Experimental

  • Khavn – Desaparadiso (2015)

    2011-2020CrimeExperimentalKhavnPhilippines

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    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 »

  • Peter Tscherkassky – Tabula rasa (1989)

    1981-1990AustriaExperimentalPeter Tscherkassky

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    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 »

  • Raj Amit Kumar – Unfreedom (2014)

    2011-2020DramaExperimentalQueer Cinema(s)Raj Amit KumarUSA

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    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 »

  • Carolee Schneemann – Fuses (1964 – 1966)

    1961-1970Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtCarolee SchneemannEroticaExperimentalUSA

    http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/7506/vlcsnap2010051118h37m53.png

    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 »

  • Abdellatif Abdul-Hamid – Aayadina aka Our Hands (1982)

    Arthouse1981-1990Abdellatif Abdul-HamidExperimentalSyria

    Quote:
    This is a great little short from the back-catalogue of the 70s-80s Syrian art/experimental scene. It is a nine minute short about hands. Hands, and the things hands do. It’s handsomely edited to some hand-conducted orchestral music…Read More »

  • Jean-Luc Godard – 3x3D: Les trois desastres (2013)

    2011-2020DocumentaryExperimentalFranceJean-Luc Godard

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    Qute:
    It’s no surprise that in undertaking his first 3D project (one third of 3X3D, a triptych that also includes Peter Greenaway and Edger Pêra), Jean-Luc Godard would do so much that everything else yet shot in the format looks meager and infantile by comparison (even the few notable filmmakers to have explored 3D’s potential fall short of Godard’s ambitions: Scorsese, Herzog, Paul W.S. Anderson). Also, it should not have been a surprise that 3D would make perfect sense for Godard’s layering of texts and superimpositions, which command an even greater effect with the extra dimension. All of Godard’s films, are, to an extent, about images, and here as much as ever he concerns himself with the apparatus, perspective, history (through images) and specifically 3D and digital’s impact on these things, as well as on cinema itself.
    Adam CookRead More »

  • Vsevolod Pudovkin – Dezertir AKA The Deserter (1933)

    1931-1940ExperimentalPoliticsUSSRVsevolod Pudovkin

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Synopsis:
    In 1929, four years before making this film, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein had collaborated on a Sound Manifesto that called for a radical use of asynchronous sound effects, which would be used in counterpoint to the screen image, rather than supporting it, as is normally the case. In DESERTER, Pudovkin put this theory into practice.

    Starring Boris Livanov as German dockworker Karl Renn, the film focuses upon a politically unconscious figure who learns the error of his ways. Renn becomes involved in picketing and demonstrating on the dock but walks out on his comrades one day, doubtful about the value of this kind of political activity.Read More »

  • György Pálfi – Szabadesés AKA Free Fall (2014)

    2011-2020ExperimentalGyörgy PálfiHungaryMystery

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Seven floors, seven identically built apartments yet completely different worlds. Seven situations, seven different stories that are nevertheless tied together by thousand strings. They are absurd, often times mysterious mocking glasses of reality as we know it. Like images of an exhibition, these stories are authentic per se, created in different styles and genres, thus told in different ways. It is exactly this diversity that organizes these stories into one peculiar tale.Read More »

  • Shûji Terayama – Sho o suteyo machi e deyou aka Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)

    1971-1980ArthouseExperimentalJapanShuji Terayama

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    “Throw away your books, Go out into the streets!” is Terayama’s adaptation of Terayma’s eponymous book and play. This actually is his first full-length film as a director after shooting a few shorts experimental footage, and writing scenarios for other directors as Hani Susumu (Nanami Inferno of first love 1968) or Shinoda Masahiro (Buraikan 1970). Basically the story is about a teen in Japan, who plays soccer and deals with his highly dysfunctional family. His grandma is senile, his sister loves her pet rabbit to the point of sexual obsession, and his father gets him a prostitute so he can be more of a man. Out of rage our protagonist runs away and hits the street. But the main story is broken up by random short narratives of various Japanese strangers, punk like sing along and psychedelic surreal imagery.Read More »

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