Episode #75 - Blake Williams (INLAND EMPIRE)

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"When I'm making work it's very important that me that I'm unsure where it's going"

What does it mean to view a stereoscopic image, to see films in a way that's at once closer to our daily life perception while also expanding it beyond anything we could ever see? Blake Williams is one of many filmmakers working in the avant-garde who has been exploring this question—through filmmaking, criticism, and historical research. Williams joins the podcast to trace his lineage as both a critic and a filmmaker, and the very nature of 3D images that has made this such an exploratory visual medium to work in, using it to explore heady concepts in both literal and theoretical terms. Peter and Blake then turn to a narrative filmmaker who created his own long experimental: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE. The two debate the use of narrative in the film while also examining the nature of its low-grade digital imagery, which can be sublime or absolutely terrifying.

0:00-3:02 Opening

3:40-11:14 Establishing Shots — The Mermaid and Mountains May Depart

11:59-1:10:24 Deep Focus — Blake Williams
1:11:26-1:15:24 Sponsorship Section
1:16:39-1:39:33 Double Exposure — INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch)

1:39:36-1:41:14 Close 

Visit Blake's film-viewing blog and his filmmaking website.
Watch the films of Blake Williams, including No Signal, A Cold Compress, Coorow-Latham Road, Depart, Many A Swan, Baby Blue, and Red Capriccio.

Read Blake on Cinema Scope and Ion Cinema.

Notes and Links from the Conversation

—More on LA's Acropolis Cinema

—More on Stephen Chow's The Mermaid from Sean Gilman and R. Emmet Sweeney

—More on Jia Zhangke's Mountains May Depart from Aliza Ma and Michael Koresky

—Houston Museum of Fine Arts

—SMFA Boston

—Robert Fenz

—Blake on Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice

—Blake's Berlin dispatches are now on Filmmaker Magazine

—With Darren Hughes on The Strange Little Cat

—On Gasper Noé's Love

—On Sundance 2015

—On 3D in the 21st Century

—More on Ken Jacobs's Brain Operations, his 3D "crossed-eyed" film

—Jacobs's The Guest

—Ray Zone's Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film

—Bart Testa writes on Michael Snow in Presence and Absence

—Some notes on Ito Takashi from Yaron Dahon

—Blake writes on Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE here (scroll down)

—Dennis Lim's The Man From Another Place (his recent David Lynch book)

—Slavoj Zizek on Lynch's Lost Highway

—Lynch campaigns for an Oscar with a cow

Theme Music: “Forward” by Northbound

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