Experimental

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Of all my films, this is the most popular to date. Unfortunately, it is also the most cartoon-like and has an almost visible storyline: the young boy’s travels through terror, death and the Underworld. My own conception of the circus sequence in the film connotes the world’s weakness for striking up the band to cover tragedy, as when someone falls from a high wire in the circus. I did achieve certain special “break-throughs” with OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE, in that the flat surface was broken with forward and away zooms, but this is a simple thing. In the process, I had to relinquish certain subtle and more tenuous relationships between moving components and also the highly artificial gravitational formulations and inventions of such films as DUO CONCERTANTES and HAMFAT ASAR. – Lawrence JordanRead More »

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Lawrence Jordan shot TRUMPIT in the basement of a house on Baker Street in San Francisco that he shared with Stan Brakhage in the mid-1950s. Brakhage himself stars in the film (along with Yvonne Fair). Featuring a card game played on the body of a naked woman, Jordan portrays male sexual frustration while slyly satirizing Hollywood reaction shots. Beat poet and filmmaker Christopher Maclaine provides the soundtrack of voice and manipulated instruments. TRUMPIT is a charming, youthful example of the American avant-garde. – Stela JelincicRead More »

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A tableaux vivant. The sound of the victrola employed “live” for screenings, utilizing the Vitaphone sound system. Created as part of Residency Unlimited: Special Features.Read More »

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This new medium of expression is the Absolute Film. Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) being subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification. – Mary Ellen ButeRead More »

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“Maclaine’s next film, Beat (1958), might be thought of as a continuation of The Man Who Invented Gold, since it often cuts back and forth between shots of golden lamps, lights in windows, and gold-colored objects, often situated in the direct center of the frame (in fact, golden lights show up prominently near the close of the fifth section of The End as well). Otherwise, Beat is something of a portrait of the bohemian characters of late-1950s San Francisco, made just as the scene was disintegrating into mass-marketed national media consciousness and North Beach became the tourist’s emblem of the Beat Generation. Once again, Maclaine’s editing technique positively sparkles.Read More »

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In 1978, Ruiz was commissioned to make a television documentary about the French elections from the viewpoint of a Chilean exile in the 11th arrondissement. But, contrary to the producers’ expectation, the Left lost. Ruiz seized on this anti-climax to make a documentary about nothing except itself – a film whose central subject is forever lost in digression and ‘dispersal’, harking back to his Chilean experiments of the ’60s. It is the best, and certainly the funniest, of self-reflexive deconstructions of the documentary form. Ruiz drolly exaggerates every hare-brained convention of TV reportage, from shot/reverse shot ‘suture’ and talking-head experts to establishing shots and vox pops (narrator’s note to himself: “Include street interviews ad absurdum”.) Every fragment of reality (e.g. polling booths on voting day) comes through the lens as a pre-fabricated televisual cliché. And, as always, Ruiz detonates his own auteur status.As an essay-film, Great Events contains many echoes – and a cheeky critique – of the sophisticated political filmmaking of Chris Marker. But Ruiz increasingly spices up the lesson with surreal elaborations – such as progressively shorter re-edits of the entire film, avant-garde decentrings of image and sound, and crazy runs of ‘secondary elements’ such as particular colours, angles and gestures.Read More »

This hypnotic documentary by cinephile par excellence Mark Cousins takes a brave – but increasingly rewarding – abstract angle by seeking through aesthetic rather than conventional exposition to capture the strange, sensory ethos of the Atomic age (a period spanning approximately 1940-60 but having a far-reaching legacy up to the present day). Using Mogwai’s ethereal electronic soundtrack as his conduit, Cousins takes us through the history of the Atomic period through sound and image alone (there is no overt narration) – even trying ambitiously to suggest that splitting the atom and creating atomic weapons were not in themselves immediately malign developments but almost the end-game of a form of evolution, and symbol of mankind’s mastery over the properties of his planet. Hence Cousins finds in the famous, awe-inspiring images of atomic mushroom clouds a correlation with more common sights of proliferation in nature (a bud that grows, a flower that blooms, sperm that fertilises an egg).Read More »

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is a BBC documentary series by British filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. It began airing on BBC Two on 11 March, 2007.

The series consists of three one-hour programmes which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically “how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.”Read More »

A compilation film designed to evoke nostalgia for the shared entertainment experiences of early baby boomers, “The Movie Orgy” includes clips from television programs and B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as commercials, music clips, newsreels, blooper outtakes, satiric short films and promotional and government films. The effect is something like a simulation of a lazy Saturday of channel surfing or a long double (or triple) matinee at the movies. The film is primarily structured around extended clips from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) and Speed Crazy (1959); as it progresses, segments primarily culled from about a dozen other films and programs are increasingly intercut to create the effect of a single disjointed story in which numerous monsters and assorted social menaces seem to inflict themselves simultaneously on various American cities and towns. This principal focus is occasionally interrupted by commercial breaks and other assorted side features. (IMDB, Written by scgary66)Read More »