Sometimes I want to scream and often times it isn’t appropriate. Especially when I’m in museums. (although I rarely want to scream in museums, just once in awhile @ MOMA when people are misbehaving during film screenings).

I find this video to be very cathartic:

Not only are they screaming, it sounds great AND they’re in a museum! Triple score

takepart to learn more about Screaming Men.

It’s an unconventional trailer for a film, but then again Alanis Obomsawin is not necessarily a conventional filmmaker.   The trailer below for her film entitled Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance is about the Mohawk protest against the expansion of a golf course into sacred burial lands and given that key piece of information I think the trailer is actually quite beautiful:

In case you aren’t familiar with Obomsawin check out her impressive bio after the jump.

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P.F. 1, or Public Farm 1, has brought an urban farm to MoMA’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens. The project by New York City based WORK Architecture Company is the winner of P.S. 1’s annual summer Young Architects Program, the purpose of which is “to provide emerging young talent in architecture with the chance to prepare and present architectural solutions for a specific site.” That “specific site” is the courtyard of P.S. 1, which during the summer plays host to the popular Warm Up Music Series, perhaps the largest urban “beach party” in the United States, giving thousands of museum going revelers the opportunity to see, experience, dance and party hard within the architectural installation.

Public Farm 1 is an experiment in sustainable urban farming composed of a groups of mounted cardboard tubes. The tubes are mounted throughout the courtyard with the more prominent part of the installation structured into a form similar to a flying carpet landing on the space. Swings, fans, mist, innovative seating areas are situated in nooks throughout the installation and a refreshing pool is located in its center. Within the tubes various plants and vegetables are grown. The entire installation is constructed with sustainable materials that will be recycled after the structure is taken down.

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Eat, for This Is My Body, Michelange Quay’s binary heavy film acts more like a poem than a movie. There is no plot to speak of and we instead follow images and sounds that lead us on a journey of post-colonialism of the Haitian variety. The scenes aren’t all disparate though, we see the same characters throughout the piece, and together they help to build a tension that is both erotic and filled with disgust. Those characters include an old woman or matriarch of an old estate (amazingly played by Catherine Samie), a young male servant, a younger woman called Madame and the troop of young black boys she instructs.

The feature film is a first for Quay, who was born in Queens and is a first generation Haitian. The film is filled with a cinematic language that strays from convention and instead offers up it’s own rules of comprehension. The mishmash of images and auditory emphasis on sounds that are wet and bring the focus to the human aspect of things, seem fitting considering how the “story” came to be

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The New Directors/New Films festival starts today! Put on by The Film Society of Lincoln Center and MOMA, the festival is:

Dedicated to the discovery and support of emerging artists. New Directors/New Films has earned an international reputation as the premiere festival for works that break or re-cast the cinematic mold. Twenty-six features and six shorts, handpicked by curators of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, made the cut this year, as the 37th edition of this non-competitive program spotlights the very best in the current class of new directors, actors, producers, writers, cinematographers, editors and more. We expect many of the filmmakers will be attending the festival to discuss their work first hand. [Filmlinc]

The line-up looks pretty great this year, with many films lining up with Takepart’s motto of media inspiring social action. Below are the films I plan on seeing, and interestingly enough, they all coincide with ideas that encourage folks to examine the world we live and make it better.

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Usually museums are quiet. We are often asked to be careful around the pieces on display. We are encouraged to walk slowly and take in each piece. However this Saturday the Museum of Modern Art in New York puts museum etiquette aside for a one-night dance party.

In conjunction with the exhibition Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, PopRally invites you to bring the color chart to life on the dance floor with an amazing lineup of DJs from DFA Records.

Color Chart, which explores artists’ use of ready-made color”from paint chips to colored tape”features works by forty-four modern and contemporary artists, including Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, and Angela Bulloch. PopRally presents an exclusive preview of this monumental exhibition before its official opening to the public.

MoMA encourages guests to wear their boldest and brightest colors and get ready to DANCE! More info at http://moma.org/calendar/poprally/upcoming.php

Armin Mueller who? While at MOMA a few weekends ago to see Laura Dunn’s powerful documentary The Unforeseen, I got into a conversation with a gentleman about the year in movies and we got to talking about David Cronenberg and his film Eastern Promises. The man claimed that the actor who played the head of the crime family did a really good job and he tried for a moment or two to remember who the actor was that played the old man.

After a moment I said - “It’s Armin Mueller-Stahl.”

The man shook his head, and said “no no, it’s not him”. I reasserted my position that it was in fact Armin Mueller-Stahl and the man again told me I was wrong. We talked about it until we got let into the theater and my friend decided to look up the answer on his I-Phone.

It was in fact Armin Mueller-Stahl. I resisted the urge to find the man and tell him I was correct and instead thought back to my introduction to the actor.

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Seeing The Unforeseen at last years Human Rights Watch Film Festival reconfirmed for me how powerful documentaries can really be. Laura Dunn’s flawless portrait whisks you away to Austin, Texas directly into the murky battle between nature and ideas of development. The film follows a local developer, a legal battle over Austin’s beloved natural swimming spot Barton Springs and different families as they try to find affordable housing, often having to turn to new developments.

What makes the documentary stand out is that it shies away from being a film that simply makes the developer the bad guy.

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