The Girl and the Boy play in a garden. They are left alone there and they do not have any obligations to behave in a certain way. This gives them the freedom to create their own ways of interaction with the world. During such an interaction, adult social constructs inter-twist into weird children folklore and shift into an abstract sphere. There are secrets and various modes of being in the world of the Girl and the Boy.
(imdb)Read More »
Steven Soderbergh mixes Siodmak’s 1946 and Siegel’s 1964 The Killers
with wide selection of musical numbers “when presented with the challenge of delivering
some audio/visual material for a series of events organized in LA “Read More »
Synopsis wrote:
“The sub-personalities of me, as baby, athlete, witch and artist are synthesized in this film of superimpositions, intensities, and color layers coming together through the powers of film.” — Barbara HammerRead More »
Quote:
Jonas Mekas, the godfather of American “underground” cinema, shot literally miles of impromptu film on a tiny, touch-and-go Bolex camera before assembling his first “diary film” and screening it before an audience of friends and fellow indie artists in 1969. At that point the home-movie ethos was somewhat less than groundbreaking, but a glance at what Mekas’s contemporaries were working on or releasing at the time—Kenneth Anger was ensconced in off-and-on production for Lucifer Rising, Stan Brakhage was toiling on the 8mm Songs cycle, and Paul Morrissey had just morphed the Warhol aesthetic into the zeitgeist-preaching Flesh—suggests just how perpendicular his project stood in relation to the remainder of the bicoastal art-house scene. Read More »
Synopsis wrote:
In her first feature, after decades as a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Barbara Hammer weaves striking images of four contemporary gay and lesbian couples with footage of an unearthed, forbidden, and invisible history, searching eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of queer culture. Questions of historic representation are examined through addressing the margins, between-the-line readings, and images outside of prescribed textual boundaries. Archival footage from Lot In Sodom (1933), often regarded as the first queer film made in the United States, as well as footage from German narrative and documentary films of the thirties, are interwoven with contemporary footage in this multi-faceted, haunting documentary.Read More »
Leslie Thornton’s remarkable, mind-boggling experimental feature-length cycle of short films which she’s been working on and releasing in episodes since 1981 is a postapocalyptic narrative about two children feeling their way through the refuse of late-20th-century consumer culture; the films employ a wide array of found footage as well as peculiar, unpredictable, and often funny performances from two “found” actors. Apart from one startling and beautiful color shot in the penultimate episode, Whirling, the whole cycle is in black and white. (Episodes that have been added since an earlier version of the cycle showed in Chicago six years ago include Introduction to the So-Called Duck Factory and The Problem So Far.) Highly idiosyncratic and deeply creepy, this series as a whole – which includes passages in both film and video, sometimes shown concurrently – represents the most exciting recent work in the American avant-garde, a saga that raises questions about everything while making everything seem very strange.
– Jonathan RosenbaumRead More »
Very brief description: Feminist porn with mirrors.
Quote:
The mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body image. (Lacan, Some reflections on the Ego, 1953)Read More »
Synopsis wrote:
“I picked up Stan and Jane Brakhage at the airport and drove them to San Francisco State College where Stan spoke about his films to the student body. I was fascinated with Jane. She was so interested in the world around her while Stan seemed caught up only in his ideas. She picked seed pods from trees and plants and told me she had written a lexicon of dog language. She was so much more complex than Stan’s portrayal of her in Window Water Baby Moving (1958) that I decided to make a documentary about her for my graduate project.” — Barbara HammerRead More »
Synopsis wrote:
Combining perhaps the only footage from the first Women’s International Day march in San Francisco and rare footage of the second National Lesbian Conference at UCLA, Sisters! is a joyous and vital landmark in feminist, queer, and lesbian filmmaking.
Preservation information wrote:
Preserved by BB Optics and the Academy Film Archive. Preservation of this film was made possible by a grant from The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.Read More »