Experimental

A choreographed motion study for twinkling trinkets: costume jewelry and natural wonders join forces to perform plastic pirouettes, dancing a luminous lament until the tide comes in.

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Best known for her single-frame animations centered on fabrics, weaving, and other craft-based materials, Mack has recently taken an interest in a more conventional photography, examining objects like reflective mobiles that have the capacity to instigate semi-psychedelic, prismatic light-play, but on the cheap. These are the optical toys of our time, the glinting doodads from Justice or Hot Topic that bring the hypnotic dazzle of reflective light into the mundane self-styled universe of the girls’ dorm room. (These shiny points of jagged illumination can provoke what Kenneth Anger believed to be epiphanic moments of communion with Lucifer, the God of Light.) Something Between Us plays with the cheap shine of costume jewelry, but does so in a broader, more environmental manner.Read More »

From Time Out Film Guide:
In 1968, Godard began work on a film in America (One AM or One American Movie) dealing with aspects of resistance and revolution. Dissatisfied with what he had shot, he abandoned the project. Pennebaker here assembles the Godard footage, together with his own coverage of Godard at work (One PM standing for either One Parallel Movie or One Pennebaker Movie). Although it may be dubious to show stuff that Godard had rejected, the film does manage to convey how he got his results. You can draw your own conclusions about his approach and why he abandoned the film.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘Les divisions is a documentary about the Château de Chambord and the title comes from the Divisione of Johannes Scotus (Erigena), the ninth century Irish philosopher (who was a ‘realist’, although the film is more ‘nominalist’ in characterization of the castle which presents itself as a representation). I say that it is a representation, since it is neither practical for military purposes (too many doors), nor to live in (too many draughts), but only as pure representation. So for the commentary, I tried to imagine how a Renaissance philosopher would view it in a pastiche of a scholastic or gothic text, then a pastiche of Fichte’s Vocation of Man and finally a pastiche of Baudrillard.’
– Raoul RuizRead More »

Synopsis:
A Spell follows an unnamed character through three seemingly disparate moments in his life. With little explanation, we join him in the midst of a 15-person collective on a small Estonian island; in isolation in the majestic wilderness of Northern Finland; and during a concert as the singer and guitarist of a black met al band in Norway.

Marked by loneliness, ecstatic beauty and an optimism of the darkest sort, A Spell is a radical proposition for the existence of utopia in the present.

Starring musician Robert AA Lowe (best known for his intense live performances under the name Lichens) in the lead role, A Spell lies somewhere between fiction and non-fiction – it is at once a document of experience and an experience itself, an inquiry into transcendence that sees the cinema as a site for transformation.
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Synopsis:
Dead End Run is an hour length collection of three short films by Japanese visual genius Ishii Sogo. Starring three of Japan’s hippest and most talented actors: Yusuke Iseya (Casshern,) Masatoshi Nagase (Electric Dragon 80,000V) and the extraordinary cool Tadanobu Asano (Ichi the Killer, Electric Dragon 80,000v.) Each short focuses on the protagonists running away from a threat, be it a hitman or the police then finding themselves stuck in a dead end. Read More »

Midnight Eye wrote:
A horrifying series of murders, committed by a teenaged killer in 1968, prompted a group of filmmakers to chart his path, capturing the things he might have seen before committing his crimes. Their result is this provocative, rarely-screened meditation on geography and society.Read More »

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An impressive example of the vitality and the formal potential of silent cinema, the long-awaited second feature by Esteban Sapir is also welcome proof of the continuing attraction it has for contemporary film makers. Inspired by the cinema of Murnau and Lang, of Eisenstein and Vertov, La Antena is nevertheless a very modern film. Not only in the theme – monopolisation, consumerism, cultural dulling – is there talk of an update, also the form, the editing and the techniques used reveal that La Antena is a film of our own time. Read More »

Synopsis wrote:
Lenz leaves England and returns to Paris in search of Madeleine who disappeared in uncertain circumstances. He meets Helena, a nurse still struggling with the loss of her infant son. Thus begins a fevered love story set against a backdrop of sorrow, passion, jealousy and self-destruction.Read More »

Detour de Force presents the world of thoughtographer Ted Serios, a charismatic Chicago bell hop who, in the mid-1960’s produced hundreds of Polaroid images from his mind. Constructed from 16mm documentation of Serios’s sessions and audio recordings of Serios speaking with Dr. Jule Eisenbud, the Denver psychiatrist who championed his abilities, the film is more ethnography than biography, portraying the social and scientific environments in which Serios thrived. The film foregrounds the state of image and sound recording technologies of the period as essential to the emergence of Serios’s psychic photography. It is also a document of the filmmaker’s encounters with the archival materials themselves. The film enjoys a rich sound environment by Ernst Karel, Kyle Bruckmann and Guiseppe Ielasi.Read More »