Experimental

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The film is a Homeric journey through the history of cinema. Its theme is based on the mythological Odysseus of Homer, the Ulysses of James Joyce, and the synthetic figure, Telemach/Phil, from the 24-hour-long piece «The Warp,» by Neil Oram. Werner Nekes combines these three figures, and he shows their stories within the history of «lighterature,» writing with light = film. His central theme, however, is visual language in of itself: Odysseus/Bloom is transformed into Uli the Photographer, Penelope/Molly into his model, and Telemach/Stephen into Phil, who begins his «Telemachia». The connecting of their three lives occurs during the course of a single day, in September of 1980, in Germany’s industrial Ruhrgebiet region, preceding the elections in the Federal Republic.Read More »

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“Knot” — wrapping things up, tying things up. “Not” – cross out, erasure. Material from a documentary about conductor Wilhelm Fürtwangler, material from a graffiti stencil work on a brick wall near where I live, a stencil of a girl writing something on the wall, what she wrote crossed out by another act of graffiti. These are the main elements. Also footage looking down at the water of Pearl Harbor with the ruins of battleship Arizona beneath. It had turned red with age. And some footage from Manchester the morning after the terrorists struck. All composed against a sound piece, a multiplication table repeated in four languages. Read More »

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A parody of anthropology, linguistics, and cultural imperialism. The film follows an unlikely team of linguists into the wilds of an ersatz Patagonia to study the last speakers of a dying language. That language apparently consists of a single word, which therefore means everything.Read More »

Cineuropa wrote:

Following on from L [+] (2012) and Pity [+] (2018), Babis Makridis is returning to the International Rotterdam Film Festival, within the Voices line-up, with Birds (Or How To Be One), a film based on Aristofane’s Greek comedy The Birds, exploring the desire for and fear of freedom. The story tells the tale of two men who distance themselves from the rest of humanity in order to find the man-bird Upupa and build a city where birds can live in harmony, far away from humankind. Makridis takes this premise as his starting point to develop a work of an experimental form, bringing together the casting process, rehearsals for a theatre production of the comedy in question (directed by Nikos Karathanos) and interviews bordering on the absurd.
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“Influenced by avantgarde artist-refugees from Europe, non-representational art dominated the art market after WW2 and pictorial comment on social conditions, popular before the war and still vital in some of Picasso’s work, went out of fashion. For the owners threatened by the appeal of socialism, it had become time to change the subject to pure aesthetics: ‘Rockefeller’s Paintings’ one MoMA show advertised. In a society that allows both non-religious and multi-religious thinking and where opposing beliefs can neutralize each other, an openness to new thinking is possible and a great development in the art did take place.Read More »

Dedicated to Bruce Baillie and Hollis Frampton.Read More »

“Machine Gun or Typewriter? is at once a landscape essay film, a fractious collage piece and an abstract confessional, restlessly serving the film noir narrative trope of a missing woman. Wilkerson plays the radio man, seen only behind a pop screen and a Sennheiser mic, who tells stories about falling in and out of love with his partner, another would-be political reactionary. Each anecdote is tethered to a place, both physically — mapped out with pins and string on the man’s wall — and figuratively: the man’s fury at the injustices perpetrated at these landmarks wrests attention away from the woman who has gone missing. There’s a perverse solace he finds in re-visiting narratives of systemic racism, class divide and police brutality.” Conor Bateman, 4:3Read More »

SYNOPSIS
The viper is deaf and the scorpion can’t see, so it is and so shall be, the same way the countryside is peaceful and the city bustling and the human being impossible to satisfy. Lacrau demands the return “to the curve where man got lost” in a journey from the city towards nature. The escape from chaos and emotional void we call progress; matter without spirit, without will. The search for the most ancient sensations and relationships of mankind. The amazement, the fear of the unknown, the loss of basic comforts, loneliness, the meeting with the other, the other animal, the other vegetable.
A dive looking for a connection with the world. Where beginning and end are the same, but I am not.Read More »

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Ultimate Reality is a collaborative performance by Baltimore’s Dan Deacon and Jimmy Joe Roche. It combines an intense musical composition for electronics and drums with a psychedelic montage of Arnold Schwarzenegger films that is projected at a monumental scale. The live energy of the performance has allowed the piece to freely move between art and music venues and grant it a wide audience of appreciation.Read More »