In Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Adrian Jackson’s freewheeling kaleidoscopic film Here for Life, place is again of paramount importance. We’re in Hackney in rapidly gentrifying east London, full of fenced-off, securitised spaces where the large cast of marginalised real-life characters the directors have assembled must endure the pain of displacement together with other day-to-day difficulties – recovery from addiction, domestic violence, isolation, terrible life losses.Read More »
Synopsis
The short film “La vie nue” (The Bare Life) is based on Virus, a series of pictures taken by Antoine d’Agata in the streets and the hospitals during the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.Read More »
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The contents of a black briefcase lead us into a superficially well-ordered life in West Germany in 1970, in a city that can be seen as representative of the entire country. In this briefcase: the meticulous documentation of an affair between the small business owner Hans and his secretary Monika.Read More »
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Here the codes are both amplified and distanced by an expressionist plastic that for the first time perhaps in Expressionism, takes humor into account. Some very close-ups of flowers, insects, are reminiscent of the prose of a Caillois that I did not know until this film equivalent cinema. There is a double movement in this film. At the same time, a sort of restraint of the plans and a bulimia, a frenzy to film, perhaps this is what mainly troubles us and takes us into a way of seeing that was unknown to us.Read More »
Synopsis
Perrone returns with a new exploration of his quintessential aesthetic territory, Ituzaingó. This time the night in the western city exudes cinema and theatre. Actors, actresses, directors and producers parade like daffodils from the underworld in a world of jealousy, hypocrisy, idiocy and much more.
(FILMAFFINITY)Read More »
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The long way around the barn never looked so good. Larry Gottheim composed BARN RUSHES from eight tracking shots tracing the same arc around a barn in different conditions. The fact that nothing changes makes it all the much more apparent that everything does: a meditative approach that Tony Conrad described as “a textbook of atmosphere, camera vision and lighting, as they relate personal concept to purely visual relationships.” The simplicity of the film’s structure echoes the functional design of the barn while simultaneously suggesting a distinctly cinematic equivalent to Claude Monet’s serial views of Rouen Cathedral. – Max GoldbergRead More »
THE GEORGETOWN LOOP
(Ken Jacobs, 1996, 11m, widescreen 35mm film, black and white, silent)
Originally photographed in 1903, US Library of Congress collection. New arrangement in 1996 by Ken Jacobs, assisted by Florence Jacobs. 35mm optical rephotography by Sam Bush, Western Cine, Denver.
I’ve been raiding the Paper Print Collection of the Library Of Congress in Washington, DC, since the late 1960s with TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON. It’s a preserve of early cinema. Until 1912, in order to copyright film, one deposited with the library a positive from the negative printed on paper, unprojectable, but – unlike nitrate prints – capable of weathering the years without Crumbling into chemical volatility. And there the stacks rested, safely out of mind, hundreds and hundreds of silent rolls most less than 30 meters, many Edisons, American Mutoscope And Biograph, Gaumont, Lubin, Vitagraph ; cine-snatches of life as it was lived, vaudevillians, proto-dramas, and too many state parades.Read More »
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Jonas Mekas’ The Brig is a fake documentary about ten confined soldiers in a U.S. Navy ship and the three guards who beat and humiliate them. After the title of the film, “The Brig”, the next title is “March 7, 1957 – U.S. Marine Corps – Camp Fuji, Japan – 4:30” Then Mekas goes on showing the daily lives of the soldiers, which consists of beatings, degradations, unnecessary cleanings and senseless rituals. The audience is expected to constantly question the reality of what is on the screen while being moved by the illusion.Read More »
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A Tom Tom Chaser is Jacobs’ 2002 poetic riff on the transformation of his classic film Tom Tom the Piper’s Son from chemical to electronic form during the telecine process.Read More »