Experimental

Anthony Stern’s San Francisco, could be described as a city film and allied with Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice (France, 1930) and Walther Ruttman’s Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a City, Germany, 1927). It could also be described as a film of visible and invisible journeys. It moves between day and night, the city centre and its outskirts, the shops and the counter-culture. The invisible journey travels between the two 1960s psychedelic capitals of the world, San Francisco and London; Stern shot the film in the city of its namesake but returned to edit it in London, firstly at the BFI Production Board’s facilities at Waterloo and then at the Arts Lab at Drury Lane.Read More »

Sain (The Closed Vagina) 57min, 16mm

The Nihon University Cinema Club (Nichidai Eiken) was an organization formed in 1957 by Hirano Katsumi, Kanbara Hiroshi, Ko Hiro, and Jonouchi Motoharu. Employing a collective production method that eschewed the name of the author, the group mixed documentary and surrealist tendencies to confront the increasing political tensions
arising in Japan. Sparked by the security treaty with the US (Anpo) the group reformed and Wan (1961) was the first work by the newly formed collective. Read More »

Quote:
For his career-long excavation of the American national character, James Benning found two of his most striking case studies in a pair of murderers whose crimes took place 30 years and more than half the country apart. Landscape Suicide, like many of Benning’s films, consists largely of footage of places, landscapes, and roads accompanied by—or paired with—speech. The speech, in this case, comes from the court testimonies of Bernadette Protti, who stabbed one of her California high-school classmates to death in 1984 over an insult, and Ed Gein, the infamous Plainfield, Wisconsin, killer who made trophies out of his victim’s bodies, read aloud by actors directly to the camera. Benning’s America is a country terrified equally by the wilderness to which it’s in thrall and the civilization it’s set up to keep that wilderness at bay—and nowhere in his work does that tension become more chillingly clear.Read More »

A shrine made by many in honor and memory of Lucas Wheeler.Read More »

PLOT OUTLINE :
A non-linear surrealistic horror film documenting a man’s broken descent into isolation, body mutilation, paedophilia and murder.Read More »

BW/Silent/5 Hrs 21 Mins at 16fps/4 hrs 45 mins at 18fps
John Giorno

Andy Warhol:

“I could never finally figure out if more things happened in the sixties because there was more awake time for them to happen in (since so many people were on amphetamine), or if people started taking amphetamine because there were so many things to do that they needed to have more awake time to do them in… Seeing everybody so up all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete, so I decided I’d better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping. Sleep was the first movie I made when I got my 16mm Bolex.”Read More »

Quote:
“Simultaneously developed by its writer-director Simon Pummell as a film, a website, and a gallery installation, Bodysong is not a work lacking in ambition. It sets itself the task of providing an overview of the human condition with Pummell and his researchers trawling through film, video, and television archives, as well as drawing on home movies.Read More »

Quote:
Swimmer is a poetic journey through the waterways and coastline of the British Isles, following a lone swimmer through lakes, rivers and coves. The journey is framed by a soundtrack of seminal British music, combined with a sound tapestry of hydrophonic recordings and snippets of bankside conversations. The film aims to give a real feel for the diversity of landscape and people of Britain.Read More »

Quote:
Benning, like Kaczynski a mathematician who came of age in a working-class Midwestern family in the late 1950s/early 1960s, was able not only to get hold of Kaczynski’s secret journals but also managed to decipher their code (giving added significance to the filmmaker’s reprise of his subject’s words: “FBI, suck my cock!”).Read More »