Experimental

Militant feminist scientists brainwash research subject to assassinate the Welsh Minister of Prostitution. Meanwhile World War III is being fought and refugees are fleeing from North America en masse.Read More »

“Marking a stylistically and philosophically turn away from the earlier features, The Sand Rose is Reis and Cordeiro’s most abstract, conceptual and literary work. The film’s collage structure gathers texts from multiple sources – including Kafka and Montaigne – and crafts a world of theatrical artifice far from the documentary inspired naturalism of Ana and Trás-os-Montes. Reis and Cordeiro’s least known film has lingered in obscurity and never recovered from the unfairly negative reviews that resulted in its severely limited release. Reis died less than two years later, just as he and Cordeiro were about to begin an ambitious adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo.” —Harvard Film ArchiveRead More »

A nearly-wordless collage that follows a day in New York City from early morning to late at night. The day starts with a look at power generators, ready to light the city. At eight, an alarm clock goes off, people go to work on the subway, type, and break for lunch. In the evening, night clubs and jazz take over. The images are fanciful, abstract, and multiple, suggesting a kaleidoscope of color and activity. The soundtrack is light, breezy, and staccato. New York City is a place of bridges, skyscrapers, and motion.Read More »

“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 »