Experimental

The concept of Spin, the inherent turning momentum of electrons, stands for the passing of time and for time itself. The unceasing transformation of the world is translated into film via the gliding movement of the camera. Bright light and blurring portray the environment of the film’s elderly subject, my mother, as pure atmosphere. Her few calm gestures in the face of diminishing time and energy convey a personal presence undisturbed by specific goals. She sits and breathes quietly. When walking she travels across space. The turning away of a tree full of apples evokes regret, as does a sharp light that narrows and dissolves. In the final image my mother seems to taste a bitterness that eludes comprehension.Read More »

The Newest Olds is the second installment in Argentinian filmmaker Pablo Mazzolo’s cinematic diptych exploring the natural and urban environment within and surrounding the border region of Windsor–Detroit. Completed seven years after the release of Fish Point (2015), Mazollo’s revelatory study of light and landscape that animated the deciduous forest harbours and rare ecosystem at the southeastern tip of Pelee Island, The Newest Olds transforms Detroit’s iconic cityscapes, dislodging buildings from their foundations and collapsing the physical, political, and sensory boundaries between Canada and the United States through alchemical, in-camera, and optical printing techniques.Read More »

Densité Optique I (Optical Density I) mark a chromatic decomposition of the image. The choice to show a scrolling film movie as an extreme slow motion, frame by frame voluntarily directs the gaze on the work of the image. This aesthetic can remember those photographs retouched by painting. However, this type of image is obtained by a chemical decomposition of the film emulsion. Indeed, it is composed of three colored layers deposited on a transparent plastic substrate. Light passing through these layers is tinged with the colors and optical density, recreates the images and colors of the frames. Certain mixtures of chemistries acids attack these layers in the decolorizer, diluting in different aspects.Read More »

Synopsis
Old Redwood Series – 95 min. silent, 1974-1979
Animations – by Jack Fisher and Carl Conversa

In 1974 I moved to a rural property on Old Redwood Highway in Sonoma County near the town of Penngrove California where I still live. I had started a filmmaking curriculum in the Art Department at nearby Sonoma State University in 1969 after obtaining an MA in Film from San Francisco State University, and wanted to live closer to work.Read More »

Documenting Mekas’s return to the Lithuanian village of his birth, Semeniškiai, for the first time since he and his brother Adolfas escaped from German labor camps and emigrated to the United States in the late 1940s, Reminiscences is arguably the greatest achievement within Mekas’s exploration of the film-diary form. We begin in Williamsburg with footage shot by Mekas with his first Bolex of his and Adolfas’s first years in exile, before skipping ahead to the brothers’ return to Lithuania in 1971, their reunions with family members, their experience of their home country as displaced people, and finally, their visit to the labor camp near Hamburg where they were imprisoned during World War II.Read More »

A cosmic journey in Sweden together with electronic musician and composer Ralph Lundsten. A film about art, music and philosophy.Read More »

Concentration Face features live performances filmed while on tour in Japan by the band Hella.

Concentration Face (DVD)
“Part I” – 60:26
Tokyo 5/3
Osaka 5/4
Kyoto 5/5
Nagoya 5/6
“Part II” – 60:33
Tokyo 5/7 (Entire Show)Read More »

Plot Synopsis
With characteristic invention, Ariane Mnouchkine, one of Europe’s most visionary stage directors, had the actors of Le Théâtre du Soleil improvise refugee stories based on what they’d gathered in a lifetime of newspaper reading before showing them the extraordinary letters on which THE LAST CARAVANSERAIL is based. Selected letters – written by Iranian, and Kurdish refugees held in France, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand – were then organized into an episodic, non-linear, structure that honors and recalls Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, manifold tales of war, no matter its cause, and its consequences. The 6-hour play, presented in two parts, neither points its finger at the West nor portrays the refugees as saintly; what it does is give dimension to withering statistics.Read More »

Quote:
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi are filmmakers of the resistance. They don’t want to convince at all costs, but rather aim at inducing a productive sense of dout, leading to a dialectic between present and past, there and elsewhere, truth and lies, ideology and history. Like Godard, the Gianikians have a solid belief in the ontological power of the image, in its radiant permanence. (…) If their films are formally superb, the Gianikians are part of that category of filmmakers of splendor, who use this as a dialectical means, rather than as an aim on itself. It’s also in this regard that they are political filmmakers. Like all great cineastes, the Gianikians learn us to look anew. They are worried poets, who compose their films with scraps from the past to throw a stronger light on the present. (Frédéric Bonnaud) Inventario Balcanico: Images of the Balkans, coming from diverse Yugoslav communities.Read More »