Experimental

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A formal 1861 portrait of a Chinese Mandarin and his wife is the starting point for this allegorical investigation of the fantasies spawned in the West about the East, particularly that which associates femininity with the mysterious Orient. ADYNATA presents a series of oppositions-male and female images, past and present sounds-which in and of themselves construct a minimal and fragmentary narrative, an open text of our imaginations, fears and fantasies.

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“Beautiful and beguiling…mixes Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player with The Bride of Frankenstein, a TV cop show and a Betty Boop cartoon-yielding a complex form of signification run riot.” -Jonathan RosenbaumRead More »

IMDB:
User Review

not sure why it’s titled this, but it’s a fanciful and exciting little trip
by Jack Gattanella

Jack Smith was one of the masters of the underground film-making ‘group’ in New York city in the early 60s, and this was one of the few films that Smith finished and screened. While nowhere near the notorious nature of Flaming Creatures or the color-grandeur of Normal Love, Scotch Tape is significant because in a 3-minute stretch of time Smith is able to convey a lot of energy and excitement over some footage that is hard to make out. It looks as those there are figures dancing among garbage or something, moving about, maybe even at 16 frames-per-second, and all done to a super catchy swing tune from the 30s.Read More »

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The film does not have a story. There are three characters and violent action. I was interested in making a technical experiment, concernig the problem of the resistance of the duration of the cinematographic take. There, we can see how the technique interferes in the cinematographic process. I decided to make a film in which each take would have the length of a chassis, and study the almost elimination of the editing when there is a verbal action and a psychological action in the same take. – Glauber RochaRead More »

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In his New York City landscape, Cohen finds inspiration in disturbance. Looking to life for rhythm and to architecture for state of mind, he locates simple mysteries. Just Hold Still is comprised of an interconnected series of short works and collaborations that explore the gray area between documentary, narrative, and experimental genres.

The first part concerns a personal, poetic approach to narrative and includes 4:44 (From Her House Home), Never Change (with Blake Nelson), Love Teller (with Ben Katchor), and Light Years. The second part involves hybridized use of verité footage and the confrontation of documentary concerns with the music video format and includes Selected City Films, Glue Man (with Ian MacKaye), and Talk about the Passion (with R.E.M). The work can be considered as a whole, or each piece in the project can be viewed (and rented) as a separate entity.Read More »

What you first need to understand before watching Jess Franco’s Paula-Paula is that it’s not a normal movie. There’s not script, there’s a beginning and ending, but something else in between. It’s actually what the title say it is, an audiovisual experience that could belong in an art gallery. I’ve seen stuff like this at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, but this might be a little bit more sleazy…

It begins with the arrest of a young woman, Paula, who claims she’s been working at a sex club since she was five, first with her dad, and later together with another woman named Paula – and now she killed her. The police, played by a butch Lina Romay, is skeptical about it, and seem to almost let her go. No one cares about her, another crazy woman… There’s a cut to the interaction between Paula and Paula, in something that seem to be the first Paula’s apartment. They dance, there’s long psychedelic mirror-effects, slow-motion and an amazing jazz score by Friedrich Gulda (given to Franco by the children of Gulda, the composer himself is dead) and slowly it leads to the expected ending…Read More »

Although allusions to François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless suggest José María Nunes’s affection for French New Wave, Sexperiencias finds greater kinship with Nagisa Oshima’s fractured, interconnected themes of sexual and social revolution. In a way, young hitchhiker, María (María Quadreny) is also a stand-in for accidental revolutionary, Motoki in The Man Who Left His Will on Film, a cipher who, in trying to capture the rhythms of everyday life (albeit through photography rather than filmmaking), is politicized by an atmosphere of unrest. Finding momentary connection with an outspoken activist, Antonio (Antonio Betancourt), María’s life is upended when her lover is imprisoned for dissent. Restless and adrift, she embarks on an affair with a nurturing, middle-aged engraver, Carlos (Carlos Otero), only to find her newfound life of comfort and stability at odds with the chaos of the world around her. But while Oshima’s melding of fact and fiction captures the spirit of an internal revolution, Nunes’s revolution is a distant one – a reminder of an empowered other reality that can be turned inward to incite change – galvanized by geopolitical headlines that dominated the local newspapers of 1968: Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, May 68 protest, the coup in Panama, the turning of the tide in the Vietnam War with Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election. Incorporating an incongruous soundtrack of nature sounds, assorted music, and ambient noise, Nunes creates a disorienting environment that is literally out of sync – the separation between image and sound implicitly reflecting the disconnection between the reality of Franco-era Spain and its projected image. Framed against the bookending reference to the U.N.’s adoption of the nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1968, the question of enforcement becomes an ironic coda to the problem of inaction, where the struggle is not in the ability to speak, but in an unwillingness to listen.Read More »

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Drink Deep is a lyrical vision of friendship, hidden secrets, and desires. Cohen uses several types of film image to add texture to the layered composition. Beautiful shades of grey, silver, black and blue echo the water, reminiscent of early photography and silverprints. Cohen says, “The piece was constructed primarily from footage I’d shot of skinnydippers at swimming holes in Georgia and rural Pennsylvania. It’s about water and memory and stories just submerged. It is also, in part, a response to thinking about censorship. I would say that Drink Deep is both unabashedly and deceptively romantic. Surface, flow, and undertow. What looks like paradise is always paradise lost.”

Music composed by Stephen Vitiello and performed with Gabriel Cohen and Mary Wooten.Read More »

Tsai Ming-liang’s delightfully shot film Walker, which could also work as a gallery installation, takes an unusual look at the bustling streets of Hong Kong as its features a series of stunningly shot scenes with at the centre a red-robed monk who walks at a snail’s pace. With traffic and pedestrians speeding around him the man (head intensely bowed, bare feet and holding a bread roll in one hand and a plastic bag in the other) walks only a step every minute.Read More »

No story.. just a promenade with Isabelle in a park… Read More »