Experimental

  • Andrés Duque – Color perro que huye (2011)

    2011-2020Andrés DuqueDocumentaryExperimentalSpain

    After an accident that leaves him bedridden for two months, the filmmaker retrieves discard images he’s been collecting for eight years on his computer’s hard drive. With them he develops an intimate and poetic film, consisting of portraits of friends, walks through Barcelona and a trip to his native country, Venezuela, where chaos imposes its aesthetic appeal. A complex and fragmented film that shows the world of the filmmaker that sometimes happens to be as absurd and miraculous as a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.Read More »

  • T. Minh-ha Trinh – Shoot for the Contents (1991)

    1991-2000DocumentaryEthnographic CinemaExperimentalT. Minh-ha TrinhUSA

    Reflecting on Mao’s famous saying “Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” Trinh T. Minh-ha’s SHOOT FOR THE CONTENTS—a title that alludes to a Chinese guessing game—is a unique excursion into the maze of allegorical naming and storytelling in China. The film ponders questions of power and change, politics and culture, as refracted by the Tiananmen Square massacre. It offers at the same time an inquiry into the creative process of filmmaking, intricately layering Chinese popular songs and classical music, the sayings of Mao and Confucius, women’s voices, and the words of artists, philosophers, and other cultural workers. The result is a meditative documentary that captures major shifts of interpretation in modern Chinese culture and politics.Read More »

  • Hans Jürgen Pohland – Schatten aka Shadows (1960)

    1951-1960ExperimentalGermanyHans Jürgen PohlandShort Film

    A black-and-white experimental film with light and shade – the basic materials of cinematography and other projected art forms.Read More »

  • Guy Sherwin – Messages (1984)

    1981-1990ExperimentalGuy SherwinShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    A response to my young daughter’s discovery of language and to her questions about the world.

    Messages was made over a 3 year period, when my daughter Maya was first learning to talk and write.

    It was my first film that involved gathering material around a central theme. That theme was not constant, but shifted its ground between ideas to do with childhood, with language, or with visual perception.Read More »

  • Jonas Mekas – Guns of the Trees (1961)

    1961-1970DramaExperimentalJonas MekasUSA

    Quote:
    Four young people are trying to understand why their friend, a young woman, committed a suicide. A film made up of disconnected scenes weaving between past and present. The title of the film comes from a poem by Stuart Perkoff which tells that some young people felt (around 1960) that everything is against them, so much that even the trees in the parks and streets seemed to them like guns pointing at their very existence.
    – Jonas MekasRead More »

  • Frans van de Staak – Rooksporen AKA Traces of Smoke (1992)

    1991-2000DramaExperimentalFrans van de StaakNetherlands

    Quote:
    The central character in Rooksporen is a woman who finds herself facing an interrogator. Around these interrogation scenes are scenes in which 26 witnesses (from A to Z) are introduced: first in their houses and then in a space adjacent to the interrogation room. The questioner has an ambiguous identity and function: he directs his questions at the woman and then turns away only listening and watching as a sounding-board, to the witnesses. And the witnesses also have an elusive identity. Who or what they are remains unclear, they exist thanks to the sensuality and/or obscurity of their language. It is also far from clear what the woman is accused of. Most witnesses eventually think she is guilty, but what of remains the question. Read More »

  • Alexander Kluge & Edgar Reitz – In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod AKA In Danger and Deep Distress, the Middleway Spells Certain Death (1974)

    1971-1980Alexander KlugeDramaEdgar ReitzExperimentalGermany

    Quote:
    A female prostitute and thief makes her way through the city with a female GDR spy. Frankfurt, 1974. It’s Carnival time. At the same time police forcibly evict students from occupied buildings).Read More »

  • Peter Rose – The man who could not see far enough (1981)

    1981-1990ExperimentalPeter RoseShort FilmUSA

    From peterrosepicture.com
    The man who could not see far enough (1981, 16 mm film, color, sound) uses literary, structural, autobiographical, and performance metaphors to construct a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the limits of perception, and the rapture of space. Spectacular moving multiple images; a physical, almost choreographic sense of camera movement; and massive, resonant sound have inspired critics to call it “stunning” and “hallucinatory.” The film ranges in subject from a solar eclipse shot off the coast of Africa to a hand-held filmed ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge, and moves, in spirit, from the deeply personal to the mythic. “The man who could not see far enough” has won major awards of distinction at numerous festivals both here and abroad, including the Oberhausen, Edinburgh, American, and Sydney Film Festivals, has been broadcast nationally, and is in collections at Centre Pompidou in Paris and at Image Forum in Tokyo.Read More »

  • Jennifer Reeves – Chronic (1997)

    1991-2000ExperimentalJennifer ReevesShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    Chronic is an experimental narrative of one young woman living with “so-called” mental illness. Beautiful and skillful, it probes her misogynistic and violent surroundings for the motives behind her compulsive self-mutilation.Read More »

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