USA

A man who has devoted his life to tending roses finally confronts his love objects, castigating them for their preening self-regard and disregard of his own feelings, resulting in a violent catharsis.Read More »

An auto-documentary about a disenfranchised Everyman and his struggle to re-integrate himself into society. He fails and turns to crime.Read More »

The film was directed by Hudlin while he was a Yale College senior, and focuses on the experiences of African-American students at Yale in the early 1970s. The influential documentary short follows students Erroll McDonald and Eugene Rivers, and features a conversation with civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
This powerful, unsettling film elevates voyeurism to its central element in a series of raw sexual encounters reflected in an apartment mirror, from which a hidden camera records its images. The lustful sex turns increasingly pathetic and the mirror is finally smashed in despair. The “playing” on reality — the entire film is staged, the mirror thus reflecting a double illusion — is eminently modern and structural, as is the camera’s passive immobility, with action at times leaving the frame or the film “running out”.Read More »

Part of the New American Cinema group in New York City during the 60s, Jack Smith’s flamboyant aesthetic can be characterized by a mix of baroque exoticism, gaudy costumes, and detritus salvaged from the city streets. Flaming Creatures is a non-narrative, Dionysian orgy, complete with wild dancing, gender bending, and a climactic earthquake. The carnivalesque madness of the film is reinforced by the chaotic density of its formal composition. Smith’s deliberate spatial disorientation creates a pansexual landscape of tangled body parts; just as the viewer is unable to situate the visual coordinates of the image, the creatures are unaware of which extremity belongs to whom.Read More »

In 1870, a gang robs a train and steals a ceremonial Japanese sword meant as a gift for the U.S. President, prompting a manhunt to retrieve it.Read More »

Autotranslated description:
Joan Crawford’s close-up in HUMORESQUE. Michelangelo’s David and Boticelli’s “Birth of Venus”. Stendhal was overwhelmed by the cultural overstimulation in Florence, which Graziella Magherini described scientifically in 1979 as Stendhal syndrome. Mark Rappaport describes his fascination for the Austrian actor Turhan Bey, who made a career in exotic roles in Hollywood in the 1940s. A very personal essay about the effect of close-ups, the canvas idols of the dream factory and the role of their admirers and fans.
(Stefan Drössler)Read More »

Quote:
In a run-down Mexican mining town, Luisa brings her boyfriend Paco home to meet her family. They’re both actors, and the visit grows increasingly (and hilariously) awkward as Luisa’s father becomes fascinated by Paco’s minor role in a television phenomenon. Fauna’s exploration of performance deepens as the film reinvents itself halfway through, reconfiguring its characters into a mystery plot set at a nearby hotel. Scenes and characters begin to repeat and revise each other’s earlier incarnations, creating a deadpan mindbender that grows more entrancing with each beguiling detour, and invites a parallel universe of interpretations. (MK)Read More »

From the DVD notes:
”A computer-created animation of high-speed stroboscope mandalas with molecular-like energy. The surprise of this film is the color produced from the strobing black and white symmetrical images. Done with an electronic stylus on a special computer at MIT. This film demonstrates the possible use of the computer interacting with the graphic artist.”

“Electronic-optical computer finger-painting. Laws of reflective mirror images. An interplay between drawing by hand and computer. Art form of the future – electronic calligraphy.” – S.V., not dated.Read More »