"Everything about David Secter's wondrous debut feature film, Winter Kept Us Warm, feels like a time warp," writes Matthew Hays. This relationship is anticipated by one of the earliest still lifes, in which a mountain of food leads the eye to a stolen embrace in the background desire + consumption = sexual satiation." After touching on films by Godard and Straub- Huillet, O'Donoghue spells out his problems with this Facets Video release. If the nude model in An Image was manipulated as a piece of fruit to be arranged, lit, and presented to the viewer as desirably as possible, so the continued focus in Still Life on cheese, beer, and wristwatches, placed on pedestals, endlessly discussed by shadowy craftsmen, embraced by repetitive, slow, semicircular tracking shots, and brightly lit as if illuminated from within, contrive to give the objects a real spiritual presence, that of the (commodity) fetish, removed from their mode of production or original use value. In that short, he recorded the shooting of a German Playboy centerfold spread, from the building of sets and the arrangement of props (including the model herself), to the taking, analysis, and retaking of photographs, and the staff finally leaving the studio. The documentary sequences have no commentary, mostly last ten to fifteen minutes, and take their cue from Farocki's earlier An Image ( Ein bild, 1983). These two levels, though defined by opposites - stasis/motion, tell/show - are linked by visual motifs and rhymes, just as the modern products echo the subjects of the paintings. To begin, Darragh O'Donoghue on Harun Farocki's Still Life (1997): "Five aphoristic essays on 17th-century Dutch still-life painting, of about three minutes each, bracket four documentary sequences of photographers creating modern still lifes for magazine advertisements.
Tuesday, DVD roundup day, is a fine day for taking a look at the new Summer 2011 issue of Cineaste, particularly since, among the online samplings this time around, DVD reviews outnumber all other types of articles combined.