Experimental

Shows the surveillance of a woman by overseers who have judged her to be mad. What is most provocative about this film is that it proposes multiple credible points of view even as the woman is being certified insane by the Censors. We voyage into the skull of a woman and peer out to a monumentally static cold waste with planetary slow motion. It is the bunker-eye view.

‘A Cold Draft is drawn from (a drawing of) the conditions produced by ‘liberal’ economics in the UK in the 1980’s. Truth is reckless, certainty a sham, but such is faith in repetition that line by line certainty is drawn. The account may be fictitious, a representation, but the events are the result of the imposition of private ownership.’ – Lis Rhodes 2008Read More »

Quote:
Dawn Breaking is the opening chapter of Yang Fudong’s Museum Film Project. The idea of the series first conceived while Yang worked on his solo exhibition in Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in 2005. After more than a decade, the first episode has been fulfilled this year in Shanghai Long Museum. Yang set the background of “Dawn Breaking” in Song dynasty which was prominent for achievements in art, culture and science. He also extracted nearly three hundred sentences of Nietzsche’s Quotations as the exclusive script. Live performance in the context of ancient oriental history intertwines with the quotes of desire, and power from the German philosopher. Read More »

Desperate sexuality, desperate emotions;
every gesture and inflection an act of grave
import; a film of young adults, infused with
a new existentialist humanism, devoid of
certainty or illusion. The sharp contrast
and graniness of the still indicate the film’s
distance from slick commercial cinema.
A major new talent.
– Amos VogelRead More »

Quote:
“Filmed in 1964-1968. Edited in 1978. The material for this film is footage that didn’t find a place in the WALDEN reels. Some of it begins in between LOST, LOST, LOST and WALDEN. It’s mostly New York, and some travel footage. The City friends: Richard Foreman, Amy Taubin, Mel Lyman, Peter Beard, David Wise, Andrew Meyer, Salvador Dali, Jerome Hill, David Stone and Barbara Stone, my brother Adolfas filming DOUBLE BARRELLED DETECTIVE STORY, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Ed Sanders, Gordon Ball, Henry Romney, Jack Smith, Shirley Clarke, Louis Brigante, Jane Holzer, etc. etc. It’s a period piece. The sounds were recorded about the same time. Bits of radio music, bits of records, my own voice, and voices of my friends. Mel Lyman playing playing banjo on the roof on 23rd Street was actually recorded on the roof, with the wind blowing into the mike.” -Jonas MekasRead More »

Cows enter a milking parlour in the early morning. As their milk is sucked away, a cataclysmic storm builds on the horizon. Under the onslaught of wind and rain, summer disappears. A meteorologist investigates the bizarre shift in the weather. He follows his equipment through the dark and wintry landscape and arrives at the farm where the cows were milked, but nothing remains of the animals. He begins a more precise investigation, but the results are inconclusive. In such miserable and remorseless weather, how can he measure reality?Read More »

Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid shows no signs of slowing down in this shattering follow-up to his bat-out-of-hell Synonyms. A film of radical style and splenetic anger, Ahed’s Knee accompanies a celebrated but increasingly dissociated director (Avshalom Pollak) to a small town in the desert region of Arava for a screening of his latest film. Already anguished by the news of his mother’s fatal illness (Lapid’s film was made soon after the death of his own mother, who had worked as his editor for many years), he grows frustrated with a speech-restricting form he is encouraged to sign by a local Ministry of Culture worker (Nur Fibak). The confrontation ultimately sends him into a spiral of rage aimed at what he perceives as the censorship, hypocrisy, and violence of the Israeli government. This boldly shot and conceived work, which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, feels as though it has welled up from the depths of its maker’s soul.Read More »

A closely hewn remake of the first half of Viennese Actionist (and convicted sex offender) Otto Muehl’s 1967 film Kardinal with the following minor substitutions: the original woman is played by the artist, the original artist is played by a woman wearing a powdered wig, and the film is presented as a Karaoke sing-a-long to a tune by one of Otto Muehl’s more effete 80’s popstar countrymen.Read More »

Short meditative documentary about the iconic Eiane Radigue who is now 90 years old.Read More »

Young Autant-Lara’s (1901-2000) avant-garde debut, made a decade before his first feature and two decades before his breakthrough. It features his mother, who was a famous actress, as well as Antonin Artaud, who was a friend of the family.
The films circulates around a triangular love drama with a lot of faux avant-garde effects: filming only hands and feet, rotating camera, dream sequences expressing the tensions between the protagonists etc. etc. Given that this was made many years before Un chien andalou and most of the titles that can be found in Kino’s box sets, this was pretty cutting edge in 1923.Read More »