Experimental

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 »

Synopsis
In his adaptation of Hattie Naylor’s play Ivan and the Dogs, experimental filmmaker Andrew Kötting travels to the Chilean desert to recreate the life of the young boy who left his Moscow apartment to live with a pack of wild dogs. A crossover between narrative film and contemporary art piece.
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Synopsis/Background wrote:
“Don.t let Hollywood fool ya! Gay porn filmmakers in the 1970.s were more creative. And Jack Deveau proves it. In this erotically experimental shot entirely in France, director Deveau has statues coming to life in a art museum, who instructs handsome Thomas Jeffries on his inmost desires.

While touring Paris, Thomas is cruised by an older man in a cafe, and then goes to the museum (after the guard has left and locked up). A handsome statue comes to life who embraces and kisses Thomas passionately before leading him into another room. Here, as Thomas lies on a pedestal in his underwear, where two men – a bearded Geek god, the handsome stayue that has come to life embrace Thomas.Read More »

Description: – ”The 40 Labor [the manufacturer firm] as a faithful conservative reaches back – his generation only – to the tradition looking like the lost one. To the twentyfold years’ avantgarde, the ones of sixty filmlanguage-his narration revolution, to the seventy ones’ experimentation. And to the postmodern one which recalling was kept always, for which all this fits shakily under the world’s big umbrella, ( everything else – and the contrary of everything – too).
Buharov brothers strong and effective pictures are dreamed onto the linen, their work lasts caught if we understand nothing from him. We do not recognise their world’s rules, we feel it though these rules his strength.” – Báron GyörgyRead More »

Quote:
A spiral design spins dizzily. It’s replaced by a spinning disk. These two continue in perfect alternation until the end: a spiral design, a disk. Each disk is labelled and can be read as it rotates. The messages, in French, feature puns and whimsical rhymes and alliteration. The final message comments on the spiral motif itself.Read More »

Synopsis:
With its title taken from Georges Bataille’s journal Acéphale (literally, a headless man, but figuratively expressing the need to go beyond rational ways of thinking), Deval’s film is the most literary of the Zanzibar works. The film opens with an illustrative image: a head in the process of being shaved, in close up. This image is accompanied not by the sound of an electric razor but an electric saw, suggesting the need to achieve a tabula rasa by radical means. The story follows the adventures of a young man and his friends as they wander through a barely recognizable post–May 1968 Paris. In documenting the by-gone expressions and gestures of the ’68 generation in France, Acéphale becomes something of an anthropological film that reveals the rites and beliefs of the ideological novitiates.Read More »