1991-2000

In Untitled Fall ’95, Bag, at the time an art student, “plays” Bag the art student. In a series of deadpan performances, Bag gathers fragments of pop detritus, fashioning a thoroughly mediated document that is at once a celebration and a record of loss. With the narrative inevitability of a TV serial, the eight diaristic segments trace a woman’s struggle to make sense of her experience at art school. As each installment marks the start of a new semester, Bag’s character addresses the camera with her latest observations and frustrations.Read More »

Signs & Wonders is a 2000 psychological thriller directed by Jonathan Nossiter and co-written with British poet James Lasdun (also co-writer of Sunday) was inspired by the Polish surrealist novel, Kosmos of Witold Gombrowicz.Read More »

Set in the late 1950s, when geisha culture was threatened by moral crusades, it tells the story of Omacha (Miyamoto Maki), a young girl who sees the geisha life as a way to lift her poverty-stricken family from their hand-to-mouth existence. Through her eyes, we see the protocols and complex financial relationships which dictate the running of the geisha house. Fukasaku’s film is a work of great delicacy with moments of hypnotic beauty, and his tender direction, often touched with a sense of wonder, fills the screen with lovingly constructed scenes. At its heart is the poignant situation of the women who must sacrifice their normal relationships to live an ambiguous life in which they are a key part of society while being kept, for the most part, on its periphery, like perpetual mistresses.Read More »

Quote:
To Lavoisier Who Died in the Reign of Terror (1991) is a collaboration with filmmaker Carl Brown, who specializes in homebrewed chemical film development. In a series of tableaux, people perform everyday tasks — sleeping, dining, reading, card-playing — as the camera arcs past and over them (the replete set of positions recalls La région centrale’s movements). Brown abraded the film stock, creating a continuous dynamic surface-effect tension with the comparatively static views and cueing the soundtrack, the crackle of fire. The physics and chemistry of combustion were the scientific focus of Lavoisier, the 18th-century savant.Read More »

Quote:
The latest film by Hartmut Bitomsky is, just like much of his early work, a original film essay about film and film history. Just as in earlier films, he makes inventive use of the potential offered by the medium video to analyse films.The history of the UFA is the story of a risky financial venture in the twenties and a propaganda instrument in the thirties. Bitomsky’s approach stands out because he involvesthis social and political context in investigating and dissecting films.Read More »

Quote:
“Les œuvres de Lena Vandrey qui se trouvent au Musée d’Art Brut de Lausanne, acquises par Dubuffet, sont des effigies de femmes, des sortes de déesses, d’amazones, des personnages totémiques d’une grande force d’expression. Elles sont faites de matières très brutes. Ce n’est pas de la peinture illusionniste. Il y a une tension dramatique qui détruit le système de représentation pour créer un contact beaucoup plus charnel avec l’objet” (Michel Thévoz).Read More »

Shy, chain-smoking, insomniac Peter McGowan is an L.A. playwright with a string of hits that preceded his current ten years of failed productions. His mother-in-law is sinking into senility, a stranger is meandering the neighborhood claiming to be him, neighbors have a new dog that barks all night; his wife wants to have a child, and he does not: he’s become impotent. He’s working on a new play when a single mom moves in next door with her 8-year-old daughter. His wife immediately invites the girl into the McGowan household. Will this child stir Peter’s paternal feelings? Will she also help him get his dialogue right? And what of his doppelganger and the neighbor’s dog?Read More »

Quote:
Boaz Yakin’s astounding debut feature looks at the violent world of the projects through the eyes of a 12-year-old drug runner. Sean Nelson delivers a quiet but intense performance as Michael–street name Fresh–a cynical but introspective kid grown up fast and hard on the killing streets of the projects. Samuel L. Jackson costars as Fresh’s estranged father, a speed chess hustler in the city park whose dispassionate philosophy–the chess board as life–becomes the film’s central metaphor, as Fresh plots a brilliant, coldly brutal plan to save himself and his junkie sister from his world of drug dealers and street violence.Read More »

Quote:
Gallivant is a fantastic British road movie and Andrew Kotting deserves to take his place with those two other great film iconoclasts and chroniclers of late twentieth century life in Britain: Derek Jarman and Patrick Keiller. He is also a great stylist and humourist, which makes the film very accessible despite it’s restless experimentation and disregard for documentary conventions.Read More »