A subjective documentary that explores the numerous theories about the hidden meanings withinStanley Kubrick’s film The Shining (1980). The film may be over 30 years old but it continues to inspire debate, speculation, and mystery. Five very different points of view are illuminated through voice over, film clips, animation and dramatic reenactments. Together they’ll draw the audience into a new maze, one with endless detours and dead ends, many ways in, but no way out.Read More »
Quote:
Angelo is an orphan who grew up with a nomad woman. He reacts to his pain over the death of his best friend for overdose, thanks to the encounter with Serena. She survives being a prostitute, but she has not lost hope. Angelo moves along an axis of characters in a desolate and poetic day without end.Read More »
It’s been argued that this frightening and erotic piece of experimental montage from Belgian directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani is all form and no feeling. It’s easy to see why, since its most easy pleasures derive from a cool juxtaposition and stylisation of sound and imagery. But there’s more to it: the film also functions as a knowing, lightly feminist homage to Hitchcock and the chief exponents of the Giallo genre, Dario Argento and Mario Bava. As such, its ‘meanings’ may not be instantly traceable through a cosy linear storyline or densely wrought characterisations.
In immaculate detail and with barely any dialogue, the film depicts three symbolic events in the life of Ana: the first involves a family death and some mid-coitus voyeurism; another shows her first experience of male attraction; and the final, most impressive chapter (a wholesale updating of a key segment from Argento’s ‘Deep Red’) sees our heroine (played by Marie Bos, pictured above) sneaking around an eerie, European mansion, maybe stalked by a razor-wielding maniac.
Cattet and Forzani sculpt with pure mood. They deliver a vivid sense of Ana’s heightened sensitivity towards her surroundings via an array of bravura camera tricks and fine edits. The best way to describe it would be to imagine the shower scene in ‘Psycho’ played over feature length. A large part is shot in extreme close-up, mostly of Ana’s eyes or the silhouette of her crotch underneath a billowy cotton summer dress.
This technique imbues the film with a rich sense of texture, such as in an early scene where Ana runs her fingers over the cracking, mottled skin of (what appears to be) the corpse of an old man, or later when she’s riding in a taxi and the heat makes the leather trim too hot to touch. Some may find the film a mite academic in its glassy deconstruction of genre convention, and it’s perhaps asking a bit much to read it as anything more than a claustrophobic portrait of sexual danger, but it still fulfils that highly specific brief with blood-splashed gusto.
Amer.2009.1080p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 30 min
Size: 7.92 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 1916x816
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 11.9 Mb/s
BPP: 0.317
Audio
#1: French 5.1ch AC-3 @ 640 kb/s
https://nitro.download/view/98BD1FC98329ADF/Amer.2009.1080p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
Language(s):French
Subtitles:English
Chicago Reader wrote:
Chantal Akerman’s haunting 1993 masterpiece documents without commentary or dialogue her several-months-long trip from east Germany to Moscow–a tough and formally rigorous inventory of what the former Soviet bloc looks and feels like today. Akerman’s painterly penchant for finding Edward Hopper wherever she goes has never been more obvious; this travelogue seemingly offers vistas any alert tourist could find yet delivers a series of images and sounds that are impossible to shake later: the countless tracking shots, the sense of people forever waiting, the rare occurrence of a plaintive offscreen violin over an otherwise densely ambient sound track, static glimpses of roadside sites and domestic interiors, the periphery of an outdoor rock concert, a heavy Moscow snowfall, a crowded terminal where weary people and baggage are huddled together like so many dropped handkerchiefs. The only other film I know that imparts such a vivid sense of being somewhere is the Egyptian section of Straub-Huillet’s Too Early, Too Late. Everyone goes to movies in search of events, but the extraordinary events in Akerman’s sorrowful, intractable film are the shots themselves–the everyday recorded by a powerful artist with an acute eye and ear.Read More »
Quote:
2003. USA. Directed by Andrew Noren. “Energy pictures; mindful kinesis. Light and shadow vigorously conjoin, conjuring delusion of depth and duration, fiction of space and time. The fool’s paradise of the illusory window … (remember: flutter of phantoms, trick of the light) … is savored and shattered and seen for what it is” (Andrew Noren). Silent. 62 min.Read More »
Quote:
I can’t stress enough how wonderful, anarchic and unique is this early Israeli film. It blends lots of genres and pokes
fun at many sacred cows while dealing with connections between cinema, reality and its ideological representations.
There simply isn’t any other film like that, and it’s the first time it’s on the net, with subs.
Not much information in English, so I edited an article I’ve found, but it dosen’t do the movie justice:
A comic and episodic satire, the film uses improvization to ilustrate the clash between fantasy and reality in real life. Although conceived in the style of Mekas’ “Hallelujah the hills” (1962), it’s an authentically Israeli satire, an openly rebellious and individualistic expression that poked fun at the sacred myths of earlier zionist films. The technique of film within the film is used to portray film as reflection of the imagination, a miracle based on dreams and fantasies that take on concrete characteristics- parallel to the miracle of Israel, the dream that has become reality (?). Although not a commercial success, there’s no equal to it in all of the Israeli films made since then.Read More »
A boy’s sleep disturbed by the weaking, and the sound of reality. Found-footage montage with the chemical reactions of the celluloid on rare erotic s8 reels.
23. Festival Premiers Plans d’Angers – free forms section (2011)
MADATAC Video Art Festival, Madrid; 2011
8. International Super8 festival – Szeged: Best hungarian film; Audience award; 2009
41. Hungarian Film week: Award of the most promising young talent; 2010
The Canton Palace Theatre First Annual International Film Festival – Ohio ; 2010
Kalgart underground evening, Istambul; 2010
An evening with Cinema 16,- The Kitchen, New York (2011)
San Francisco – MisALT series – 2011Read More »
“Screening Room was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner, who at the time, was Director of Harvard’s Visual Arts Center and Chairman of its Visual and Environmental Studies Department. His own films include Dead Birds (1964), and Forest of Bliss (1986).
A major figure in the American experimental film movement of the 1960s and ‘70s and a widely published theorist, Hollis Frampton made such acclaimed and influential films as Zorns Lemma, the Hapax Legomena series, and the unfinished Magellan. Retrospectives of his work have been shown at the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.The journal October twice devoted whole issues to Frampton, and the entire body of his work is preserved in the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. Frampton taught at Cooper Union, Hunter College, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. In January 1977, Hollis Frampton appeared on Screening Room to discuss his work and screen Lemon, Pas De Trois, excerpts from Maxwell’s Demon, Surface Tension and Critical Mass, and footage from what ultimately became Magellan.” – DER websiteRead More »
The Orinoko: main character in the film. The first part is set during the pre-conquest and is represented as an earthly paradise. A shaman has precognitive visions: go to Columbus and the Catholic missionary in 1498.Read More »