Experimental

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The count Henri d’Ursel shot La perle (The Pearl) under the pseudonym of Henri d’Arche “in the flush of inexperience”, as he put it. D’Ursel made only one film, based on a screenplay by the poet Georges Hugnet. In a Paris straight out of the serials of Louis Feuillade, the hero goes in search of a pearl which constantly disappears in a string of bizarre encounters – sneak thieves in a hotel wearing body stockings à la Musidora, a beautiful fiancée on a bicycle and a somnambulist walking the rooftops in a night-shirt, amorous fantasies in the undergrowth. Hugnet himself played this waking dreamer, haunted by an unending eroticism reflected in the images.Read More »

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(…) Ferreira finest and most political film is Horror Palace Hotel. This forty-minute piece does many things at once: it is an essay about the state of Brazilian cinema, which unfortunately has not yet dated enough; a spot-on look at how film functions within a film festival; a haunted house movie; and a contagious narrative. It was shot during the 1978 Brasilia Film Festival, where a small horror sidebar is going on, in the hotel where everyone that works around the festival (filmmakers, journalists) is staying. This most angry of Ferreira’s films, it is his most focused on achieving, through close observation and a perfect structure, both physical precision and an ambitious allegorical tendency. Using Rogério Sganzerla as a guide and José Mojica Marins as a main object, Horror Palace Hotel slowly arrives at its central targets by transgressing all borders. The horror sidebar becomes something much larger, thanks to Ferreira’s camera: it becomes whole repressed history of Brazilian cinema. Horror, we learn, is not just a genre there anymore, but everything that does not fit into official history; the film thus restages an invasion of the official event by those who represent the repressed. A new history of cinematic forms takes over.Read More »

The first Alien Workshop video stands as one of the trippiest skate videos ever made, and arguably the companies most influential. At times the video feels more like an avant-garde visual experiment than something made to spotlight the gnar shredding of Bo Turner, Rob Dyrdek and other Workshop riders.Read More »

“My eyes are imprisoned/ Weeping with great longing”. Soèdade (saudade) — “longing” or “yearning” — is a Portuguese word that does not have a precise translation in English. It has been described as a “…vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist…”Read More »

Detective Beauty undertakes an investigation into reality. He tries to understand a world he cannot grasp, to capture the things that escape him.Read More »

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Inspired by legendary painter and writer François Augiéras, a soldier – who believes he is Augiéras – searches for a series of spiritual murals supposedly made by the painter in an abandoned bunker. The renowned Spanish painter and ceramicist Miquel Barcelo (playing himself), whose recent work is inspired by Augiéras, soon joins in the search as well. The film’s numerous doublings, conundrums, and sexual innuendos reflect Augiéras’s innovative art and troubled life: “The best way to escape from your pursuers without leaving any trail is to walk backwards over your own footsteps.”Read More »

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“HANDS is an ingenious piece of propaganda that communicates not only through the thrust of its content, but through the very unconventionality of its “experimental” structure. The film suggests that the government that produced it is imaginative and inventive, open to new possibilities, and supportive of forms of free expression.” – Scott MacDonaldRead More »

Walter Ungerer wrote:
From “Introduction to Oobieland, Part Two of Oobieland moves to a television studio in New York City where the Princess of Oobieland is being interviewed and asked to describe this place called “Oobieland”. She says you can’t locate it on any maps. “There are no maps of it”. She is then asked her opinion about the American landscape, American women, American men and the climate in America. Her answers though insightful, are not altogether flattering.Read More »

“Strange, what love does.” The role of a lifetime, a Hollywood mystery, a woman in trouble . . . David Lynch’s first digitally shot feature makes visionary use of the medium to weave a vast meditation on the enigmas of time, identity, and cinema itself. Featuring a tour de force performance from Laura Dern as an actor on the edge, this labyrinthine Dream Factory nightmare tumbles down an endless series of unfathomably interconnected rabbit holes as it takes viewers on a hallucinatory odyssey into the deepest realms of the unconscious mind.Read More »