Friends of the Armchair Traveller

  DESERTED ISLAND CINEMA (FOR THE ROTTEN CINE-GOERS AND FOR THOSE WHO ARE ABOUT TO ROT) I recently received an email from a dear friend from my "Facebook era". Jutta Pryor , a Melbourne video artist and respectable organizer of cultural events, decided to present my work at the prestigious Australian cultural institution "The Center Ivanhoe - Melbourne" . Her unexpected (I hope this is no joke) gesture prompted me to reflect on the infantile idea of ​​a deserted island and the ideal partner for such a life scenario. Thinking for a while (and excluding Jutta because of a possible “conflict of interests”) I came to the conclusion on which this video experiment is based and produced exclusively for Peter Tamme r's blog "Friends of the Armchair Traveller" (you are on the address), which, along with David King and Bill Mousoulis , I am maintaining recently.  BEWARE: This one is depressing a bit: Darko Duilo - Odessa Morning (2022) Take this as a short intr...

  Okay friends, this delightful piece comes from way back! From a foreign country and a completely different epoch, not very long after the "invention of the cinema". It was sent to me by a most excellent buddy who wishes to remain anonymous. I must respect the wishes of my friends even when I might not share their reticence. It's always their call. I deeply thank our anonymous donor for this delight!  pt

MOVIE AS A GIFT (ONE MORE PIQUANTERY FROM SPLIT; CROATIA AND OTHER STORIES) Following the recent posts on the " Friends of the Armchair Traveler " blog, I noticed the immense happiness of their authors connected with the fact that they can share the published materials with other people via the Internet and without any obligations or compensations. Peter`s “gifts” from “ AEON ” Magazine, production houses that allows the authors to share their own works as “gifts” with friends and others (“ My Life as a Turkey ” “case”) , David`s treatment of his own and supervised video materials during presentations arranging etc. Thinking about giving someone a personally made and unpublished film as a gift on some ordinary occasion (instead of flowers or chocolates) lead me to the idea to use this gesture to express myself in the context of meeting an unusually nice female doctor who was apparently given the task (by the authorities at the local hospital here in Split) of "examining ...

  Mike Kuchar This post comes from my friend Fred Harden who was one one the original people who set up the Melbourne Filmmkaer's Co-op.  I will also add some comments into this post with some of my own reminiscences of that time as Mike visited Monique and me when we lived at Canning Street, North Carlton. I think that was in 1973 when the world was wonderful, our lives were full of expectation. I'm sure those days were much better than the days we're living through now. I really enjoyed meeting Mike Kuchar. He had a lovely personal style, very gentle, great wit and most elegant. I also found the Kuchar programme which we presented at the Co-op to be ground breaking, a great gift from the US Underground. That programme was organised by the people at the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op and sent on to us, as they also did with a programme by Pier Farri. We were very lucky to have Pier visit us while he was in Melbourne for his season. Anyway, here's what Fred wrote about it all ...

Well, the truth is I love crazy films. I love films which go out on an edge. I love docos based on natural history. This one has everything for me. And guess what? I can share it with every one for free! All you have to do it to give it a few moments of your time... Here it is on Daily Motion: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvccpd It's also on Vimeo but I think the Daily Motion version is better HD quality. Have fun! https://dai.ly/xv My Life as a Turkey  from  ASECIC_VIMEO  on  Vimeo .

 THE TIME WE KILLED Jennifer Todd Reeves Towards the end of this summer, in search of intriguing places for collecting some shots that I am taking with my mobile phone for a long time now since my last useful pocket cam broke, I have stopped many times at the several same nearby points to examine immediate devastating effects of carbonization of the environment (in the immediate vicinity of my apartment in Split; Croatia). Together with some personal reasons and feelings that I do not want to discuss openly, that carbo situation make me rethink of “carbon cinema” phenomena and some respectable authors that were “possessed” with analog (S8 - 16 mm) filming around hospitals and factories chimneys, unkempt parks, septic flats, unclean dumps and other (sub)urban rusty places so inspired for catching that strange, dirty but at the same time beautiful and subliminally unexplainable effect on analog film rolls. This was one of the agendas I wanted to discuss with recently deceased undergr...