Experimental

Guy Maddin (Sullivan Brown) reluctantly returns to his childhood home, an abandoned Canadian island, where his parents ran an orphanage. As Guy fulfills his dying mother’s request to paint the lighthouse which served as the orphanage, memories of strange events there overpower him. An undercover investigation by child author/detective Wendy (Katherine Scharhon) and a revolt by the repressed children, blew open a cover-up by Guy’s parents. Wendy disguised herself as her brother Chance and discovered that Maddin’s inventor father performed outro scientific experiments on the orphans. In black and white, with title cards, plus narration by Isabella Rossellini. In the film’s opening weeks, some showings included live narrators (such as Crispin Glover, Lou Reed, Barbara Steele), an orchestra, a castrato, and costumed sound effects techs.Read More »

Guy Maddin directed this short biopic on the castrato known as the Manitoba Meadowlark, Dov Houle, who performed on tour with the film (Brand Upon the Brain!)

Music: It’s My Mother’s Birthday Today (Lisbonna, Conner) sung by Arthur Tracy, additional vocals by Stacey NattrassRead More »

From link –
This digital featurette, not quite a companion piece to Tropical Malady but certainly related to it, shows Joe operating at the height of his formalist powers. One of the things I’ve valued about Weerasethakul’s work since Mysterious Object at Noon is his commitment to exploring the traditions of avant-garde cinema while taking those idioms into uncharted territory. While some works by Joe have displayed an interest in bending the strategies of Andy Warhol and Bruce Baillie to the needs of Thai folklore and narrative gamesmanship, Worldly Desires takes a more structural approach. However this piece bears little resemblance to structural film as we usually think of it; if there are specific touchstones for Worldly Desires in film history, they would be those “other” structuralists, so wonky and off the beaten track as to thwart easy categorization. Like Morgan Fisher’s early film projects, Worldly Desires is a documentation of the filmmaking process. Within a single expansive jungle location, portions of a Thai soap opera are being filmed by day, and a music video is being made by night.Read More »

O Estado do Mundo is a compilation of 6 different short movies, retracting differents views of people above the world, showing people from different continents.

Luminous People from Thailand.
People traveling from Thailand to Laos on a boat, most part of the people seems to be dislocated with the travel, every one lost in their own reverie.

Germano from Brasil.
Some fishermans are trying to explore different parts of the ocean, trying to find better fishes and unpolluted areas. In their trip, their boat broke down, and they need help to back home safely.

One Way from India.
A man travel from Nepal to India. At his new country, he’s working as a security man, thinking about his trip, his expectations from a new and free Nepal and his future.Read More »

Quote:
Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought an appetite for experimen­tation to Thai cinema with his debut feature, an uncategorizable work that refracts documentary impressions of his homeland through the surrealist concept of the exquisite corpse game. Enlisting locals to contribute improvised narration to a simple tale, Apichatpong charts the collective construction of the fiction as each new encounter imbues it with unpredictable shades of fantasy and pathos. Shot over the course of two years in 16 mm black and white, Mysterious Object at Noon established the director’s fascination with the porous boundaries between the real and the imagined.Read More »

Like A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, Phantoms of Nabua is a portrait of home. The film portrays a communication of lights, the lights that exude, on the one hand, the comfort of home and, on the other, of destruction.Read More »

This is a series of shorts that Lynch made after Mulholland Drive, using the actors from that film.

A story of a group of humanoid rabbits and their depressive, daily life. The plot includes Jane ironing, Suzie sitting on a couch, Jack walking in and out of the apartment, and the occasional solo singing number by Suzie or Jane. At one point the rabbits also make contact with their “leader”. A really Lynch-esque series of episodes.

A slow, stylish, eerie and extremely interesting story set “in a city deluged by constant rain where three rabbits live with a constant mystery”. Mr Lynch has a great talent for establishing atmosphere and this series is soaked with his trademark (weird) mood. When I watched the first episode I was not sure whether to laugh or be baffled at what I was seeing. 3 Rabbits talk out of sequence, an unseen audience claps whenever one of them enters the room and laughs (not because something funny is said, but at the misery of the rabbits), a candle burns in the corner, a demon face chants something undecipherable (reminds me of the litanies of Satan, the camera seems to be disturbed in the beginning of the 7 out of 8 episodes by something I can only guess to be a spirit.Read More »

New York Portrait

Hutton’s sketchbook of mid-1970s New York, edited in three parts over twelve years, is a chronicle of indelible impressions and an act of urban archeology. The artist evokes the city’s delicate rhythms, tonal contrasts, and shifts of scale—scrims of white mist and black smoke, of gauze, cloud, and fluttering pennant; the shadowy geometries of tenements and water towers; palimpsests of graffiti, skywriting, and painted signs; ecstatic sunlight glinting off the wings of homing pigeons as they traverse a pillowy sky; the slight rustle of a homeless man’s shirt; the flowery patterns of rainwater draining from a flooded street; a blimp’s lazy progress between two buildings whose balconies resemble film sprockets; and a winter fog rolling over the sandy rivulets of Coney Island, making of it a lunar park, removed from time.
Part I
1978–79.
Part II
1980–81.
Part III
1990.Read More »

The Passenger (1975) marked the end of Antonioni’s three picture deal with MGM, and simultaneously the end of his mainstream acceptance. Although revered now as one of his finest works, The Passenger had lukewarm reception at best, with most of the American critics still bitter of Antonioni’s caricaturing of American capitalism in Zabriskie Point (1969). Since those two films had been costly flops, Antonioni found himself unable to secure investors for the arthouse pictures he’d become known for. Five years past, and still not a film, until finally Antonioni settled on The Oberwald Mystery.Read More »