“Est-ce une chose douce et tendre, une chose énigmatique, une chose humaine, une chose à nulle autre pareille, une chose fragile ? C’est une chose tissée de mille choses, douces, fragiles, énigmatiques et humaines. Le Journal de septembre est un voyage intérieur qui se déploie jour après jour d’une forme à une autre, glissant peu à peu d’images du quotidien du cinéaste à des séquences plus intimes et plus surréelles.” — Centre de l’Audiovisuel à BruxellesRead More »
In an avant-garde attempt to explore widely disparate, unconnected subjects dealing with topics as diverse as sex, a broken marriage, artists’ housing in New York, and Central American politics, director Yvonne Rainer meanders through a lot of philosophical and rhetorical territory. In the end, the voyage may be too much for most viewers, although certain segments of the film stand out as quite successful.Read More »
A young girl that regularly dresses as a boy falls in love and seduces a young girl that has no clue that her lover has the same sex. When the girl introduces ‘her boyfriend’ to her father he becomes skeptical and unmasks the fraud. Even though, strangely, the feelings of the girl persist without shifting, the father does not allow them to ever see the other again. Furious and delusional the ‘boy’ develops an adventurous plan to prove his true ‘masculinity’ to the father of his lover.Read More »
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 »
Martin tried to fight the system and is now on the run. Sara is a conceptual artist. Together, they join the revolutionary commune in the countryside and become the target of the police. Inspector Ambroz knows that the right questions are more important than the answers, because perhaps none of this is true.
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Exploding the possibilities of animation and genre, Dalibor Barić’s dazzling debut dances from noir to sci-fi, from Philip K. Dick to Tarkovsky with philosophical abandon. Through a vivid array of technical effects, this hyper-sensory rush punches a hole in the fabric of nostalgia and reality.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 »
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In Removed, Naomi Uman physically erases the female body from old 16mm porn using nail polish remover and household bleach. This gorgeous attack of beauty and domestic product on celluloid results in a series of animated white ‘holes’ writhing orgasmically in the place of porn stars. The leering men are captured in various inadequate poses and the original dialogue tracks remain, complete with badly dubbed exchanges. The hole in the film becomes an erotic zone, a blank on which a fantasy body is projected. This brilliant work is unusually precise: it is politically subversive, pornography in its own right, sassy and extremely funny.Read More »
Synopsis
SONG AND SOLITUDE was conceived and photographed with the loving help and kindness of Susan Vigil during the last year of her life. Its glance is more toward an expression of inner landscape, or what it feels like to be, rather than an exploration of the external visual world as such.Read More »
Orleans in the year 2011. Joane and Sylvia are twenty. They work as dancers in a striptease club at the edge of town. In the center the annual Joan of Arc commemoration is underway. The two girls find themselves caught up in these strange festivities.Read More »