holy grails

Wardomatic has this excellent post about the "holy grail of animation": "The other day, Brandon, our resident "Technology Specialist" here at Primal Screen, came up to me and asked, "Ward, what do animators consider as 'The Holy Grail' of animation?" He asked me this because he was considering flying to New York to see an extremely rare screening what many cinemaphiles consider as "The Holy Grail" of cinema: Out 1, a 13 hour long 1971 film directed by French New Wave director Jacques Rivette. There is only one English subtitled print of the film, and that one print will be screened at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NYC this weekend.".

It's very interesting to find out what various people who are extremely passionate about one thing or another have been looking for for ages with no result. I remember i first thought about this when i was 8 or 9, i was in primary school and we were simply crazy about collecting Action Man stickers to fill in a catalogue that would have brought us a toy in exchange. We ate loads of Action Man chewing gum at first, after which we kept on buying the shit without further eating it. Because while most of us had filled in almost the entire catalogue, there was one sticker we simply couldn't get hold of. It was "the jeep". We even started asking ourselves whether there was any jeep sticker anyway, but without actually abandoning the race. Nobody in my school at the time ever found a jeep sticker, but, boy, how much we've tried!!

Then, I remember when i first started being so crazy about old movies: i had tons of holy grails and some of them simply seemed unreacheable - the www wasn't what it is today, downloads were not what they are today (and i didn't know much about either anyway), you couldn't find anything on the market, i did not have too many connections, oh well. And, even today, i still have plenty of movie-holy-grails.

I think there's something really wonderful in these quests - and it's not only interesting to find out about what holy grails of passionates/fans/collectors are in various fields, but it's also extremely interesting to look at the process they go through in order to try and get hold of them. Especially since this process usually brings out a certain interesting side of a person.

In the mean time, here are three shorts from two of my favourite directors: Six Figures Getting Sick and The Alphabet are David Lynch's firsts (and the soundtrack from "The Alphabet" stiil hounds me every once in a while), while Vincent is Tim Burton's first.