Experimental

Quote:
“I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium. Video for me is a way of configuring light, just as painting is a way of configuring paint. What you see is simply light patterned in various ways. For an artist, video is the best light organ that anyone has invented.”

“I started working with video in the late 70’s … as a way of making paintings. Rather than dramas or stories or all the things that are usually connected with video, because of its background and its connections with theatre and film. I wanted to connect video with pictures and with picture-making, and began by making pieces that were very long, slow, slowly changing examinations of, for instance, a landscape – or in my case the skyscape of Manhattan, where I was living at the time.”Read More »

Synopsis:
Julien et son preneur de son, Michel, tournent à Bruges un documentaire de commande. Julien rêve au film qu’il pourrait tourner dans cette ville mystérieuse: une adaptation de Shakespeare ou de Musset. Le rejoint bientôt Sophie, sa femme, ancienne comédienne, qui souffre de la distance que Julien semble mettre dans leurs rapports. Bientôt, à une exposition de peinture, elle rencontre un artiste qu’elle voit sous les traits de Julien et qui l’invite à venir visiter Florence. Elle confie à Michel ses tourments. Julien, de son côté, vient d’accepter la proposition de son producteur: réaliser une “histoire” avec des “personnages” et, pourquoi pas, des “vedettes”… Alors qu’elle semblait décidée à suivre l’inconnu, Sophie se jette dans les bras de Julien. Le metteur en scène qui tourne un film intitulé “L’hiver” demande une nouvelle prise. Pour la seconde fois, Sophie se jette dans les bras de Julien. Le peintre inconnu s’en va…
© Fiches du CinémaRead More »

Quote:
“Kristine Leschper wrote to me with a very intriguing proposition: create a short film in response to her song “Figure and I”. I knew that this deeply rhythmic two-minute song needed some kind of somatic imagery. I needed to move with my body and my camera as I was shooting it. A few days later, I went to “The New Woman Behind the Camera” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In this show, I saw two photos by two women photographers from the 1920s whose work I had never seen before. These images guided me to a way of interpreting the physicality and the intimacy of Kristine’s song. Soon afterward, I invited my friend Kim Wilberforce to be in my film and to interpret the song herself, through her vibrant wardrobe and her precise, ecstatic clapping gestures. “
—Lynne SachsRead More »

Quote:
A meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality, constructed from decaying archival footage of old silent films shown at eight frames per second to enable the viewer to grasp the effect of the decay on each frame. The film is set to an original symphonic score by minimalist composer Michael Gordon, featuring detuned pianos and the instruments of the orchestra playing out of phase with each other, mirroring the decomposition of the film stock.Read More »

1. Et cetera
1997, 16mm, Color, 33 mins

‘Et cetera’ is a tetralogy of four separate films that seek to examine the various levels at which the reality of human existence functions. Shown at Dhaka Short film festival, 1999, and Cinema Nova Brussels, 2005.

Avikunthak’s foray into filmmaking was directly an attempt at playing with time — all the four films in Et cetera, are directly an attempt at engaging with real time, the fact that they are single shot, single take, unedited films. For him, as a temporal experience they are most linear cinematic narrative, most pure. These films, rather than sculpting in time, were slicing time. However video art has been more successful as an engagement with real time, he says, “I look at my films as an attempt at invoking ‘kaal’ as a metaphysical entity, rather than ‘kaal’ as a temporal category; Et cetera and Kalighat Fetish being articulation of such an invocation.”Read More »

Quote:
Working between text, sound, and moving-image, Hayama crafts profoundly beautiful short films whose obliquely mythopoetic narratives explore what might best be termed “ecological anomie.” Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as the Lumière brothers, medieval Japanese poetry, and proto-scientific treatises by Goethe and Aristotle, Hayama’s works probe the essential loneliness experienced by a human-kind which has been estranged from the unity of nature by our modern systems of perception and knowledge production. While many experimental filmmakers operating in a romantic mode have taken nature as a subject – often seeking to spectacularize her optical presence through the creation of “transcendent” imagery – Hayama’s films are characterized by an uncommon sense of aesthetic restraint, a conscious preservation of critical distance in the face of nature’s inscrutability and our own primordial entanglement within it.Read More »

Quote:
Wyborny’s film is a startling modern take on Roman victor and dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Combining traditional togas and contemporary casual clothes, the German director stages a visually puzzling balancing act between the Roman era and the present. He examines Sullas inner world and his distorted relationship to nature as well as the outer influences in his building of a nation. Juxtaposing the functions of Sullas body and mind, Wyborny has created a stunning portrait of the politician, in which he blurs the lines between advanced civilization and pornography.Read More »

Quote:
Why Not is hypnotic, compulsive and claustrophobic. It is bathed in a cold, pervasive eroticism, which, oblique and displaced at first, finally becomes explicit in one of the most bizarre masturbation sequences ever filmed. For almost two hours, we observe a young, strikingly pretty girl, nude most of the time and alone in an apartment, engaged in a sonambulistic and sensuous attempt at coming to terms with herself.Read More »

Quote:
Opening with torch-wielding villagers and a wall bleeding oil, this experimental film attaches vivid scenery and strange characters to the wonderful melodic wavelengths of the band Animal Collective, revitalizing the lost form of the “visual album.”Read More »