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 »
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 »