The Selling of the Pentagon, was an important documentary aired in primetime on CBS on 23 February 1971. The aim of this film, produced by Peter Davis, was to examine the increasing utilization and cost to the taxpayers of public relations activities by the military-industrial complex in order to shape public opinion in favor of the military…..Read More »
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Ultimate Reality is a collaborative performance by Baltimore’s Dan Deacon and Jimmy Joe Roche. It combines an intense musical composition for electronics and drums with a psychedelic montage of Arnold Schwarzenegger films that is projected at a monumental scale. The live energy of the performance has allowed the piece to freely move between art and music venues and grant it a wide audience of appreciation.Read More »
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Spining tale of a woman, her sister, and the man who completes the triangle. Told through such fertile sources as grand opera, classical painting, and Victorian melodrama.Read More »
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Trouble in the Image is a collection of visual and auditory ideas, many of which seem to radiate a sense of internal conflict, irony and rage. The film has no continuing characters, but is made up of dozens of performances dislodged from other contexts. These are often relocated into contemporary industrial landscapes, or interrupted by the chopping, shredding, or flattening of special-effects technology turned against itself. All is not lost, however. The reward is to be found in immersion within a space of complex and intricate formal relationships, where subject matter is almost irrelevant. The film was accumulated over a seventeen-year period by a filmmaker who continues to insist that film can be an art form independent of storytelling.
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A cat steals the headpiece of a dog to deceive the bulldog Spike and get a chance to eat the canary Spike is guarding.Read More »
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The first official appearance of Bugs Bunny. Elmer is a dimwitted hunter, “wooking for wabbits.” Bugs is a clever, smooth-talking character, who confuses Elmer with double-talk and misdirection. Elmer is no match for the wascally wabbit, even when he thinks Bugs is dead.Read More »
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A very stern owl who teaches ‘voice, piano & violin, but no jazz!’ becomes a father of four. Very soon, three of his boys turn out to be musical talents in the classical repertoire. However, the fourth isn’t into classical music but into jazz. When he keeps singing jazz songs, the father decides that enough is too much and turns him into the street, much to the distress of the mother. While joyously walking and singing through the forest, the young son stumbles across a radio audition day and decides to try his luck.Read More »
Horizontal Boundaries takes on Los Angeles as an uncertain subject, a displaced location in space and time. Shot in and around the city and other locations in California with “the intent to produce “synthetic” depictions of locations made up of multiple and disparate parts,” O’Neill combines the visual effects with a visceral soundtrack that demands the total attention of the viewer. As O’Neill writes, the goal is to “present an image that is both clearly understood and obviously altered. Altering the imagery from its original photographic state raises inevitable questions concerning its reception: What are we to believe? How is a representation changed by proximity with another? How does contradiction, itself, represent our experience?” And goes on to point out that, “My films share some of the concerns of other experimental filmmakers worldwide: defining parameters for the representation of space and time, exploiting personal experience as metaphor, using archival materials in a restated context.” – Cherry and MartinRead More »
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Billy Wilder’s 1974 remake of the Ben Hecht – Charles MacArthur play The Front Page, famously adapted 34 years before, by Howard Hawks as His Girl Friday, is widely regarded as that point in time when Wilder’s art went into rapid decline, that the picture demonstrated that the director of Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, and The Apartment had lost his confidence, that he had become out of step with the times and could no longer connect with the tastes of a changing movie-going audience. In fact The Front Page is a reasonably successful adaptation, darkly cynical like most of Wilder’s best work. Wilder and collaborator I.A.L. Read More »