Sierra Zulu‘s director Johannes Grenzfurthner will give a talk at HOPE Conference in NYC in July 2012: How To Create A Feature Film About The Digital Age — And Why That’s Pretty Hard
Movies are exciting. Things crash and burn. Bolts and fists fly. There are bangs and kabooms. People go to the cinemas in order to experience new worlds. But cinema is about to lose its prime source of narrative, having so far tethered to physical action that can be filmed. Cinema needs tempo, needs speed. The “movement-image” (Gilles Deleuze) depends on physical action onto which the cameras can point. Yet in contrast, the real world of non-cinema is losing physical action day by day. It is a time of abstract, optically unpresentable processes in networks and data systems. This regress of visual displayability is rather daft. Cinema has lived well on it for more than a hundred years. It’s easy to create a feature film about a bank robbery, but that’s anachronistic. Some of the most important crimes exist as electronic money movements between international stock exchanges. Hollywood cinema on the other hand still hasn’t evolved beyond anything better than banal sequences straight out of an Errol Flynn movie. How can we accurately portray the stories of our (new) world? All those dramas and comedies? All those crimes and stories?
That’s why we at monochom are working on a feature film called SIERRA ZULU. Let me tell you about our challenges and hopes – and why we think you might be able to help us.
July 13, 2012; 9 PM (Room: Dennis, 18th floor of Hotel Pennsylvania, NYC).
Link / HOPE