USA

Quote:
For his career-long excavation of the American national character, James Benning found two of his most striking case studies in a pair of murderers whose crimes took place 30 years and more than half the country apart. Landscape Suicide, like many of Benning’s films, consists largely of footage of places, landscapes, and roads accompanied by—or paired with—speech. The speech, in this case, comes from the court testimonies of Bernadette Protti, who stabbed one of her California high-school classmates to death in 1984 over an insult, and Ed Gein, the infamous Plainfield, Wisconsin, killer who made trophies out of his victim’s bodies, read aloud by actors directly to the camera. Benning’s America is a country terrified equally by the wilderness to which it’s in thrall and the civilization it’s set up to keep that wilderness at bay—and nowhere in his work does that tension become more chillingly clear.Read More »

Jodorowsky’s Dune is a 2013 American documentary film directed by Frank Pavich. The film explores Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unsuccessful attempt to adapt and film Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune in the mid-1970s.
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AMG: One couple’s rocky road toward togetherness is mapped in this comedy drama which melds elements of documentary and fiction. Arin (Arin Crumley) is a struggling independent filmmaker who pays the rent by shooting and editing wedding videos; he loathes the “four-eyed, two-mouthed, eight-limbed” beasts known as couples in love, but he would also prefer to be less lonely than he is. However, Arin is terrified of talking to women, and has a borderline phobia about sexually transmitted disease. On an Internet dating site, Arin meets Susan, (Susan Buice), an artist who wants to pursue a career in painting but in the meantime supports herself by waiting tables at a coffee shop. Susan’s attitudes about romance are only slightly more optimistic than Arin’s, but after exchanging photos and messages, the two sense they have something in common.Read More »

A shrine made by many in honor and memory of Lucas Wheeler.Read More »

Wealthy Rollo Treadway (Buster Keaton) suddenly decides to propose to his neighbor across the street, Betsy O’Brien (Kathryn McGuire), and sends his servant to book passage for a honeymoon sea cruise to Honolulu. When Betsy rejects his sudden offer however, he decides to go on the trip anyway, boarding without delay that night. Because the pier number is partially covered, he ends up on the wrong ship, the Navigator, which Betsy’s rich father (Frederick Vroom) has just sold to a small country at war.Read More »

San Francisco is a 1936 film directed by W.S. Van Dyke, written by Anita Loos, starring Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, Spencer Tracy and Jack Holt. It was nominated for six Oscars, of which it won one. The film tells the story of Mary Blake, who, out of poverty, starts singing at a local gambling hall. When she moves on, the owner of the gambling hall, Blackie, keeps following her. The confrontations between Mary and Blackie are suddenly put to a stop with the advent of the San Franscisco earthquake.Read More »

Plot: Blackstone ‘Blacky’ Gorman, rising service station owner, is blessed with the devotion of supremely sweet and noble Marje Harris, but he meets coquettish and silly debutante Glory Franklyn and, between Glory’s charm and his social ambition, is snared into an upscale marriage that proves to have its downside. Written by Rod Crawford
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A hilarious romp that turns topsy-turvy the old Hollywood standards of female sexuality and pleasure, Three Examples of Myself… brings together three fantasies of how women would run things if they were on the throne of power. Remixing fluffy musical numbers with a definite feminist twist, director Biller creates a rebellious coquette for the 90’s–a kind of Sandra Dee meets Madonna–as she rules a harem in the Arabian Nights, rules over a hiveful of submissive drones, and even finds sexual liberation in the disco era. With a scoreful of delightful musical fantasies, the film delivers a magical twist to the notions of visual pleasure. With lyrics like “She is fertile, she is nice–She gives us good advice. She is everything we need!”, you simply can’t go wrong. — New York Asian American Film FestivalRead More »

BW/Silent/5 Hrs 21 Mins at 16fps/4 hrs 45 mins at 18fps
John Giorno

Andy Warhol:

“I could never finally figure out if more things happened in the sixties because there was more awake time for them to happen in (since so many people were on amphetamine), or if people started taking amphetamine because there were so many things to do that they needed to have more awake time to do them in… Seeing everybody so up all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete, so I decided I’d better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping. Sleep was the first movie I made when I got my 16mm Bolex.”Read More »