Experimental

Originally, Documentarist was intended as a traditional documentary about a country that has to face challenging problems such as war, unemployment, extreme poverty, mass emigration, alcoholism and crime. Unfortunately, Harutyun Khachatryan did not raise enough state money in order to make the film he wanted to and therefore had to settle for a different project. Thus, he decided on a very unorthodox narrative strategy. By weaving together different styles, such as documentarist observation and docu-drama approach, he shed a new light on the complexities and challenges a director has to face in order to present a multifaceted picture of reality. 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 »

Quote:
“Wavelength” was shot in one week in December, 1966, preceded by a year of notes, thoughts, mutterings. It was edited and first print seen in May, 1967. (The Film-Makers’ Cooperative)

Quote:
I wanted to make a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic ideas. I was thinking of, planning for a time monument in which the beauty and sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of “illusion” and “fact,” all about seeing.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 »

Quote:
Filmed from the artist’s window during lockdown, short fragments from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s speeches relating to COVID-19 are combined with views of the London skyline.Read More »

Synopsis:
The film interprets a story from the Uttara Kanda of the epic poem Ramayana, where Rama sends his wife, Sita, to the jungle to satisfy his subjects. Sita is never actually seen in the film, but her virtual presence is compellingly evoked in the moods of the forest and the elements. The film retells the epic from a feminist perspective, and is about the tragedy of power and the sacrifices that adherence to dharma demands, including abandoning a chaste wife.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
One of the very few Brakhage films to have a plot and be acted, this bitter and wise polemic pits an actor who constantly confesses his role against an unseen audience. He sarcastically mocks our belief in filmic truth, disclaiming the omnipotence we ascribe to him and the director and insists on the falsehood and artificiality of the art work. This is a very modern film of ambiguity, mixed tenses, skepticism, and ultimately, anguish at the realization that the artist is both con-man and magician, impotently straining for unattainable perfection yet inevitably being taken seriously by an audience panting to be duped.Read More »

IMDB:
For two years, HPG has daily pointed his camera on his work, his friends, his lovers. Exposed, sometimes with unusual tenderness, his thoughts, his emotions, his body, his sex. He thus delivers a hilarious and poetic filmed diary, a piece of raw brutal art, Bukowskien until the end of the night.Read More »

“Secret Tear / Secret White / Secret Language / The Secret Soul” (MH)Read More »