Experimental

A man who has devoted his life to tending roses finally confronts his love objects, castigating them for their preening self-regard and disregard of his own feelings, resulting in a violent catharsis.Read More »

An auto-documentary about a disenfranchised Everyman and his struggle to re-integrate himself into society. He fails and turns to crime.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
Genet’s only film — hounded by the censors, unavailable, secret — is an early and remarkably moving attempt to portray homosexual passions. Already a classic, it succeeds as perhaps no other film to intimate the explosive power of frustrated sex; male prisoners in solitary confinement “embracing” walls, ramming them in erotic despair with erect penis, swaying convulsively to auto-erotic lust, kissing their own bodies and tattoos in sexual frenzy. In a supremely poetic (and visual) metaphor of sexual deprivation, two prisoners in adjoining cells symbolically perform fellatio by alternately blowing or inhaling each other’s cigarette smoke through a straw inserted in a wall opening, while masturbating. Like all of Genet’s early work, the entire film is, in effect, a single onanistic fantasy, filled with desperate frustration and sensuous nostalgia. In the end, and after many failures, some flowers — painfully passed from one barred window to the next — are finally caught by the prisoner in the adjoining cell in a poetic affirmation of love in infinite imprisonment.Read More »

Part of the New American Cinema group in New York City during the 60s, Jack Smith’s flamboyant aesthetic can be characterized by a mix of baroque exoticism, gaudy costumes, and detritus salvaged from the city streets. Flaming Creatures is a non-narrative, Dionysian orgy, complete with wild dancing, gender bending, and a climactic earthquake. The carnivalesque madness of the film is reinforced by the chaotic density of its formal composition. Smith’s deliberate spatial disorientation creates a pansexual landscape of tangled body parts; just as the viewer is unable to situate the visual coordinates of the image, the creatures are unaware of which extremity belongs to whom.Read More »

From the DVD notes:
”A computer-created animation of high-speed stroboscope mandalas with molecular-like energy. The surprise of this film is the color produced from the strobing black and white symmetrical images. Done with an electronic stylus on a special computer at MIT. This film demonstrates the possible use of the computer interacting with the graphic artist.”

“Electronic-optical computer finger-painting. Laws of reflective mirror images. An interplay between drawing by hand and computer. Art form of the future – electronic calligraphy.” – S.V., not dated.Read More »

A montage of images of film making is followed by a silent western story.Read More »

Quote:
“Das Kino und der Tod/Cinema and Death”(1988), is one of his ‘Cinema Anthology’ ,which was made by extraordinary Bitomsky’s voice and movement of his hands that turn over photos of murder in films.It’s ‘a film noir as a film essay which analyzes film noir’. When he analyzes classic films like Hitchkock’s “Torn Curtain”,Lang’s “Hangmen also die”, Siegel’s “The Killers”,Aldrich’s “Kiss me deadly”,etc, each viewer tries to remake the images that always becomes uncertain in the memory,with the movement of Bitomsky’s hands and voice as a detective showing photos of evidence of murders. There is an astonishing moment of new discovery of the image which we remember as a movement of the film.Read More »

A FICUNAM commission for four directors, Liminal seeks to play with poetic affinities between film and music. Moving across aesthetic and generational differences, the film-makers explore this relationship through four distinct stories as to context and imaginary.

Within the category of world cinéma d’auteur, Philippe Grandrieux and Lav Diaz have much in common in terms of their affinities with radical cinematographic form: both are extremely inventive in their practical relationship between music and narration.Read More »

A short film in honor of Federico Fellini’s centenary.Read More »