Quote:
Compline is a night devotion or prayer, the last of the canonical hours, the final act in a cycle. This film is also the last film I will be able to shoot in Kodachrome, a film stock I have shot since I was 10 years old. It is a loving duet with and a fond farewell to this noble emulsion.
–Nathaniel DorskyRead More »
Quote:
In THE BETRUCTION OF THE BLUE SAILORS, Tabea Blumenschein “plays four different roles in changing appearances and in fantastic costumes that structure the film: a mythical figure that permeates the film on desert sand with siren song; a bird that is killed; a Hawaiian girl and a Sailors. While the siren, accompanied by Asian music, strides along the desert, sailors and birds become the victims of perverted naturalness in the form of the wild Hawaiian girl.” (Claudia Hoff) In the collage principle, areas and quotations from commercialized everyday life and the music, which ranges from noises, sacred gongs, Hawaiian music, Schuricke melodies, musette waltzes to Burmese songs and cultic Ketchak rhythms, and the language – literary texts by Apollinaire, which already use the quotation method, phrases from the world of American show business (Hollywood veteran star), lamentations of a Russian silent film mother […], come satire, the grotesque, the caricature, the clown and the doll up; and it is the deep meaning of these forms of expression, through the demonstration of the marionette-ness, the mechanization of life, through the apparent and real torpor, to let us imagine a different life. (Raoul Hausman). (From the conversation between Ulrike Ottinger/ Tabea Blumenschein and Hanne Bergius)Read More »
Bruce Baillie’s (…) Quixote (1965) stands alongside other synoptic 60s masterpieces such as Stan Brakhage’s The Art of Vision and Peter Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise, which use dense collages of diverse images in an attempt to make sense of a troubling world. In Quixote wild horses and a basketball game are part of a cross-country trip that ends with an antiwar demonstration in Manhattan. Baillie says he’s depicting our culture as one of conquest, but his film’s greatness lies not in its social analysis, which can seem as simpleminded as equating businessmen with pigs. Rather it’s in the way his superimposed and intercut images float almost weightlessly in space, creating a hypnotic sense of displacement that lets us see beyond aggression.Read More »
Quote:
A performer faces a seated audience. Behind the performer, covering the back wall (parallel to the frontal view of the seated audience), is a mirror reflecting the audience.Read More »
A tortured artist is stuck in an abusive relationship with a woman, whose torments (demonstrated through nightmarish scenes of disembowelment) are slowly driving him mad.Read More »
Quote:
Recording of the annual Christmas folklore street ritual Krampus in Austria, in which people dressed up as hairy monsters scare the wits out of the population. The accompanying metal soundtrack by The Melvins provides a curious American perspective.Read More »
Review from TimeOut:
Shot in Paris, it chronicles a couple of distracted days in the life of Orlando (Miranda), an American sports journalist, during which her near-incestuous obsession with her late brother finally prompts her French lover to pack his bags and split. Little else happens: she misses a deadline (Scott Thomas cameos as her editor), meets a basketball team in their locker room and replays some of her brother’s old smell-o-vision software (designed by Chris Marker). But Shamberg uses digital editing to seamlessly integrate her memories/fantasies and larger reflections on the film’s themes into the minimal narrative, generating images of uncommon density and beauty and turning the film into a kind of nervous rhapsody. The ending consolidates the various levels of paradox, bringing us back to earth with an elegiac bump.Read More »
A leather-clad man watches a woman’s apartment before entering it, cutting the phone cord, leaving a calling card, and confronting her with a razor in hand.Read More »
Quote:
An optically-printed canvas which explores the interior feel of world moving with inherent fluidity through a medium of wind and water. It presents an impressionistic portrait of unnatural forces that collide.Read More »