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:
Prior to its destruction in June 2011, the Phillis Wheatley Elementary School served the historic New Orleans African-American neighborhood of Tremé since it opened in 1955. Celebrated worldwide for its innovative, regionally-expressive modern design – the structure had sustained moderate damage during the storms and levee breach of 2005. DOCOMOMO Louisiana advocated for its restoration via adaptive reuse. A Plea For Modernism is narrated by actor Wendell Pierce (“The Wire”, “Treme”). (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2011, 11:59)
DIR Evan Mather NARRATOR Wendell Pierce TEXT Francine Stock, Evan Mather VOICES John Klingman, Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc, John Stubbs, Wayne Troyer PROD Hand Crafted Films in collaboration with DOCOMOMO Louisiana and the School of Architecture, Tulane University ANIMATION Evan Mather MUSIC Juuso Auvinen IMAGE Frank Lotz Miller, Emily Ardoin, Meg Holford, John DeFraites, Karen Gadbois, Karran Harper Royal, John Stubbs, Anthony DelRosario, Sergio Padilla, Francine Stock GRAPHICS John DeFraites, Evan Mather
SCREENINGS Modesto International Architecture Festival ’11, 2011 AFFR (Architectuur Film Festival Rotterdam), 4th Budapest Architecture Film Days, onSCREEN (Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles).
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39-A: Een Reisverhaal Van Eindeloos (A Travel Tale Of Interminable) is an experimental film that challenges and subverts the typical elements of documentaries, thus making us all reflect upon important questions in documentary filmmaking such as What material can be trusted, can the voice-over narrator be trusted, where does documentary end and fiction start? Besides these questions, that the film raises, it has managed to convince the jury by it’s unusual and alienating collage of super 8 footage, by its investigative style and suspense. The film is putting audiences continuously on the wrong track yet consistently intriguing, leaving the viewer bewildred and pensive. Through its hybrid form, 39-A: A Travel Tale Of Interminable is showing inventive ways of dealing with documentary footage and transforming reality into film. – Webcuts.11
Weirdest of all is 39-A: Een Reisverhaal Van Eindeloos (A Travel Tale Of Interminable), which seems specifically designed to make the viewer feel as if he or she is experiencing some abnormal brain activity. In the short, Old Super 8 footage of a trip to the Kennedy Space Center is overlaid with an animated roadmap and a narration track that sounds as if it’s been run through Babel Fish half a dozen times. It’s proof—if more were needed—that finding the festival’s hidden treasures sometimes requires a little digging. – The Onion A.V. Club
… a high brow spoof on art theory, deconstruction, documentaries, and reality itself. – D Magazine
Evan Mather’s short film is one mindfuck of a travelogue. – Film Threat
In this insightful autobiographical mashup of Super-8 home movies, vibrant animated cartography, and Dutch pidgin-speak, a family’s 1981 vacation to the Kennedy Space Center is chronicled in exquisite detail. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2010, 7:24)
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
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