Hasta La Motion!

Join us on a transformative journey as we follow a single piece of fleece in pursuit of its family. From the shearing sheds of the Australian outback, to the ancient weaving mills of Yorkshire, discover how modern technologies and age-old techniques combine to transform fleece into fashion. Read more at http://www.merino.com/wool/lost-and-found/

Red Giant Offload is a simple, stand-alone application for safely offloading and backing up your footage from your camera’s media card to your computer and/or external drives. Offload runs on both windows and Mac and works with virtually all cameras, cards and media formats. No special hardware is needed, so Offload is ideal for use on set, in the field, or for when you return home. Offload is available now for just $49. Download a free trial at: http://redgiant.com/products/all/offload/

Produced with a graphic flare and text, this piece is the classic tale of the tortoise and the Hare with a key difference; the Hare has four legs while the tortoise has none. jackkhouri.com

Peter Labuza says film noir is best described as a “mode,” and in this video essay describes how this mode responds to classical Hollywood melodrama and continues to pervade today’s movies. Order Peter’s book, APPROACHING THE END: IMAGINING APOCALYPSE IN AMERICAN FILM, now from The Critical Press: http://www.thecriticalpress.com/product/approaching-the-end-imagining-apocalypse-in-american-film/ NARRATION What is film noir? The term “film noir” conjures specific images: of dangerous men and femme fatales, of lost souls in darkened streets, or violence in its most gruesome moments. We might think of it as a genre cemented in Hollywood’s past, or as something visual that seeps into all modern day movies. But there’s more to noir than simply a style. Some of our favorite films don’t even resemble film noir. And it’s more than a genre as well. In the canonical text, THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA, Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger consider film noir a “challenge to dominant values. It simply indicates particular patterns of non-conformity within Hollywood.” But how can we locate these dominant values? Where do we see the dominant mode of Hollywood, and what is its inherent structure? Why, it’s the melodrama. Not just *those* movies. Linda Williams writes about how all Hollywood films resemble melodrama, whether it’s a western or a sci-fi epic. These films all begin with innocence and must return to it by the end. But this is not the case in film noir. Williams calls melodrama a “mode.” Perhaps noir is one as well, one meant to challenge all that Hollywood – and largely America – came to represent. Think of your favorite film noirs. They don’t begin with an innocent family home. They begin in bars, in dingy motels, on lonely streets, or simply murder. In melodrama its about the virtues: we know the characters and their moralities, and we can assign them easy significance. In noir, this is not so easy. The hero may have to risk it all, even if it would cost him his life. And the innocent woman may not be as innocent after all. More than anything, there’s never satisfaction. Even if the killers are brought to justice, and morality restored, we still feel a tinge of twisted darkness. Because of this noir may not look like noir. It could be set in the west or the distant future. It may never feature a shot of shadows, but we can feel it in the air. We can feel it because it displaces us. We feel temporally uncertain. If there has been an innocent past, it has been long forgotten, and there’s rarely hope for a good future. We live and sit in “lounge time,” as Vivian Sobchack has called it: the places away from home and away from the center of innocence. And if we *do* have the home, it has become morally corrupt. And without time, morality disappears as well. The protagonist cannot exist without choice, without action, and in a world without morality the protagonist must often make a choice against their own values. *Any* choice is better than nothing, even if it’s defiant. This choice could be a crime or falling into lust, taking a life or taking one’s own life. Noir is not just a genre. It’s a response to narrative style in Hollywood, that which we see in the melodrama. It thus pervades into today. Whether we’re watching crime films, or perhaps period pieces, and even contemporary television, noir pervades because it is a necessary response. It counterbalances Hollywood, even if it resembles Hollywood itself.

The year 1914 saw the birth of 35 mm Leica photography as we know it today. Oskar Barnack made the Leitz Camera, the very first Leica, 100 years ago. And now, in 2014, Leica Camera AG is celebrating the centenary year of this occasion with numerous events, exhibitions and exciting new products. The slogan for this centennial celebration is ‘100 years of Leica photography’. Leica has celebrated the centenary of the 35 mm camera and the opening of the Leica Gallery in Sao Paulo with “100”, a television commercial recreating 35 historical Leica photographs.

Oskar Barnack, an employee of the Leitz Werke Wetzlar and a pioneer of photography, invented and constructed the first still picture camera for the 35 mm film format (24 × 36 mm) in 1914. The construction of this so-called Ur-Leica according to Barnack’s philosophy of ‘small negative – big picture’ revolutionised the world of photography with vastly increased creative scope for photographers who, up until then, had had to rely primarily on cumbersome plate cameras for their work. Barnack therefore originally gave his compact and highly portable prototype camera the name ‘Liliput’, as is noted in the company archives in a document dated March 1914: ‘Liliput camera completed’. The original is still in the possession of Leica Camera AG, together with the negatives and prints of the first exposures captured with the Ur-Leica – including pictures from a trip Ernst Leitz II took to the United States in the summer of 1914.

In 1925, following inevitable delays as a consequence of the First World War, the Leica finally set out to conquer the world of photography and founded the legend of the brand with a multitude of iconic pictures that have profoundly influenced our understanding of the world. Examples of these include Robert Capa’s ‘Falling Soldier’ from the Spanish Civil War, the famous portrait of Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara by Alberto Korda, the naked and burning young girl Kim Phúc, photographed by Pulitzer Prize winner Nick Út during the Vietnam War, and the photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt which captured the celebrations on VJ day in New York’s Times Square in 1945.

Recreated Photos

“Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” by Joe Rosenthal
Buzz Aldrin on the Moon (of the Apollo 11 mission) by Neil Armstrong/NASA
“Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange
“Le Baiser de l’hôtel de ville” by Robert Doisneau
“Rue Mouffetard, Paris (1954)” by Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Behind the Gare St. Lazare” by Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Muslim women on the slopes of Hari Parbal Hill” by Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Phan Thi Kim Phúc” by Nick Ut
“Sanaa, Yemen,” by Samuel Aranda
“General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon” by Eddie Adams
“Flower Power” by Bernie Boston
“Quang Duc self-immolation” by Malcolm Browne
‘Unknown Rebel of Tiananmen Square” by Jeff Widener
“Portrait of Che Guevara” by Alberto Korda
“Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey (1967)” by Diane Arbus
“Segregated Water Fountains” by Elliot Erwitt
“John Lennon and Yoko Ono” by Annie Leibovitz
“Girl With Leica” by Alexander Rodchenko
“Self Portrait with Wife & Models, Paris (1980)” by Helmut Newton
“Seine-Maritime, Dieppe” by Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Falling Soldier” by Robert Capa
“The Photojournalist” by Andreas Feininger
“Weeping for FDR” by Ed Clark
“Rodeo – NYC” (1955/56) by Robert Frank
“Man with Book in Mouth” by Jeff Memelstein
“The Troubles” by Hanns-Jörg Anders
“V-J Day in Times Square, New York (1945)” by Alfred Eisenstaedt
“La Piete Araba” by Samuel Aranda
“Gun 1 (1955)” by William Klein
“Flower Child” by Marc Riboud
“Self-immolation of Thích Guảng Dức” by Malcolm Browne
“El Morroco, New York (1955)” by Garry Winogrand
“Wenceslas Square, Prague (1968)” by Josef Koudelka
“California (1955)” by Elliot Erwitt
“India, Kashmir, Srinagar (1948)” by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Credits

The Leica 100 campaign was developed at F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi, Sao Paulo, by executive creative directors Fábio Fernandes and Eduardo Lima, creatives Bruno Oppido, Romero Cavalcanti, Thiago Carvalho, head of art João Linneu, planners Guilherme Pasculli and José Porto, agency producer Victor Alloza, account team Marcello Penna and Melanie Zmetek, media planners Fábio Freitas and Gabriela Guedes, working with Leica marketing team Luiz Marinho and Anna Silveira.

Filming was shot by directors and editors Jones+Tino via Stink with director of photography Bjorn Charpentier, editor Danilo Abraham, production designer Daniela Calcagno, executive producers Cecília Salguero and Maria Zanocchi, line producer Victoria Martinez, 1st AD Santiago Turell, location manager Lucia Sánchez, stylist Alejandra Rosasco.

Post Production was done at Casablanca.

Sound was designed at Satelite Audio. Voiceover is by Nick Brimble.