[Should Minority Filmmakers and Actors be much exited about the Oscars?]

Scheduled to premiere on tomorrow, Sunday February 22nd, the 87th annual Oscars Awards are the most anticipated of all filmmakers, actors and film consumers as it has ever been in years. But the question rings, should minority filmmakers and actors be as excited for them?

Let's look at the facts:

1) The Oscars are composed of 5,783 judges, most of whom are older, Caucasian men, namely some conservative and few liberal. According to a UCLA study, the Elite Oscar Committee prefers to see films about activists overcoming oppression as opposed to "Iron Man smashing a tank." If that is indeed the case concluded in the authoritative American Sociological Review, then it is more important to see what has occurred in this human history as opposed to fictional, fantasy, childlike portrayals, action films that carry no significance other than suspense and for-the-moment thrills. But on the contrary, of the 86 years of the Oscars, only 16 African-American filmmakers/actors have been awarded an Oscar, all in roles that has more to do with human degridation as opposed to overcoming civil oppression. 

2) In the upcoming 2015 awards, not a single actor or filmmaker of color or female filmmaker is up for nominations. Not only are the Oscars the elite rank for film awards, it now resembles country clubs in the past that accepted no one but white men. After the biopic and powerful story of Martin Luther King Jr., by Ava Duverney [Selma], there was no doubt in anyone's mind that Duverney deserved at least the consideration for nomination, but that did not come. [The Theory of Everything] the story of Steven Hawkings, on the other hand, has received 10 nominations from the Oscars, a film that was ranked by highly acclaimed film critics Rotten Tomatoes at 79% and 85% audience approval as opposed to Selma's 98% by the critics and 87% audience approval. 

Is it fair to surmise that the story of Steven Hawkings of more pressing importance to the Caucasian "elite" of the Oscars as opposed to the story of the civil rights leader whose life was taken for promoting peace and unity throughout America?

[Etcetra] A Study on the Short Film II

We has been said has been said; now let's make the painful plight to say the truth.........



There purpose of life is that there is no definite purpose other than to be and become. The film, made in the image of man, is on that purpose of becoming, ever-becoming, yet it still stumbles and trips on the straights of its own creation. Being that film is made in the image of man, it too holds the imperfections of man, so beyond the interstitial, it is said that film was created to construct the future of humanity- upon its conclusion, the mind is set to wander, wonder and sequence what can become of the human race.

Actors are artist and as such able to grasp all cruelties that transpires and transfigure the mode of a film, whether consistent or shifting; it is with the compound that has become their life that details the rhythm of a film, moreover, a fiction so telling, so emphasizing, so captivating, that in a matter of moments, the moment teir physical language begins to speak, that fiction then becomes a reality corrosive to the life of audience, rekindles a flame that is reminiscent to pain perhaps most have felt. To be placed in the language, whether bliss, rather melancholy, rather terror or lustful desire, the momentous captivity that carries the eyes of viewers through the body of the film as blow flow through the arteries, cements a purpose, decimates the limitations of the filmmaker imposed by the filmmaker. In the short film left to its seemingly vague being, a conclusion is written in the hearts of the audience, and it is the heart that determines an "happily ever after" or a "tragic" ending, the filmmaker has no true control over this sequence. The actor is only the intermediary that drafts what cannot be forged by the novice mind, by the vacu
um void of any pride of its own tale of emptiness.

It must be said that film in itself is a viral manifestation upon the human condition, the sweetest and most detriment of vices that plagues. But as an image of man, the day film was created, the very next day, it was being perverse as man came about, the preceding day, he enslaved his fellow. If film has not sought freedom to live freely, it is because man has not, serves itself in a platter as an indigent example to ignite a subsidiary revolution, planted a kernal in an unsown soil that cannot take fruit, a wingless bird that dreams of the sky but cannot take flight.

The disharmonious endeavor is a definite symptom of decay, a malignancy along the vertebrae ignoring the anatomical structure of uprightness and refuses the plight of both feet upon the earth. Bygone filmmakers were aware of this malignancy, aware of the disarticulation that follows in a sole effort to save the body from the spread of infection. Major film is bleeding but it has not yet been bled dry of its metaphysical inaccuracies, its ignorance and ignoring of opportunity to introduce this world that those who know not of its splendor, its pains, its wanders, its mysteries. Furthermore to solve the intricate wound that art has been inflicted upon the artist, a greater understanding of the artist's desire, depravities, past and constructed worlds must be documented accurately, else it is left upon us as a confounded event.

[Juste Amis] A study on the Short Film

Too many films have adopted the notion of an illegitimate plot, a thing if distorted enough, the audience will not see, and if they do not see, they do not question, rather become obliged to follow, praise and dignify. Man, as a film, must first fall to know that it can stand upright; and this fall, cannot afford to come in the release of it to the public, the fall must come in the mind of the film
maker before they commit to a more drastic fault when their work meets cinema. These vital mistakes are committed and not only committed but committed to; If one is enable to escape the consequence of their crimes, then the criminal will then commit to more mayhem, he will feel God-like inasmuch he is the sole exception of all humanity that has no ill-relationship with punishment.

Despite how much planning goes into life, Murphy's Law pertains to every facade of this life. Whatever is made by man is made in the image of man and thus imperfect, flawed and contemptuous. Life is about perpetual movement, we all have to figure that out sometime, and it isn't always pleasant. But without movement, everything that is myopic is the only thing that will be found. Film, as humanity, must move forward to its destination; art has more than one fate inasmuch it lives on far past the point we all return to dust. But from plans, from all we try to gain in preparation, spontaneity can also provide a function in which to find success. The 2007 French short film "Juste Amis" (Just Friends) starring Armelle Lecoeur was shot in a matter of five hours. The director, his camera and a few actors, no script, no crew, all flutter of experimental. Lecoeur, portraying a Parisianne woman on her way home who encounters a man in the window of a nearby hotel. She is starstruck and amazed to see him, Bastien, a childhood romance that stained upon her memory and immediately caused the yearn of reconcilement. Invigorated and flustered, she hides in the doorway of a building, smokes a cigarette and calls her friend Elsa, who is in a cab headed for her location. Once Elsa arrives, she rants to her, attempting to convince Elsa to go to the hotel to find out if he's married, how many kids do he have, how long have he been staying at the hotel and if he has been thinking about her. Elsa, in a look of confusion, believes her friend has lost it but out of friendship, she goes to the hotel, checks and returns to tell Lecoeur that Bastien wasn't there, kisses her and leaves. During the duration of her frantic breakdown, her boyfriend has been calling looking for her and once she answered the phone, she finds out that her friend Elsa has called and told him about Bastien. She panics. She attempts to calm her boyfriend who has been trying to reach her for 2 hours that Bastien is just a childhood friend. He doesn't buy it, tells her to come home or he will kill her and hangs up. She calls Elsa, frantic once again in a terror disgusted of her betrayal, warning her that she will be thrown out on the streets or killed by her boyfriend. Elsa attempts to calm Lecoeur but to no avail; she is torn in between her childhood lover Bastien, her murderous boyfriend awaiting her at home and the betrayal at the hands of her friend. In under 12 minutes, there is an unfolding of dramatic fevor, destructive humor, frantic wit in a romantic language in a minute fraction of a romantic city. Spontaneity in this light has a corrosive intent; that 12 minutes can capture, captivate and hold captive an audience in a way that most major films cannot. There is only a splinter of time that a short film has to open, progress to the climax, recruit the audience to its cause, and take them down into a mad murder-suicidal plummet.

The short film must surpass the ordinary limits of this life, flagellate itself as a flagellate at the base of life for the fracture that has become the major motion film. Nothing can diminish the authenticity a poetic sense of a profound, original idea- originality declares itself as a glow amongst the inane. It is in the very unwritten, unscripted murmur of material as "Juste Amis" that we see the significance that unravels when timing and authenticity collides and becomes an immortal compound.

Geena Davis & the Female Film Revolution

Geena Davis, actress known for her roles in the films Thelma & Louise, A League of Their Own & The Long Kiss Goodnight, and the head of the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media, is making yet another great contribution to film by partnering with Wal-Mart, Kraft Foods and Coke to host the Bentonville Film Festival.

"According to a news release from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, the festival is designed to champion women and diversity in film and will take place from May 5 to 9 in Bentonville. It is also the first and only film competition in the world to offer guaranteed theatrical, television, digital and retail home entertainment distribution for its winners, the release states."

The film festival, which is in the position to become one of the most sought after and acclaimed by women filmmakers creating in male dominated culture, will be chaired by Davis and will board noteable actors and celebrities as Samuel L. Jackson, Randy Jackson, Eva Longoria, Julianne Moore, and Natalie Portman, according to the release.

With Davis's work to make women equals in media, it is nearly irrefutable to believe that Bentonville will be the greatest aim for neophyte and veteran female filmmakers who have met an inability to market their films on a merit as in comparison to men. This is not a race issue, it is a sexist one; male dominated markets have run the gauntlet to a point that female filmmakers, though believing they are equals to their counterparts, are started to hear the chants of inequality.

Women outnumber men 7 to 1 in the modern world but in film, it is men who have taken on the role of the dominant bellwether and the greatest award to the prestige of film, the Oscars, boards more older C
aucasian men than any other race. With Geena Davis now reemerging her altruism, it is possible that the shift in the power and awards may reach those who have the merit to earn them, those who have the power to move those with the film. If the film has lost anything, it has not only lost creativity or originality, it has lost its equality.

[The Exterminating Dream]

A man wakes in an empty room. He has no furniture, no family, only a dream. His dream is to interpret the dream of art, to capture what has been an undeciphered illusion since the day he was a fetus afloat in a placental sea.

He has no money, no connections; in fact, no one knows him. He is as transparent as the wind,  moving the ground he walks on in no visible motion to another, juxtaposed to no one. Genius isn't in his possession; nor is the influence of it; he interprets what he can, collects anything he can writer with and write on to record every fiber from this dream, tells no one because there is no one to tell. Living is not in his best interest, only to relinquish a dream into the world and move on our of it and the dream.

He is attracted to ruins photography inasmuch his life is all ruins but he's known nothing else, so he fancies not the complaint. Complacent, compliant to a subterranean existence, he takes the few hand-outs, hand-me-downs and charity that comes his way. Pride
is as paralyzing as hope; he knows if he does not eat, he cannot write, if he does not write, he cannot eat, he cannot live; the dream will allow him only an allotment of suffering until the woes must be submerged beneath his frenzy to recreate the reverie that has taken the formation of more fragments for everyday he fails to look within himself- chart the thick brush against the  thorns with his bare hands. To not light the darkness, but as an existentialist, allow the darkness to be, not to define the darkness as a philosopher, but to not defy it, as a Chameleon, as a transparent man, become apart of the darkness.

A most perilous voyage begins as all do when facing the doppelganger of themselves. Some have found him out, his dream and have taken into it, but he only takes into himself and as long as those who admire the becoming of his dream are at bay in their origins, he can remain true to his own. Coexistence is decimation, death.

He is on the verge of collapse, on the verge of madness, his shoes are are but tatters barely covering his feet, callous formed in thick layers from the stabbing of the concrete along the sidewalks. He is in full obedience living the life the dream has forced him to live, refusing to live no other way. He cannot be released from being a starving artist, cannot declare who he is because he truly doesn't know. In the realms of truth and knowledge, there are volumes to digest before one can begin to scratch the surface of truth and knowledge; the only volume that has become of interest to him, is the one he has written of the necessary torture in which the dream has expelled on him.

So he writes, but he does not write enough, he cannot write enough to satisfy the minimum of the dream's medium, the risk of everything for nothing that is the existential art he must create if he is to ever be free of the night terrors, of the hunger, of the desolate landscapes and abandoned cathedral of mind. The misunderstood hadn't even been given the opportunity to be applied to him; his drive was more important than the world's perception of his drive. As a poet turns the poem and words upon itself, his life is folded as time comes, goes without being known or noticed. It takes a character in full chaos, in crisis of its ultimate disintegration, to embark on the trail of a dream in the promises of nothing. He doesn't know that this road will take him from the nothingness that has become his very squalor, deep into the 21st century, where time forgets him, where no one knows him.

[Beauty No. 2] Andy Warhol & The Posthumous Acclaim to Fame

Warhol never penetrated Hollywood in the way that he would have preferred, instead, he was the dominate whale in the small pool of indie film. A dapper dandy, the "Good-Time Charlie" of his era, film invited invited him nor his art, despite its unorthodox stylism of pop art. Artistic expression came alive as never before under his experimentation with film. The pioneer of Interview Magazine and author of "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism; The Warhol Sixties," his openly gay lifestyle, bohemian trysts with intellectuals, the term "15 minutes of fame," was coined; in a Warhol film, that was all he needed to solidify his diversity.

Why in all of his charismatic artism did Andy Warhol fail to make it to mainstream prominence?

It is irrefutable that most of Warhol's collections are highly valuable. A 2009 article in the Economist described Warhol as "the bellweather of the art market;" his works are considered some of the most expensive paintings ever sold. Of his numerous works of art, his filmography details the visual scrapbook of genius, noteably the films "Beauty No. 2 and Poor Little Rich Girl, both of which starred the most popular underground film actress, the late Edie Sedgewick.

Both display an instrumental demise to Sedgewick, a siege of personal and derogatory questions whilst she is in bed with another man, then the subsequent crime of passion, the strangulation. In the admixture of both film, we see that Warhol was partial to not only Sedgewick but to female characters in general. The chauvinistic manner blanketed over the seemingly internal Sedgewick in unleashes in an unforgiving climax, a foreign object embedded into the skin of a sufferer imprinted with a slave's mentality. There is a seemingly hidden desire, an inalienable desire, to completely dispose of the fragilely intact character and scatter its remnants completely, severe it from its only source of metastazing confidence, dismember the source at almost an identical desire. There is no question nor debate as there is in Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," whether Warhol loves or hates his characters in these two films, his loathing spills over from film to reality as evident in his split from Sedgewick personally and professionally.

The pathology of the filmmaker is that the true desire itself cannot be contained; it shifts and varies itself through the dimension that separates film and life, fiction and non; the only pretension is that it allows them to breathe and bare the brunt of true life. A filmmaker discovers the world only because they must and for the reason that art depends on it.  But before there is anything at all, the desire must embed itself, the bliss of the desire when finally expelled and placed upon the reel. It is a mutual encounter, as the parasite and the host, the degradation of one and the life of another, portraiture of the artist at the limits of themselves.

Warhol's desire was of a deeper pathology than some pundits may believe; he revised and pioneered a world of his own in spite of one that would not accept him rightfully. One traces the movements of the desire a thousand times over but desire cannot live if it too has not the opportunity to breath. Warhol created that opportunity, created his world, now scattered and displayed on the walls of wealthy connoisseurs.

[In Utero]

An infant begins to first dream in utero, before it reaches the 38th week of full term, followed by the trauma of birth. It can be said that that initial dream remains embedded within the fetus, as it is born and becomes an infant, infant to toddler, toddler into the schematic age.

As they grow within the realm of victimhood, that jungle that surrounded childhood, this dream is nutured with creativity, with concrete ideas. It is in this childhood, that the dream splinters the artist, sets them apart from other children. They are then removed from themselves, observe the interpersonal behavior of adults, become precocious and the child is then inane in comparison.

The succession of images are finite in the dream, some clear, some distorted, lost in a deeper chasm than the soul can ever burrow. Few moments of a reoccurring, haunting dream can be melancholic, treacherous, where in the day one seems to be at peace with the world, an unsettling shift of axis. The dream, if anything, is the reminder to not become complacent but to always remain in motion, always live myopic, that the loiter is the deadliest form of night terror.

[The Starving Artist]

A pen, a pad and a dream; that's all the starving artist truly has, colossal hauntings, evaporation into reality. Malevolent lassitudes are frequent, sporadic bouts of nostalgia; they want to reconcile, they want reckonings, but art has become their predominant, has become predominant, superimposed itself as the vessel in which to channel their self-loathing, they, the vassal to shifting identity. Art is the thing of immortality, the road to immortality, time seems limited, because when one charts their inner darkness, they become not only aware of their impending demise, they can feel it.

They cannot create if they don't eat, or they don't eat if they don't create. Money is borrowed, then given away, always on the verge of utter collapse, their soul is a devouring force inasmuch it cannot devour itself- it burrows, deeper into the abyss of the body, refuses to resurfaces and enrages every sense without fail.

Their life has nothing to do with the scientific method; there is no controlled variables, more over, there is no control. Chaos is so frequent that in time, it becomes mastered, expected, commonplace, a tantamount, their equal. Lovers are transitory in their transitory homes. A few books, a desk, a pen, a pad and a dream- that is what makes it a home and if they fail to feel the comforts of homes, it is when the dream has called upon them to move, to another flat, into the arms of another lover, closer to an immuno-compromised fiction; there is not only a refusal to live anyway else, it is the incapability. Text is started, then abandoned, volumes of poetry are composed, then burned; the philosophical means to become a victim has thus far failed to rear its decapitated head; the void has become immense, vast, finite, a desert's sandstorm that continues its migration over the lush savannah. Everything alive becomes endangered, Autumn is the only season that becomes the death of things, of all, the earth will soon become a desolate world, a fiber, a fabric of evolution brought to a standstill.

The horizon never stops receding and pain is forever unravelling in the disposition, the inherent, as the dream they dream is the same as when they were fetuses in utero; the juxtaposition to nothing, to no other man, in the sense of a scattered intellect, asymetrically astute. The only genius is the possession of genius, an unmastered essential that drives man first to success, then infamy, then an indigent death.

There is a pen, a pad, a dream; religion is partially abandoned, if not, completely, family has fled and if they are still present, they are gone. Medicinal cures, psychiatric wards, sanotoriums have been built to house this askew visionary, yet chased to the ends of the earth, launching their words and art into the wind just before the plunge off the edges.

[Pornographic Necessity]

Pornography has been known to man as early as film; the day the reel rolled, couples begin to incorporate their sexual acts and depravity onto footage. Two of the earliest pioneers were Eugène Pirou and Albert Kirchner. Kirchner directed the earliest surviving pornographic film for Pirou under the trade name "Léar". The 1896 film, Le Coucher de la Mariée showed Louise Willy performing a striptease. Pirou's film inspired a genre of risqué French films showing women disrobing and other filmmakers realized profits could be made from such films. Films as such were embraced by the late infamous American Sexologist Alfred Kinsey, a man whom depravity was transcendence itself. Upon his death, he owned a collection of 5 million wasps and could insert a toothbrush bristle first into his urethra. Boundaries in sex were non-existence in pornography from its commencement and it is in this boundless art that man is attracted to.

The darkest fantasies in the realm of the human psyche are lived out in pornographic depiction; incest, sadomasochism, beastiality, frottage, swinging, cuckholding, transvestitism, urophilia, copraphilia, foot fetish, cross dressing, medical malfeasance, pedophilia, ephebophilia and rape fantasy. The pornographic film is the dream of man's yearn to live free, to pursue catharticism without fault, without guilt, without consequence. If man's devices to access his ultimate transcendence held no bounds, he'd sodomize civilization we know today, make of mother nature the nymph MILF, leave scant on the ground he transgress and erase the sanctity of the mother and daughter and make of all woman whores, whores whose existence are solely to please.

Hugh Hefner may have depicted bare-breasted nymphs for art but his art in turn created a straight for cathaticism. With the exception of children, pornography is a victimless expenditure, the bastard child of film never to find its mother major motion. Its stars, Rachel Star, Bree Olson, Charity Banz; all daughters of this bastard child, now a patriarch and go to man for a time immemorial, inflation-proof syndicate.

In the fantasy of porn, no ills, no ails, no consequences exists, only the provided fantasy, labeled under genre for one's particular fancy. Where prostitution and pornography runs parallel is the resort to man and woman whose depravities have become too hideous as to live them out in private.  Also, pornography, as prostitution, has been crucified by politicians on one account and embraced in private on the next. This hypocritical indulgence, that differs from prostitution, doesn't imbue porn with life yet feed its already mult-billion dollar bustling empire.

If pornography has caused any discomfort in any society, namely the American one, it is be
cause it offers the mirror for humanity to see its own ugly reflection and does away with the denial of desire. This denial is an instrument of repression, of supression, of oppression, the very induction of physical demise.