Experimental

Ashes contemplates love, pleasure, and the destruction of memory. The surroundings of everyday life are shared with extreme intimacy. For Apichatpong, Thailand, while full of beauty, is slowly collapsing into darkness.

“King Kong rarely barked. She had been with us since she was three months old. Every night she slept and looked around in her dreams.

We thought that our spirits were enriched by the fertile soil and the greenest leaves and the rarest insects and the abundance of humility. But came a day in March we woke up from our dream. The sky wept ashes. The rotten ground trembled as baby worms rose to taste the gray snow. Across the mountains the light of devotion shone and blinded our souls. The darkness was so bright we wept and shouted in silence. And we woke up again, and again.Read More »

Quote:
Piero Bargellini was born in Arezzo in 1940. An agronomist, film lover and amateur filmmaker, he joined the “Cinema Indipendente” Cooperative in 1968 and became one of the most important figures of Italian underground cinema. His films are intensely poetic and reflect artisanal wisdom, based on his scientific knowledge of optics and chemistry. He made films like Morte all’orecchio di Van Gogh, Fractions of Temporary Periods, Trasferimento di modulazione, Gasoline, Stricnina, between 1966 and 1973, in a total identity of art and life. These works tell “the history, in its own way exemplary, of one of the secret protagonists, and of the famous victims, of the revolution of 1968.” Ideally conceived as a dialectic interface between the Italian Competition and Detours, this tribute (curated by Fulvio Baglivi with the help of Adriano Aprà) is also the way we have chosen to remember Marco Melani on the tenth anniversary of his death. Marco, who was a friend and collaborator of Bargellini’s, and who continues to be our inspiration and a “hidden” prompter, organized for the first festival in Torino (1982) a commemoration of his friend, who had recently passed away. His intent was to remove the label of “experimental”: “his cinema was cinema tout court, like that of Rossellini, Hawks, Bertolucci, Schifano, Brakhage and all the other filmmakers he loved.”Read More »

BACKGROUND
Yaadein (“Memories”) is a 1964 B&W Hindi film directed and produced by Sunil Dutt also starring himself. The only other actor in the film is Nargis Dutt, that too as a silhouette in the final scene.

This film is the first of its kind as it features only a single actor and hence has found an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records in the category of “Fewest actors in a narrative film”.

Film narrative progresses through dialogues and background music composed by Vasant Desai, who also gave the song, Dekha hai sapna koi.. (sung by Lata Mangeshkar.)

SYNOPSIS
The film is soliloquy of a man who comes home to find that his wife and son are not at home, he assumes that they have left him and reminiscences his life with them, and scared of his life without them, he regrets his past indiscretions. The suspense is only revealed in the end.Read More »

“The three films—Unmade Beds, The Foreigner and Subway Riders—represent a kind of trilogy. The first is a European film made in New York City, a reinvention of the nouvelle vague in the context of New York. I wanted to start where Godard started, to go back to basics: innocence, romanticism, bohemianism, all the things that made up New York City for me at that time. It is the story of an artist: a medium, an ego, and a changed society. He thinks his camera is a gun, he thinks he is Belmondo, and he thinks New York is Paris. His fate is therefore doomed. So when Godard and his pals at the Cinemateque saw Sirk, Hawks, et cetera, they tried to make films like that—but they failed. Instead they created the New Wave. My attempt created a kind of New Wave in New York.”
Amos Poe, 1982
Read More »

SYNOPSIS:
Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman’s experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.Read More »

EL DOCTOR is a dark animated poem set in a crumbling Mexican hospital about 1920. Inhabited by surreal characters including the man shot with one hundred holes, the girl who sprouted morning-glories, and the woman who thinks she is a horse, the Doctor prefers to drink. The Saint of Holes and a mysterious gargoyle rearrange the Doctor’s fated demise and send him on a dark and twisted journey.

The film celebrates the nature of perception and the miraculous. Over five years in production the film was entirely hand painted by artists in Los Angeles and Mexico.Read More »

Quote:
Lawrencia Bembenek was a beautiful bride, a 22-year-old blonde who had worked as both a policewoman and a Playboy bunny, when she was arrested in Milwaukee for the murder of her husband’s ex-wife. Though the evidence was circumstantial and none of it implicated Miss Bembenek directly or exclusively, she was sentenced to life in prison. Her husband, who had expressed resentment over having to support his ex-wife, sought a divorce soon after his wife’s conviction. ”Dear Lawrencia,” he wrote to her. ”Goodbye. Good luck – Fred.”Read More »

from imdb user comment:

“2 Eggs; to break, broke, broken”, the only English phrase and theme song spoken in Tinto Brass’ “L’Urlo”. What a film! The only available version of this film I could find had no subtitles. Either way it doesn’t matter since it is very visual. When most people here the name Tinto Brass, right away they think of the horrid sleaze epic “Caligula”, or some might name “Salon Kitty”. If your lucky, you’ll here of some who have seen his fun slapstick sex comedies from Italy like “Miranda” and “All Ladies Do it”. Known mainly for his lighthearted sex romps with curvy women, Tinto Brass’ earliest experimental films were much different. Heres a recipe for a film like “L’Urlo”. Take some Fellini, add some Jodorowsky/Arrabal and a little table spoon of Godard for extra kick, stir and you got yourself “L’Urlo”. One crazy psychedelic, surrealist anti-war art orgy. A bus is lit on fire! Hippies are chased by riot cops. There’s stock footage of Vietnam and other wars with a machine gun showdown! S&M, slapstick sexuality, a man’s pursuit of a beautiful lady… abstract art and nudity galore! Most memorable is a man in a gas mask jumping around with nude people while goose feather’s fill the air! One amazing experimental protest movie! Rebel art at its finest!Read More »

An androgynous poet/dreamer sits and writes and meditates on the aching void that is her life.Read More »