This edition explores the establishment of cinematic genres in the first years of the 20th Century, offering rare glimpses of the innovative visual comedy of Max Linder, the pioneering Italian epic NERO – or THE BURNING OF ROME, the phenomenal animation of Windsor McCoy, the social realism of Alice Guy Blaché’s MAKING OF AN AMERICAN CITIZEN, D. W. Griffith’s early melodrama A GIRL AND HER TRUST, and more!Read More »
EXPERIMENTATION AND DISCOVERY (vol. 3 of THE MOVIES BEGIN) Dir. (various). U.S. and Europe. 1898-1910. Color-tinted, B&W. Frequently comical, often risque, and sometimes just plain baffling, the twenty films of this anthology challenged the precepts of the visual representation of narrative, thereby inventing the photographic and editing techniques that would quickly become accepted as cinematic syntax. Includes Peeping Tom (1901), History of a Crime (1901), How It Feels to be Run Over (1900), and The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906).Read More »
The European Pioneers
Director: (various)
Country: (various)
Year: 1895-1906
From the archives of the British Film Institute, this collection features forty distinctive works from cinema’s infancy, produced by such Euro pioneers as R.W. Paul, George Edward Smith, Fran Mottershaw, Walter Haggar & Sons, and James Bamforth, as well as by acknowledged innovators like the Lumière brothers and Méliès. Includes Demolition of a Wall (1896), Exiting the Factory (1895), and Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (circa 1895).Read More »
The Movies Begin
The Great Train Robbery & Other Primary Works
Directors: Edweard Muybridge, Edwin S. Porter, Thomas Edison
Country: (various)
Year: 1893-1907
This survey of the cinema’s earliest landmarks and rarities features the 1877 motion studies of Edward Muybridge, the early productions of Thomas Edison’s Black Maria, the actualites of Louis Lumiére, George Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902), and climaxes with the premiere of a mint-condition print of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, complete with the authentic hand-tinting witnessed by audiences of 1903.
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His latest, a 5-minute experiment titled Odin’s Shield Maiden is quite beautiful if not all that thematically engaging. Essentially, it’s a series of black-and-white shots of several women mourning the drowning of a guy named Mundi near the shore. The photography is, needless to say, stunning, and Maddin’s lyrical rhythms are spot on. Still no Heart of the World (2001)–or even My Dad is 100 Years Old (2005)–but wonderful to watch, anyway.Read More »
If you like early John Waters pieces, you have to see this one. In fact, this movie was released a year earlier than Pink Flamingos. The director was also writer, art director and set decorator, in the traditon of underground cinema – the movie is considered part of the movement called Cinema Marginal and was banned by the military Brazilian authorities. –mandragoruRead More »
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Black Sun tells the story of Hugues de Montalembert, a French artist and filmmaker living in New York, who was blinded during a violent assault in 1978.
In telling the story of this unique man and his extraordinary reaction to a life-changing trauma, Tarn has created an expressionist film whose power lies in visualising a world from the perspective of the blind de Montalembert.
Part- survivor’s testimony, part- philosophical meditation on the nature of perception, BLACK SUN is a celebration of life that makes us see the world anew.Read More »
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PASSION is a film dairy in which daily events are related to archaic and evolutionary images. The chemical decomposition of the film emulsion blurs the borders between the microcosmic world of the embryo and macrocosmic elements. It leads to an alchemical quest for filmic expression based on the exploration of film’s physical material qualities. Sound segments and melody fragments combined with rhythmical pulsating, droning and hissing of natural events create a dramatic tension between image, sound and chemistry.
PASSION is a personal film-journey in which Reble accompanies his unborn child in a filmdiary, following the seasons until his birth. Reble’s unfamiliar chemistry generates slowly pulsating structures and colors. Micro- and macroscopic imagery build a near-abstract, hypnotic landscape – an intimate perception of creation.
(Re:Voir Video)Read More »
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The most remarkable discovery in recent German-language cinema: Gerhard Friedl’s first feature is a hypnotic visual puzzle at the interface of documentary, essay film and pulp fiction. On the soundtrack: an unflinchingly ‘objective’ account of the labyrinthine genealogies, criminal involvements and afflictions of Germany’s economic leaders in the 20th century. On the screen: pans and tracking shots through European financial centres, production sites and landscapes. Read More »