Experimental

Synopsis
Pairs moody landscape imagery culled from a video game with John Huston’s reading of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’.Read More »

Journal of Film and Video
Response to Phil Solomon’s WALKING DISTANCE
By Albright, Deron

“Imagining one of those rusted medieval film cans having survived centuries, a long lost Biograph/Star, a Griffith Melies co-production, a two-reeler left to us from, say, the Bronze Age, a time when images were smelted and boiled rather than merely taken, and they poured down like silver, not to be fixed and washed, mind you, but free to reform and coagulate into unstable, temporary molds, mere holding patterns of faces, places, and things, shape-shifting according to whim, need, the uncanny or the inevitable. . . WALKING DISTANCE is a simple Golden Book tale of horizontals and verticals, a cinema of ether and ore. . . “Read More »

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character – host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect (played by Richard Serra), and the Entered Apprentice (played by Barney), who are both working on the building. They are reenacting the Masonic myth of Hiram Abiff, purported architect of Solomon’s Temple, who possessed knowledge of the mysteries of the universe. The murder and resurrection of Abiff are reenacted during Masonic initiation rites as the culmination of a three-part process through which a candidate progresses from the first degree of Entered Apprenticeship to the third of Master Mason.Read More »

Cremaster 2 is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney’s abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1. Cremaster 2 embodies this regressive impulse through its looping narrative, moving from 1977, the year of Gary Gilmore’s execution, to 1893, when Harry Houdini, who may have been Gilmore’s grandfather, performed at the World’s Columbian Exposition. The film is structured around three interrelated themes – the landscape as witness, the story of Gilmore (played by Barney), and the life of bees—that metaphorically describe the potential of moving backward in order to escape one’s destiny.Read More »

Cremaster 1 is a musical revue performed on the blue Astroturf playing field of Bronco Stadium in Boise, Idaho – Barney’s hometown. Two Goodyear Blimps float above the arena like the airships that often transmit live sporting events via television broadcast. Four air hostesses tend to each blimp. The only sound is soft ambient music, which suggests the hum of the engines. In the middle of each cabin interior sits a white-clothed table, it’s top decorated with an abstract centerpiece sculpted from Vaseline and surrounded by clusters of grapes. In one blimp the grapes are green, in the other they are purple. Under both of these otherwise identical tables resides Goodyear (played by Marti Domination). Read More »

The latest short film from João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata is a dreamy, experimental look at a deactivated fireworks factory in Macao.

Quote:
Macao, Taipa Island, 2014.
The word “panchão” was first heard in Macao. From the Chinese “pan-tcheong” or “pau-tcheong”, dictionaries define it as a Macanese regionalism also known as “China cracker” or “Chinese rocket”.
Who inhabits the ancient Iec Long Firecracker Factory?Read More »

Synopsis
Suggestions of ancient and modern myths and folklore coalesce in dreams to bring alive a colourful animated world.Read More »

A six-part film by Al Razutis (1973-1984)

56 min. color, sound

These six essays on film/image history reconstruct cinema history by ‘re-imagining’ its origins, and its poetries, and use historical films themselves (as ‘text’) to provide the meanings of their creations. Together, these film essays comprise a critical/structural investigation of silent cinema ending with Segei Eisenstein’s works (for Stalin) – from Lumiere and Melies through surrealism and horros, to montage and propaganda, we ‘re-invent’ epochs in cinema that became its language and culture.Read More »

The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is based on the inferred prison encounters between the 18th century criminal Jack Sheppard and Daniel Defoe, ghostwriter of Sheppard’s ‘autobiography’. Set in the wake of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, Britain’s first financial crisis, the film is a critical costume drama constructed from a patchwork of historical, literary, and popular sources. It explores the connections between representation, speculation and the discourses of high and low culture that emerged in the early 18th century and remain relevant to the present day.Read More »