Experimental

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One of the most vertiginous of Markopoulos’s interior landscape studies, Himself as Herself is based loosely on Balzac’s Séraphita. The film consists of a shimmering, nearly plotless evocation of gender identity in flux, and it contains some of Markopoulos’s most haunting, densely interlaced images. Markopoulos portrays a hermaphrodite body, its movements, postures and gestures or expressions, a study of a highly stylized inner landscape that takes Bresson’s ideals to their ultimate conclusions. This film is dedicated to the American artist Emlen Pope Etting and features a musical excerpt from Poulenc’s “Gloria.”Read More »

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In 2007, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler began a new collaborative project inspired by American author Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient Evenings, set in pharaonic Egypt. The project was conceived as a nontraditional opera with a series of one-time-only live acts performed across the American landscape over a five-year period. This opera developed as a film titled River of Fundament, which combines documentation of the three live acts with scenes set in a reconstruction of Norman Mailer’s brownstone apartment in Brooklyn Heights.Read More »

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The race does not begin at the start line, it does not end at the finish line either. The camera observes the participants of the Polish 4×100 metres relay team, getting ready for the race and slowing down after the finish line. The competition would not exist without the following stages: mobilization, full of anxiety, and composure of the red-hot organism. Interestingly enough, they are observed really rarely. “Bieg” is a film directed by Bohdan Kosiński, a classic of the Polish school of documentary. Kosiński was associated with the Documentary Film Studios, he began his professional career with the so-called black series (“Miasto na wyspach”, 1958). Read More »

This little film was shot by Jean-Luc Godard in 1981 when he was visiting Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco, where Coppola was directing One from the Heart. It stars Andrei Konchalovsky reading a book about Cézanne, while a crew is trying to fix the light to film a painting by Georges de La Tour, Le Nouveau-né.

A few seconds of this film are included in Godard’s Les trois désastres.Read More »

Sex-Power (L’homme coeur) is a film about what happens when imagination takes over. It is the story of a boy (Alain Noury) in search of himself and of the real meaning of freedom: a twenty-year-old face to face with Woman, with Love.His emotional education takes place between two journeys: a solitary trip across America -in the grip of the hippie myth- and a long oneiric odyssey on the part of the hero, who lets his mind dwell at length on the temptation provided by women other than the one who loves him. So Alain is torn by an emotional reality -his relationship with Jane (Jane Birkin)- and the wanderings of his youthful imagination. Read More »

The voices say a story. forget it. Of what time. And who speaks. Both of them. One or the other. later. Others may be. Of chance. Which would cross in this narrative. When. The times have intermingled. The winds meet. History. Pictures. The summer. Humble vacancy with furtive foliage. Fragile memory. Light is a trace of forgetfulness.Read More »

Revolutions, natural disasters, toxic fall-out, plane crashes – these are all part of the running picture of news against which America’s leading novelist, Don DeLillo , sets his fiction. In this film, as in his novels, DeLillo pinpoints the deep unease beneath the surface of our lives. The film begins with the assassination of President Kennedy and the politics of violence it brought to television screens for the first time. It goes on to look at the way the media has continued to feed its audience images of disaster and terror: massacres in great public squares, disasters in football stadiums, and dramatic acts of terrorism. DeLillo explores the relationship between words and images, and between gunmen and the novelist.Read More »

Nursing homes in Holland have a long waiting list. It has become customary to register as early as possible to ensure future placement.
Impressive is Rob Houwer’s film which casts its eye on an old peoples’ home. Filmed in colour, it contains the haunting image: an eerie, disquieting shot of numerous residents all peering out of their windows simultaneously, all silent, all looking heartbreakingly lonely. Were this a horror film it would be terrifying, as it is it strikes a more melancholy chord.Read More »

Summary:
Broodthaers’s first film, Clef d’Horloge was made using a borrowed camera and some film stock that he had been given. It was shot at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, in 1956, during an exhibition of works by Kurt Schwitters. The film is made in negative and positive and is based on several works that were on display. It premiered on 23 April 1958 at ‘Filmexprmntlfilm’, an experimental film convention in Brussels.

La Clef de l’Horloge, a so-called documentary about the poet, painter and uber-bricoleur Schwitters, is ‘rounded off’ by adding a love poem. The film shows close-ups of Das Sternenbild [The Constellations]. Starry skies and other similar constellations often reappear in later works and also recur in his films.Read More »