Experimental

Technical fetishism and trite philosophy abound in Talking to Strangers, a relatively daring American independent film that, despite its strengths, only points out the creative plague in the rest of American independent cinema. Built around a simple gimmick–nine continuous takes arranged in random order and photographed with bravura camera moves and a one-to-one shooting ratio–the film is, metaphorically, about art and the struggle of the artist. Specifically, it is about a pompous, college-educated artiste who tries to find his material by talking to strangers. His type, played by Ken Gruz, is one of mankind’s most despicable–a condescending, egocentric leech who preys on others in order to serve his own need to create art.Read More »

A short film made for “Venezia 70 – Future Reloaded.”

The day will come

We shall set sail from the mysteries of mythologies
And i shall be singing hymns to set you free
All of the effort I put into 70 Hours Of Diaz and I somehow forgot that he had a short in Venice 70: Future Reloaded…

Outside of experimental affair like Let Your Light Shine or Brakhage’s hand painted affair where the film is 100% dedicated to an aesthetic and that’s what the film must be judged on alone it’s hard to muster the same enthusiasm on a narrative level you would for a 77 second short that you would for say, a 9 hour film for example.
GrimsChild (letterboxd)Read More »

Quote:
Ophelia’s Suicide soliloquy is staged by a forest pond against the backdrop of a stretched piece of blue fabric gently quivering in the accidental breeze. A few years earlier, Jørgen Leth and Per Kirkeby had put on a highly stylized production of “Hamlet” at the Svalegangen theatre in Aarhus and from there comes the idea of Ophelia’s soliloquy literally “going to pieces” according to this principle: when Leth in the wings, strikes two wooden blocks together, the actress halts her reading and starts over. As the actress is halted again and again, the soliloquy breaks up according to the accidental principle, which is unpredictable and enervating. Read More »

Europa is a 12-minute anti-fascist film made in 1931 in Warsaw, Poland by surrealists Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. The film is based on Anatol Stern’s 1925 futurist poem Europa. It uses collages and photograms, and articulates the sense of horror and moral decline its makers were witnessing. The film, while long thought to have been lost, is considered an avant-garde masterpiece.Read More »

A student film by Béla Tarr, from 1979.
Presumed lost until very recently.Read More »

Produced for the 1984 London Film Festival, Derek Jarman’s Imagining October is a dreamlike meditation on art and politics in the final years of the Cold War. In this film Jarman explores art and politics in the final years of the Cold War, drawing connections between pre-Perestroika Russia and Thatcherite Britain. The title refers to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and Sergei Eisenstein’s propaganda film October: Ten Days That Shook the World 1928.Read More »

Temenos explores the phenomenon of visionary experience, taking the viewer to locations where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared, including Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje in Croat-occupied Bosnia, where the visions continue. Nina Danino films the landscapes that have witnessed these transcendental appearances, imbuing them with a powerful sense of the sacred.Read More »

#37
(35mm scope, 31 min, 2009)

“Andronicos says that in a certain place in Spain one finds small, scattered stones which are polygonal and grow spontaneously. Some of them are white, others are like wax and pregnant of smaller stones similar to themselves.
I kept one to verify this myself and it gave birth at my place, so the story is not a lie.”

‘Paradoxographus Palatinus’, anonymous, 3rd century.Read More »

1 – the last day in the life of Pasolini but from the look of his aggressor a ragazzi – like any other his friends – his environment – his tragedy

2 – a group of ragazzis working with their wooden carts in the city of Cordoba but the gaze is focus on them – playing in the river and with a mysterious woman Ragazzi is a symphony in two movementsRead More »