Experimental

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Mark Rappaport’s second feature film (amongst a remarkable string of off-beat, experimental narratives that runs from CASUAL RELATIONS to CHAIN LETTERS) takes off from the deliberate anachronism of using modern props, performance styles and attitudes to evoke the romantic entanglements of the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Rich La Bonte) with three sisters: Constanza (Margot Breier), Sophie (Sasha Nanus) and Louisa (Sissy Smith). This melodramatic plot of rejection, pining and sacrifice may have its basis in reality, but everything else is strictly stylized: back-projected settings, mix-and-match historical costumes, primary-colored walls, actors striking poses and the miming to records of Mozart arias, frequently interrupted by the raw audio track of real, untrained singing. Read More »

Deus Ex
I have been many times very ill in hospitals; and I drew on all that experience while making DEUS EX in West Pennsylvania Hospital of Pittsburgh; but I was especially inspired by the memory of one incident in an Emergency Room of SF’s Mission District: while waiting for medical help, I had held myself together by reading an April-May 1965 issue of “Poetry Magazine”; and the following lines from Charles Olson’s “Cole’s Island” had especially centered the experience, “touchstone” of DEUS EX, for me: Charles begins the poem with the statement, “I met Death – ,” and then: “He didn’t bother me, or say anything. Which is / not surprising, a person might not, in the circumstances; / or at most a nod or something. Read More »

6 is the number of shots on an analogue roll of film. It’s also the number of shots in this film. Yet it’s not a strict film, but the playful quest of a young photographer for the photos that disappeared on her computer: a whole year’s worth, including one of a challenging encounter.

The title 36 refers to the roll of film in the filmmaker’s old-fashioned analogue still camera. Each roll had 36 photos and it was always a surprise to find out after it had been developed what was on the negatives. Often the photos didn’t have much to do with each other, and often he didn’t know when and why he had taken a picture.Read More »

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VAMPIRE JUNCTION, for example, takes an inexplicable mix of characters (cowboys, doctors, acrobatic nudist vampires, a Dracula-wannabee, drunks, etc.) and tosses them all into a tourist trap of an old West ghost town and allows them all to shake up against one another for 90 minutes or so. Who knows what happens or why? Seeing nubile naked vampettes walking backwards on all fours like spiders while chubby old sheriffs are taking pot shots at old Scratch as we listen to the town drunk warbling nonsense while sitting on a hobby horse isn’t supposed to make sense to anyone but Jesus Franco. Naturally, Lina Romay, with her prime deep in her rear-view mirror, wanders through the proceedings trying to solve whatever mystery the director has foisted on the story.

And it’s as though Franco is daring you to try to understand or even try to enjoy anything he puts in front of you.Read More »

This is a digitally transferred work print of an exceptionally rare film. There is some light residual ghosting here and there.

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In December 1968 I participated in the film Orpheus Shot on the Battlefield, which originated as a collective work, a movie without an author, but which would ultimately be attributed to Antonio Maenza in the end even though he only played the role of the director in the film. The film, which was never provided a soundtrack, was screened on several occasions with a soundtrack performed live consisting of a text for three voices and a number of musical pieces, among which were the “descent into hell” from the opera L’Orfeo by Monteverdi in the version by Edward H. Tarr, released in 1968 by Erato, “New York 1963 – America 1968” from Every One of Us by Eric Burdon and the Animals; and “The Return of the Son of the Monster Magnet” from Freak Out by [Frank Zappa and] The Mothers of Invention. After the “state of emergency” in January 1969, an epilogue was shot but it was never developed.Read More »

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In this ‘comedia tragedia’, multi-talent Juan Daniel F. Molero takes us on a digital trip down all the perfidious byways of ‘the interwebz’. Peruvian schoolgirl Luz looks a lot more innocent than she is. She meets Junior online, who spends most of his days gaming in Internet cafés. His ambition is earn a living making amateur porn. Junior, obsessed by Mayan predictions of the end of the world, does everything you are not supposed to do with Google Glass. It is immediately clear that his seduction of the lovely Luz will have bad consequences. But for whom? Read More »

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Ce film est une oeuvre supertemporelle. Le support des participations du public est constitué par une image, qui a varié plusieurs fois au cours des diverses projections. Une projection de Maurice Lemaître, lui-même, dans la bande sonore, éclaire le fonctionnement de la séance, pour se terminer sur un défi lancé à la salle.Read More »

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The singular title of Bruce Conner’s A Movie positions this avant-garde short as though it were a prototypical example for the entire medium. In fact, Conner’s film is the self-conscious inheritor of a particular tradition within the movies, a particular use to which moving pictures have been put: the filmic spectacle. Where Conner’s film, constructed entirely from a wide variety of found footage, diverges from this tradition is in its recognition that in spectacle, the content hardly matters so much as the sensations conveyed through the film.Read More »

Whitehead’s breakthrough film, the documentation of the great Albert Hall Poetry Festival in ’65, which won him acclaim and awards. Shot handheld with only 45 minutes of stock (the finished film is 33 minutes), and presumably closely distilling much of the tension and event-ness of the celebrated ‘happening’. Verse luminaries include a bill-topping Allen Ginsberg (who reclines into his adoring entourage like a decadent monarch), the gruff, pipesmoking compere Alec Trocchi, an incendiary Adrian Mitchell, and most memorably the stoned heckler who disrupts the wired Harry Fainlight to the delight of the massive crowd. Read More »