Experimental

  • Stan Brakhage – The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971)

    1971-1980ExperimentalShort FilmStan BrakhageUSA

    Forensic pathologists perform autopsies. The first two consist of examination, measurement, and checking muscles. The remaining ones involve cutting away bone to expose and examine internal organs, peeling back skin and muscle, removing organs, using syringes to extract bodily fluids, and cutting pieces of tissue. Clothes are inventoried. As each autopsy ends, bodies are covered with sheets. There is no soundtrack. We see a body with extensive burns. The hands and trunks of the pathologists appear; sometimes we see them holding the microphone of a tape recorder. The work is sometimes delicate, sometimes not; it’s often bloody. We are form and meat.Read More »

  • Andy Warhol – Beauty#2 (1965)

    USA1961-1970Andy WarholArthouseExperimental

    reviews from imdb:
    Warhol’s Visions of Beauty, 11 October 2006
    8/10
    Author: Gerald Santana from Oakland, Ca

    Beauty No.2 reminds me of being in love. If I remembered the last time that I was in love and then decided to talk about it, depending on my mood, I could pretty much describe it in two ways; amazing and f**cked up. Warhol and Wein (among others) both saw something in Sedgewick that provoked feelings like love, amazement, and violence. Beauty No.2 is a collaboration between these people that show all three antagonists in brilliant form.Read More »

  • Andy Warhol – Kiss (1963)

    1961-1970Andy WarholArthouseExperimentalUSA

    Quote:
    Close-ups of couples kissing for three minutes each.Read More »

  • Stan Brakhage – Murder Psalm (1980)

    USA1971-1980ExperimentalStan Brakhage

    I had just finished the last of the “Sincerity and Duplicity” series which I had been working on for over 10 years. I was completely exhausted and desperately needed a rest. I was in the middle of reading a book about Sigmund Freud by the keeper of the International Psychoanalytical archives. Before I went to sleep I had come across the statement that, while there is a vast multitude of case histories of the murder of the father there are only very few and very oblique references to murdering the mother. That night I dreamed that I murdered my mother, with an axe to her head. And the dream was so vivid that my hand was vibrating as if from the handle of the axe. Read More »

  • James Benning – Him and Me (1982)

    1981-1990ArthouseExperimentalJames BenningUSA

    Quote:
    In ”Him and Me,” at the Film Forum, James Benning, one of our more highly regarded experimental film makers, appears to be looking back over his life, from the 1950’s to the 80’s, recalling it in terms of public events and private sorrows, landscapes, streets, music and colors.

    I emphasize the word ”appears” because ”Him and Me” makes no attempt to be coherent in any conventional sense. The film is composed of dozens of sometimes startlingly beautiful fragments of images and sounds, involving people who are never identified, sometimes accompanied by off-screen voices that may take the form of first-person reminiscences or of inconclusive conversations.Read More »

  • Metin Erksan – Bir intihar aka A Suicide (1975)

    Drama1971-1980ExperimentalMetin ErksanTurkey

    “Isn´t suicide an introverted desire to kill?”

    The man wants to die and the woman wants to be famous. According to the man, there could not be a better plan than the woman killing him. This way the man will get his wish to die and the woman will become famous. The man tries to convince the woman: “You are my killer and my life source.” The gun finally goes off and the interrogation of the woman begins.Read More »

  • Qiu Jiongjiong – Chi AKA Mr. Zhang Believes (2015)

    2011-2020ChinaDocumentaryExperimentalQiu Jiongjiong

    An experimental documentary epic, Mr. Zhang Believes recounts 30 years of China’s 20th-century history through the story of Mr. Zhang Xianchi and the interacting forms of theatrical fiction and autobiography.Read More »

  • Will Benedict, David Leonard – Toilets Not Temples (2014)

    2011-2020David LeonardExperimentalWill Benedict

    Toilets Not Temples, a film by David Leonard and Will Benedict, mixes different styles of narrative storytelling such as live journal (rehearsing the breaking news over and over again), news anchor (reporting on catastrophes as if the reporter was reading lottery numbers), and rap video (does anyone ever listen to the lyrics?), only to mention the most important ones. These are wrapped in a (post)apocalyptic film narrative. A narrative that, despite the dominant trend in feature films that must have an end-of-times scenario, finishes with a five-minute scene of a jubilant crowd somewhere in India—celebrating the end of food shortage and the volunteers’ (who fall from the sky) success in containing a spread of giant rats.Read More »

  • Gürcan Keltek – Gulyabani (2018)

    2011-2020DocumentaryExperimentalGürcan KeltekTurkey

    Gulyabani is an entity, a ghoul, an outsider. She’s the restless spirit of a desolate and lonely place. Fethiye Sessiz, a notorious clairvoyant from Izmir in 1970s and 1980s, remembers fractions of her survival from abuse, kidnappings and violence. Recounting the events of her childhood through her diary and letters to her estranged son, Gulyabani recollects the emotional landscape in the most violent period of post-Republic Turkey, where the memory of the future and fragments of the past come together at once. (IMDb)Read More »

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