Bill White's Reviews for The Seattle Post Globe

My friend Bill has written thousands of reviews for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, and when the paper stopped printing about 2 years ago and he was laid off, he and some colleagues decided to continue what they do as the Seattle Post Globe. Bill continues to view and write about legions of films I will never see. He wrote a short remembrance of my Filmers Almanac project in his blurb for the youTube sponsored movie "Life in a Day".

http://seattlepostglobe.org/2011/05/21/siff-pick-of-the-day-for-saturday-may-21-tom-tykwers-3

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Screening today at the Cinerama at 6:00 pm

Life in a Day

When an an apparently fresh idea surfaces in the mainstream, it often has an antecedent in the distant obscurity of an earlier decade’s avant-garde. In the eighties, for instance, David Lynch plundered Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising” for the visual and sound motifs in his otherwise pedestrian detective thriller, ”Blue Velvet.” Now we have, as the gala closing film of SIFF 2011, “Life in A Day,” an assemblage of blips from filmers around the world, all shot on the same day. Three decades ago, an adventurous young film-maker from Boston accomplished something very similar. His “Filmers’ Almanac” covered one year, with each filmer choosing one day on which to shoot a three-minute roll of Super-8 film. Whereas the material for “Life in a Day” was instantaneously delivered through today’s internet technology, the rolls of film to comprise “Filmer’s Almanac” were acquired through detailed and extensive mail correspondences, by which O’Toole became acquainted with his 365 contributors. Rather than a festive screening at a film festival, “Filmer’s Almanac” was screened in a room on a college campus with some very hardcore cineastes in attendance for the multi-projections that continued for several wondrous hours. I am looking forward to seeing what kind of world-beat extravaganza the mainstream has assembled out of the 4,500 hours of footage submitted to Youtube by 80,000 people from 140 countries. The 95 minutes chosen from such a wealth of material is bound to be a reductionism of real life into the carefully selected imagery meant to represent a particular point of view towards all the peoples of the world. O’Toole showed his film unedited, and the activities of his 365 filmers reflected the unity of all peoples rather than a colorful array of cultural differences. One thing to remember when watching this movie: Thirty years ago, one guy without any money did the same thing and received nothing for his efforts except the satisfaction of accomplishing a crazy mission.