Experimental

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After a twenty year period of multiple illnesses and injuries, the filmmaker turns the camera on herself as a way to analyze her chances for a happier, healthier life. In the process, she captures the frustration, tedium and petty annoyances of a revolving-door relationship with the medical establishment, while portraying the complicated web of emotions that accompany any medical problem. With humor and honesty, The Odds of Recovery uses the filmmaker’s medical history as a means to address a perennial human problem: the desire to avoid conflict and deny the need for radical change.Read More »

blurb sez: In Sept./Oct. 1992 a mini festival took place in the Temple Bar Area of Dublin. Called ‘The Here To Go Show’, it celebrated William Burroughs and Brion Gysin and was located at The Gallery of Photography, The Project Arts Centre, and a number of Private locations. Organised by English writer Terry Wilson, Irish rock singer Frank Rynne, and writer Joe Ambrose. The show was documented in guerilla fashion by the organisers the results of which have been distilled into ‘Destroy all Rational Thought’.Read More »

Psychological narrative avantgarde film about a wealthy young businessman who consecutively falls in love with a classy English woman (Pearl), a Russian sculptress (Athalia), and a naive working-class girl (Lucie). Overpowered by weakness, the coward sidesteps the obligations that love affairs impose: rather than living up to his dates he takes his sports-car from an ultra-modern garage and speeds to the fashionable beaches of Deauville. On his way, he is fatally hit by a descending swallow. The film is divided into three segments each of which consists of events the woman experienced. These sequences are embedded in scenes in which each of the three women is telling and casting her mind back to her own love affair. Thus, present, future and past merge and cannot be distinguished clearly. The intertwinement of several layers of time experience, recollection, telling and showing have been regarded as a source of inspiration of Alain Resnais and this film prefigures his “L’Année dernière à Mariënbad” to a certain extent.Read More »

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DAMNED IF YOU DON’T is Friedrich’s subversive and ecstatic response to her Catholic upbringing. Blending conventional narrative technique with impressionistic camerawork, symbols and voice-overs, this film creates an intimate study of sexual expression and repression. Featuring Peggy Healey as a young nun tormented by her desire for the sultry irresistible Ela Troyano.Read More »

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Rules of the Road tells the story of a love affair and its demise through one of the primary objects shared by the couple: an old beige station wagon with fake wood paneling along the sides. A typical American family car for an atypical American family, it provides the women at first with all the familiar comforts. But when their relationship ends, the car becomes the property of one woman and the bane of the other’s existence. Even long after their separation, this tangible reminder of their life together–and thousands of its imitators–continues to prowl the streets of the city, haunting the woman who no longer holds the keys either to the car or the other woman’s heart. Read More »

According to Harun Farocki, today’s photographers working in advertising are, in a way, continuing the tradition of 17th century Flemish painters in that they depict objects from everyday life – the “still life”. The filmmaker illustrates this intriguing hypothesis with three documentary sequences which show the photographers at work creating a contemporary “still life”: a cheese-board, beer glasses and an expensive watch.Read More »

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Pier Paolo Pasolini takes up with a young man and journeys to Ostia, and his death.

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Ostia is a fascinating short film directed by Julian Cole and produced for the Royal College of Art, which reconstructs the events leading up to the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Ostia relocates the proceedings to London and stars Derek Jarman as Pasolini. The film features an evocative dream sequence which is accompanied by poignant excerpts from Pasolin’s own poetry, as read by Jarman.Read More »

A young Oriental man with a headscarf and bare torso shadowboxes indoors in front of a series of unadorned walls, light, dark, both shades. He is then shown exercising outside with a sword in an area surrounded by a low stone wall and overlooking a river, before there is a return to the first sequence.Read More »

Three shores is the portrait of an imaginary river. By crossing it, from east to west, or by making a detour to the south, from red to green, from the undergrowth to the city, to its industrial zone: the film attempts to map the functioning and organization of our society through the time of flowing water.Read More »