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Industrial Soundtrack for the Urban Decay traces the development of one of music’s most quietly influential genres from the post-industrial cities of Europe to America’s avant-garde scene, and features contributions from members of pioneering outfits : Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, NON, SPK, Test Dept, Clock DVA, Re/Search – V Vale, Z’EV, Click Click, Sordide Sentimental, Hula, The Klinik, Ant-Zen, Orphx, In The Nursery and Prima Linea.Read More »
ORG and excess roads to wisdom
Fernando Birri
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” said William Blake. This was the mantra we attempted to analyze in the non-film ORG. I want to try to make this lecture correspond formally to its subject, an experimental film. This may or may not work, but I want to attempt an experimental lecture as a way into the film.
I chose Memories of Fire by Eduardo Galeano because I think it gets to the heart of our experience. That is, the Americas as a vessel for delirium. This has as much to do with dreams as it has to do with the creative energy that some call poetry.Read More »
“It’s a black-and-white record of European cities in the dark (2-5am), from Basle to Belfast. Quiet, and meditative, what ermerges most strongly is an eerie sense of city landscapes as deserted film sets, in which the desolate architecture overwhelms any sense of reality. The only reassurance that we are not in some endless machine-Metropolis is the shadow of daytime activity: a juggernaut plunging through a darkened village, a plague of small birds in the predawn light. The whole thing is underscored by a beautiful ‘composed’ soundtrack, from quietly humming stretlamps to reggae and the rumble of armoured cars in Belfast. A strange and remarkable combination of dream, documentary and science-fiction.”
Chris Auty, in: Programmheft London Film Co-opRead More »
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Finally reunited, Stan Brakhage’s masterpiece Dog Star Man is an experimental movie without sound. A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of our Earth appear, woods, a part of a body, a nude woman perhaps giving birth. Imagery evokes movement across time and space. If the movie tends sometime toward abstraction, there is still a kind of off-the-tracks narration here. Dog Star Man could be about a man, lost in mountain, struggling to survive, and as he fell the breath of death on his shoulder, remembering trough flashes his wife and son.Read More »
War Requiem is a 1989 film adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s musical piece of the same name.
It was shot in 1988 by the British film director Derek Jarman with the 1963 recording as the soundtrack, produced by Don Boyd and financed by the BBC. Decca Records required that the 1963 recording be heard on its own, with no overlaid soundtrack or other sound effects. The film featured Nathaniel Parker as Wilfred Owen, and Laurence Olivier in his last acting appearance in any medium before his death in July 1989. The film is structured as the reminiscences of Olivier’s character, the Old Soldier in a wheelchair, and Olivier recites “Strange Meeting” in the film’s prologue.Read More »
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The Scream, a 63-minute sequence depicting nude bodies engaged in variations of cathartic experience, is projected on eleven separate channels across five walls, with a three-second delay for each channel at its Hong Kong premiere along with the new gallery installation, The Bare Life.Read More »
This compilation film focuses on the contents of Nazi propaganda shorts such as “The Beauty of Work” (1934), “We Have No Problems” (1933), or “The Will To Live” (1944) that preceded the feature films in German movie theaters between 1933 and 1945. The shorts reveal that men and women workers were idealized, uniformity was stressed, optimism in the face of adversity was the goal, and, in general, all the classic lies that dictatorships use to control and mold their citizens are featured. Deutschland Bilder would be offensive to many because of its content alone, even more so when one remembers what these same Nazis were doing in the extermination camps. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »
When Max, a young poet hires a marketing company to turn his suicide-by-jumping into a mass-media spectacle, he finds that his subversive intentions are quickly diluted into a reactionary gesture, and his motivations are revealed as a desperate attempt to seek attention through celebrity.Read More »
