Experimental

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 »

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 »

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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 »

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 »

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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 »

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 »

PLOT:
Vertov and his Kino group produced this lyrical documentary on the lives of Coal miners in the Donbas who are struggling to meet their production quotas under the five year plan. Enthusiasm is most noteworthy for it’s creative use of the new sound medium. Vertov liberated the recording equipment from the studio and shot sound on location. He also used common everyday sounds and wove them into what can only be described as a symphony. In fact, after seeing the film Charlie Chaplin wrote: “Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged to sound so beautiful. I regard it as one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have heard. Mr. Dziga Vertov is a musician.”Read More »

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Nocturnes pour le roi de Rome is a French film directed in 2005 by Jean-Charles Fitoussi in Rome during the Pocket Film Festival and released on January 6, 2010. This film is the first feature film to have been shot with a cell phone equipped with a camera.

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An old German composer is invited in Roma by the King to compose for him eight Notturni. But the memories of tragic events he used to live there, in the very place he is now coming back, make him unable to write anything.Read More »

Vietnamese-born Trinh T. Minh-ha’s profoundly personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women historically and in contemporary society. Using dance, printed texts, folk poetry and the words and experiences of Vietnamese women in Vietnam—from both North and South—and the United States, Trinh’s film challenges official culture with the voices of women. A theoretically and formally complex work, Surname Viet Given Name Nam explores the difficulty of translation, and themes of dislocation and exile, critiquing both traditional society and life since the war.Read More »