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Four days of captivity in a tragic Holy Week, when the Argentinian regime received Pope John Paul II and the radio and television transmitted how Videla ate his wafer and tried to purge his sins. In the meantime, in the clandestine cells, thousands were being tortured and killed.Read More »
(From Wikipedia)
Mary Ellen Bute (November 21, 1906 – October 17, 1983) was a pioneer film animator who did much of her work in visual music. She was one of the first female experimental filmmakers in the U.S. From 1934 until 1953, she made 14 short, musical abstract films, working in New York. Many of these were seen in regular U.S. movie theaters, such as Radio City Music Hall, often before a prestigious film. Several of her films were also called “Seeing Sound” films.Read More »
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For their 35mm Materialfilme (1976), the Heins randomly spliced together a mix of color and black and white material taken from the header and footer of commercial films. The scratches, scribbles, hand-written and commercially printed numbers and dots that adorn such footage rush past the eye until they are replaced by images consisting only of washed-out colors or scratched black and white frames. The Heins acquired this material during their years as programmers and projectionists for various avant-garde and commercial film screenings. […] Over the years, this watercolor paint had faded and cracked, and various blotches, scratches and other irregularities have scarred the surface of the filmstrip. In projection, these marks of the material enter into arbitrary rhythmic relationships with the movement of color and the interrupting flashes of white light.Read More »
www.bfi.org.uk wrote:
The BFI’s fascinating collection of 60 short films all made before 1911 comes to DVD with the aim of giving wider access to some of the extraordinary film material held in the National Film and Television Archive, much of which has been restored. Although most films made at this time were actualities and newsreels, this collection contains mostly fiction films, ranging from the dramatic to the comic and the fantastical.
This double-disc set provides an entertaining look at how many film devices such as the close-up, the cut-away and editing, were first invented by film-makers before the turn of the century.Read More »
Standard Gauge
1984, 16mm, colour, sound, 35 min
“While on one level, Standard Gauge is Fisher’s homage to 35mm and to the diverse cinematic world it made possible, the irony of its having been filmed in 16mm reveals a conceptual paradox central to the film, and which unites it with the webs of irony and paradox evident in his earlier work. (…) As Fisher explains in his program notes, the thirty-two minute shot “is virtually the maximum length of a scene in 16mm, and is longer by far than 35mm is capable of.” For all its potentials and accomplishments, standard gauge is limited, and in ways that a non standard gauge-a gauge quite marginal to mainstream film history-is not”. (Scott MacDonald)Read More »
Synopsis:
A man (Carmelo Bene) can not bear to be part of society. He considers himself a “jerk” and so invents its own philosophy, which involves the destruction of his land of Puglia where all citizens are devoted to the Catholic religion. However, the man can not destroy the belief of the pilgrims of Salento, because a woman would prevent that. It is an unknown “Santa Margherita”, which tries to divert man from his weird and impossible philosophy. Successive scenes of the film show various situations unreal and dream in which the two protagonists try to obtain the best one on the other. After a blasphemous dialogue between monks, the man includes his whole philosophy in a Moorish building. In fact, this seems to have been the scene of the massacre of the famous 800 Martyrs of Otranto, which are considered by the scetic man the absolute death of Christianity.Read More »
This experimental film by the maverick Italian director Carmelo Bene is a free adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome and is even more irreverent than the original. In this film, Bene carries the New Testament story beyond the incident with Herod, and pictures Christ nailing himself to the cross, unable (of course) to finish the task. This film uses many musical and filmic special effects and includes at least one pornographic sequence and a number of sadistic ones. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »
From IMDb :
Animals/People: Along the rhythm of the changing seasons they watch one another. Bestiary unfolds like a filmed picture book about mutual observation, about peculiar perception. A contemplation of a stable imbalance, and of lose, tranquil and indefinable elements.
From www.berlinale.de (Berlin Film Festival) :
A drawing course, a safari park and a taxidermist’s workshop: three settings in which humans and animals meet. The focus of observation is on relationships of sight and perception, which often reflect unequal power structures at the same time. In the process, the film also seems to be considering the question of how animals can be filmed.
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Made in remembrance of Anne Frank, Solomon’s fragile and haunting film evokes Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”) and Gustav Mahler’s Kindertodenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”). Stan Brakhage wrote memorably of Solomon’s filmmaking craft that it “utilizes the organic mold and dry crack patterns, the natural decay of the footage, until the original subject matter, its anima, crawls with the textural ‘maggots’ of its own chemical decomposition and dissolves in a beautiful display of multifaceted light.”Read More »