Experimental

“Ten properties of a subject, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness.”

– Robert Bresson

“They began very promptly—these tender, fluttering sensations; they began with the sight of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened and brightened by the season; with the carpeted fields and flowering hedge-rows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the spires of the rural churches, peeping above the rook-haunted tree-tops; with the oak-studded parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light…”

– from Henry James’ “An International Episode”Read More »

Quote:
Stan Brakhage’s 1974 film The Stars Are Beautiful is unusual among his works, primarily because it features a soundtrack, in the form of a narration (as well as direct sound which accompanies home-video footage of his children clipping a chicken’s wings). He wrote the voiceover himself over the course of a month or two: growing tired of the same old creation myths, he invented a new one every night – imaginative speculations on where the stars, sun, and moon came from. The film itself is not one of his strongest works but the narration is inventive, humorous, often silly, and occasionally quite stirringRead More »

An essay-film on language and theater, on human communication – intellectual in content, but purely poetic in terms of form: image, sound, language, cinema. Stagefright, with the exception of one shot, was all filmed in a small puppet theater space, actors against black.Read More »

This little-seen and little-discussed film combines animation with self-reflexive, live action segments to embody the anarchic, satiric spirit of the poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930). The film also showcases Sergei Yuktevich’s fondness for formal experimentation. It is nominally adapted from Mayakovsky’s play “The Bedbug” and his screenplay “Forget All About the Fireplace.”Read More »

T – WO – MEN
Germany, 1972, sound, colour, 90 mins, 16mm. Sound by Anthony Moore. With Geeske Hof-Helmers and Dore O.

Werner Nekes: a short comment on the aesthetic organisation of T-wo-men: The orthography of the title refers to the ‘horizontal readability’ of film. The tiniest film information is an amalgamation of two individual images in the mind of the recipient. Cader A joins up with Cader B to achieve the thaumatropic effect, to a form a ‘cine’, the smallest transmission element of cinematic information. Read More »

Quote:
“A long setting of a basement window to the street. Slower and stopping down the street brothers in Hamburg (where Nekes lives). A stand of the belly of a girl on her legs and her dress. Then, vagina and penis, as they are complementary. The 60-minute film is silent. The canvas, as in previous Nekes movies, to the canvas of the painter. It does not look in an imaginary space, one sees an area that is divided divided, with each cut and replaced by a new canvas. In particular, an impression: strong, cool calculation. It stands there like a block. Immovable. The picture is so much that it is beyond the linguistically appropriate formulation. One must see that.” – Werner KließRead More »

Aryan Kaganof & Nicola Deane | 2003 | 5 min. | video | no dialogue

“We cannot abstain from watching the revelation of a being that would be an object neither for herself nor for any other gaze and yet which would effect, in the mystery of her own invisibility, the condensation of all objectivity.”

Aryan Kaganof plays with the contradiction and relationship between the vulnerable, private realm and the voyeuristic, objectified domain in a film about a young woman’s sexual initiation.Read More »

Synopsis:
The film opens with a rubber-clad woman stepping sensuously out of a limousine. The camera lovingly closes-up on her stilleto’ed foot… She enters a dark desolate warehouse, and meets two men, who proceed to chain her up and worship her body. Originally projected on three screens simultaneously. Music by legendary noise musician Merzbow.Read More »

Filmmaker and teacher, Stéphane Marti has been researching experimental cinema as an art form liberated of aesthetic codes and the economics of big budget cinema. His work is primarily focused on the themes of the sacred and the human body. An avid supporter of the Super-8 format, he has been fighting for its merits as a tool. He has used this format film after film and has been sharing his experiences with new filmmakers during his workshops at the Sorbonne’s College of the Arts (Paris I).Read More »