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Gallivant is a fantastic British road movie and Andrew Kotting deserves to take his place with those two other great film iconoclasts and chroniclers of late twentieth century life in Britain: Derek Jarman and Patrick Keiller. He is also a great stylist and humourist, which makes the film very accessible despite it’s restless experimentation and disregard for documentary conventions.Read More »
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An American provincial town’s public consultation about the expansion of the Wal-Mart supermarket, recreated in minute detail as a feature film shot in black-and-white 16mm. The transcript from the real life public hearing is serving as the actors’ manuscript – complete with a five minute break in the middle! – while power-point presentations from the meeting are serving as backdrop.Read More »
With a screening time equivalent to a full day’s work, Everson turns the cinema into a factory floor. Workers are observed while performing specific tasks, as well as while taking breaks. His humble approach paradoxically results in a monumental film.Read More »
”This rarely screened 1989 masterpiece by Pat O’Neill is a moving meditation on industrialization, focusing on the dystopic desert created by Los Angeles’s vast water consumption. O’Neill conceived the film partly as an answer to Godfrey Reggio’s mind-numbing Koyaanisqatsi (1983), a hypnotic inventory of touristy landscapes showing a world out of balance. In contrast O’Neill creates images full of internal contradictions, using optical printing to collage different locales and suggest the inevitable conflict of industry and nature. One slow dissolve between the Owens Valley desert and Los Angeles at night suggests a direct cause and effect: the city flourished only by despoiling the land. Using time lapse to make weather changes visible, O’Neill renders people as fleeting shadows whose power to alter the landscape fails to mitigate the fragility and shortness of human life on a geologic scale.” – Fred Camper, The Chicago ReaderRead More »
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A complex and fascinating experimental exploration of time and identity. Anti-Clock is a film of authentic, startling originality.
Brilliantly mixing cinema and video techniques, Arden and Bond have created a movie that captures the anxiety and sense of danger that has infiltrated the consciousness of so many people in western society.
Filled with high tension and high intelligence, Anti-Clock is mysterious, disturbing, fascinating and exciting’. (Jack Kroll, Newsweek)Read More »
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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 »