Experimental

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The image of the fountain returns in Angel (1957; color; 3 min.), one of Cornell’s most poignant films. Dedicated, as Cornell said, to his friend, the painter Pavel Tchelichew, who had recently died, the film offers a rather moving meditation on mortality. Comprised of static shots of a statue of an angel and a fountain in a Flushing cemetery, the films elegant and quiet close-ups against an expanse of blue sky of the statues solid yet partly decaying marble brilliantly capture a sense both of the earthly and time-bound and the unworldly and eternal. The films stylistically innovative dissociation of moving image from moving subject (a technique Cornell also largely deploys in “Centuries of June” from the same year) anticipates by several years the daring cinematic experiments of Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964), foregrounding duration, in contrast to movement, as cinemas true subject.Read More »

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Once a common medium to record home movies and holiday souvenirs, the memory of Super-8 film is now disappearing fast. Yaël André has recycled a wealth of random Super-8 footage into a fake biography, with cheeky off-screen voiceover.Read More »

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Images of the World and Inscription in War is an essay whose central motif is the aerial photograph of the camp at Auschwitz taken on April 4, 1944 by an American reconnaissance plane. On this photo, analysts identified the surrounding factories but not the concentration and extermination camp. Dialectic montage and a distanced commentary compose this film which analyses the conditions under which an image becomes readable. The gap from “seeing” to “knowing”, interlacing the polysemy of words and photographs.Read More »

The Chicago films do not use actors. Instead, the main characters are played by major avant garde talents from other creative fields. Dr. Chicago is played by renowned composer Alvin Lucier whose stream-of-consciousness soliloquies in the films are punctuated by his ferocious stutter. Painter and performance artist Mary Ashley, a primary member of the legendary ONCE Group, smolders throughout as Chicago’s girlfriend, Sheila Marie.Read More »

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The history of the city symphony is dominated by artists who identified as progressives and radicals, or in some rare cases, such as that of Walter Ruttmann, artists whose politics appear to have undergone a rather startling transformation, from a position that was at least centrist or moderate, to one that was far to the right of center. Stramilano (1929), directed by Corrado D’Errico (1902-41) and produced by the company of the Za Bum music hall by Mario Mattoli and Luciano Ramo for instituto LUCE, was not only Italy’s first contribution to the city symphonies cycle, it was also the earliest example of such a film to emerge from a fascist nation. Read More »

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Hotel Monterey is a cheap hotel in New York reserved for the outcasts of American society. Chantal Akerman invites viewers to visit this unusual place as well as the people who live there, from the reception up to the last story.New York City’s Monterey is a residence hotel; the residents we see are older, most live alone. The camera, usually stationery, begins with a look into the lobby. The film ends with a panorama from the hotel’s rooftop. There’s no soundtrack. The lobby is clean with granite floors. Men wear hats. People enter and exit an elevator. The camera looks out from within the elevator as doors open and close. People sit alone and motionless in their apartments. There are long shots of empty halls. Paint peels. The flooring on upper levels is linoleum. Hall lights are florescent. Doors open a crack then close. The film provides the feeling of what it’s like to live there.Read More »

In ancient Greece “theoria” describes a journey to bear witness at a festival taking place in a foreign city. The “theoros” undertook the journey on behalf of their community and, upon returning home, described what they had seen with their own eyes. With “theoria” the first step towards knowledge is seeing. With a hero’s journey the return is as essential as embarking in the first place—through the act of leaving and then returning after the arduous journey the new is metabolized and the old is seen in a new light.Read More »

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We’re leading up to talking about Elliot, the pair’s most ambitious project to date. But first I ask them about the medium they shot it in: VHS. Jacobson explains why the pair chose that format: “We got into VHS for Cassandra’s most ambitious short, Wireboy, because it provided the look we were going for in that movie. It was important to have a dirty image due to the subject matter and it became a bit of a production element too. Elliot was kind of a further exploration of some of the same themes, but it was very different in what it dealt with exactly. Again, VHS seemed most appropriate for the story because this was another grimy world, and because the sets in Elliot were all made by hand rather cheaply; shooting the movie in HD wouldn’t have done it any favors.Read More »

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A collection of Super 8 films shot by Derek Jarman between 1972 and 1975, edited to the music of Throbbing Gristle.

Derek Jarman used some of his 70s home movie footage to produce this wonderful piece of exploitational avantgarde cinema. Actually the original material has been slowed down to a speed of 3-6 frames, then Jarman added colour effects and the pulsating, menacing score by Industrial supergroup Throbbing Gristle

The result is a piece of art not to dissimilar to Jarman´s painting work in using found footage as elements of memory and mind that resemble ideas reflected in the Cabala and in C.G. Jung`s writings about an archetypical past that is hidden in everyone of us.Read More »