review of Dream Machine from link
Burroughs’ Dream Machine On Film… Nearly., 26 March 2004
6/10
Author: scottanthony from Dorset, England
In theory: a short non-narrative film made to commemorate the visit of Burroughs and Gysin to the UK. In practice: four shorts (directed by Jarman, Kostiff, Maybury and Wyn Evans) broken up by footage of Gysin gazing at said machine.Read More »
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A whimsical black and white film essay exploring the Tuscan landscape and its relationship between, tradition, modernity and food. Through shimmering hand-processed, window-framed ruminations, time passes in licks of light, while a storm gathers and a woman makes pasta by hand.Read More »
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The animated film VISITATION unwinds through a dark landscape of unending life and death; steeped in the alchemical and inner dream life the film explores a black and white landscape of gothic figures who enact evolving metaphysical dramas. Surrealistic and strange, cast in grainy 16mm images, the film allows an imaginary glimpse within “an outer-world night…” The visions in the film are summoned from the film maker’s imagining of a mythical eternity which is beautiful but fraught with pain, exposed by the ether voices and figures which inhabit the eternal ballet beneath our consciousness. VISITATION imagines scenes from the alchemical experiments which were calculated to disclose and finally manipulate existential nature. Metals, air, fire and water were essential elements in Alchemy, and their psychological counterparts are likewise interpreted within the film as essential elements of death, cruelty, rebirth, and eternal evolution. The film was inspired by hearing wolves crying and simultaneously reading H.P. Lovecraft, a combination which led the filmmaker’s imagination into the world she then created. Using painted cut-outs and early cinema techniques (multiple passes, mattes, multi-plane levels, in-camera superimpositions, shutter manipulation, etc.) the film was shot with a 16mm Bolex camera in black and white which gives it a grainy handmade look. The abstract passages were created by placing objects directly onto raw film and exposing the film with a flashlight. Thus the film’s process mirrors the alchemical nature of chemical and material experimentation.Read More »
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In describing the process of BIG SUR, artist Lawrence Jordan writes, “As with RODIA-ESTUDIANTINA only one shot, which probably was the result of lapse in concentration, was deleted from the original camera roll. This film was intended to extend my experiments with the ‘in-camera’ film, and is probably one of the most successful. Against the coastline of the Big Sur country the camera catches swiftly shifting fragments of the women at the baths, playing the guitar, cutting their hair, sleeping. In this case I attempted to use the camera movement to slightly smear the images onto the film emulsion in a manner parallel with the use of broad different medium from music or painting, I have always been interested in the dynamic parallels that existed once photography in its still form was released into time (the parallel with music) and into motion (the parallel with the brush stroke).”Read More »
SUMMARY
The film recalls various periods of Greece’s history. Sfikas studies and interprets the artistic movements of his time, influenced by eighties Post-Modernism. Starting in antiquity, he passes through the Byzantine and feudal eras and ends up in capitalism, without proposing this as a final end. Following the spire of this development, Sfikas resorts to poetic allegory. His cinematic oratorio, where angels are crushed in the abyss of civilizations, is something more than the transformation of a philosophical idea into a film; it becomes the very soul of the poet who wonders about its perpetual evolution.Read More »
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Night Awake is an experimental noise film provoking 3rd eye (seeing what is inside beyond the limit of symbols) opening with image and sound. By transferring camera into a spiritual medium, the lunar god has taught messages in the gap of time. The film is from the graveyard, and it is a textile of death(final transformation), which made the lucid light shines in the depth of many dimensions. To call the third eye awakening, we should not agitate the surface of the mind and physical eye, but soothes and provokes the third eye to awaken. In the gap of time, the flame of images that rise and become eternity is forming the rhythm and the speech. The teachings received in green crystals and had been translated into this film. In distanced mysteries and the half rotten emulsion is the art of metaphysical connection and awakening.Read More »
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Longtime experimentalist Walter Ungerer extrudes a snow-covered forest obscured by icicles through time-lapse and polychromatic effects into a more synesthetic experience. – Tom FritscheRead More »
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San Francisco based filmmaker Lawrence Jordan’s 1954 short follows his hand, gesturing through a house of mirrors, cards and paintings of women. Shot in black-and-white and playfully incorporating direct animation, enhancing the photographed image by scratching and etching directly on the film. A woman reads Philip Lamantia’s poem (from which the film gets its title), a choice, which evokes masculine angst as the hand acts out the scenario of the poem. – Stela JelincicRead More »
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Described as a cross between a “speech” and a “fireworks display.” A magician-like figure delivers a peculiar speech that is embedded in extravagant arrays of time-delayed images that reflect and refract ideas about memory, time and language. By embedding his gestures in a spectacular diachronic array, Peter Rose has created a new form of kinetic poetry.Read More »