Videos for the weekend

16th February 2013

I know I’m coming late to this, but Girl Walk // All Day (above) is a feature-length dance film that since late 2011 has been freely available to view online in twelve chapters. And its tale of a girl, played by Anne Marsen, dancing her day through New York City is a really great watch. The director is Jacob Krupnick (there is a New York Times Q&A here) and the crowd-funded finance came from Kickstarter. There are occasional one-off showings in the real world too, such as one this past week in Glasgow. Chapter 1 is embedded here, and see also articles about the project from The Hollywood Reporter, Wired and recently by David Jenkins on the BFI blog. Across the jump, as usual on a Saturday, are nine further recommendations for online viewing.

2. Naran Ja (One Act Orange Dance)

Another remarkable dance piece, just twelve minutes long this time, that has premiered online. Produced with a low-fi VHS-type aesthetic, it was created by choreographer Benjamin Millepied (soon to be Paris Opera Dance Director), the LA Dance Project and Oscar-nominated director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who made Babel (2006) and Biutiful (2010)

3. Video essays about the work of Koreeda Hirokazu

Sight & Sound recently premiered a video essay by the filmmaker :: kogonada about the everyday epiphanies in the cinema of Japanese director Koreeda Hirokazu. It’s a very nice piece, but frustratingly Sight & Sound do not permit embeds of their commissions (or at least I can’t work out the mechanism for this). So I thought I would include here another video essay on the same topic, by the videographer Kornspel, and in this case freely available on and embeddable from YouTube.

4. Intimate Catastrophes

Another recent video essay, albeit a more oblique and conceptual one, but also rather beautiful and authored by Adrian Martin & Cristina Álvarez López. Make sure you read their accompanying notes here (which are also available in Spanish), either before or – perhaps better – after your first viewing.

5. Silver Linings Playbook featurette

As part of their Oscar campaign for Robert De Niro the Weinstein Co has released this half-hour ‘making of…’ doc, parts of which are genuinely interesting.

6. Juilliard master class with Joyce DiDonato

The audio isn’t immaculate (it’s great to have a radio mic on the star, but what about the piano?) but this is still a hugely enjoyable encounter between the magnificent mezzo-soprano and a group of young singers; embedded here is just the first part.

7. The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Scene 2

A nice offering from the Royal Shakespeare Company, even if it is all-too-brief; this is a fragment of Lucy Bailey’s current, very strong production in Stratford, with Jo Stone-Fewings and Tara Fitzgerald.

8. Alex Ross interviewed by Alan Rusbridger

The author of that essential history of twentieth-century music, The Rest is Noise, talks with the Guardian’s resident pianist (and sometime editor) Alan Rusbridger)

9. Feb 7, 2013

After the Russian meteor made so much news this week, it is worth taking a look at these other astounding images of the natural world at work – this really is pretty incredible; there is more at the associated Facebook page.

10. The Centrifuge Brain Project

‘If anything, the mistake is in nature. Gravity is a mistake.’ Genius.