Experimental

An applauded New York intellectual hires a young archivist to whitewash her late psychologist father’s reputation by eliminating a forbidding, potentially incriminating paper trail.Read More »

The Only Luxury: An Interview with Ted Fendt
By Dan Sullivan

For the past few years, Ted Fendt has been one of the busiest under-the-radar figures in film exhibition in New York: a projectionist at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, he is also the city’s go-to live-subtitler of rare, unsubtitled prints of French films, and ranks among its most active moviegoers. But his contributions to film culture extend beyond the local scene to the online sphere, where he has become an essential translator of texts by Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet, Eric Rohmer, and Jean-André Fieschi, among others. He has also produced new English subtitles for a number of films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (having taught himself German in order to so) and co-edited the catalogue for an upcoming retrospective of their films to tour the US later in 2016.Read More »

Joanna wanted a film on the collages of Max Ernst, and I wanted to make a tribute to the two men who most influenced my film work at the beginning: Max Ernst (collage) and Luis Bunuel (surrealism in cinema).I had written a book of about 100 pages in the surrealist tradition of ‘automatic writing’, which I called the CLOUD JOURNAL. I thought I could marry some of the text of the journal with the collages of Ernst’s UNE SEMAINE DE BONTE, along with bits of my own animation.So I shot the film on day one of the Ernst collage novel (example: lion), and used the first 16 pages of my journal. I enlisted my friend and collaborator, Leroy Clark, to narrate and engineer the sound. We finished up digitally, then on 16mm film (the original format).I have nothing esoteric to say about this film, except to explain the title: it is a tribute to Luis Bunuel. There is no walrus in the film, as there is no dog in LE CHIEN ANDALOU.Read More »

Close to Home
“ In the first part, the camera travels around (West) Berlin like a tourist picking out touristic monuments and describing them in terms of their significance to military history….the commentary charts the bleak history of blockade and the cutting of transport links. The filmmaker reads aloud a letter. She is reading it privately to herself but it is the sound of her reading that makes the connection with the viewer. In the second half (in which the commentary also charts the escalation of land frontier sea and air restrictions), a ferry leaves a quayside and sails into the open Strait, it is an image of freedom but also a melancholy image of parting” Helen De Witt, Visionary Landscapes, 2005Read More »

A talk given at the “LACK II Conference on Psychoanalysis and Politics NOW” at Colorado College on Friday October 20th, 2017.
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Collage of dramatic scenes, some exaggerated to comic effect, with asynchronous sound from well known classic, operatic, and rock and roll music – with different approaches to love, suffering, and death.Read More »

In the nineteenth century, a French adventurer sets off to establish a kingdom in the inhospitable South of Chile, uniting the feared Mapuche under him. The response of the Chilean army is devastating. Rey is both an intricately designed adventure film as well as powerful textural experiment.

We’re excited to present, in synch with its cinema release, this phantasmagorical gem of a film. An unconventional and kaleidoscopic biopic that plays with history, myth and memory attesting to the endless possibilities of cinema. Strikingly beautiful, gloriously decadent and delectably avant-garde.Read More »

Quote:
Angela Schanelec’s first feature since 2010 is the much-anticipated Der traumhafte Weg, a serious work that is deliberately constructed image upon image and allows the viewer to read a seemingly realistic, yet artificially created world as it is being experienced, yet ultimately works against any simple narrative comprehension. The best way to tackle Der traumhafte Weg is to proceed, scene by scene, with a description of the shots, of how within the shots the characters are framed, how the characters gaze, how they hold their bodies… In other words, it is an Angela Schanelec film, where attention is required and rewarded, and the characters are at the mercy of the elements of chance.Read More »

Synopsis:
Emak-Bakia shows elements of fluid mechanical motion in parts, rotating artifacts showing his ideas of everyday objects being extended and rendered useless. Kiki of Montparnasse (Alice Prin) is shown driving a car in a scene through a town. Towards the middle of the film Jacques Rigaut appears dressed in female clothing and make-up. Later in the film a caption appears: La raison de cette extravagance (The reason for this extravagance)and it cuts to a car arriving and a passenger leaving with briefcase entering a building, opening the case revealing men’s shirt collars which he proceeds to tear in half. The collars are then used as a focus for the film, rotating through double exposures.
When the film was first exhibited, a man in the audience stood up to complain it was giving him a headache and hurting his eyes. Another man told him to shut up, and they both started to fight. The theatre turned into a frenzy, the fighting end up out in the street, and the police were called in to stop the riot.Read More »