viz.

If you haven’t yet heard about Sita Sings the Blues, then I’ll let Roger Ebert introduce you to it:

It hardly ever happens this way. I get a DVD in the mail. I'm told it's an animated film directed by "a girl from Urbana." That's my home town. It is titled "Sita Sings the Blues." I know nothing about it, and the plot description on IMDb is not exactly a barn-burner: An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Uh, huh. I carefully file it with other movies I will watch when they introduce the 8-day week.

After Ebert decides to watch it he writes:

I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord. You might think my attention would flag while watching An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Quite the opposite. It quickens. I obtain Nina Paley's e-mail address and invite the film to my film festival in April 2009 at the University of Illinois, which by perfect synchronicity is in our home town.

To get any film made is a miracle. To conceive of a film like this is a greater miracle. How did Paley's mind work? She begins with the story of Ramayana, which is known to every school child in India but not to me. It tells the story of a brave, noble woman who was made to suffer because of the perfidy of a spineless husband and his mother. This is a story known to every school child in America. They learn it at their mother's knee. Paley depicts the story with exuberant drawings in bright colors. It is about a prince named Rama who treated Sita shamefully, although she loved him and was faithful to him.

Despite rave reviews like this one,--and winning a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival--Paley’s film has remained unavailable to most people because she was unable to clear the rights to the songs she used in the film, and the cost securing those rights scared off most distributors. Fortunately, some of these issues have been resolved, and the film is now being released to a wider audience.

If you live in New York, WNET/NY will be airing Sita on Saturday, March 7 at 10:45 (thereby atoning for this). In the meantime, you can watch the entire film online via WNET’s streaming player or download the film to watch at your leisure.

Update: here's the trailer from YouTube:

At his New York Times blog, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has posted interviews with the head photo editors of the AP, Reuters, and AFP on the photographic record of the Bush administration. Morris asked each interviewee “to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration” and then discussed the photos with them along with the reasons each chose the photos they did.

With Standard Operating Procedure Morris has shown an acute interest in understanding the different ways in which the image is used to create reality, along with the ways in which that reality can be interrogated. In these interviews, Morris and each interviewee seem to share a different approach to how these images should be interpreted and what they mean. Although the discussions can sometimes be repetitive, they were a reminder to me of how much my judgments about our last president were based on these photo-ops.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Why do you like the picture so much?

VINCENT AMALVY: We don’t understand what is going on. Why does the shadow appear? I suppose it’s a shadow of somebody else beyond the corner. But the picture is only of two guys walking. It’s a profile of George Bush and Barack Obama. And he’s near the Rose Garden of the White House. And so in the back is a shadow of somebody who says, “Bye-bye.” And it is looking like a joke, but it is amazing.

via Word Presser

Here’s an interesting ad campaign that attempts to connect the visible, the tangible, and the audible:

I saw these two responses to the our recent economic woes on BoingBoing.

The first, posted by guest-blogger Clay Shirky, is a graph showing the distribution of the returns of the S&P 500 in 10-percentage-point increments since 1825. The placement of 2008 adds a chilling perspective to our current crisis.

The second is a humorous response to the proposed auto industry bailout in the form of a car advertisement:

A recent New York Times article on the invention and dissemination of atomic weapons included the infographic above on the travels of the atomic bomb. The article references some new works on the history of the bomb, noting that it was only invented once:

All paths stem from the United States, directly or indirectly. One began with Russian spies that deeply penetrated the Manhattan Project. Stalin was so enamored of the intelligence haul, Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman note, that his first atom bomb was an exact replica of the weapon the United States had dropped on Nagasaki.

Moscow freely shared its atomic thefts with Mao Zedong, China’s leader. The book [Robert S. Norris’s Racing for the Bomb] says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from jail, did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs gave the mastermind of Mao’s weapons program a detailed tutorial on the Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with its first blast.

Here’s another hybrid proposal argument / introductory video, the likes of which I think are perfect for rhetoric classrooms. It was produced by girleffect.org:

While it is certainly possible to disagree with parts of the argument here, I think this format is fascinating. This emerging genre of public discourse is something that rhetoric instructors should be teaching their students to create.

via Information Aesthetics

According to the interwebs, these ads, explaining how you can buy a pill to transform you into Kanye West, are for Absolut Vodka.

Mr. West’s tongue-in-cheek appearance marks the second collaboration with the vodka company, which is sponsoring his “Glow in the Dark” tour this summer.

In a video at the Web site bekanyenow.com, which is designed to resemble an infomercial, Mr. West sells tablets called “Be Kanye” that promise to transform the taker into “Kanye” for a four-hour duration. “How many times have you told yourself, ‘I feel famous and powerful on the inside, but nobody sees it that way on the outside?’” he asks.

via SuperTouch

I saw this video on BoingBoing last week:

I think this is a perfect example of a video proposal argument, the kind that students should be making to connect their work in the classroom with the outside world.

Some people still think design matters. (link is NSFW)

I think this video should be able to spark a great discussion as to whether or not digital tools help to improve visual culture.

via Boing Boing

Artist Lena Gieseke has modeled Picasso’s “Guernica” in 3D.

Here’s how Gieseke describes her work:

“The idea of creating a 3D version of an influential artwork came out of doing jigsaw puzzles of famous paintings. When you assemble a jigsaw, you study a painting in great detail and you become aware of the very lines, shapes and colors that the painting is composed of and how these elements merge to create a unified expression. Through the puzzle, you explore the artwork, examining details your eye might not have caught otherwise.”

Link (via SuperTouch)