Experimental

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 »

Quote:
Correction Please is a formally adventurous and rigorously philosophical essay on the nature of early cinema, made under the auspices of the Arts Council of Great Britain in the late 1970s. It emerged in the era of works like Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall’s Argument (1978), two other instances of filmmaking-as-film-theory to which Burch’s otherwise singular project might be compared. The topic of Correction Please is the development of narrative cinematic language from film’s inception to the period of sound—what Burch has dubbed “the gestation of the Institutional Mode”—investigated through a series of tautly structured segments, including ten archival examples of so-called “primitive” films made prior to 1906, animated diagrams explicating these early works, quotations from Maxim Gorky, Christian Metz, and Lillian Gish, and, most dramatically, a series of five staged sequences that recapitulate and analyze emblematic formal properties of five different chapters in cinema’s evolution.Read More »

Quote:
David Gladwell is perhaps best-known for his celebrated work as editor on Lindsay Anderson’s If…. and O Lucky Man! Requiem for a Village, along with the four exquisite and startling short films also included in this BFI Flipside Dual Format Edition, reveal him to be an unfairly overlooked director of ground-breaking work.

The idyllic, rural past of a Suffolk village rises to life in Requiem for a Village (1975) through the memories of an old man who tends a country graveyard. With influences that range from the poet TS Eliot to the artist Stanley Spencer, and using real village residents as amateur actors, the film powerfully suggests that history and memory are ever-present in our lives, regardless of the unrelenting drive towards modernisation.Read More »

Quote:
A horrifying series of murders, committed by a teenaged killer in 1968, prompted a group of filmmakers to chart his path, capturing the things he might have seen before committing his crimes. Their result is this provocative, rarely-screened meditation on geography and society.Read More »

Independent filmmaker Nina Hedenius Det speglar i mitt öga [My Eye Is Reflecting] is a poetic film on the act of seeing and on the details that rarely gets our attention. The film is a collage of diverse scenes depicting life, death, objects and people; a Swedish crayfish party, a classroom, cows in the meadow, the Stockholm subway… With musical effects by Ralph Lundsten.Read More »