Experimental

Details, fragments, transformations and shadows of a confined space: the toilets of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op in Gloucester Avenue, Primrose Hill, London. This film is neither abstract, nor firmly resolved in terms of what is depicted. Saturated colors and snatches of images are punctuated by darkness, whilst silence is punctuated by mysterious sounds, which are confined to moments when the image is extremely low key. The haunting use of sound and silence and the enigmatic juxtapositions and fragmentation contribute to the film’s overall abstract quality.Read More »

Mike Dunford’s 8mm films were made within a short period of time between 1968 and 1971 whilst he was a sculpture student at Goldsmiths College. Using offcuts, junk footage banality, politics, performance, pastiche, escalators, flowers, aeroplanes and motor cycles, Dunford experimented with film as a medium which he approached as a materialist sculptor. For Dunford, “the reality of a filmstrip running through the gate, and all its previous incarnations as a representational record of a social reality, an object to be worked on, physically scarred, in its existence and evidence in and of time, its evanescent fragility as modulated light, this was the true subject matter of these films. Four Films includes a ‘walking piece’ with Sally Potter.Read More »

Galaxy (Gingakei), in many ways, embodies a transitional point in Adachi’s direction as a filmmaker. Many of his fellow society members offered production support, and in a sense the film could be construed as a continuation of the activities of the Nihon University Film Studies Club. Although at this point Adachi was already involved with Wakamatsu, the film was produced as the inaugural title for the Theatre Scorpio, where people began to take pink cinema seriously. Yet, Galaxy is quite unlike anything else Adachi has been involved in before or since, a substantial piece of art cinema that reveals the singularity of the filmmaker’s vision.Read More »

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Symphony for a Sinner (1979) was a long, lavishly photographed color film generally considered the magnum opus of the class productions. New York critic and coauthor of Midnight Movies J. Hoberman would rank it as one of the ten best films of the year, while Stan Brakhage would call it “the ultimate class picture.” John Waters, who now visited George regularly whenever he passed through San Francisco, envied the lurid color photography and wanted George to shoot his next picture (which would have been Polyester and didn’t happen). Symphony, Waters said, had the look he craved for Desperate Living (1977).Read More »

“Wind From the East” (“Le Vent D’Est”) is a very deep and highly political discussion about communism, capitalism, art, revolution, intellectualism, Maoism, USSR, tradition, paradigms, poetry… It’s hard to put it in terms of “it’s about…”, since the sequence of images is not based in any form of traditional narrative. In fact, it’s the very opposite of it, its essence sprouting from the need of subversion, a need directly connected to the social/historical/political/artistic context of the 60’s and 70’s: to show things in a different way leads the viewer to see differently, therefore to think differently. A experimental cut, poetic even, given the metaphorical quality of the images. The frontiers of film language fades and encounters those of other art forms, not to weaken the film unity nor its message, but to strengthen them both.Read More »

Desert in your mind is the first feature movie directed, written and produced by Marta Grimalt Canals. This surrealistic road movie is filmed in super 8 bw around California, Barcelona and Mallorca.

Through his frustrations, an obsessed novelist connects with a dimension where a walking girl encounters weird characters in a mysterious urban world, slowly driving to the peaceful nature of the desert. In this trip between light and shadow, hope for finding an inner mental peace will prevail.

This movie is characterized for an experimental language, with purposed technical and performing imperfections, wrapped in an organic fantasy effect.Read More »

When Jorge, a Chilean filmmaker living in New York, decides to seek a statue of a Portuguese neurologist in a park in Chile, a curious investigation begins in the streets of Santiago, Brooklyn and Lisbon, but also through the history of his native country and his own family memory – for which he tries to fi ll in the gaps. And what if the statue were really a bust? Or just a plaque? What if, instead of being in Chile, it were in Lisbon? And what if the film were really about something else? Because, from this starting point in anecdotal appearance, Jeronimo Rodriguez creates a refl ection on memory and disappearance – of people, places and things.Read More »

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Jean-Luc Godard’s densely packed rumination on the need to create order and beauty in a world ruled by chaos is divided into four distinct but tangentially related stories, including the attempts by a young group of idealists to stage a play in war-torn Sarajevo and an elderly director’s efforts to complete his film.Read More »

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Based on fragments from Günther Anders’ novel The Molussian Catacomb, which was written between 1932 and 1936, Nicolas Rey’s captivating nine-part film presents allegorical stories and musings by political prisoners sitting in the pits of an imaginary fascist state called Molussia. Shown in random order whenever it is screened (there are 362,880 potential versions of the film), the film’s nine 16mm reels ruminate on capitalism, imperialism and resistance—accompanied by gritty, unsettling self-processed images of undefined landscapes. A haunting and moving meditation on brutality and control, differently, Molussia has galvanized audiences at festivals around the world.

Since 1993 Rey has been making films that hover between photography, documentaries and the avant-garde. He is one of the founders of the Paris-based artist film lab L’Abominable. (synopsis from Northwest Film Forum)Read More »