Experimental

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 »

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“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 »

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Not a good movie, though a prime example of audacious, rule-breaking cinema. It’s an early seventies French film shown almost entirely in negative exposure, which in itself makes it worth a watch.

The Package
LE GRAND DEPART (THE GRAND DEPARTURE; 1972) was the only feature directed by the famed French painter and sculptor Martial Raysse. In keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the time, LE GRAND DEPART has no plot to speak of and appears to have been largely made up on the spot. It shares a kinship with such films as BEGOTTEN (1990) and the X-rated short THE OPERATION (1995), both of which experimented with negative exposure (and far more effectively).
For decades LE GRAND DEPART was thought a “lost” film, but in late 2008 it made its DVD debut (in France), to alternately enchant and disappoint viewers anew.Read More »

Seven unique state intersections along Nebraska’s border.
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The twenty-seven minute Vulgar Fractions (2011) employs a less linear but equally indexical method of visual inquiry. Shot at seven different state intersections along the Nebraska border, the film moves between these disparate locations with casual impetus, observing different seasons and unique landmarks with a patient, detailed sense of discovery. Rappmund, who was born in Wyoming, appears to have a deep affection for the sounds and spirit of the less traversed corners of the American landscape, the unrepresented but no less storied regions of the country, whether that’s the heartland depicted in Vulgar Fractions, the treacherous West Coast terrain of Psychohydrography, or the volatile northern expanses of Topophilia. Without a comparable focal point to that of Psychohydrography, Rappmund’s time-lapse effect is left in Vulgar Fractions to animate the small details (clouds, leaves, light, snow) coloring these state lines, signs of life amidst otherwise serene locales. (Source: mubi)Read More »

DAMNED IF YOU DON’T is Friedrich’s subversive and ecstatic response to her Catholic upbringing. Blending conventional narrative technique with impressionistic camerawork, symbols and voice-overs, this film creates an intimate study of sexual expression and repression. Featuring Peggy Healey as a young nun tormented by her desire for the sultry irresistible Ela Troyano.Read More »

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“The title refers to Japanese landscape painting on rolls. Furthermore it indicates the film’s theme, the balance of colors (blurred tones of blue, green and grey) and the type of montage that gives priority to continuity of development rather than to disruption and contrast. This continuity is achieved by dissolvings and double exposures and by extremely long pans. The rhythm accelerates: a meditation on landscape, which unfolds before the eye or is visually paced out, gives way to fluidity and pure motion, to a feeling of dizziness, the result of two contrasting camera movements.Read More »

Directed by Japanese underground legend Yoshihiko Matsui, most famous for his epic film Noisy Requiem and his early work with maverik Japanese director Sogo Ishii (Gojoe, Crazy Thunder Road), Pig Chicken Suicide is a veritable assault on the senses, mixing violent images of animal slaughter, racial strife and surrealism to tell the story of two Koreans living in Japan who’s love is destroyed due to overwhelming racial discrimination.Read More »