“This film is above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us. About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938 , fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment. An apartment in Brussels. A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.”Read More »
This is a story about people in love with cinema, and a country going through its most difficult times. A group of friends, who met sometime ago in a movie theatre, get together to see one of them off to Belgrade. So their journey begins: from personal memories to the remembrance of their country, out of a small dark room to the mystery of Kiev’s night. Their last stop – the farewell party where reality and cinema once again become a single whole.Read More »
Jean-Marie Straub pushes this musicality of blocks to a paroxysmal extreme, mixing blocks of time (40 years separate the various extracts that are going to be used, and what is to be filmed), blocks of text (Malraux, Fortini, Vittorini, Hölderlin) and blocks of language (French, Italian, German), and from this ruckus emerges the history of the world, yes, History with a capital H, and from the same movement, the political hope of its being overtaken. So this is an adventure film, about the Human adventure, still one that is always, in the end, overtaken by Nature.Read More »
Randy Greif is best known as an experimental musician, perhaps most notably as the creator of the six-hour Alice in Wonderland project. Subtitled Adventures in Psychotica, his first film is a disturbing, surrealistic cinematic fantasy combining elements of Lewis Carroll with a big helping of “the cinema of transgression.” Think Luis Bunuel’s Belle du Jour, David Cronenberg’s Crash, Jonathan Weiss’ The Atrocity Exhibition and Andrew McElhinney’s Story of the Eye. Other possible influences: Georges Bataille, Octave Mirbeau, Anais Nin, etc. The film is the only recent example of a truly kinky, but still very artistic erotica film I can think of. The soundtrack is amazing, and features lots of post-industrial experimental heavyweights, including Nurse With Wound, Lustmord, SPK, Illusion of Safety and Muslimgauze.Read More »
The title Lingchi refers to a photograph taken by an unidentified western anthropologist according to some, and by a French soldier at the beginning of the 20th century, according to others by others. It shows the execution of a condemned man by Lingchi, a slow torture involving more than a thousand cuts made on the body of the condemned person before death. If he died earlier the executioner was himself put to death. This punishment was practiced in China for thousands of years and was not finally abolished until 1905. A large crowd would gather for the execution, not only to witness the extraordinary spectacle but also to collect blood and strips of flesh from the body, to be used for medical purposes. The photo immediately started to be circulated, especially amongst westerners passing through China and in particular in a set of postcards Les supplices chinois. It was later published in France in Louis Carpeaux’s Pekin qui s’en va in 1913, and then by Georges Dumas in his Traité ! de psychologie in 1923. It was, however, Georges Bataille, who came into possession of a copy in 1925 and for whom, according to his own statement, it was of decisive importance in his life, who introduced it with greater authority into the imagery of western culture when he used it at the conclusion of his last study of eroticism, Les larmes d’eros, published a year before his death in 1961, to demonstrate the identical nature of contraries and in particular of religious ecstasy and extreme horror.Read More »
Plot Summary:
One day, they just disappeared. Just like that. One didn’t go to work, one didn’t go to his appointment, didn’t meet his date. The dishes served were left to rot, and the bed remained immaculate; the sheets unruffled and unslept in. One cannot say if they are alive or dead. And for this reason, there is no funeral, no nine-day wake, no mass, no burning of candles, or recitation of litanies for the dead. Because they are not dead (or maybe there are), and who is to know what has become of them?
What can a family do if someone disappears in a dictatorship? You can’t go to the police for help or information. Many families were affected in this way by the cruelty of the Marcos dictatorship (1972-1986). The film shows one of them as an example of paradise lost.Read More »
From PT’s website:
The target of Tabula Rasa is the heart of cinema. Voyeuristic desire as the pre-condition for all cinema pleasure is at stake here. What Christian Metz and Jacques Lacan have established in theory is rendered as film in Tabula Rasa. At the beginning we can recognize only shadows from which the picture of a woman undressing herself hesitantly emerges. But exactly at the point when one believes one can make out what it is, the camera is located in front of the object. Tabula Rasa takes distance, the fundamental principle of voyeurism, in so far literally, as it shows us the object of desire but continually removes it from our gaze.Read More »
The movie that is BANNED in India.
Quote:
When a film is “banned” by the Censor Board of Film Certification, you know you are onto something. Well, that is exactly the case with Raj Amit Kumar’s film Unfreedom.
Homosexuality.
Islam.
Thinking outside of convention.
Unfreedom breaks all the “rules”.
The film follows two different lives, the storyline pivoting on a female same-sex relationship and the dangers of religious extremism.Read More »
A silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between Schneemann and her then partner, composer James Tenney; observed by the cat, Kitch.
Carolee Schneemann wrote:
…I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt– the intimacy of the lovemaking… And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense– as one feels during lovemaking… It is different from any pornographic work that you’ve ever seen– that’s why people are still looking at it! And there’s no objectification or fetishization of the womanRead More »