In this personal documentary, Jane Giese, a working class woman in Newark, comes to realize that she has to take control of her own life after years of physical and mental abuse.
One of the most moving documentaries of the era, Newsreel’s Janie’s Janie breaks with their usual format for a more personal approach, following one woman’s journey to self-determination, or as Janie says, “First I was my father’s Janie, then I was my Charlie’s Janie, now I’m Janie’s Janie.”Read More »
IMDb User wrote:
This correspondence, or exchange of letters and video diaries between acclaimed filmmakers Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guerin is extremely potent, there’s sorcery at play in the mixture of the two. Together they’re light and dark. Mekas knows life’s joys, and is always a participant in what he films, Guerín is a detached observer, cold, present only as a black mote, reflected in the eye of one of his subjects. Guerín shoots in black and white and strives for formalism, Mekas loves hazard, loves his chaotic hand-held colour camera. Jonas Mekas felt that his images were inferior to those of Guerín, but a picture of his son Sebastian devouring a pickle, followed by Jonas on the deli sausage and wine, and then a cheeky close up of Goethe’s Faust; which of them Faust and which Mephistopheles? That one shot set me thinking about the nature of art and the privilege of artists, and could be interpreted in any one of several fruitful ways.Read More »
The installation THE SILVER AND THE CROSS by media artist Harun Farocki examines the 1758 painting “Depiction of the Cerro Rico and the Imperial City of Potosí” by Gaspar Miguel des Berrío (in the Museo Colonial Charcas de la Universidad San Francisco Xavier, Sucre, Bolivia). Farocki uses the medium of video to dissect the painting and its historical layers. In addition to artistic aspects, Farocki also looks at historical context and colonialism.Read More »
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Bouche sans fond ouverte sur les horizons (1971, 26′)
In 1971 Thierry Zéno creates a fascinating portrait of artist Georges Moinet in the form of a 16 mm medium-length film. A schizophrenic who lives in a psychiatric hospital near Namur, Moinet paints. After being mute for 24 years he chooses this cinematic encounter to explain his artist approach, revealing what lies behind his personal cosmogony. But this long logorrhoea proves disturbing and fails to provide possible clues to understanding his work, gradually becoming a form of music that blends in with the sounds and distant, invisible hubbub of the hospital. With Alessandro Ussai behind the camera and Roger Cambier responsible for the sound, Zéno gets up close to Moinet to better capture him in all his demiurgical excessiveness, his existence on the fringes but also his humanity, deconstructing in a series of very tight shots the man and his canvasses.Read More »
Shun Ikezoe wrote:
By the time you wake up, they might be gone―
For me, “mother” means my grandmother, who raised me with undying affection. She is gradually dying. I thought that I would definitely regret it if I didn’t listen to my grandmother’s story, so I started going to her house and collected her voices little by little since summer two years ago. She told me the story of her first romance.
She get worse at the beginning of last year. Seeing that she talks as if her memory is muddy, “She is now dreaming of memory,” said my father.Read More »
Christian Berger invented the Cine Reflect Lighting System which he used on his latest films.
This documentary shows how this technique has evolved.Read More »
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Shown in a new restored print at the 2011 Telluride Film Festival, screening before Aki Kaurismaki’s new film Le Havre, Carroll Ballard’s 1969 documentary short Rodeo became the talk of the festival. For those who don’t know Ballard, he did 2nd Unit work on the original Star Wars film, and had a relatively successful career as a studio director before disappearing to a ranch in New Mexico, finding the studio system soul-crushing. When Francis Ford Coppola received his Lifetime Achievement Award from the DGA, he passed the award onto his old friend and classmate Ballard. Caroll Ballard is one of the great unsung heroes of the American film galaxy, and nowhere does his prowess shine more than in this early short, Rodeo.Read More »
It was the 1990s in Río Tercero, a small town in the Argentine province of Córdoba. At the Garayalde family home, 900 meters from the river and 300 meters from a military factory, the children play with their new toy: a video camera purchased to register los recuerdos. What is not yet known, however, is that family memories will intertwine with one of the most lurid episodes in the country’s recent history and will lie at the heart of a film which delicately acknowledges that images outlive bodies.Read More »
