USA

Begun as a document for insurance purposes, OBJECTION catalogues the contents of a house with ever-increasing horror. The soundtrack carries the voices and sounds of the family unseen.Read More »

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The new movie written and directed by Jim Jarmusch is a total fantasy. This in spite of being shot on the streets of the New Jersey city in which it is set, and for which the movie itself and its lead character are named. It’s as much of a fantasy as Jean Cocteau’s “Orpheus,” another great film about a poet that was at least partially set in the “real” contemporary world. It’s maybe not as much of a fantasy as the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.Read More »

One of Jem Cohens first films (his third), conducted on Super 8 camera in 1987-88, consisting of impressionistic shots of urban development and decay. An impressive short piece (not least considering its year of production!) pointing ahead to his masterful ‘Lost book found’.Read More »

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A magical voyage into the subconscious in search of “the lost continent” of first human memories. Based on Anais Nin’s prose poem, the film provides a visual equivalent in subaqueous, drifting imagery taken from reality but entirely transformed into a new and sensuously poetic universe. Excellent electronic score by Louis and Bebe Barron. – Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive ArtRead More »

Synopsis:
Peter Dunning is the proud proprietor of Mile Hill Farm, which sits on 187 acres in Vermont. The land’s 38 harvests have seen the arrivals and departures of three wives and four children, leaving Peter with only animals and memories. The arrival of a film crew causes him to confront his history and his legacy, passing along hard-won agricultural wisdom even as he doubts the meaning of the work he is fated to perform until death. Haunted by alcoholism and regret, Peter veers between elation and despair, often suggesting to the filmmakers his own suicide as a narrative device. He is a tragedian on a stage it has taken him most of his life to build, and which now threatens to collapse from under him. At once a postcard from paradise and a cautionary tale for our times, Peter and The Farm sifts through the potential energy of a human life, that which is used and that which is squandered.Read More »

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Sandwiched between his notorious saga of rape, revenge, and realist horror, Last House on the Left (1972), and his franchise-initiating fairytale of supernatural serial killing, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes tends to get lost in critical discussion of America’s reigning horror auteur. This may be truer today than ever, considering Craven’s meteoric rise to mainstream respectability after the staggering box office success of his Scream trilogy (1996, 1997, 2000), for which he was ‘rewarded’ with the opportunity to direct a Miramax melodrama (Music of the Heart, 1999). A relentless chronicle of violence against and within the bourgeois family unit, Hills usually occupies the role of Craven’s ‘cult classic’ – celebrated by the director’s hardcore fans, appreciated for its low-budget aesthetic, generating semi-ironic readings which praise its archetypal allusions as well as its exploitation movie themes.Read More »

The inherent kinetic qualities are brought into actuality in GYROMORPHOSIS, as seen in the construction-sculpture of Constant Nieuwenhuys of Amsterdam. To realize this aim I have put into motion, one by one, pieces of this sculpture and, with color lighting, filmed them in various detail, overlaying the images on the film as they appear and disappear. In this way I have hoped to produce sensations of acceleration and suspension which are suggested to me by the sculpture itself. – Hy HirshRead More »

Storyline: In 1876, an old man finds gold in the Sioux lands, provoking a gold and land rush from immigrants to Dakota. On the way to Custer, the lonely cowboy Dan O’Malley helps to fix the wheel of Mr. Carlton’s wagon and flirts with his daughter Lee Carlton. Later, Lee and her father are attacked by horse thieves and Mr. Carlton is murdered; however, the outlaws “Bull” Stanley, Mike Costigan and “Spade” Allen save her from the criminals and head with her to the camp where the pioneers are waiting for President Grant proclamation to explore the lands. In the site, the corrupt Sheriff Layne Hunter rules with his henchmen with horror and injustice. The trio of outlaws decides that Lee needs to get married and select Dan to be her husband. When Bull’s sister Millie Stanley is murdered by Hunter’s right arm Nat Lucas, “Bull” organizes the men to chase Hunter. But it is 1877 and the gold and land race of wagons is ready to start.Read More »

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WHITE ASH is an immersive walk through the edges of consciousness. While firmly grounded in recognizable images and sounds captured from reality, WHITE ASH is designed to scrape through the patina of normal day to day perception, leading to an embodied associational state, something ‘to the side’ of our familiar narratives and perceptions. Pierce meticulously eaves the warp and weft of image and sound to gently lead the viewer into this very conscious yet meditative state. Beginning with the shooting and then the animation of thousands of moving camera, hand held, long exposure digital still photographs into abstractions actual space and events, Pierce then re-articulates and re-contextualizes the video by applying the lever of his judiciously and intentionally composed concrete-music soundtrack.Read More »