Experimental

Quote:
While visiting SUNY Binghamton, Frampton asked for the two most “volatile” acting students and had them improvise an argument. It was his first time utilizing actors, and the results aren’t bad. Of course, much of the credit belongs to the two young performers, who were only given a basic starting point and did all the work themselves. The woman (Barbara DiBenedetto) in particular is on fire… kind of a shame that she has no other screen credits. So where does Frampton come in? He stutters and repeats the film, amplifying the intensity and giving a sense that this is a perpetual, ongoing argument. At first it’s just a black screen (I would assume because the audio was rolling before the camera was set up, but I don’t know) and the sound of lines and fragments of lines being repeated is merely annoying, but once it gets melded with the image it lends the piece a crazy, stilted momentum. I would say this one is better for the performances than the concept, but either way it’s worth watching.Read More »

A poor man in his mid seventies lives alone in a house near the beach in the south of Mexico. He doesn’t have the and deed and a foreign man claims the property is his. The man attends a hearing to solve the conflict, but nothing gets resolved. During this time he starts losing his mind. Memories of the past start hunting his daily life. He ends up losing his property and his house gets demolished. He embarks on a journey to the mountains in search for people he knew in the past. A memory of his younger self hunts him throughout the trip. He ends up finding some people he knew, but no one he can stay with, so he continues wandering through the forest and into his memories. He meets his younger self, but doesn’t recognize him. They get drunk together, sing songs of the past and nearly pass out after a long night of drinking.Read More »

Synopsis:
The film is a video-art para documentary following Adam, a literature scholar who has a hard time in making a connecting with the surrounding world after he survives an accident. He quits his job and becomes a store cashier in order to have more time to study Dante’s Divine Comedy. The film is both a visual experiment and a tribute to Majewski’s beloved city Katowice.

“These are intimate visions, things that are in my head that are taking place in Katowice. Why Katowice? I was born there, I lived all over the world, but the visions that I have are usually connected with this place,” Majewski told FNE.Read More »

Quote:
The Astronauts (1959) is a short, collaborative animation project between eccentric filmmakers Walerian Borowczyk and Chris Marker. Borowczyk would later move into live-action film-making, turning his attention to a cinema of perverse eroticism with projects like Goto, The Island of Love (1969), The Immoral Tales (1974), Beast (1975) and Emmanuelle 5 (1987). Likewise, Marker would produce the short masterpiece La Jetée (1962), the celebrated proto-documentary Sans Soleil (1983) and his critical study of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, A.K. (1985). The film, at twelve-minutes in length, is a testament to the creative energy and ideas of these two filmmakers, not only standing as an interesting short film in its own right, but as a window into the creative world of these two, highly skilled, highly original filmmakers. It remains an amazing piece of work for this very reason, more so perhaps than any other; even if it is admittedly impossible to distinguish between which filmmaker was responsible for each individual part of the creative process, leaving us to assume that it was a pure collaboration in every sense of the word.Read More »

A radio, a warning repeated in a loop, intuition of a catastrophe that slowly approaches through the ruins and houses of a tropical rainforest. A natural disaster is coming, a natural disaster is coming, a natural disaster is coming… The paradox and its danger are served: a warning endlessly repeated may become a strange peace message. Read More »

We Utopians are happy / This will last forever”

Loosely framed by Plato’s invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel, Atlantis is a documentary portrait of Utopia — an island that has never / forever existed beneath our too-mortal feet. Herein is folk song and pagan rite, religious march and reflected temple, the sea that surrounds us all. Even though we are slowly sinking, we are happy and content.

“Atlantis interrogates this space of fabulation without ever leaving the real island behind, finding itself caught between a portrait of place and the conjuring of a drowned paradise.”

–Erika Balsom, ArtforumRead More »

Manohla Dargis’ review from The New York Times (October 26, 2007):
Manohla Dargis wrote:
A Man, His Movies and, Sometimes, His Monkey

Whether you dig “Lynch,” a feature-length video visit with the director David Lynch, will largely depend on your views of his work and whether you think there’s something instructive and characteristically wonderful and weird about him telling an assistant, “I want a one-legged 16-year-old girl.” It says something about the unflappable nature of his employees or their familiarity with his desires that the assistant doesn’t appear startled by this request or his ensuing demands for “a Eurasian” and “a pet monkey.”Read More »

Black Sheep Boy is the first of three short films by Michael Wallin on his Water Bearer Films DVD. All three films present images with voiceovers and are included. There are no extras.Read More »

Maddin’s frequent collaborator Evan Johnson (who is co-director on The Forbidden Room) presents four visuals essays, ranging from one and a half to four minutes in length: Puberty, Colours, Elms, and Cold, each representing a visual exploration of a specific theme.Read More »