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Featuring stylized visual storytelling, this rarely seen film by famed experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage was produced for the Colorado Department of Public Relations and is one of two films (the other being “Colorado Legend”) to explore Colorado myths. This film tells the story of the Ute people and the tension between the youth, “the Braves”, and an elder, “Smoking Water”. The cultural objects were provided by the University of Colorado Museum and Denver Art Museum.Read More »
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In 1960 the “Colorado Department of Public Relations”, undoubtedly eager to have more tourists falling down abandoned mine shafts in search of lost treasure, brought in Stan Brakhage to film this archetypal gold rush yarn. Stan gets to do a little urbex in a gorgeous snowy ghost town and then materializes a couple long-dead miners through double-exposed pipes, beer steins, and flashing knives. Narrated, naturally, through song.
A tale of two gold miners of the old west who struck it rich. The lonely life made them heavy drinkers, and one night when the heavyset and silent Dutchman wouldn’t talk to the feisty little Irishman, he was knifed to death. The Irishman was hanged and the whereabouts of the mine lies buried with him.Read More »
A portion of a building, Maine Montparnasse, filmed from the 5th floor of a neighboring building according to architectural lines, is transformed by geometric movements more or less fast blurring our perception.
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Movie’s themes : Architecture, Urbanism, Cities, French experimental of the 70’sRead More »
Fragile the image reflected in the mirror and on the snowy surface. But sweet is the naive force that reweaves it in every way, tirelessly searching for it.Read More »
This short black-and-white film shows eerie scenes of a downtown without people. The effect is disturbing. The camera shoots familiar urban scenes, without a soul in sight: streets empty, buildings empty, yet everywhere there is evidence of recent life and activity. At the end of the film we learn what has happened.
23 Skidoo is a 1964 short experimental black and white film by Julian Biggs, produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Its central images are “eerie” and “disturbing” scenes of downtown Montreal devoid of people.Read More »
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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 »