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Jedes Jahrzehnt hat seinen eigenen Zugang zum Himmel.
Clonetown, 1974 bis 1979, die Chronik eines Abschieds. Charon, ein abgesprungener Terrorist, sitzt am Ufer zur Vergessenheit und kommentiert die bevorstehende Vermoderung eines entführten Autohändlers. In seiner Erinnerung ziehen seine zweiten und dritten Ichs herauf, der megalomanische Künstler und der perverse Teppichhändler. Die ehedem achtlos mißhandelten Dinge rächen sich in seinem Kopf.Read More »
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Sixty Six began as a three minute, 16mm film I created in 2002– a pop poetic filled with the lush palette of Daylight Noir and primary color abstraction. For some undefined reason, I never took this little conjuring to the printing stage but would instead occasionally screen it publicly as tape-spliced workprint. In June of 2012, I felt compelled to finally complete this short. I decided to re-create it, shot for shot, in digital video, which in the intervening decade had replaced 16mm as my format of choice. But a surprising thing happened as I transposed some of the original shots into video, the piece kept expanding as new images and materials spontaneously folded in.Read More »
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Lockhart began by constructing a portrait studio in a small rural community, and extending an open invitation to local children, and then by immersing herself in their environment and noting the complexity of their interactions. Her highly descriptive, almost painterly portraits, taken over the course of several years, abjure narration for the pleasure of the gaze and the notion of temporality. The studio remains a constant, its black backdrop, cement floor and natural lighting a theatrical setting that allows the children to develop a different kind of relationship to the camera. Those stills stand in stark contrast to the pictorialism of a series showing the community’s majestic natural surroundings, and to the portraits on 16mm film that accompany them, which are both literally and figuratively moving.Read More »
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Dawn of the Capricorn, made by Ahmad Faroughi Kadjar (Qajar) in 1964, is a strange composition that looks at the stagnated situation of a country suspended between the old world and the modern era. Nevertheless, while its aim is clear, the message is vague and up to interpretation. Wherever it casts its eye, Faroughi’s camera tries to register this somehow cynical dichotomy. It begins in a theater house in the old city of Isfahan that has staged Shakespeare’s Othello. There is no attentive audience and the players are detached and exhausted. A young man from amongst the audience begins a long journey into the web of narrow alleys of Isfahan and ends up in the main mosque of the city where he meets a young girl. Despite the initial chaotic situations, from its halfway point, the film begins to render a silent observation of a night that will end at the break of dawn.Read More »
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A wordless film, save for a voice-over introducing us to the imagery of dreams. A shirtless young man dreams of awakening to finds photographs of a muscular sailor carrying him in his arms. He goes to a bar where the sailor from his dream displays his muscular upper torso. A gang of sailors, swinging chains, enters menacingly. He watches, smoking. They surround him and an assault begins. Surreal touches accent the dream-like qualities. A phallic firework, a flaming Christmas tree, and the burning photographs provide climax and closure as the young man, back in bed, is beside the sailor.Read More »
M. is a common man, and we see his everyday life as he wonders through the city. But he’s also “a reactionary priest, a survivor of the right wing”, as David Oubiña properly described him –someone who is “rejected by everyone”. We can see him not as an individual or as psychologist, but as “a case that sheds light on contexts”, according to Cozarinsky himself. Although the film shares a spirit with other films of the so-called Argentine underground scene of the late 60’s and early 70’s that opened the way for the careers of Fischerman, Bejo, Ludueña and Filippelli, Dot Dot Dot features a figure that has fascinated and marked Cozarinsky’s posterior films: a character who is uncomfortable about living in his own time. Read More »
The Magic of Méliès
Director: Georges Méliès
Country: France
Year: 1904-1908
Tribute is paid to the screen’s first special effects wizard in this special collection of marvelously restored prints. In addition to more than a dozen of his early trompes l’oeil – such as Untamable Wiskers, Tchin-Chao, the Chinese Conjurer, and The Mermaid – this volume boasts the illuminating documentary, Georges Méliès, Cinema Magician and a rare hand-tinted print of the fantastic spectacle An Impossible Voyage.Read More »
Amir Dutta’s latest film, Wittgenstein Plays Chess With Marcel Duchamp, Or How Not To Do Philosophy, is a 17-minute animation that adapts an essay of the same name by Steven B. Gerrard. The essay examines how Wittgenstein and Duchamp, both keen chess players, used the game to question language and perception. The film has a winking style of animation—by the director’s wife, Ayswarya S. Dutta—that involves the juxtaposition of cutout figures, objects and backgrounds. It’s a sprightly investigation into the nature of surface appearances and how we perceive meaning, packed with allusions to art, linguistics, philosophy and chess.Read More »
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From Wikipedia: Pull My Daisy (1959) is a short film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of a never-completed stage play entitled Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It starred Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross, Delphine Seyrig and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank’s then-young son.Read More »