Experimental

From Charles Tesson, Cahiers du cinema 333 (March 1982):
Raul Ruiz filmed the gardens of the Château de Versailles. The first one, French, focuses on the King’s Square (a space where everything is arranged in order to be seen). The other one, English, is the exact opposite, because from any point within it, one falls out of view. Within these two constructions, the labyrinth and the concentric circles, Ruiz conceives a ‘photo-roman’ plot: a husband and his mistress rendez-vous in the English garden (one understands why) and, through a series of accidents and afraid of being seen, he relocates to the other garden. There he runs into his wife who is with her own lover, into the ex-husband of his wife who is with his new mistress, and into the new lover of his ex-wife….Read More »

PLOT SUMMARY
a new film about the birth of man from director Elias Merhige, video artist and composer David Wexler, composer Ben Gillespie, visual artist Ariana Tosatto, visual philosopher Leigh J. McCloskey, and psychophysicist Miguel P. Eckstein.Read More »

Shot on 42 St. in New York, mostly in slow motion and sometimes in negative slow motion, accompanied by original and haunting music, the film captures the depravity, loneliness, poverty, and insanity of New York. While Woody Allen’s upbeat New York exists, Goldman’s New York also exists. With beggars and drunks lying on the streets and bodies passing film Marquees in a rhythmic slow motion the film reminded me of Geroge Grosz’s paintings of Berlin in the 1920’s. All of Goldman’s films are known for their powerful imagery and Pestilent City is no exception. This is one reason the film was shown twice at the New York Film Festival. Goldman was one of the innovators of the film art, but his films have all but been forgotten.Read More »

Quote:
Makino records the life around him on film, which he then digitizes, color correct, and layers, adding electronic noise, to create intense visceral experiences out of his daily experience. Freed of its referential moorings, the subject matter becomes atomized, reduced to a proto-image particulate.Read More »

Quote:
Salome was the daughter of Herod II and Herodias. According to the New Testament, the daughter of Herodias demanded and received the head of John the Baptist. This is a choreographed version of the play by Oscar Wilde.Read More »

Quote:
A single mother struggles with the grief of her missing child on the one-year anniversary of her disappearance, while her neighborhood milkman begins to feel a strong connection to her grief.Read More »

Alexander Calder’s fascination with the circus began in his mid-twenties, when he published illustrations in a New York journal of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, for which he held a year’s pass. It was in Paris in 1927 that he created the miniature circus celebrated in this film – tiny wire performers, ingeniously articulated to walk tightropes, dance, lift weights, and engage in acrobatics in the ring. The Parisian avant-garde would gather in Calder’s studio to see the circus in operation. It was, as critic James Johnson Sweeney noted, `a laboratory in which some of the most original features of his later work were to be developed.’ This film exudes the great personal charm of Calder himself, moving and working the tiny players like a ringmaster, while his wife winds up the gramophone in the background. The Circus is now housed at the Whitney Museum in New York.Read More »

Quote:
These six reels of my film diaries come from the years 1949-1963. They begin with my arrival in New York in November 1949. The first and second reels deal with my life as a Young Poet and a Displaced Person in Brooklyn. It shows the Lithuanian immigrant community, their attempts to adapt themselves to a new land and their tragic efforts to regain independance for their native country. It shows my own frustrations and anxieties and the decision to leave Brooklyn and move to Manhattan. Reel three and reel four deal with my life in Manhattan on Orchard Street and East 13th St. First contacts with New York poetry and filmmaking communities. Robert Frank shooting The Sin of Jesus. LeRoy Jones, Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara reading at The Living Theatre.Read More »

Quote:
Today, when one goes on a journey, the travel is ritualized through the visual machine. The image, coming alive in time as it frames time, is there where the actual and virtual meet. In the process of ritualizing Japan’s “hundred flowers,” it is the encounter between self and other, human and machine, viewer and image, fact and fancy that determines the field of relations in which new interactions between past and present are made possible. Shown in their widespread functions and manifestations, including more evident loci such as festival, religious rite and theatrical performance, “rituals” involve not only the regularity in the structure of everyday life, but also the dynamic agents in the ongoing process of creating digital images at the speed of light (trinhminh-ha.com)Read More »