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Paul Harnden

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  • Acéphale
    Senior Member
    • Apr 2010
    • 444

    May Tomorrow Shine The Brightest Of
    All Your Many Days As It Will Be Your Last
    (UK, 13 min, 16mm, b/w)


    by
    Ben Rivers and Paul Harnden
    Somewhere in the backwoods at the turn of i'm not sure which century, a crack unit of female Japanese soldiers track a group of lost, ancient desperadoes. They dig holes, they read, their leader channels the ghost of Italian sound poets (as yet unborn..?), all the while moving onward...but who is searching for who and why? Hand-processed with a soundtrack cobbled together from dictaphone recordings, old 78s, hiss and scratches and whines.



    « Rivers, a British filmmaker who films frontiersman in ramshackle houses, their few homemade utensils, their voices that sound like decades-old radio broadcasts that have played on repeat ever since, and the frontier itself—clouds, grass, animals—is something like the Terrence Malick of the avant-garde: it's never clear in these scrapbook documentaries whether civilization is just starting or ending against an indifferent, pretty nature, and Rivers, like Malick, willfully dissolves civilization's structured sense of space by a lot of ambient cutting between pretty shots that may not have any spatial relationship to each other and that seem to stand outside of time altogether. For a while, for both Rivers and Malick, it's been a formless form as fascinating as it frustrating. A string of shadowy shots with, quite deliberately, no place, function, or necessity is not necessarily an accurate representation of undifferentiated nature before or after God, but ornamentation without an architecture to ornament. Any shot could be removed with little impact.

    But Rivers has started laying the barest traces of scaffolding, and made what's probably his best work. I Know Where I'm Going, another survey of edge of the world Britain, made under a Vauxhall Commission as a road trip from one nowhere place to another, makes use of 16mm cinemascope to set up a firm x-axis from objects (railings, etc.) bridging one side of the screen to the other (he's as much a master of 'scope as Anthony Mann) that he keeps cycling back to in new situations, as if to ensure this firm graphic design of a line going somewhere; then breaks through it into the z-axis with interludes from the car onto the passing road that give the misleadingly forward sense that the film also is going somewhere, when of course it's progressing from one lost outdoorsman to another and seems as lost as they are. Just the vague hint of architecture at the edge of madness, of a few objects set firmly in place across the screen against which the characters move, is enough: the film, matching characters' voice-over to images of them at work on their own, becomes a means of connecting disparate lives into some sort of nomadic collective voice of people still learning how to live their daily lives.

    Rivers' Weekend-like May Tomorrow Shine the Brightest of All Your Man Days As It Will Be Your Last, in high-contrast black-and-white, and without the stern frame of cinemascope, plays from the opposite perspective, nature's facetious perspective on humanity, as a portrait again of grass and clouds and, here, a band of revolutionaries studying theory in the meadows and then roaming the hills looking for war. Its last few minutes, as awesome as any segment from the entire festival, find these self-proclaimed missionaries of civilization lost in the woods as humans with books and scythes and swords while the clouds roll on, humans and clouds each ignorant of the other, and the humans having no idea how beautiful and dumb they look as elements of outdoors wildlife. »

    -- Johnny Lavant
    ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα

    Comment

    • Ilie
      Junior Member
      • May 2008
      • 19


      Comment

      • michael_kard
        Senior Member
        • Oct 2010
        • 2152

        Wow, that's the first PH piece I really like. Love the back pocket, sort of reminds me of Rick.
        ENDYMA / Archival fashion & Consignment
        Helmut Lang 1986-2005 | Ann Demeulemeester | Raf Simons | Burberry Prorsum | and more...

        Comment

        • Faust
          kitsch killer
          • Sep 2006
          • 37852

          Saw some new stuff at IF yesterday. Nice, but the color palette not for my taste.
          Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

          StyleZeitgeist Magazine

          Comment

          • eton97
            Senior Member
            • Dec 2008
            • 922

            Originally posted by Faust View Post
            Saw some new stuff at IF yesterday. Nice, but the color palette not for my taste.
            ummm....curious to know which bits you are referring to - from what i saw this season it was his standard variations on black plus 'cement' which seemd to be greyish/brown.....saw little else...
            you can't polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter...

            Comment

            • philip nod
              Senior Member
              • Aug 2007
              • 5903

              the little waxed cotton olive number with civil war blue grey lining is fucking amazing
              One wonders where it will end, when everything has become gay.

              Comment

              • Faust
                kitsch killer
                • Sep 2006
                • 37852

                well, there was white, bright red, olive with prince of wales check.
                Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                Comment

                • AKA*NYC
                  Senior Member
                  • Nov 2007
                  • 3007

                  i think most of those are old styles that they brought out of the basement to replace the new stuff that's primarily sold out. the predominant colors of this season were "black 1" and "black 2."
                  LOVE THE SHIRST... HOW much?

                  Comment

                  • TheNotoriousT
                    Senior Member
                    • Oct 2009
                    • 754

                    Originally posted by philip nod View Post
                    the little waxed cotton olive number with civil war blue grey lining is fucking amazing
                    I second that. Best PH piece IF has on the shelves!
                    "Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that"

                    Comment

                    • Faust
                      kitsch killer
                      • Sep 2006
                      • 37852

                      Originally posted by AKA*NYC View Post
                      i think most of those are old styles that they brought out of the basement to replace the new stuff that's primarily sold out. the predominant colors of this season were "black 1" and "black 2."
                      Oh, really? I must have missed the boat. Let's see some pix then!
                      Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                      StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                      Comment

                      • Chinorlz
                        Senior Member
                        • Sep 2006
                        • 6422

                        Aw man... they were supposed to call me when the new stuff arrived :( Would have loved a black POW check lighter peaked lapel jacket
                        www.AlbertHuangMD.com - Digital Portfolio Of Projects & Designs

                        Merz (5/22/09):"i'm a firm believer that the ultimate prevailing logic in design is 'does shit look sick as fuck' "

                        Comment

                        • AKA*NYC
                          Senior Member
                          • Nov 2007
                          • 3007

                          Originally posted by Faust View Post
                          Oh, really? I must have missed the boat. Let's see some pix then!
                          mike nouveau already put em up
                          LOVE THE SHIRST... HOW much?

                          Comment

                          • Faust
                            kitsch killer
                            • Sep 2006
                            • 37852

                            oh, that, right. yeah, they still have the unlined blazer. the fabric is nice and summery.
                            Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                            StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                            Comment

                            • Silver
                              Member
                              • Sep 2008
                              • 86

                              Thanks for putting that Vid up... hadn't seen that one.... definitely the best ive seen from Ph and Ben Rivers... beautifully shot i thought.
                              http://research-development.tumblr.com/

                              Comment

                              • endersgame
                                Senior Member
                                • Aug 2009
                                • 1623

                                they brought up the olive anorak again. that thing must be from 3 years ago..

                                tried the long coats for the first time and at first i thought these actually fit well but from the side view, the blooming bottom and a-frame like silhouette makes them feel like women's coats..

                                Comment

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