An abstract short consisting of a series of quick shots, in which hands are shown doing a variety of things: peeling an egg, holding a cup, etc. Tinted pink, these shots are consistently interrupted by other black and white shots of other images.Read More »
Quote:
Technical mistakes? This is a Brazil’s specialty, this land without know-how. The documentary which, as Marcio Souza said in his modesty, should be to current Brazilian cinema as Aruanda was to Cinema Novo, will be shown in Brasília – we hope – and should fall like a thorn inside the throat of all idiots who are yet to discover Brazil – by the way, Oswald de Andrade, anthropophagous, language designer, revolutionary and whatever more that could exist in this section of the Third World: Brazil.
– Jairo FerreiraRead More »
Synopsis:
Peyote Queen is the second and best known part of de Hirsch’s trilogy, The Color of Ritual, the Color of Thought. It is preceded by Divinations (1964) and Shaman (1966). The film’s imagery is abstract, consisting of both live action footage and animated sequences which de Hirsch created by painting and etching directly on the 16mm film stock. Split screens, kaleidoscopic lenses, and abstract animations are used to create a psychedelic effect. De Hirsch had a background in painting (she published an interview of the abstract expressionist painter, Willem de Kooning, in 1955), and her films of this period have been described as “painterly.” The soundtrack consists of African drumming and singing interspersed with American pop music.Read More »
Quote:
“…What sounds rather bookish and intimidating, in fact unfolds an enormous sensual stimulus on screen. In more than 20 sequences, based in part on work by Stifter and Camus, Hamburg’s experimental film director and a number of students from Braunschweig and Göttingen demonstrate a higher school of hearing and seeing. With manipulations of sight and sound, which are at times highly complex and mathematically precise, he shows the tension between optical and acoustic elements, inventing ever new combinations from which an abstract poetry issues forth. Nekes works with single frame mechanism and multiple copying of the images, thus defamiliarizing the sound at the same time. The title of the film pertains to Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. Lagado is the name of the academy in which scientists of the most diverse disciplines work at strange projects.” – Hans C. BlumenbergRead More »
Quote:
A documentary in 17 movements, in which testimonies and the guitar define the genius, the bravery and the modesty of Carlos Paredes. In PERPETUAL MOVEMENTS ‚ A TRIBUTE TO CARLOS PAREDES a dialog is established between a guitar and a SP8 camera, in an aesthetic which evocates the memory of old family pictures, full of intimacy, revealed in the sharing of simple stories of life. The Carlos Paredes’s concert in Auditório Carlos Alberto, in Oporto, 1984, is the starting point for the unfolding of prison stories, resistance, success and amateurism, stories marked by simplicity and passion.Read More »
Untouched Director’s Cut
Chilean film maker Ignacio Agüero begins filming objects in his flat that are connected to the history of his family and his country. But the outside world keeps intruding on his private film setting: beggars wanting something to eat, friends, neighbours, delivery men or young graduates looking for a job. Soon, Agüero turns the tables on them and asks his guests whether he may be their guest and accompany them to their homes, setting out on excursions into dangerous parts of town and lives: corrugated iron shacks, drugs. shootings. A journey from the inner world of one’s thoughts into the outer world of the present.Read More »
Quote:
“Diwan, a lyric anthology, an outdoor movie with people. With people living in the surrounding precious and very beautifully photographed nature, are neither more nor less than one part of it. What Nekes manages there with landscape, as a cunning and quote many fine artist in a medium that runs in time, as he defeated the time changed, by themselves for change of scenery uses, as it interferes with the laws of chronology through the rewind ability of the camera or destroyed, which is a compelling and highly aesthetic experimental company.”Read More »
Beavers shot The Hedge Theatre in Rome in the 1980s. It is an intimate film inspired by the Baroque architecture and stone carvings of Francesco Borromini and St. Martin and the Beggar, a painting by the Sienese painter Il Sassetta. Beavers’ montage contrasts the sensuous softness of winter light with the lush green growth brought by spring rains. Each shot and each source of sound is steeped in meaning and placed within the film’s structure with exacting skill to build a poetic relationship between image and sound. (Susan Oxtoby, Toronto International Film Festival)Read More »
Kékszakállú is an unconventional portrayal of several young women witnessed in immersive yet indeterminate states: within their bodies, among their friends and lovers, and ultimately in a culture of economic and spiritual recession. The torpor of boredom and privilege is undercut by the vicissitudes of Argentina’s economic malaise, forcing the offspring of a vanishing upper class to extricate themselves from the props of familial privilege. The film presents a documentary-like exposure of the quotidian while extending possibilities for redemption among this brood of the weary. Obliquely inspired by Bela Bartok’s sole opera, Kékszakállú radically transposes the portent of Bluebeard’s Castle into something far less recognizable: a tale of generational inertia, situated between the alternating and precisely rendered tableaux of work and repose in Buenos Aires and Punta del Este.Read More »