Experimental

  • Pat O’Neill – Foregrounds (1979)

    1971-1980ExperimentalPat O'NeillUSA
    Foregrounds (1979)
    Foregrounds (1979)

    Quote:
    “FOREGROUNDS, like SAUGUS SERIES, is devoted almost entirely to carefully constructed spatial ambiguities. The most visceral of these prints a rotating boulder, occupying half of the screen, over a slow lateral pan across the desert (painted by Neon Park). A faint superimposition of leaves on top of the landscape has the effect of pushing its vista farther back in space. Correspondingly, the boulder bulges out of the picture-plane like a Cezanne apple. The effect is so strong that even when O’Neill begins to animate ‘scratches’ over the image, one’s eye refuses to surrender the illusion of volume.” – J. Hoberman, The Village VoiceRead More »

  • Peter Schamoni – Hundertwassers Regentag (1971)

    Peter Schamoni1971-1980DocumentaryExperimentalGermany
    Hundertwassers Regentag (1971)
    Hundertwassers Regentag (1971)

    Hundertwasser the painter is portrayed in this international prize winning film. The life and works of the artist are woven into a fascinating, enchanting visual composition using a refined crossfading technique. The effect is a glistening, irridescent display of images; a rainbow of colours on a blissful rainy day. ~~ from the back o’ the box.Read More »

  • Curtis Harrington – The Assignation (1953)

    Curtis Harrington1951-1960ExperimentalShort FilmUSA
    The Assignation (1953)
    The Assignation (1953)

    Quote:
    Long considered lost, this was Harrington s first color film. It was shot in Venice, Italy, and not unlike Fragment of Seeking, follows a masked figure through the labyrinthine canals of the city, building to a spectacular climax.Read More »

  • Thom Andersen – A Train Arrives at the Station (2016)

    Thom Andersen2011-2020DocumentaryExperimentalUSA
    A Train Arrives at the Station (2016)
    A Train Arrives at the Station (2016)

    This film was a gift to me. I make no claims for it, nor do I offer any apologies. It comes from work on The Thoughts That Once We Had. There was one shot we had to cut whose loss I particularly regretted. It was a shot of a train pulling into Tokyo Station from Ozu’s The Only Son (1936). So I decided to make a film around this shot, an anthology of train arrivals. It comprises 26 scenes or shots from movies, 1904-2015. It has a simple serial structure: each black & white sequence in the first half rhymes with a color sequence in the second half. Thus the first shot and the final shot show trains arriving at stations in Japan from a low camera height. In the first shot (The Only Son), the train moves toward the right; in the last shot, it moves toward the left. A bullet train has replaced a steam locomotive. So after all these years, I’ve made another structural film, although that was not my original intention. – Thom AndersenRead More »

  • Eija-Liisa Ahtila – Rakkaus on aarre AKA Love is a treasure (2002)

    2001-2010Eija-Liisa AhtilaExperimentalFinlandVideo Art
    Rakkaus on aarre (2002)
    Rakkaus on aarre (2002)

    This is quite a rare stuff from Eija-Liisa Ahtila, a Finnish videoartist and photographer.
    The film tells five different stories about women who have developed psychoses.
    It consists of five episodes each telling the story of one woman. In the first a woman prefers to stay underneath her bed because of the imaginary killers hunting around her. In the second a teenage girl becomes the assistant of UFOs controlling sounds heard on earth. In the third episode a woman crawls over a bridge because things have become unstable due to the emergence of past events. The fourth part depicts how anger takes the form of a wind in a woman’s apartment. In the last episode a woman starts to hear the sounds of other places, and shuts out all images by covering the windows of her house so as to be able to be in the space where the sounds are.
    The script links the episodes together by using various spaces and surroundings, and through the treatment of images.Read More »

  • Luke Fowler – To the Editor of Amateur Photographer (2014)

    Luke Fowler2011-2020DocumentaryExperimentalUnited Kingdom
    To the Editor of Amateur Photographer (2014)
    To the Editor of Amateur Photographer (2014)

    Quote:
    Luke Fowler and Mark Fell’s new film revolves around the testimonies and collected documents linked to the complex and often contested history of Pavilion, Europe’s first feminist photography centre. To the editor of Amateur Photographer examines a radical shift in photography whilst also foregrounding the problems of presenting history through archival fragments and personal recollections.Operating out of former park premises in Leeds, Pavilion was formed in 1983 with the stated aim of being the first photography centre dedicated to representing and supporting the production of women’s photography. Against a backdrop of heightened social, political and economic conflicts, the Pavilion set about turning the prevailing patriarchal image culture inside-out. ~LUXRead More »

  • Abram Room – Strogiy yunosha AKA A Strict Young Man (1935)

    1931-1940Abram RoomExperimentalPoliticsUSSR
    Strogiy yunosha (1935)
    Strogiy yunosha (1935)

    Two heros are placed face to face in this film; a famous medical professor who has kept his bourgeois lifestyle intact and a young man engaged in the Komsomol, an ardent enforcer of mankind’s new moral code for the construction of communism. But the severe young man falls in love with the professor’s wife.Read More »

  • Yashaswini Raghunandan – That Cloud Never Left (2019)

    2011-2020DocumentaryExperimentalIndiaYashaswini Raghunandan
    That Cloud Never Left (2019)
    That Cloud Never Left (2019)

    Quote:
    Director Yashaswini Raghunandan has a perceptive sense of humour. Her film That Cloud Never Left opens with a title card that reads, “This is a work of fiction. Only people, places, and the work are real. For the rest, any resemblance to anything that might have actually happened or dreamt of is purely co-incidental.”Read More »

  • Peter B. Hutton – Lodz Symphony (1993)

    Peter B. Hutton1991-2000DocumentaryExperimentalPoland
    Lodz Symphony (1993)
    Lodz Symphony (1993)

    A portrait of Łódź, Poland that exists in a time warp of sad memory. Hutton creates an empty world evoking the 19th century industrial atmosphere that is populated with the ghosts of Poland’s tragic past.Read More »

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