If you've been pointed in this direction by the recent article in The Guardian, please note that I now blog at this address.

 
Kite Circuit: The Pitch (QuickTime, 33.4MB)

links: Kite Circuit


UPDATE: Regardless of the outcome, which turned out to be very good, I thought our pitch went really well and that we couldn't have done much better. We covered a lot material in a very short period of time and answered the panel's questions well; it was telling, I thought, that the questions we got were ultimately about aspects of the story itself as opposed to about things like budget, cast and schedule, which many groups overlooked in their actual pitch, but which we made sure we covered. Overall, I was very confident (much to Kat's chagrin, but, then, that's almost par for the course these days) that we were in there with a good chance of getting selected and funded, which, as it turns out, we were.

I got a phone call from Kat far sooner than I'd expected to (the decision making process didn't take them very long at all, I didn't think) telling me that Austin had run into two of the lecturers in the hall and that they had let him know that Kite Circuit was one of the five greenlit projects. About fifteen minutes later, my Finnish friend Jörgen sent me a text message on my phone that basically confirmed this. What this means in a practical sense is that the school's going to give us between fifteen-hundred and two-thousand dollars to put towards the film, which, of course, is rather helpful.

 
Kite Circuit: Last Minute Pitch Rehearsals (QuickTime, 19.8MB)

links: Kite Circuit

 

I've finally decided to make Notes from the Arctic Circle available online.

You can download the film in a variety of formats, including DVD-quality MPEG-2, from both the film's page on my website and from its page at the Internet Archive. Click here for the QuickTime version.

DVD-quality versions of Three Card Monte, Film No. 2 and Mark and Katrina Go Boating have also been made available.

 

FILM:

Control Room (d. Jehane Noujaim, 2004) *** ½
Dear Phone (d. Peter Greenaway, 1977) ***
Don't Look Back (d. D. A. Pennebaker, 1967) *** ½
Gimme Shelter (d. Albert Maysles, David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin, 1970) ****
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (d. Werner Herzog, 1997) *** ½
Malcolm X (d. Spike Lee, 1992) **
Monterey Pop (d. D. A. Pennebaker, 1968) **
Short Cuts (d. Robert Altman, 1993) **
A Walk through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (d. Peter Greenaway, 1978) ** ½
Trouble in Paradise (d. Ernst Lubitsch, 1932) *** ½
War of the Worlds (d. Steven Spielberg, 2005) **
Water Wrackets (d. Peter Greenaway, 1975) * ½
Why Close the G8? – Gleneagles 2005 (d. Camcorder Guerillas, 1975) *** (link)

LITERATURE:

Fences and Windows by Naomi Klein ****
"Information-Age Guerrillas: The Communication Strategies of the Zapatistas" by Bethaney Turner *** (link)

 
The Prologue to Pyramus and Thisby (QuickTime, 5.4MB)

In 2003, I played the role of Peter Quince in a school production of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I captured and rendered this short segment from the production a couple of years ago and then found the QuickTime file again just recently. It's the only footage I have of my performance and I've decided to vlog it for posterity.

 
From: Anne Démy-Geroe
To: Matthew Clayfield
Subject: Notes from the Arctic Circle
Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005

Dear Matthew Clayfield,

Re: Notes from the Arctic Circle

Thank you for entering your film in the 2005 Brisbane International Film
Festival.

We received many high quality entries, making the selection process a
particularly difficult one.

I regret to advise you that your film has not been selected for the festival
programme.

We are grateful for your interest in our festival and hope to see your work
in coming years.

Best wishes for future projects.

With kind regards,

Anne Démy-Geroe
Artistic Director
Brisbane International Film Festival

 
From ABC News Online:

"I like Bjork and when Japan was added to Live 8 I decided to come. In my daily life, though, I also think about Africa," he said.

Pft. Go figure.

 

Short Cuts (d. Robert Altman, 1993

Except for when I'm writing one of my pieces on Australian cinema, which I consider to be of at least some minor polemical importance, I don't much like writing about films that don't do it for me. Time management's all about picking your battles and seeing as we've only got so many hours in the day, I'd much rather spend them writing about, say, Gimme Shelter (d. Albert Maysles, David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin, 1970), which I saw recently and loved (but didn't have the time to write about), or, yes, Alexander Nevsky. The only reason I'm writing about Robert Altman's Short Cuts is because so many people have said so many good things about it to me and will be shocked when I give it one-and-a-half stars on Sunday.

One of my favourite Altman films is M*A*S*H (1970), which I nevertheless find inferior to another irreverent, though much-less-lauded, war film of that year, Mike Nichols' Catch-22. My reason for this is simply that Nichols' film is far more cinematic than Altman's and that the latter's roots in television have never been too well hidden (nor have Nichols' in theatre, of course, but that's another story). When Altman works with inherently cinematic genres – the war film, the film noir (The Long Goodbye [1973]), the Western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller [1971]) – this doesn't really matter too much – indeed, it ultimately allows him to more effectively subvert the genres, which I think is far and away one of his greatest strengths as a filmmaker. And I do think he can be formally interesting, too. His use of zoom lenses and his layering of sound are both very clever, useful and innovative, but – and this is ultimately the key for me – for some reason seem absolutely uninteresting when applied to this more melodramatic material. It should also be noted that I'm not a fan of Altman's Nashville (1975) (though I should probably see it again just to be sure), which Short Cuts most obviously resembles.

I'm a big fan of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999), which many of Short Cuts' hardcore supporters deride for being so derivative. While I can definitely understand where they're coming from, I also feel that Anderson improved upon the formula considerably by making his film in a way that was far more formally interesting. It's still three hours long and it's still unapologetically melodramatic, but it's also cinema as opposed to television with daring sound design and that's what makes it the better film. It's also what makes, in my opinion, Anderson the better filmmaker.

 
Everything was back to normal this morning. Well, almost back to normal. The lake's water level is still subsiding and the lake's now full of mud:


Click here for more photos of the aftermath.