Experimental

KINO FLÄCHEN BUNKER (Das Kino und die Schauplätze) [Cinema, Surface, Bunker (The Cinema and its Settings)] which is also known as »Bombardement und Bunker« [Barrage and Bunker] is an essay film about the (narrative) space imagined by fiction films. Reflections and associations about movement in space as the basis for every kind of story-telling. The film is sometimes referred to as part of Bitomsky’s Cinema Trilogy. Sequences from over 20 movies are quoted and commented on by a team of three »researchers« (Bitomsky, Petzold, Tanner) in a sort of laboratory. TV-monitors, production stills or screenshots are used as well as quotations from books. A long night’s work.Read More »

Quote:
Lunch Break features 42 workers as they take their midday break in a corridor stretching nearly the entire shipyard. Contrary to her previous films, the camera is untethered and, as it slowly moves down the corridor, we experience what was a brief interval in the workday schedule expanded into a sustained gaze. Lined with lockers, the hallway seems not only an industrial nexus but also a social one, its surfaces containing a history of self-expression and customization.Read More »

Quote:
Sharon Lockhart’s film Rudzienko was shot over two years in collaboration with the residents of the Youth Center for Sociotherapy in Rudzienko, Poland. Building on the relationship she established in 2009 with Milena, who later moved to the center, Lockhart conceived of a series of workshops to empower the young women. The group worked together to develop dialog and movements to be enacted on camera based on their collective activities. The resulting film features a range of conversations, from the philosophical to everyday teenage concerns, and depicts actions both theatrical and mundane that voice the girls’ rich humanity. The Polish-language film proposes an innovative approach to the relationship between image and language by offsetting the spoken conversations with their written translations. (lockhartstudio.com)Read More »

Synopsis
The Casino del Duca is an ancient palazzo, a cross between a palace and a manor farm, located in San Basilio, near Taranto. For two thousand years it was the beating heart of an entire region, as well as the focal point of the most important estate in Apulia. And today it’s nothing: marred, destroyed, and forgotten. But above all, this film looks at time, at its legacies and ruins. The story of the Swiss traveler from the 18TH century evinces the contrast between its past splendor and current decay, deriving from a distracted modernity dominated by ugliness. History as a vestige and as death.Read More »

Quote:
The Experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage first appeared on Screening Room in May, 1973 to screen and discuss the films Eye Myth, Desist Film, Moth Light, and Blue Moses. Screening Room was a Boston television series that for almost ten years offered independent filmmakers a chance to show and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) television station. The series was developed and hosted by the filmmaker Robert Gardner who was Chairman of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University for many years. This unique television series explored genres which are rarely found on broadcast television including, animation, documentary, and experimental films.Read More »

Misshandlingen (1969)
Quote:
A young leftist gets in an argument with a man on the street who represents in his mind a typical upper-class person. He ends up in a fight and is charged with assault. The film illustrates how his “treatment” is destructive.Read More »

In the mountains of Córdoba hides a historical scar. In 1575, hundreds of Hênia-Kâmîare women, children and elders jumped off in order to avoid slavery. A free, poetic view at the very place where the largest mass suicide in the history of the territory known today as Argentina took place. The film is a phantasmagoric trip within this geographical extension, taking it as a vast, green cemetery.Read More »

Der Riese (The Giant), 1983
by Harun Farocki

[Harun Farocki gave the following introduction at a screening of Michael Klier’s Der Riese as part of the #VIDEOTAPES series at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in January 2014. Special thanks to the N.B.K. for their permission to reproduce the following text for ERC’s screening of Der Riese on April 29th, 2015 at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz. Translated by Fjoder Donderer. Edited by Ekrem Serdar and Jennifer Stob.]Read More »

Quote:
This single-channel video explores the effects of technology and information overload on the contemporary psyche. Set in a virtual tech-noir urban space populated by strange hybrids of non-humans and augmented people, part of the expansive, fractured narrative focuses on the continued adventures of Xanax Girl and her search for her companion—a hybrid dog/seal with the head of a boy—who has been abducted. Read More »