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The "found footage" genre has been around for some time, in both fictional form (1999's  The Blair Witch Project ) and nonfiction form (1927's  The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty ). If one considers the overwhelming amount of available found footage content online, namely through social media videos that people Snap or Tweet or Facebook Live every few seconds, it becomes clear that we need to gauge this appropriated art catalog through a new cultural viewfinder. It also prompts us to ask this important question: What public imagery is worthy of being curated for studied viewing? Russian filmmaker  Dmitrii Kalashnikov 's The Road Movie  (distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories ) is a good example of social videos being culled together to give us a surprising and thoughtful insight into how we behave and feel -- today. The Road Movie is a moving image montage that is comprised of dashboard camera footage from dozens of Russian drivers, from all walks of life. As ...

"A visual essay on culture, history and the act of physical filmmaking used to recreate memories, myths and images." A Myth In Movements is a deeply personal film for me. It's about a lot of things. It's about riding the train in Chicago, which is how I get around. It's about the stasis of celluloid film. It's about the endurance of day-to-day life. It's about the horror of war. It's about dealing with a lost love. It's about the power of the image, when coupled with memories, ideas or thoughts. We create our own myths in this life. Here's a window into some of mine.

Steven Soderbergh , the Oscar-winning Director ( Traffic ) and recently-retired-from-theatrically-released-studio-films visual artist, has just released his Psychos , a mashup and appropriated retelling of Alfred Hitchcock 's Psycho (1960) which uses a desaturated version of Gus Van Sant 's Psycho from 1998 and intercuts between the two films. Currently streaming on his Extension 765 website, Soderbergh claims to have created Psychos with "total affection, openness, and honey bought directly from a beekeeper.” Psychos runs at a feature length time and cleverly jumps from the modern version clips to the older version clips, in chronological narrative order. The best aspect of Psychos is how Soderbergh handles the climatic moments: He superimposes both the black & white Hitchcock images over the colorized Van Sant images. The effect is hypnotic. And its power comes in our built-in knowledge that Van Sant's version is a supposed "shot for shot" ...

"Piracy is great." - Harmony Korine Last week Facebook pissed off a lot of its users, detractors and indifferent site visitors when it introduced its new feature : the "Timeline." As if privacy was erased yesterday, a good chunk of Internet bloggers questioned the ethos behind having one's entire life available in a social media platform. But am I missing something? Aren't we over the whole privacy hump already? Are people still under the spell of attaining some romantic mystery? These people need to get with it. This is OUR era: An open, free network of information, ideas and innovation. Non-transparent walls are not welcomed.   Facebook isn't doing anything it wasn't bound to do anyway. A massive social network that spent years building a base of active users HAS to raise the level of access and interactivity at some point. The only logical way of doing this is by highlighting and exercising the key trait of every user (and of every...