Dreams in Copenhagen is director Max Kestner’s documentary film portrait of Denmark’s capital. COPENHAGEN DREAMS is a film about the physical surroundings that are part of shaping our lives. About the buildings we wake up in, the front doors we walk out of, the streets we traverse. It is also a film about how the way we live our lives affects our physical surroundings. About the places we dream of and the walls onto which we scratch the names of our loved ones, before it’s too late.Read More »
Naqoyqatsi, also known as Naqoyqatsi: Life as War, is a 2002 documentary film directed by Godfrey Reggio and edited by Jon Kane, with music composed by Philip Glass. It is the third and final film in the Qatsi trilogy.
Naqoyqatsi is a Hopi word meaning “life as war”. In the film’s closing credits, Naqoyqatsi is also translated as “civilized violence” and “a life of killing each other”. While Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi examine modern life in industrial countries and the conflict between encroaching industrialization and traditional ways of life, using slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and natural landscapes, about eighty percent of Naqoyqatsi uses archive footage and stock images manipulated and processed digitally on non-linear editing (non-sequential) workstations and intercut with specially-produced computer generated imagery to demonstrate society’s transition from a natural environment to a technology-based one. Reggio described the process as “virtual cinema”.Read More »
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We are on the continent of Robert Kramer’s essay-films. What country is this, what year, what time? There are no establishing shots, no introductions to ease us in. Everything is in medias res. Kramer never gives us a superimposed title telling us we are watching ‘Vietnam’ or ‘Paris’ or ‘USA’; he never includes the identifying names of people, typewritten on screen, the first time we see them (and indeed, if we ever do learn this, it is often indirectly, by accident); he rarely introduces a radically different piece of footage into the montage with a reassuring title saying ‘ten years ago’, or a voice-off saying ‘I remember …’.Read More »
Until the beginning of the 20th century in France, the game of hide and seek was called “cligne-musette”. In a winter landscape, the film follows five kids and a young man who wanders alone between the desolate buildings of the Valibout neighbourhood, located in the province town of Plaisir. They will not cross paths but seem destined to meet the same fate, that of being abandoned to themselves; to hide and not to be found.Read More »
During its presentation at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, Fang and Claw was a sensation. The fruit of labours which spanned over two years, and whose editing amalgamated some 65,000 meters of film and 37 hours of sound, the film was unlike anything from the world of wildlife documentary. Not only was it technically interesting at the time (the construction and transportation of two large high powered spotlights for night scenes, as well as special trucks to carry them), nor the exceptional preparation required to craft each scene, but what all this work is in the service of. Totally without dialogue, with a soundtrack crafted by Michel Fano from natural sounds as well as an electronic instrumentarium, using an editing technique devoted to the rhythm and rhyme between each shot. Between plastic beauty and bloody cruelty, hunting scenes and scenes of rut, stillness, quickness, carnivorous, and nocturnal and diurnal races hound this feral world which becomes savage, becomes fragmented and alien.Read More »
With breathless pace, Hélène Chatelain (“the woman” in “La jetée”) reconstructs the life of Nestor Makhno from his writings, Soviet propaganda films, reactions of workers today and the memory he has left in the hearts & minds of his people in Gouliaïpolié, in the east of the Ukraine.Read More »
Much has been sad about this documentary, before it’s been shown. Europe outside Italy has its view clear. How is Berlusconi possible? You meet this agent with Mussolini songs in his cell phone. You meet the paparazzi king who with a considerable amount of self irony calls himself a Robin Hood, who takes from the poor and gives to himself. You also meet the 26-year-old worker, still living with his mother, who wants to be famous, combining Ricky Martin songs with karate tricks.Read More »
Documentary short made for Swedish public television (SVT) about the past and current situation for Native Americans in the US. The film was produced as an introduction to the American documentary Navajo Girl (Robert Young, 1973). Något om USA:s indianer [Something about the Indians in the USA] is another example of Nestler’s method of combining still photos, drawings and moving images from different sources.Read More »
