USA

Rob Breer blazing the trail.Read More »

Quote:
Self-funded, 16 mm and six years in the making, this politically-engaged, heartfelt and pantheistic three-hour exploration of American responses to the Gulf War is effectively unique in its decision to commit this conflict to celluloid. Written and directed by John Gianvito, programmer of the Harvard Film Archive, it weaves three fictional strands alongside documentary footage, interviews and a singular concert performance to create a multi-stranded, many-layered text that is fueled as much by (focused) anger as it is by the prerogatives of aesthetics.Read More »

An experimental film in which a photograph of an airplane turns into a wire diagram, then into an animated plane in flight, and then it explodes into words.Read More »

16mm, color, silent, 6 minutes, print from Anthology Film Archives Preserved by Anthology Film Archives

“Film is a fragile medium, and some artists push its fragility to the breaking point. Paul Sharits (1943–93) was a pusher.‘I think of [film] as a sort of a primitive, vulnerable medium,’ said Sharits. ‘I know it’s going to disappear, and I almost look upon it with a certain empathy.’ He moved his films out of the theater and into the gallery, creating multiscreen environments that exploited the qualities that made film different from the other visual arts. The projectors, with their clatter and flickering light, became protagonists, and the strips of celluloid, agents of ephemeral beauty.Read More »

The film recorded by Basinski on the roof of his apartment as the twin towers burned in the distance. Accompanied by part 1.1 of his four album set of disintegrating tape loops which he played with friends on the rooftop as the drama unfolded.Read More »

Quote:
A complex historical truth emerges in Nicolas Rossier’s intelligent examination revealing the oft-supressed story of the 2004 coup d’etat in Haiti, as well as the systemic violence and human rights violations that erupted under the interim government. An interview with the deposed president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Pretoria, South Africa, is juxtaposed with the views of a wide range of supporters and critics, including US Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega. It is not Aristide and the Lavalas supporters who emerge looking like thugs but international interests concerned with suppressing popular democracy and ending the reforms Aristide was capable of making – despite embargoes and the need to service a debt for loans Haiti never received.Read More »

Quote:
Against the barren wintry backdrop of a psychiatric hospital, inpatients and authority figures drift through turgid psychological states. We meet the artist Jean and his lover Monica, patients of the facility, and several characters circling its periphery: a guard, an Episcopalian priest, and a church organist. Minimalizing dialogue and plot intricacy, Tregenza concedes only kernels of information, demanding that the viewer breathe dimensionality into his archetypes. Acting out primal instincts of lust, envy, fear, and love, subjects teeter vulnerably on the brink of sanity and insanity, freedom and repression in their attempts to navigate their existence.Read More »

Quote:
Varda shot “The Little Story of Gwen From French Brittany” over several years beginning in 1996. The documentary short follows Varda’s friend Gwen Deglise as the two meet in Paris in 1996 and Deglise then moves to Los Angeles. Deglise is now the head programmer for the American Cinematheque. The short film was sent to American Cinematheque accompanied by a letter from Deglise in which she writes about how her life often crossed paths with Varda’s since their first meeting in 1996. It was during this first encounter where Varda asked Deglise if she could follow her around with a camera as Deglise ventured to Los Angles.Read More »

Harvard Film Archive writes:
One of the Coppola’s most overtly stylized works, Rumble Fish uses its breathtaking black and white, Koyanisqaatsi-inspired time-lapse photography and propulsive original score by The Police’s Stewart Copland to evoke a dream world of alienated youth. A beautiful postmodern art film, Rumble Fish is wonderfully uncertain of its time and place, stranding glittering icons of Fifties Americana – pool halls, flickering neon signs – within an Eighties post-industrial wasteland. The stylistic bricolage shapes the performances too, with Matt Dillon channeling Method Acting as a young man infatuated with the enigma of his self-absorbed brother, played with whispering intensity by a Marcel Camus-meets-Marlon Brando modeled Mickey Rourke. The late Dennis Hopper makes a poignant appearance as the absent even when present father who proves that the center inevitably cannot hold.Read More »