The Tribe is #1 on i-Tunes

 

Tiffany Shlain’s movie, The Tribe, is the number one short film on i-Tunes. In a New York Times article last week she said that “iTunes had actually made it advantageous, in a way, to make short films. “It’s one of these beautiful moments in time,” Ms. Shlain said. “People aren’t trained yet to download a feature and watch it” on their television, she added. “Most people are going to watch on their iPod or a computer. The technology really isn’t there yet to move it over to TV. And people are much more apt to download shorts, because of YouTube and iTunes.”

Tiffany’s early short films can be found on You Tube. They’re a collage of found images and archival footage spliced with images she’s created. Tiffany describes her films as ‘fast paced’ but it’s the smooth glide of exhilaration not an edgy adrenalin rush. The Tribe – an essay on “what it means to be an American Jew in the 21st Century” –added extra elements, narration, bits of performance, animated dioramas using dolls (in this case Barbie, the iconic doll created by a Jewish American woman) and “avant-garde visual techniques”. They have elements of humour as well as poignancy, an approach that Tiffany’s husband Ken Goldberg, an artist and scientist who co-wrote The Tribe, has described as “using humour and play to disarm our preconceptions.” Tiffany created a book and flash cards to go with The Tribe and described the film as “the appetiser” and the discussions as “the main course”.

Ken is a pioneer of telerobotic art projects conducted over the internet and these installations, that create an art project as a way of commenting on the tool and critiquing it while it’s being developed, will be wrapped around the experience of the films they’ll be producing with their new company, The Moxie Institute. It has a still-to be-announced structural mix of non-profit services (a ‘think tank’, white papers) and the sale of the films, which have a strong social message “focusing on the power of film and the web to make social change”. Ken and Tiffany are investigating ”the intersection between these worlds and how the rules are changing. We hope to share the ideas that work and form bridges with leaders in the respective industries to achieve better financial and social returns.”

There are now many film-makers taking on big environmental, social, humanitarian, and cultural questions. At the recent Sundance Film Festival Tiffany co-hosted a ‘think tank’ on the intersection of film, the internet and social change. Highlights from The Movies That Matter panel were intercut with an interview with Tiffany from the think tank.

Directors, writers and producers on Monday’s Movies that Matter Panel have influenced everything from AIDS policy, to the phase-out of PVC packaging, to the global warming debate. Participants included: Sean Fine War / Dance, Judith Helfand Everything’s Cool, Rory Kennedy Ghost’s of Abu Graib, Eric Schlosser Fast Food Nation, Gayle Smith (The Center for American Progress), Diane Weyermann Participant Productions, and Brian Steidle (subject of The Devil Came on Horseback), Helene Cooper of the New York Times (who became an anti-Apartheid activist after seeing Cry Freedom) moderated. While everyone agreed that the movies can matter, there were a variety of approaches to how and why. We’ve all seen the effects of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. My mom’s cat knows about it. Weyermann noted, “The idea was to try to reach as many people as possible to incite change.” Participant Productions clearly carried this out successfully through non-profit partnerships and savvy marketing. To head off doubters, a “bible of science” was provided to press along with the film’s initial release. A year after the Sundance premiere, “The debate about whether global warming exists is over,” said Weyermann. “Now it’s ‘what can we do?’”

Report from Treehugger.

Tiffany’s movies don’t have a plot they have a perspective, where they are philosophically matters as much as what they are. Natural Connection, a short film Tiffany made in 2001 begins with the camera going in through an eye, and the way that the images slide together, morph into one another, and spark off one another makes it seem as if we’re watching the process of thinking, impressions deepening into ideas. Questioning the permeable borders between art and science, considering the reasoning of the scientist, something observable and measurable, and the mystery and intuition that fuels the artist, is also something that underpins all of Ken’s telerobotic art projects. And Tiffany’s father, Leonard Shlain, has written several books that study the intersection between art and science. His book Art and Physics proposes, “…that the visionary artist is the first member of a culture to see the world in a new way. Then, nearly simultaneously, a revolutionary physicist discovers a new way to think about the world.” I think of Tiffany’s movies as demonstrating what happens when this seeing and thinking collide.

Tiffany was the founder of the Webby Awards and a few years ago stepped away from the day-to-day running of the company to concentrate again on film making. Her invention that receives the most attention is the Zen koan-like five word acceptance speech: e.g. Al Gore saying “please don’t recount this vote”. But she also made the awards democratic with a People’s Voice award, able to be voted on by anyone who’s connected to the internet, running alongside the official award made by industry innovators and practitioners. What’s genuinely popular now is able to be celebrated along with technical breakthroughs that are yet to move into widespread use. Tiffany formed the Digital Academy of Arts and Sciences to vote on the official awards.

Tiffany has always been guided by the notion that the internet is a communications medium that has the responsibility to provide the kind of information as a public trust that traditional media companies find it difficult to do in a time of declining revenues. Recently the Webby Awards held a summit to look at the message of the media, with internet co-inventor Vint Cerf, Arianna Huffington the publisher of The Huffington Post, Biz Stone, Co-Founder of Twitter, and Shawn Gold of MySpace, and del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter among the presenters. There are papers from the conference at the Webby’s site.

On her own blog Arianna Huffington talked about the value of community.

Over at WebbyConnect, the talk was about a trend that is already happening: the realization by a growing number of major media companies that the best way to succeed—and make money—in the Brave New Media World is to give away your content. Forward thinking companies are now adopting long-term growth strategies, and moving away from short-term profit-seeking.

“Make as much as you can, any way you can” was the approach many big companies had taken to monetizing the web. The New York Times stuck some of its most popular content behind a pay wall, and Microsoft stuck 30-second pre-roll ads on its MSN Video videos.

Neither of these strategies paid off: online readership of the Times’ columnists dropped, and users at MSN complained of a negative user experience.

So now TimesSelect is dead. MSN is cutting way back on pre-roll ads. And, elsewhere, CBS has made a major u-turn away from the notion of hording its content on its own site, instead letting its material be available all over the web. Quincy Smith, the new president of CBS Interactive put it this way: “CBS is all about open, nonexclusive, multiple partnerships.”

The conclusion is inescapable: online, promiscuity can be profitable. And not just when it comes to porn!

To its credit, CBS and other major players are finally realizing that the key to online success is community, community, community.

LIBRARY: Becasse. Inspirations and Flavours by Justin North

neat. Photograph taken at Becasse by Xiaohan Shen at Flickr.

A few days ago, for the first time in our history as a species, the human population of the planet Earth became predominantly urban, not rural. Some bold researchers pinned down this epochal moment of passage to May 23, 2007. The date was of course a polite statistical fiction, based on a United Nations estimate of how fast people worldwide are shaking off the dust of the countryside and moving into town. In any case, nobody stood up to ask the important question: What does it mean to become a city-dwelling species?

Richard Conniff. ‘The Greening of the Urban Animal’. 11.6.2007 New York Times. ‘Select’

Becasse is the Sydney Morning Herald’s “Good Food Guide” Restaurant of the Year for 2007. Justin North has been mentioned as a ‘chef to watch’ by Food & Wine magazine, published in New York. His wife Georgia, the restaurant’s manager, has won awards as a sommelier and the quality of the service at Becasse has been praised. The entire enterprise sits at the pinnacle of a rarefied European artform.

So what does it mean when he says “it’s all about the produce”? The book Becasse: Inspirations and Flavours opens with a question: “Where are the traditional craftsmen, the skilled and passionate individuals? They are vanishing in a world of vast, overly simplified foods.” This isn’t a sentimental conceit, a classical artist revering an ancient instrument freakishly preserved beyond its own time. Or the way that the couture branch of fashion makes theatre of painstaking old-fashioned handcrafts applied to clothing made for an individual customer in an industry whose manufacturing process is otherwise completely automated to produce goods for an anonymous everycustomer. What Justin North does is align farming and food production with the precision and refinement of his own skills as a chef. He’s brought a contemporary, complex sophistication that’s generally thought of as something urban to the consideration of the practices of farming and food production. He introduces us to people who are at the pinnacle of their own branches of food production: many of them have large-scale businesses that are successful in export as well as local markets. He shows that that technology, through the development of new tools is no enemy to craftsmanship and tradition. For instance, Tim Terry trains dogs to search for truffles on his farm in Tasmania, but he’s working with a researcher in chemosensory science, Professor Bryn Hibbert, at the University of New South Wales, to develop mechanised detection systems, an “electronic nose.”

When Justin North opened Becasse in 2001 (in its original location in Surry Hills, it moved to Sydney’s CBD in 2005) he deepened his knowledge of the produce he was purchasing by visiting the farmers and producers. Becasse: Inspirations and Flavours is organised around the building blocks of his cuisine: lamb, beef, game birds, pork, seafood, and European delicacies: truffles, cheeses. He’s chosen a farmer or producer to embody each of these categories, and each section leads in with a description of their methods. He also sketches how these foods have become culturally important to us through history. He has a poet’s sharp eye for selecting a symbol that unlocks a whole world. These introductory texts could be excerpted as a book that stands on its own as an overview of food production in Australia as well as primer on the research and inventions that are maintaining the quality of fine foods, in challenging environmental conditions, as thriving businesses, in the twenty first century.

A Day With Wilbur Robinson

A Day With Wilbur Robinson is sort of The Day The Earth Stood Still meets Leave it to Beaver, together with the book The Great Gatsby and things that happened to me when I was a kid. …

I wrote and illustrated the book “A DAY WITH WILBUR ROBINSON” in 1990. In many ways “Robinsons” is my most personal and favorite book. It combines elements of my own childhood in Shreveport, the Science Fiction movies and cartoons I loved and T.V. shows like “Leave it to Beaver”, “Lost in Space” and the matter of fact absurdity of “Green Acres”.

Disney Live Action optioned it several months before its publication and so the wild ride began. 

William Joyce

When I read William Joyce’s A Day With Wilbur Robinson when it was released in 1990 I had no idea it would eventually become a movie, but it suggested something cinematic to me, something alive in time. It was what I’d imagined as a child, my life would be like in New York. Everything came together, the screwball comedy sensibility, the fox terrier, the sweetly domestic experiments with science in the form of curiously sensible philosophical inventions. But mostly there was the music I’d heard from five or six years old and grew to love: Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, particularly.

In a children’s book William Joyce had written:

Suddenly the faint familiar strains of “Potato Head Blues” came wafting from the house.

“That’s it!” yelled Wilbur. “It’s Friday — Grandfather’s in his lab working with his dancing frog band!”

We rushed to the lab. Sure enough, there was Grandfather with his friends Mr. Ellington and Mr. Armstrong….

The next morning the whole family was out front waving good-bye and singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” just like they always do.

The music was just there in the book: not introduced opportunistically, as it would be on the soundtrack of a movie, underlining (or creating) a mood. The music was a part of the story, as if it were on the page.

I read an interview with William Joyce that said that his book was optioned by Disney BEFORE A Day With Wilbur Robinson was released, and the first director attached to and then removed from the project, well before he directed the Lord of the Rings trilogy, was Peter Jackson. The movie is a Disney animation, pitched towards the future, a Jetson’s like treatment that doesn’t grab me, even in the interests of curiosity, to see how the fox terrier character is developed. I had something darker and more retro in mind, something from the dawn of talking pictures, the sophisticated strangeness of a Preston Sturges movie. And in this movie Mrs. Robinson would be reading books that are partly electronic / partly organic with the music and the words just there, together, the electronic components introduced as unselfconsicously as a bibliography or a page marker.

My version of the “futuristic” A Day With Wilbur Robinson would substitute the sister  Blanche, who seems like she might have been a dancer with a Duke Ellington style orchestra, with an intelligently absurd and charming older brother who is a wild rock musician, and be played, in a cameo-as-himself by Benny Hotel, who inhabits and whose music describes, a world equally as inventive and compelling as Wilbur Robinson’s, and who has a family equally as vast and dear and smart and engaging.

The soundtrack for A Day With Wilbur Robinson has no jazz on it. There are a great many songs by Rufus Wainright.