Nilesyyniles – Phone Call Home

For the final installment of the series I’ve selected Craig Baldwin’s by now canonical “Tribulation 99” (1992/16mm/48min). Baldwin’s film is an inspired collage that rewrites the history of the Cold War through the prism of sci-fi paranoia. A kaleidoscopic mash-up of newsreels, grade-Z low budget science fiction movies, educational films, super-imposed titles and conspiratorial narration, “Tribulation 99” is a towering milestone that helped to establish the continued vitality of the found footage film.

https://vimeo.com/36739141

This Monday’s selection is “Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band #1” (2010/video/11min) by Cauleen Smith. In another video work inspired by the music and philosophy of Sun Ra, Smith organized and documented this on-site flashmob performance of Ra’s anthem “Space is the Place” by the Rich South High School Marching Band at Chinatown Square in Chicago. The heavenly bodies move through public space leaving the music of the spheres in their wake.

https://vimeo.com/15678607

This Monday’s selection is “Sun Song” (2013/video/15min/silent) by Joel Wanek. Inspired by the sounds and philosophy of Sun Ra, this silent workaday evocation of earthbound interstellar travel features working class African American workers as seldom depicted: with grace and poetry. That Sun Song has garnered heady comparisons to work as varied as Nathaniel Dorsky’s, Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris”, Chris Marker’s “Passengers” and Luis Bunuel’s “Illusion Travel’s by Streetcar” and “Exterminating Angel” gives some sense of how vibrant and resonant Wanek’s vision is.

The next video in the series is Afronauts a retro-futurist vision of earth bound space travel by Christina De Middel.From De Middel’s Vimeo page:In 1964, still living the dream of their recently gained independence, Zambia started a space program that would put the first African on the moon catching up with the USA and the Soviet Union in the space race.

Only a few optimists supported the project by Edward Makuka, the school teacher in charge of presenting the ambitious program and getting its necessary funding. But the financial aid never came, as the United Nations declined their support, and one of the astronauts, a 16 year-old girl, got pregnant and had to quit.

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As a photojournalist I have always been attracted by the eccentric lines of story-telling avoiding the same old subjects told in the same old ways.

Now, with my personal projects, I respect the basis of the truth but allow myself to break the rules of veracity trying to push the audience into analyzing the patterns of the stories we consume as real.

“Afronauts” is based on the documentation of an impossible dream that only lives in the pictures. I started from a real fact that took place 50 years ago and rebuilt the documents adapting them to my personal imagery.