“Neshat spoke to The Stranger’s Jen Graves on Tuesday, by phone from her home in New York.
I first want to talk about Zarin, the anorexic prostitute who hallucinates at the sight of her john, then flees to a women’s bath—a beautiful place, sparkling with dusty light—where she scrubs her own skin until she bleeds. A few years ago, I caught your short video portrait of her, and was never able to get her out of my mind. You’ve said her character feels the closest to you.Read More »
Plain Talk & Common Sense (uncommon senses) “is a complex essay-film, a follow-up a decade and some years later to Speaking Directly, and so another State of the Nation discourse, made for Britain’s Channel Four in the year 1986-87. The work involved extensive travel around the United States, and poses an examination of just what America is/was, or what do we mean when we speak of it. Done in a series of radically different sections which collide with each other in a manner intended to provoke thinking, Plain Talk, which was made by an American and intended for American viewers, was indeed
broadcast in Britain, but somewhat predictably, not in the USA. “
–Jon Jost on his website. His website blurb used to be longerRead More »
A mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind window into modern China, People’s Park is a single-shot documentary that immerses viewers in an unbroken journey through a famous urban park in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.Read More »
In Untitled Fall ’95, Bag, at the time an art student, “plays” Bag the art student. In a series of deadpan performances, Bag gathers fragments of pop detritus, fashioning a thoroughly mediated document that is at once a celebration and a record of loss. With the narrative inevitability of a TV serial, the eight diaristic segments trace a woman’s struggle to make sense of her experience at art school. As each installment marks the start of a new semester, Bag’s character addresses the camera with her latest observations and frustrations.Read More »
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To Lavoisier Who Died in the Reign of Terror (1991) is a collaboration with filmmaker Carl Brown, who specializes in homebrewed chemical film development. In a series of tableaux, people perform everyday tasks — sleeping, dining, reading, card-playing — as the camera arcs past and over them (the replete set of positions recalls La région centrale’s movements). Brown abraded the film stock, creating a continuous dynamic surface-effect tension with the comparatively static views and cueing the soundtrack, the crackle of fire. The physics and chemistry of combustion were the scientific focus of Lavoisier, the 18th-century savant.Read More »
Two American Audiences (Richard Leacock, Mark Woodcock, 1968, 40 min., 16mm): Announcing itself as “a typical Pennebaker production of a typical Godard visit,” JLG speaks with grad students and Serge Losique at NYU in April 1968. Pennebaker: “When Jean-Luc Godard came to New York to make a film [1 A.M./1 P.M.] with me and Ricky Leacock, he was anxious to see America before the revolution broke out, torn up as it was with the Vietnam furor. Godard’s most recent film, La Chinoise, was playing, and Columbia University students, who had initiated their student uprising on the day the film opened, were pouring into the theater.Read More »
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The latest film by Hartmut Bitomsky is, just like much of his early work, a original film essay about film and film history. Just as in earlier films, he makes inventive use of the potential offered by the medium video to analyse films.The history of the UFA is the story of a risky financial venture in the twenties and a propaganda instrument in the thirties. Bitomsky’s approach stands out because he involvesthis social and political context in investigating and dissecting films.Read More »
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“Les œuvres de Lena Vandrey qui se trouvent au Musée d’Art Brut de Lausanne, acquises par Dubuffet, sont des effigies de femmes, des sortes de déesses, d’amazones, des personnages totémiques d’une grande force d’expression. Elles sont faites de matières très brutes. Ce n’est pas de la peinture illusionniste. Il y a une tension dramatique qui détruit le système de représentation pour créer un contact beaucoup plus charnel avec l’objet” (Michel Thévoz).Read More »
A documentary about the early beginning of the deconstructivist era of the architecture flourishing in the 80´ties.
Interviews with Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Frank Gehry, Daniel Liebeskind, Derrida, Micheal Sorkin and more.Read More »