A mode of transportation to get me to my ideal vacation destination*. And yes, I would travel to an island by transcontinental locomotive

“What I sought in 'Pacific' was not the imitation of the sounds of the locomotive, but the translation of a visual impression and a physical enjoyment through a musical construction. It starts from objective contemplation: the quiet breathing of the engine at rest, the effort of starting, then the progressive increase in speed, to arrive at the lyrical state, the pathos of the 300-ton train, launched in the middle of the night at 120 km/h.”

– Arthur Honegger, Dissonances. Revue musicale indépendante (1925) (via)

Hinted on in Abel Gance's La Roue (1923), composer Arthur Honegger's Пасифик 231 follows the narrative of a stream train ploughing through the night. The conductor's gestures mirror the fireman's and slowly, the machine comes to live. The music becomes abstract, machine-like, in its rendition of pistons and valves. Using double exposure and Soviet montage theory, music and movement become one. The Futurists, if not opposed to the Soviets that is, would have had a field day with this outing.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.

My ideal vacation spot, country, city, town, or resort*

 

An island, in this case Capri (granted I've never been there), off-season, in a space and time lost in the mists. It'll occasionally rain and it's cold enough to dress up.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.

“The house takes care of itself.”

– Roz Allardyce

Production of the last hot type copy of The New York Times on the nigh of July 1, 1978. The ETAOIN SHRDLU in the title refers to the accidental string of letters that sometimes would end up in print when using the hot type method.

 

That Linotype setting, and narration, was provided by Carl Schlesinger. That same old, but now digitally set New York Times, provided a lovely farewell when the man passed. Read it here

A [favourite] athlete in a film role for Mike Tyson's birthday

“But this art of total synthesis that is Cinema, this fabulous newborn of Machine and Sentiment, is beginning to cease its moans and is entering its infancy. Its adolescence will soon arrive, seize its intelligence, and multiply its dreams; we ask that we hasten its development, precipitate the advent of its youth. We need Cinema to create the total art toward which the other arts have always tended.“

– Ricciotto Canudo, Gazette des sept arts, 1923 (via)

The match you see is real, between two actual fighters. Paul Werrie's rhythmic poem served as the basis. Everything else is illusion made flesh with what was available. An empty painter's studio, a few friends, footage of a crowd, a deep comprehension of the Kuleshov effect and rapid Soviet-style editing. Dekeukeleire places us from the safe world of the spectator right in the line of fire. But there's no release like in James Williamson's The Big Swallow (1901). Without that gimmick, cinema enters Canudo's realm, as the seventh art.

A film set in a tropical location for the International Day of the Tropics

“We Malays, we Filipinos, are not governed by the concept of time. We are governed by the concept of space. We don't believe in time. If you live in the country, you see Filipinos hang out. They are not very productive. That is very Malay. It is all about space and nature. [...] In the Philippine archipelago, nature provided everything, until the concept of property came with the Spanish colonizers. Then the capitalist order took control. [...] The concept of time was introduced to us when the Spaniards came. We had to do oracion [pray] at six o'clock, and start work at seven. Before it was free, it was Malay.”

– Lav Diaz, via

“Don't think too much, it could affect your health, Gabrielle.”

– Dr. Marshall

[The best] sunglasses in film for National Sunglasses Day (USA)

– Why do you always wear those dark glasses?

– A souvenir of unrequited love for my homeland.

According to IMDb, the sale of sunglasses in Poland went through the roof after this film was released and Cybulski became his country's very own James Dean.

This, or any other adaptation of Shirley Jackson's story.

“Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.”

– Shirley Jackson, The Lottery (1948)