Documentary

In “Landscape Suicide” Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning’s distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. Benning has created a script which is a masterpiece of understated colloquial writing, and the actors he employs to re-enact confessional testimony and incidents recounted in trial transcripts perform with a flatly convincing lack of affect reminiscent of Gary Gilmore. Read More »

[B]The Magician’s House[B] 2007, 5:45 Both a letter to a cancer stricken, alchemist-filmmaker friend, and a quiet tribute to the vanishing art of celluloid, “The Magician’s House” is full of ghosts. Including that of Athanasius Kircher, inventor of the Magic Lantern or “Sorcerer’s Lamp”. The music, La lutte des Mages (The Struggle of the Magicians), was composed by Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff and Thomas De Hartmann. Gurdjieff thought of man as a kind of “transmitting station of forces.” To him, most people move around in a state of waking sleep, so he sought to provide aural conditions that would induce awareness.Read More »

Synopsis
Negative Space, is an experiment that’s accessible to anyone who cares about movies, using split screen to question how we look at and remember films, and to look at how film changes with time.

A portrait of film critic Manny Farber, featuring interviews with Farber and art critic Dave Hickey, as well as inventively displayed clips of the films that Farber discusses.Read More »

IMDB:
A brief look at The Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and directors charged of contempt of court after challenging the House of Anti-American Activities and their controversial and self-incriminatory questions during the red scare. With that act of defiance, they were sentenced to one year in prison simply for speaking their minds and exercising their constitutional rights as concerned citizens. This is their story, their version of the facts and their opinions.Read More »

Synopsis (EN) : At the request of French television, the writer-photographer Hervé Guibert filmed this video self-portrait chronicling the grim impact of AIDS on his life. With a dispassionate eye, he compares the decay of his body with the bodily disintegration of old ageRead More »

One of Joris Ivens’ most poetic films is his first attempt to film the wind. With a beautiful photography, a powerful editing and a poetic commentary the film tries to make the wind visible and tangible. It starts in black and white, continues in colour and ends in cinemascope to illustrate the force of the upcoming Mistral wind that blows in the south of France. The original scenario was much more elaborate and ambitious and fits Ivens’ lifelong wish to film the impossible: the wind. It was difficult to find a producer for this film, for most people were rather sceptical to finance a film with an invisible main character. Finally Claude Nedjar was willing to produce the film, which despite many financial problems was finished in 1965.Read More »

A focus on one of the grandmasters of classic Japanese cinema, world-renowned filmmaker Ozu Yasujiro.Read More »

An industrial film which shows the operations inside the Philips Radio plant: In a mêlée of activity, glassblowers make delicate glass bulbs. Machinery assists the bulb manufacture. A virtuoso glassblower begins a more complex tube used in radio broadcasting; it is then turned, fired, and sculpted. Conveyors carry partially completed units. Workers perform their various specific assembly-line tasks. Cases are manufactured and machined, wire harnesses are assembled, loudspeakers are produced. As radios near completion, they are run through a series of tests. Engineers and draughtsmen define future developments. In a closing stop-motion sequence, in a style reminiscent of Norman McLaren, a group of loudspeakers performs a playful dance. The film overall is a poetic depiction of an industrial process.Read More »

Quote:
The new film by Mark Rappaport, which spans René Magritte and Michelangelo to Bonnie & Clyde. Let’s mask up to rob a bank! But make sure that you are home before the curfew.Read More »