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“This satire on religious pretension was collaboration between the Group Theater and the newly formed Nykino. Its creation of a self-reflexive illusion within an illusion distinguishes it not only from the commercial cinema but from various arenas of experimental and revolutionary film that had developed by 1934.” – Scott MacDonaldRead More »
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In Per Kirkeby’s set with a blue backdrop beside a woodland lake Lene Adler Petersen pronounces Ophelia’s madness monologue from Hamlet, but she is constantly interrupted by the sound of two wooden blocks and has to start again: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance …” The words thereby rapidly lose their meaning and our interest turns to the specific sounds emerging from Adler Petersen’s lips and the choreographed ways she touches her face. The film starts and ends classically with a zoom in from an establishing shot and a zoom out onto a concluding tableau in which Ophelia throws herself into the lake, but in between the film is experimental, with two cameras on tracks abiding by a carefully conceived but highly impenetrable system. The frame thus changes apparently according to signals from Leth, and occasionally the camera seems to track right off the set into the sylvan wilderness. At its premiere at the Carlton it was shown before Roman Polanski’s Dance of the vampires.Read More »
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“The filmmaker took several different scenes shot earlier between 1896 and 1899 and double-printed two sets of images together to create a new artistic creation. The transformation of a stage dance into a unique ciné-dance could only be possible in cinema – Bruce PosnerRead More »
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“This new medium of expression is the Absolute Film. Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement, and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) being subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.” – Mary Ellen Bute
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An epic cycle created on the tiny, domestic medium of Super-8, the film combines the intimacy of its chosen gauge with the evocative sweep of Freudian dreamwork. It’s a moving collage clipped together out of photos and illustrations from the Atomic Age, reconfigured into a private visual language that speaks of both Klahr’s own childhood and a greater strangeness: how images from another era stand as uncanny evidence for a very different stage of development in the American psyche.Read More »
IMDB so-called plot :
“A dream-like story of America put together out of silent-film material from the archives, interspersed with many different accounts to be read, some of them in verse.”
““This is a logbook. A film which has been improvised. A poem that is slightly too long and made from other films parts, bits of sentences, pieces of music and sounds from all around. It was written in the language of cinema, without dialogue or commentary. It is both a silent movie and a wordy one as it relates many stories, twenty or so, short, minor and forming what is called History with a capital H when put together.Read More »
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“The film presents a deceptively ‘open’ series of images of gears and pistons that transfer movement from vertical to rotary directions. Musical in its repetitive visual form, it now seems akin to Charles Sheeler’s paintings and photographs of railroad locomotive gears and wheels, a tribute to the machine age.” – Robert A. HallerRead More »
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“I thought, how interesting it would be if we used the film in a different method. So far it had been used like a novel to tell a story, or else as a documentary and there was nothing else in between, and I wanted to use the film as a poetic medium, to do a poem like T.S. Eliot’s poems, and do it entirely visually and that’s how I came about to do my film I called POEM 8 and as far as I know it was the first film that experimented in that as a poetic medium.” – Emlen EttingRead More »
not recommended for people sensitive to flashing lights and colors,
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This film further indicates that computer animation — once a gimmick — is fast becoming a fully-fledged art; the complexity of its design and movement, its speed and rhythm, richness of form and motion — coupled with stroboscopic effects to affect brain waves — is quite overpowering. What is even more ominous is that while design and action are programmed, the ‘result’, in any particular sequence, is neither entirely predictable nor under complete human control, being created at a rate faster (and in concatenations more complex) than eye and mind can follow or initiate. Our sense of reality is thus disturbed not only by the filmmaker but also by the machines we have produced.
– Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive ArtRead More »