A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 1, 2000
Original Title:
For the Birds
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 8
Part three of a cycle of digital video works I'm beginning to call-after Bataille-«Theory of religion, theory of ecstasy.» The other two parts are Mirror and The Zapruder Footage.... This tape is inspired by the 11th century Sufi mystical text The Conference of the Birds. It is a text which explores transparency and opacity, multiplicity and unity, narrative and insight, the mundane and the ecstatic. I include a postscript from the text which I included at the end of the tape perhaps best responds to the attempt to parse it: «Seek the trunk of the tree and do not worry whether the branches do or do not exist.»
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.