‘Vertigo Rush’ (Johann Lurf, 2007) starts with a slow and soundless Hitchcock zoom, but ends in a pulsating and electrically glowing mind fuck, which is as if Paul Sharits and Michael Snow had remade the last scene of Kubrick‘s ‘2001’.
International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2008Read More »
The Co(te)lette Film is Mike Figgis’ cinematographic adaptation of the dance performance by Ann Van den Broek.
Women and flesh, beauty and perishableness, raw and fragile. A delirious desire overwhelms the dancers. A desire for physical and mental satisfaction. The dancers go from appeal to sensuality, over lust, fleshness, fame, success, reflection and control, to silence. They are slaves of their own desires while trying to get in control of them. Female bodies in a frenzy.Read More »
Commissioned by the ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen), this is an experimental essay on the city of Paris shot in 16mm in Les Halles district with an entire section devoted to the construction of the Centre Pompidou in 1976. An urban hell, full of noise and fury.Read More »
Selection of 14 experimental films of Paul (& Menno) de Nooijer
De Nooijer’s first attempt at filmmaking was in collaboration with his former teacher Frans Zwartjes.From then on he made short experimental films and photos and combined the two.
Paul and Menno (his son) have collaborated on numerous projects to produce video clips, commercials and short films. The autonomous work and the commercial work look similar, and elements used in the first return in the second and vice versa. But the commercial works are more straightforward, less layered in their meaning. Some deal with social (AIDS) or environmental issues (global warming).Read More »
A series of cameo portraits of the filmmaker’s friends and lovers intercut with a playful celebration of fruits and vegetables in nature.Read More »
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An opera ballet that doesn’t exist. A ghost-like piece, played in Opera Bastille and danced at Opera Garnier, An almost mystical link between both scenes, A musician is testing sounds in Bastille’s pit, The choir are taking their place in the rehearsal studio, Both sides are fine tuning the work in progress of an opera ballet : SARAH WINCHESTER, her grief, her madness, her home and her ghosts.Read More »
Standard Time is 8 minutes and feels, hypnotically, like a time-less segment fragment of life.(Life-physical movement in a space/time enclosure). The camera swivels (pans) left to right, over and over again, then tilts, up and down, over and over again establishing movement as such as the given conditions of perception and existence. This suspended tension of being holds for both the cameraman and the spaces/walls/objects/(people?)…The film establishes each viewer’s autonomous sense of self. The bombarding impulses, through the ‘repeated’ pans/tilts, permit (for each viewer, each time) different moments of reality to become relevant, exciting etc. The speed at which the camera sees the given visually creates frustration at not being able to hold (the) experience, to pattern it in a conventional manner. Michael Snow’s film activates one’s internal mechanisms for grasping, (idiosyncratically, in time), the substances one is faced with, a negates objective experience once and for all. In terms of the politics of experience and human consciousness, few films could be less fascist. Standard Time is also a beautiful ‘8’ minutes. – Peter Gidal.Read More »
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The Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969. They are seen as one of Brakhage’s major works and include the feature-length 23rd Psalm Branch, considered by some to be one of the filmmaker’s masterworks and described by film historian P. Adams Sitney as “an apocalypse of imagination.” One of the filmmaker’s most overtly political films, 23rd Psalm Branch is often interpreted as being Brakhage’s reaction to the Vietnam War.Read More »
