Experimental

Quote:
By Central Bazaar (1976), his next feature, Dwoskin seemed to have traded limitation for license: a handful of strangers gather together for what almost instantly devolves into a freeform two-and-a-half-hour-long sexual merry-go-round. Dwoskin’s subjects drift from partner to partner draped in elaborate costumes and moving half-consciously, as if magnetic currents were tugging them together and apart. There are moments of great tenderness, but the whole affair comes off as grotesque—not least because we’re made to feel like an unwelcome and particularly intrusive guest. Dwoskin’s camera roves around, focusing in on a caress here, a clasped hand there, the strap of a pair of leggings, an exposed back: always too close for comfort, yet for the most part excluded from the proceedings. In the spectacle of these able bodies contorting themselves, strutting, dancing, converging, and lounging around, Dwoskin saw a mirror of the world: a place in which human connection was something frightening and alien, something that demanded a performance well outside his range.Read More »

Newest series of polemical essay film/documentaries by Adam Curtis is both maddening and occasionally brilliant… frustrating for their reductivism and eliptical approach to complex subjects, but frankly staggering for the allusive leaps of the narrative. Truly inspired selection of music on the soundtrack, also. Anyways:

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

A series of films by Adam Curtis about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.Read More »

from Wikipedia:
It Felt Like a Kiss is an immersive theatre production, first performed between 2 and 19 July 2009 as part of the second Manchester International Festival, co-produced with the BBC.Themed on “how power really works in the world”, it is a collaboration between film-maker Adam Curtis and theatre company Punchdrunk, with original music composed by Damon Albarn and performed by the Kronos Quartet. The visitor is immersed in sets based on archive footage from Baghdad, 1963; New York, 1964; Moscow, 1959; in the Amygdala, 1959–1969; and Kinshasa, 1960. The title is taken from The Crystals’ 1962 song “He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss)”, written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King.Read More »

IMDB wrote:
Shocking and disturbing

This obscure French film, still unavailable in English, is a more fictionalized and much more exploitative version of the same real-life murder later covered in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures”. The two girls in this movie, however, are decidedly less sympathetic than the heroines of the later movie and they commit not only murder, but every form of religious sacrilege, as well as some unforgivable cruelty to some birds belonging to a poor, retarded handyman. It is thus pretty hard to feel much sympathy toward them (even if I could understand most of what they were saying).
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No. 5 Reversal (1989, 16mm, sound, b/w, 8:00)
The film opens with a pair of lovers sharing their stories and hilarity in bed while Ruth Brown’s Teardrops From My Eyes pleads on the track, lamenting a lost love. This protracted domestic scene dissolves into a series of rapturous nature portraits. A voice-over speaks of ruinous slaughter during the war as the camera combs through the ruins. The artist appears in a brief cameo, carefully posed and lit in a studio, the camera covering half her face as if she had been delivered to the machines of seeing. She appears between shots of another abandoned house, another broken window that we are looking through so that the work of putting the world back together can begin again.Read More »

One Woman Waiting (1984, 16mm, sound, colour, 9:00)
“One Woman Waiting” evokes questions of subjectivity in the mirrored performance of two women. The single take, tableau composition forms the structure for catalytic change between the characters. The sensuous desert environment accentuates the poetic and ephemeral quality of this film. “Massarella uses the fixed camera shot in her enigmatic film of a symbolic encounter between two women in a beautifully shot desert location. Its cryptic form is a good example of how an idea can be treated most effectively by simple means, for instance in the use of the frame as a point of entry and exit for characters and as a perspectival space which uses foreground and interior for dramatic and emotional ends.”
– Michael O’Pray, Independent Means, Canadian Experimental Films at the London Filmmaker’s Co-opRead More »

LaBruce stars in this vaguely autobiographical look at a triple-X star-director caught in the downward spiral of his career. Remarks Googie, the art-house auteur who’s either exploiting LaBruce or launching his comeback, “He was actually attempting to break down the whole subject-camera relationship… It was as if he was an existentialist trapped in a porno star’s body.” Well, almost.

Just as LaBruce’s scrawny, hangover aesthetics challenge the conventions of gay porn’s Wonder Bread desire, his newly adroit camera unsettles narrative assumptions. A dense weave of self-reflexive interviews, cynical vignettes, and outrageous cameos by “Kids In The Hall” Scott Thompson and drag goddess Vaginal Creme Davis – along with moments stolen almost verbatim from films like Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Perry’s Play It As It Lays – Super 8 1/2 still manages enough rude sex to keep the whole unruly narrative in your face.Read More »

Quote:
In late May of 2011 I returned to Milwaukee to make a third version. This one was shot with a Sony HD camera. For this second re-make I decided to go back to the original idea, that is, to simply document the architecture in Milwaukee’s industrial valley. I searched for buildings that looked like the ones from 1977. I found 18 of them. A few of them are also in the original 1977 film, and the others look as if they could have been. I then decided to shoot each of these building for five minutes. I felt a longer duration was necessary to study their true presence. During filming a few fortuitous events occurred that reminded me of the constructed minimal narratives of the original film, so I decided to add one constructed narrative (myself as the actor) to this latest film, ONE WAY BOOGIE WOOGIE 2012. (James Benning)Read More »

Criterion: David Hudson
February 18, 2018 | Berlinale | Critic’s Rating: +++ (jury.critic.de)
None of that was on my mind as I luxuriated in the vibrant grain. Those, like me, who’ve been familiar only with Benning’s later work may be surprised by how entertaining and, at times, even funny 11 x 14 is. . . . Dialogue is rare, muffled, and all but indecipherable, but that doesn’t mean 11 x 14 isn’t a film to listen to as well as admire for its framing and composition.Read More »