No. 5 Reversal (1989, 16mm, sound, b/w, 8:00)
The film opens with a pair of lovers sharing their stories and hilarity in bed while Ruth Brown’s Teardrops From My Eyes pleads on the track, lamenting a lost love. This protracted domestic scene dissolves into a series of rapturous nature portraits. A voice-over speaks of ruinous slaughter during the war as the camera combs through the ruins. The artist appears in a brief cameo, carefully posed and lit in a studio, the camera covering half her face as if she had been delivered to the machines of seeing. She appears between shots of another abandoned house, another broken window that we are looking through so that the work of putting the world back together can begin again.Read More »

One Woman Waiting (1984, 16mm, sound, colour, 9:00)
“One Woman Waiting” evokes questions of subjectivity in the mirrored performance of two women. The single take, tableau composition forms the structure for catalytic change between the characters. The sensuous desert environment accentuates the poetic and ephemeral quality of this film. “Massarella uses the fixed camera shot in her enigmatic film of a symbolic encounter between two women in a beautifully shot desert location. Its cryptic form is a good example of how an idea can be treated most effectively by simple means, for instance in the use of the frame as a point of entry and exit for characters and as a perspectival space which uses foreground and interior for dramatic and emotional ends.”
– Michael O’Pray, Independent Means, Canadian Experimental Films at the London Filmmaker’s Co-opRead More »

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A Hole in My Heart (Swedish: Ett hål i mitt hjärta) is a 2004 Swedish drama film written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, starring Thorsten Flinck, Sanna Bråding, Björn Almroth and Goran Marjanovic. The story revolves around a man who makes a pornographic film in his apartment with a friend and an attention-seeking starlet, while his teenage son stays in his room and listens to industrial rock.

The film is notable for its explicit imagery, including close-ups of vaginal reconstruction surgery, an anal sex scene without the use of lubrication, a masturbation scene with a toothbrush, and an extended scene about the woman’s “smelly vagina”. Moodysson leaves the interpretation of the film to the viewer: “I have cooked you a delicious meal, but I’m not going to chew it for you.”Read More »

LaBruce stars in this vaguely autobiographical look at a triple-X star-director caught in the downward spiral of his career. Remarks Googie, the art-house auteur who’s either exploiting LaBruce or launching his comeback, “He was actually attempting to break down the whole subject-camera relationship… It was as if he was an existentialist trapped in a porno star’s body.” Well, almost.

Just as LaBruce’s scrawny, hangover aesthetics challenge the conventions of gay porn’s Wonder Bread desire, his newly adroit camera unsettles narrative assumptions. A dense weave of self-reflexive interviews, cynical vignettes, and outrageous cameos by “Kids In The Hall” Scott Thompson and drag goddess Vaginal Creme Davis – along with moments stolen almost verbatim from films like Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Perry’s Play It As It Lays – Super 8 1/2 still manages enough rude sex to keep the whole unruly narrative in your face.Read More »

The legend of an ancient and forgotten civilization lies buried beneath a large expanse of dunes. For more than a century, certain travelers have reached this remote and desolate territory looking for the traces of ancient inhabitants, the ruins of a city, or perhaps a sort of lost utopia. Ignorant of these myths and the romantic delusions of archaeologists and adventurers, a few men, barely visible among the sands, today inhabit in solitude that place facing the sea.

‘The Sea Stares at Us From Afar’ premiered at Berlinale Forum in 2017 and won the Best Documentary award at Tolouse Spanish Film Festival, the Best Feature Film award at L’Alternativa Film Festival in Barcelona and the De Luxe Award at Sevilla Film Festival.Read More »

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In late May of 2011 I returned to Milwaukee to make a third version. This one was shot with a Sony HD camera. For this second re-make I decided to go back to the original idea, that is, to simply document the architecture in Milwaukee’s industrial valley. I searched for buildings that looked like the ones from 1977. I found 18 of them. A few of them are also in the original 1977 film, and the others look as if they could have been. I then decided to shoot each of these building for five minutes. I felt a longer duration was necessary to study their true presence. During filming a few fortuitous events occurred that reminded me of the constructed minimal narratives of the original film, so I decided to add one constructed narrative (myself as the actor) to this latest film, ONE WAY BOOGIE WOOGIE 2012. (James Benning)Read More »

Synopsis:
Sessomatto, or Crazy Love, or How Funny Can Sex Be? is a series of nine short sketches, all of them starring Giancarlo Giannini, and eight of the nine starring Laura Antonelli. They are:

Signora Sono Le Otto. A woman’s butler is in love with her.

Due Cuori E Una Baracca. (Two Hearts and a Shack.) A couple with a bunch of kids live in a shack and fight a lot.Read More »

A news-reel like movie about early part of the French Revolution, shown from the eyes of individual people, citizens of Marseille, counts in German exile and, of course the king Louis XVI, showing their own small problems.

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“An heroic romanticized telling of the French Revolution of 1789.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

An heroic romanticized telling of the French Revolution of 1789. It covers the events beginning in 1789, when a constitutional monarchy was created after the storming of the Bastille. It leaves off in 1792, when the aristocracy led a counterrevolution that led to their overthrow and the citizen soldiers were last seen in battle with the invading Prussian army in the Battle of Valmy. It’s directed with great skill and feeling by Jean Renoir (“Whirlpool of Fate”/”Grand Illusion”/”The Rules of the Game”). This episodic epic (told in five chapters: The Court, The Civil and The Military Authorities, The Aristocrats, The Marseilles Locals, and The Ordinary Citizens), co-written with Renoir, Carl Koch and N. Martel-Dreyfus, comes with a cast of thousands dressed appropriately in period costumes. It effectively uses the director’s noted naturalistic style of filmmaking in its well-choreographed battles and chatty behind the scene political intrigues. Read More »

The film consists of four stories plus epilogue, set in 19th-century Sicily. THE OTHER SON – A mother spends her life waiting for news from her two sons (emigrated to America) while ignoring her third, because he is the reincarnation of the bandit who raped her. MOON SICKNESS – a newly-wed peasant girl discovers that her husband goes mad every full moon. She arranges for a male friend to protect her, but they end up in bed together just as the moon emerges from behind a cloud. THE JAR – a rich landowner hires a master craftsman to repair a giant olive jar, but the craftsman gets trapped inside. REQUIEM – villagers band together in an attempt to force their landlord to let them bury their dead. CONVERSATIONS WITH MOTHER – the writer Luigi Pirandello talks with his aged mother about a story he always wanted to write, but which he never managed to capture in words.Read More »