Arthouse

Like its predecessor (De l’origine du XXIe siècle), The Old Place examines the role of art in history, only this time in still rather than moving images. Says Michael Althen of this piece, commissioned by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1999, “[T]he aim is not to give an overview of art history but to cut a path through the forest by asking how art relates to reality and its horrors.” Throughout its mid-length duration, reflections on art and its traces cross swords with future-oriented impulses. The questions it poses are not meant to be answered, but taken as wholesale embodiments of cultural memory, which tends to account for reality via myths and legends. As in the opening image of a monkey dangling from a tree, it is dependent on the presence of gravity to give hierarchical sensibilities a grounding from which to suspend our inhibitions.Read More »

SYNOPSIS:
William Klein goes on the hunt for Little Richard, the legendary “Architect of Rock and Roll”, who quit show business in 1957 at the height of his fame to become an evangelist. Richard was then lured back to secular music in the 1960s and 70s, but the excesses of stardom led him to a second retreat from the stage. For years he struggled to reconcile his religious calling with his flamboyant rock-and-roll persona, and at the time of filming, Klein finds Little Richard selling “Black Heritage Bibles” for a Nashville couple. Sensing that his image is being exploited, Richard quits his sales position and deserts the film. But Klein turns this into an opportunity to reconstruct Richard’s personality through the words of his family and friends in his native Macon, Georgia, and to celebrate his status as a cultural icon by filming scores of Little Richard impersonators and adoring fans in Hollywood.Read More »

An artist struggles to finish his work. A storyline about a cult plays in his head. Fundamentalism will destroy the world. The artist destroys his muse in the process. He redeems her in the end.Read More »

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She’s gorgeous, she’s dangerous – and she sings! Male convenience store clerk by day, fabulous drag queen/ secret agent by night, Iron Pussy must yet again come to the rescue! In this feature-length reprise, award-winning Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and writer Michael Shaowanasai (who also plays Iron Pussy) have created a spy-thriller-kung-fu-musical-western-forbidden-love story that, like our heroine, defies convention.Read More »

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This unique film from acclaimed Filipino director Raya Martin re-imagines his country’s past as an elemental humanist epic.

Fleeing the American invasion of the Philippines in the early 20th Century, a mother and son retreat into the jungle where they make a home. Time passes; a wounded woman is rescued; the mother dies; a child is born. The family survive isolated from the growing chaos engulfing their country, but a storm approaches that threatens their existence as American troops draw nearer…Read More »

Synopsis:
Sultry courtship display between a waitress and customer in a café.

At nine o’clock in the morning, the Santos Palace coffee bar opens its doors. The waitress pours her first cup of coffee for an unknown elderly man. They circle each other a little, in a kind of sultry courtship display. When the other, younger waitress arrives, jealousy ensues.Read More »

Feature film version of Mani Kaul’s film on Dostoevski’s masterpiece that was shown at NYFF.

Synopsis:
Mani Kaul’s adaptation of Dostoevski’s Idiot is his most profoundly affecting film and a “tour de force” (Rajadhyaksha) that co-ordinates actors, settings and situations to a multiplicity. It his most realized attempt at making formalist film by moving the camera,without looking through the viewfinder to make Gilles Deleuze’s reading of cinema as an any-instant-whatever or equidistant instant to an any-space-whatever or any equispatial instant. This equispatial instant is created by destroying the dialectic between required and not-required, sacral and profane. Mani Kaul, analyzing his own films would state that, whereas his earlier works engaged a rarefaction of information, Idiot was the first to encounter a saturation of events.Read More »

After a dreadful incident coupled with an ungovernable paroxysm of violence, a butcher will fall into a downward spiral that will burn to the ground whatever dignity still remained in him.Read More »

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“There is a time for sewing up and a time for tearing apart. That’s an old proverb of my mother’s”. The wise little saying is nothing less than a piece of “Heimat”. Or not really, since the words of a young woman from the Hunsrück, working as a tour guide in Munich even though she can’t tell the Frauenkirche from the Stadtmuseum, fell victim to the scissors. For Edgar Reitz the time for sewing together has begun again. Eight hours left over from the Heimats have turned up again, the montage film “Heimat –Fragmente” arising from them lasts 146 minutes and had its premiere last weekend at the Venice Biennale. The more work you turn on the lathe, the more shavings you get, and it’s not surprising that they are of good wood. Read More »