Experimental

Description: Cohl made “Fantasmagorie” from February to May or June 1908. This is considered the first fully animated film ever made. It was made up of 700 drawings, each of which was double-exposed, leading to a running time of almost two minutes. Despite the short running time, the piece was packed with material devised in a “stream of consciousness” style. It borrowed from Blackton in using a “chalk-line effect” (filming black lines on white paper, then reversing the negative to make it look like white chalk on a black chalkboard), having the main character drawn by the artist’s hand on camera, and the main characters of a clown and a gentleman (this taken from Blackton’s “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces”). The film, in all of its wild transformations, is a direct tribute to the by-then forgotten Incoherent movement. The title is a reference to the “fantasmograph”, a mid-Nineteenth Century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images that floated across the walls.Read More »

Quote:
The 1001 transformations of a woman into a witch and vice versa.

Boris Lehman wrote:
When Roland Lethem says, referring to Le Vampire de la Cinémathèque (1971), a tribute to Joseph Plateau, the brilliant inventor of the phenakistoscope, that ‘you have to let yourself be sucked dry by the film’, most viewers immediately close their eyes, shout their disapproval, break their seats and leave the theatre furious and frustrated. They cannot see because they are not free, and as Philippe Bordier said, ‘because they have shit in their eyes’.Read More »

Quote:
The deconstruction of visual pleasures and the emergence of a new visual poetry.

This experimental film is about the representation and alternative views trelated to the passage of time. The visual syntheses are assembled with the voices of the woman that gives birth and dies, and is torn by the conflicts inhabiting her body. “Topos” (Place) is in dialogue with the paintings of Uccello, Carpaccio, Cranach, De Chirico and Balthus, in an attempt to deconstruct the visual pleasures of traditional cinema, but simultaneously to give birth to an innovative seductive iconography.Read More »

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.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. 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
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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 »

Quote:
A melancholic physician in a Mexican hospital who prefers drinking to doctoring is transformed by the visit of a psychedelic saint. He begins to perform miracles on an odd assortment of hospital patients.Read More »