USA

  • Roman Polanski – Death and the Maiden (1994)

    1991-2000DramaMysteryRoman PolanskiUSA

    Quote:
    In a remote beach house on a cliff, a woman (Sigourney Weaver) rewards the doctor (Ben Kingsley) who gave her lawyer husband (Stuart Wilson) a lift home on a stormy night by tying him to a chair, stuffing his mouth with her panties and holding a gun to his head. A twisted romantic triangle? You might have thought so from Mike Nichols’ lightweight 1992 production of Ariel Dorfman’s play with Glenn Close, Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss. You won’t think so now. Director Roman Polanski restores the play to the pulsepounding political thriller it is. His electrifying film nearly jumps off the screen.Read More »

  • Robert Breer – What Goes Up (2003)

    2001-2010AnimationExperimentalRobert BreerUSA

    A volley of rapid visual associations from the mind of Robert Breer, animating collage, drawings and snapshots in a playful, but rigorous manner. What goes up must come down.Read More »

  • Sasha Waters Freyer – Her Heart Is Washed in Water and Then Weighed (2006)

    2001-2010ExperimentalSasha Waters FreyerUSA

    Quote:
    Her Heart is Washed in Water and Then Weighed is a meditation on motherhood and mortality that takes its title from a procedure in the autopsying of a human corpse. Subtle juxtapositions evoke parallels between static monuments and living families to suggest what is lost to time and age. When you die, everything you know – including this – disappears.Read More »

  • Stephen Dwoskin – Outside In (1981)

    1981-1990ComedyExperimentalStephen DwoskinUSA

    continuing with liner notes by Michel Barthelemy :
    “This is probably a good time to mention Dwoskin’s use of comedy : Outside in is a film that deals with disability but is also funny and even burlesque. Of course, only the disabled can use this mode to stage themselves as disabled characters.
    Bergson states not only that “a deformity thay may become comic is a deformity that a normally built person, could succesfully imitate” but also that “the impression of the comic will be produced (…) when we are shown the soul tantalised by the needs of the body : on the one hand, the moral personnality with its intelligently varied energy, and on the other, the stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything with its machine-like obstinacy. The more paltry and uniformly repeated these claims of the body, the more striking will be the result”Read More »

  • Stephen Dwoskin – Tod und Teufel aka Death and devil (1973)

    1971-1980ExperimentalStephen DwoskinUSA

    Without turning his back on his earlier experiments with testing the boundaries, Dwoskin made fictional films, including a superb adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Tod und Teufel, in which voids and slips are filmed during acts of speech, rather than the characters and their actions.Read More »

  • Stephen Dwoskin – Behindert (1974)

    USA1971-1980ExperimentalStephen Dwoskin

    given how he arrived in the world of film, Dwoskin is usually considered to be an experimental film-maker, which he, like any genuine artist, evidently is, but this attitude leads to a misunderstanding, and makes his films difficult to distribute, because his films are immediatly assumed (in a humdrum, unthinking world) to be primarly dominated by considerations of form rather than substance, and thus not only inaccessible to, but also uninterested in attracting, a broader audience
    But Dwoskin words do not bear this out. As early as 1981, he explained how “Behindert was intended for a television audience and it was easier to get my message accross by showing myself directly on screen. My aim is to make films that work both in the cinema and on television”(…)Read More »

  • Julie Dash – Illusions (1982)

    1981-1990ArthouseJulie DashShort FilmUSA

    from the Women Make Movies description:
    “The time is 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor; the place is National Studios, a fictitious Hollywood motion picture studio. Mignon Duprée, a Black woman studio executive who appears to be white and Ester Jeeter, an African American woman who is the singing voice for a white Hollywood star are forced to come to grips with a society that perpetuates false images as status quo. This highly-acclaimed drama by one of the leading African American women directors follows Mignon’s dilemma, Ester’s struggle and the use of cinema in wartime Hollywood: three illusions in conflict with reality.”Read More »

  • Joshua Gen Solondz – Luna e Santur (2016)

    USA2011-2020ExperimentalJoshua Gen Solondz

    Quote:
    Moon and sun are elliptically and stroboscopically conjured in Joshua Gen Solondz’s cloistered yet operatic Luna e Santur. In milky, hand-processed images, hooded figures recalling Magritte’s The Lovers enact a series of rituals in which an old trauma is remembered and exorcized.Read More »

  • Stephen Dwoskin – Naissant (1964)

    1961-1970Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtExperimentalShort FilmStephen DwoskinUSA

    Experimental film which attempts to communicate in strictly cinematographic terms the emotions of a pregnant woman alone.
    Music composed and played by Gavin Bryars.Read More »

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