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La caméra se promène entre les tables de la Rotonde et surprend une coquette saupoudrant un nez brillant, ou un intellectuel. On y devine le peintre Foujita, la clope élégante, ou Bunuel rêvassant devant les mollets qui dansent, et toute une faune qui hante les trottoirs et rappelle les plus belles heures du foyer intellectuel que fût Montparnasse.Read More »
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Statement by Hamlet Hovsepian regarding the films:
“”What have been presented are totally unrelated events (material) at the outset. The relation between them portrays neither pleasant nor unpleasant feelings. To find interest in a place outside man’s attention.”Read More »
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“Rotation around a rock” / during socialism / the passage of days and decades came to resemble one another, that was our life. Monotonous life chases after us and we are chasing after it.” (Hamlet Hovsepian)Read More »
Staggeringly simple films: a man itching his back, a man thinking, a man yawning, but like the works of Samuel Beckett, these minute gestures stand in as grand statements of the human condition, akin to the films of Bas Jan Ader and Marcel Broodthaers.Read More »
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A decade after quitting Hollywood, legendary director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, In a Lonely Place) accepted a teaching contract at Harpur College in Binghamton, NY. There, with the intensive collaboration of his students, he began work on a project unlike anything he had done before, the making of which would consume his creative energies for the remainder of his life. Entitled We Can’t Go Home Again, that film is Ray’s enormously ambitious, profoundly personal, wildly experimental magnum opus – a collection of notes on Vietnam-era America, the generation gap and the filmmaking process itself, conceived in a dizzying kaleidoscope of split screens, superimpositions and other radical image manipulations that anticipate later trends in video art and digital effects.Read More »
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“Fun and Games (for Everyone): a pitch black and milky white film shot during one of Olivier Mosset’s exhibition openings. A psychedelic game of improvisation joins the Zanzibar group with Salvador Dalí, Barbet Schroeder and Jean Mascolo… the solarized image reminiscent of thick strokes of a paintbrush.” – PHILIPPE AZOURYRead More »
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Disc two travels back in time for two late-Twenties American shorts before heading off to France for three late-Forties/early-Fifties films, including the epic Lettrism manifesto, Jean Isidore Isou’s Venom and Eternity (also known by the far better title Treatise on Slime and Eternity, 1951). From the former group only James Watson and Melville Webber’s expressionist adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) is of any note, while two of the three later films, Jean Mitry’s Pacific 231 (1949) and Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Arriere Saison (1950), serviceably employ techniques that had reached their fulfillment thirty years prior. Venom and Eternity is supposed to be the cherry on the cake—a rarely seen controversial feature with 34 minutes of restored footage.Read More »
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In the latter half of the 20th Century, Raymond Rohauer was one of the nation s foremost proponents of experimental cinema. This two-disc collection continues Kino s tribute to the Rohauer Collection, including the early works of Stan Brakhage and influential films by Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, Marie Menken, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Jean Mitry, Sidney Peterson and others.Read More »
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Lye’s first direct film, which combines popular Cuban dance music with hand-painted abstract designs, amazed cinema audiences. Color was still a novelty, and Lye’s direct painting on celluloid creates exceptionally vibrant effects. The film won several major awards, though some festivals had to invent a special category for it, and in Venice, the Fascists disrupted screenings because they saw the film as ‘degenerate’ modern art. A Colour Box was funded and distributed by John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on the condition that Lye include postal messages at the end.Read More »