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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 »
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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 »