomely transforming into a fly, both in mind and body. Though Cronenberg considers the film an analogy for disease in general, upon its release it was latched onto as a metaphor for the heightened paranoia and cultural acknowledgement of the AIDs epidemic. Analysis: “...the masochistic regression to nature, unconsciousness, and fusion with the maternal body – the image of the doctor-god with the spectre of the womb over which he will preside floating mid-belly neatly summarizes the common theme of Cronenberg’s last two films of the 1980s.” (Cohan, 2002:134) “The protagonists of Dead Ringers and...

Like something from the imagination of David Cronenberg , the sculptural installations of Henrique Oliveira magnify the sagging ringlets of tumors and bulge of prolapsed viscera to giant proportions. It's as if the architectural fabric of these spaces have suffered some catastrophic hernia or disease... "Artist Henrique Oliveira was a student in São Paulo, Brazil when the plywood fence outside his window began to peel and fade into different layers and colors. The wood, called tapumes in Portuguese is ubiquitous in the Brazilian city, serving as enclosures and barriers for various sites. When the fence was dismantled, Oliveira harvested the remains and used them as materials for his senior show. The result propelled him into his current work: undulating, swirling, bulging peels of wood layered onto hallways and walls in daunting forms... Oliveira begins with a PVC skeleton, tacking curls of scrap wood around established bends and tucks. He finds the bulk of his material i...

Museum of the Moving Image presents selected conversations with innovative and influential creative figures in film, TV, and digital media. Go here for conversation with the likes of David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Sam Mendes, Ang Lee, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola, Brad Bird, Chuck Jones, & Michel Gondry (and many more!).