Experimental

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While it was long thought that his filmography had concluded with the film Life in 1993, Pelechian has now returned with a new film, simply titled Nature, through which he once again observes the delicate cohabitation of human communities with their environment—a central theme in his work. The images composing the film—mainly amateur footage gathered from the internet—are fragile traces shot in the midst of nature and its turmoil. A visual elegy, the film resolutely acknowledges nature’s superiority, which is capable of taming all human ambition.Read More »

“Formally, Moffatt’s movie is a beautifully considered, carefully crafted ‘tour’ across various, symbolically loaded areas of space, wherein John Whitteron’s steadily exploratory camerawork forces our gaze to look at certain, otherwise quite banal, objects and activities and to studiedly contemplate them, in all their sadly arrested beauty, in all their absurd tragi-comedy. Stephen Curtis’ set design, a symphony in scale and perspective blends the saturated ambers and lavender purples of Albert Namatjira’s kitschily redolent watercolours with what, again, might, or might not, constitute a stylised rendition of the living-room interior from the 1955 Chauvel classic. And Phillippa Harvey’s sound-edited noise-scape is probably one of the best uses of ambient aural effects in any local film, so much so that the wonderfully textured wailing and weeping, the strange whistles and screams can stay with the viewing ‘auditeur’ for days afterwards.”
senses of cinemaRead More »

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ANGEL CITY seems to me one of my most dated works, perhaps because it is in the nature of satires, or the embracing of things-of-the-time (in order to skewer them) that one is necessarily enmeshed with just what one is out to attack, like B’rer Rabbit’s tar baby. Still it has some pretty funny things in it, even now. And as a film it is for the money, a pretty spectacular piece, with aerials, a big crane shot, EFX, all done for a measly (even back then) $6000.Read More »

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In Les Goddesses, filmed almost entirely in the artist’s New York apartment, Moyra Davey draws parallels between her familial experience and the family of 18th-century writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Leafing through postcards, book pages, and her own photographs as she talks, Davey reflects on varied approaches to photography and film, such as planned versus unscripted recording of reality and the passage from private to public realms with a camera. Davey punctuates her narration with thoughts on writing as she simultaneously listens to and recites a script based on her 2011 essay, “The Wet and the Dry.”Read More »

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In February 2004, after 30 years of my life in SoHo, I made a decision to leave SoHo
and move to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This video is about what it feels like to leave a
place in which one has spent more time than any other place, and which was also
the place of my family life. I am somewhere else now. It’s about beginning of growing roots in a new place, new home, with new friends, new thoughts,
experiences.Read More »

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still/here is a meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute the north side of St. Louis, an area populated almost exclusively by working class and working poor African Americans. On a basic level, the film constructs a documentary record of the blight and decay of that part of the city. For the most part, still/here is not an overt assessment of social injustices but the politics of class and race within American society are integral to the film. In still/here, the ruins are emblematic of an unimaginable absence at the core of much of the African Diaspora’s experience in North America. From the countless Africans lost in the Middle Passage to the lost future generation of unborn descendant of those that perished during the voyage, to the loss of family and loved ones that were sold away during slavery, absence has been and continues to be a fundamental feature of the African-American experience.Read More »

Exploring impressionistic, emotional and sensory environments found within the vast natural and urban landscapes of America. Neither image nor sound takes precedence: the two interact and combine preserving a raw sense of the discovery that field recordings and in-camera edited film rushes often yield.Read More »

In 2066, a survivor of an enigmatic cult recounts his country’s traumatic history and the events leading to the rise and fall of the cult. Through his reminiscence, ghosts from 2014 and before appear as witnesses. Part dream documentary, part city symphony, this film traces the lineage of oppression as inscribed in Singapore’s landscape and collective unconscious.Read More »

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The film conjures up futuristic beings from an eerie smoke-filled landscape and the crystalline depths of the earth. Look Then Below was shot in the vast, dark passages of Wookey Hole Caves, under the Mendips in Somerset. The netherworld of chambers, carved out over deep time, once held remnants of lost civilisations, now foretell a future subterranean world, occupied by a species evolved from our environmentally challenged world.Read More »