Experimental

  • Jonas Mekas – The Velvet Underground & Nico – Super 8 Films (1966)

    1961-1970ArthouseExperimentalJonas MekasUSA

    THIS IS A HOME MOVIE OF LOW QUALITY.

    This is recomended for only the DIE HARD interested in taking a peak at the Factory scene and the Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground and Nico are present in this film and their sound is distorted if it is there at all. The sound does not sync up with the film. Also in the crowd are Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Rubin, Tuli Kupferberg, Peter Orlovsky, Ed Sanders, Gererd Malanga and Storm De Hirsch.Read More »

  • Alexis Granowsky – Das Lied vom Leben aka Song of Life (1931)

    Germany1931-1940Alexis GranowskyDramaExperimentalWeimar Republic cinema

    Quote:
    Released in America as The Song of Life, this German film stirred up quite a tempest back in 1931 for its depiction of a Caesarian birth. Though not much was really shown, it was enough to cause women filmgoers — and not a few men — to faint dead away. The film was banned outright in Germany and ran into some censorship problems in the US; still, by its very controversial nature it proved to be a hit wherever it was shown. And oh, yes, there was a plot, albeit a somewhat nonsensical one: After discovering that her elderly fiance has false teeth, a young bride-to-be becomes so distraught that she contemplates suicide! She is rescued by a young sailor, with whom she has a baby, leading to the aforementioned “C-section” sequence. ~ Hal Erickson, RoviRead More »

  • Dane Komljen – Afterwater (2022)

    2021-2030ArthouseDane KomljenExperimentalGermany

    Afterwater is a three-part film spanning fiction, documentary and experimental film aiming to study and compare lakes across the world and their hidden treasures: submerged settlements, failed utopias and collective dreams, the remains of past eras and the seeds of a hopeful future.Read More »

  • Jean-Daniel Pollet & Volker Schlöndorff – Méditerranée (1963)

    1961-1970ExperimentalFranceJean-Daniel PolletShort FilmVolker Schlöndorff

    Méditerranée is a 1963 French experimental film directed by Jean-Daniel Pollet with assistance from Volker Schlöndorff. It was written by Philippe Sollers and produced by Barbet Schroeder, with music by Antione Duhamel. The 45 minute film is cited as one of Pollet’s most influential films, which according to Jonathan Rosenbaum directly influenced Jean-Luc Goddard’s Contempt, released later the same year.[1] Footage for the film was shot around the Mediterranean, including at a Greek temple, a Sicilian garden, the sea, and also features a fisherman, a bullfighter, and a girl on an operating table.Read More »

  • Christopher Petit – London Orbital (2002)

    2001-2010Christopher PetitDocumentaryExperimentalIain SinclairUnited Kingdom

    Film Description
    Visionary film about the M25. A road movie (literally) and a cinematic excursion into the difference between driving and walking, film and tape, time and memory, sound and image. Also a look at covert arms deals, Essex gangsters, drug dealing and Thatcher and Pinochet as vampire-lovers.

    Iain Sinclair’s territory has long been the hidden geography and psycho-geography of Britain. He is adept at drawing out the character of place, and in 2001 he walked the perimeter of the M25 in an attempt to understand its true nature and influence. This resulted in his recently published book, London Orbital.Read More »

  • Yvonne Rainer – Kristina Talking Pictures (1976)

    1971-1980DramaExperimentalUSAYvonne Rainer

    This is the new restoration of Yvonne Rainer’s Kristina Talking Pictures. Namechecking both Virginia Woolf and Jean-Luc Godard in the film’s opening segment, Rainer continues to experiment in her elegiac, hybrid third feature with unshackling narrative from conventional representation, using the paradoxical feminine figure of a lion tamer, Kristina (played by several women, including Rainer herself), and a disjunctive audiovisual syntax that pushes avant-garde film grammar into thrillingly novel, expressive realms. Kristina arrives from Budapest to 1970s New York City, harboring hopes of becoming a dance choreographer, as well as romantic affections for an elusive sailor named Raoul.Read More »

  • Yvonne Rainer – Lives of Performers (1972) (HD)

    1971-1980ExperimentalPerformanceUSAYvonne Rainer

    This is the new restoration of Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers. Rainer’s debut feature film announced both her shift from the world of dance towards avant-garde cinema, and what would become a career-long interest in “women’s stories” and the teasing machinations of melodrama. The familiar tale of a man who can’t choose between two women and makes everyone suffer is reworked by Rainer as a jolting and radically austere, anti-illusionist spectacle, comprising dance rehearsals, photography, tableaux, and a flurry of fragments of text, both onscreen and not. Off-camera, multiple voices can be heard—including that of cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who was at the time just beginning work with a young Chantal Akerman.Read More »

  • Martine Rousset – Chemins (2014)

    2011-2020ExperimentalFranceMartine Rousset

    The unfinished Julien Gracq text, the road 1970, a forest near the sea, the enigma of a trajectory, by this text in this lanscape and this landscape in this text, it’s diging, since a double echo to a same root, deep, invisible, an absolute presence, a stones fire, then, text and landscape are foliage of the same language.Read More »

  • Christopher Petit – Unrequited Love (2006)

    2001-2010Christopher PetitDocumentaryExperimentalUnited Kingdom

    Based on an English academic’s memoir on stalking and being stalked, Unrequited Love is a dazzling digital film essay on cinema and absence, on Hitchcock and Antonioni, on cinema and cities. It is a story of waiting, self-delusion, panic, fear of violence, and of modern technologies which define the urban stalker as they do the new terrorist. Their methods duplicate: both are irrational and targeted.Read More »

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