I recently came to the painful realization that Criterion would not be calling me up any time soon to inquire about my top 10 films in their collection. Coupled with a recent challenge from The Criterion Cast podcast for listeners to create their own Three Reasons videos, I took it upon myself to create a series of ten short videos highlighting those films in the collection that have influenced me. Here they are in alphabetical order:
Sprawling over hundreds of square miles, Los Angeles is not organized around a central downtown core. It is a city of individual neighborhoods, each with its own distinctive character. This can best be experienced by a visit to Eagle Rock – small town Americana in the midst of a megalopolis. (Evan Mather/AHBE, U.S.A., 2010, 3:00) Read More
Due to the recent unpleasantness, Baton Rouge has eclipsed New Orleans as the largest city in Louisiana. Is the city destined for greatness? Scenic Highway is the name of US Highway 61 as it passes through northern Baton Rouge. It is also this trip to the city – and such landmarks as Huey Long’s art deco State Capitol building and Buckminster Fuller’s hidden geodesic dome. This darkly affectionate memoir is also an exposé of the city’s colorful history – told through the use of animated motion graphics, archival Super 8 footage, and re-created & faux-created elements. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2006, 18:15) Read More
This short film is an adaptation of the classic urban design tome – The Image of the City – by Associate Professor Kevin Lynch (1918-1984) of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2006, 6:23) Read More
VIDEO: Olympic & Western: A Primer on the Typographic Order and an Argument for its Proper Usage in the Built Environment
“Olympic & Western” is a manifesto on the proper usage of type in the built environment – and the first video to be narrated by Siri. Tightly adapted from a mysterious analog audio tape found on the side of the road, it was shot with an iPhone 4S and edited with Final Cut Pro X. This video mash-up meshes infrastructural convergences and reveals intuitive paradigms by using the city of Los Angeles as a testbed for seizing urbanistic ecologies, curating front-end ecosystems, cultivating emergent methodologies, and revealing the link between street signage graphic design and the JFK assassination. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2012, 7:30)
DIR Evan Mather NARRATOR Siri MUSIC Protman