• Jeff Frost – Circle of Abstract Ritual (2014)

    2011-2020ExperimentalJeff FrostUSAVideo Art

    Quote:
    This film took 300,000 photos, riots, wildfires, paintings in abandoned houses, two years and zero graphics to make. It changed my entire life.

    Quote:
    Circle of Abstract Ritual began as an exploration of the idea that creation and destruction might be the same thing. The destruction end of that thought began in earnest when riots broke out in my neighborhood in Anaheim, California, 2012. I immediately climbed onto my landlord’s roof without asking and began recording the unfolding events. The news agencies I contacted had no idea what to do with time lapse footage of riots, which was okay with me because I had been thinking about recontextualizing news as art for some time. After that I got the bug. I chased down wildfires, walked down storm drains on the L.A. River and found abandoned houses where I could set up elaborate optical illusion paintings. The illusion part of the paintings are not an end in themselves in my work. They’re an intimation of things we can’t physically detect; a way to get an ever so slight edge on the unknowable.Read More »

  • Régis Wargnier – Le temps des aveux AKA The Gate (2014)

    2011-2020CambodiaDramaRégis Wargnier

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Synopsis
    Two decades after forging an unlikely alliance in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, a French ethnologist and a former Khmer Rouge official meet again after the latter is arrested for crimes against humanity.

    “Le temps des aveux” is based on the true story of a French ethnologist who was captured by the Khmer Rouge in 1971.Read More »

  • Harun Farocki – Parallel 2 – 4 (2014)

    2011-2020DocumentaryExperimentalGermanyHarun Farocki

    The four‐part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds.

    Quote:
    Cinema’s onscreen worlds have always borne an indexical bond to the real, thanks to film’s ability to register traces of physical reality and preserve them as enduring images. What happens when computer-generated video game images—images possessing no such indexical bond—usurp film as the predominant medium of visual worldmaking? How does one’s relation to onscreen heroes shift when we no longer identify with real bodies, but with affectless avatars scarcely possessing a face?Read More »

  • Bob Kelljan – Black Oak Conspiracy (1977)

    1971-1980ActionBob KelljanDramaUSA

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    Black Oak Conspiracy stars Jesse Vint (Forbidden World) as Jingo Johnson, a struggling Hollywood stunt man who comes back home after hearing his mother is sick. He is greeted by his friend Homer (Seymour Cassel) and is saddened to find that the old girlfriend he left behind (who is also Homer’s sister) is now going out with local rich kid Harrison Hancock. Jingo also finds out that his mother signed over her house in return for medical care and that the house is going to be demolished. Jingo soon discovers that there is corruption going on in town and it is up to him to stop it.Read More »

  • Ken Jacobs – Canopy (2014)

    2011-2020ExperimentalKen JacobsUSAVideo Art

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    Ken Jacobs’ most recent stroboscopic work transforms a typical New York street scaffolding scene into a mesmeric, Christo-esque merry-go-round.

    In his most recent stroboscopic work, Canopy, Ken Jacobs sets a typical New York street scaffolding scene into mesmeric, gravity-defying motion. An elegant, immersive miniature with a strange faux stereoscopic effect, it takes off like a Christo-wrapped gravitron.Read More »

  • Vicente Aranda – Celos AKA Jealousy (1999)

    1991-2000DramaEroticaSpainVicente Aranda

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    A month before he’s to marry Carmen, Antonio finds a photograph of a man with his arm on her shoulder. The photograph triggers jealousy: he questions Carmen, Carman’s friend Cinta, and his friend Luis who introduced him to Carmen. Cinta tells Antonio the man’s first name. Carmen tells him that the man meant nothing to her, and that the photograph was taken before she met Antonio. She loves Antonio and sets out to wipe the photograph from his mind through exuberant sex, but her ploy backfires and Antonio remains fixated. Slowly he finds out about the man, and about Carmen’s past. Will jealousy consume this couple or can they find a way to kill the green-eyed monster?Read More »

  • Servando González – El escapulario AKA The Scapular (1968)

    Arthouse1961-1970HorrorMexicoServando González

    Synopsis: A woman who is about to die calls the town’s priest and hands him a scapulary, saying that she knows of its great powers. Anybody who does not believe in them will end up dead.

    In the times of Mexican Revolution, a dying woman sends for the young priest of the village, she confesses to him that she has a miraculous scapular which has the power to protect the life of the owner; before she dies, she tells the skeptical priest how the scapular saved the life of her four children, thus reviving four incredible crossed stories.Read More »

  • Hsiao-hsien Hou – Qian Xi Man Po AKA Millenium Mambo (2001)

    2001-2010DramaHsiao-hsien HouTaiwan

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Synopsis: Winner of the Grand Prix Technique at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Hou Hsiao Hsien’s MILLENNIUM MAMBO is a strikingly beautiful film set in Taipei’s hot nightclub scene. The remarkable Shu Qi stars as Vicky, a lost soul who hangs out… Winner of the Grand Prix Technique at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Hou Hsiao Hsien’s MILLENNIUM MAMBO is a strikingly beautiful film set in Taipei’s hot nightclub scene. The remarkable Shu Qi stars as Vicky, a lost soul who hangs out partying with her friends, smoking nonstop, and dancing and flirting. She lives with Hao-Hao (Tuan Chun-hao), but he doesn’t seem to excite her anymore, so she starts seeing an older gangster, Jack (Jack Kao), although the depth of the relationship is left purposely ambiguous.Read More »

  • Trinh T. Minh-ha – Reassemblage (1983)

    1981-1990DocumentaryEthnographic CinemaExperimentalTrinh T. Minh-haUSA

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    From Allmovie:

    Director Trinh T. Minh-ha’s first film is an ethnographic portrait of rural Senegalese women, but its provocative editing and self-conscious narration question the very activities of ethnography and documentary filmmaking; Minh-ha inverts and critiques authoritative Western representations of the “other.'” ~ Sarah Welsh, All Movie Guide

    INTERVIEW WITH TRINH MINH-HA

    Interviewer Interviewed: A Discussion with Trinh T. Mihn-ha

    by Tina Spangler
    Emerson College

    BORN IN VIETNAM, Trinh T. Minh-ha is a writer, composer and filmmaker She has been making films for better than ten years and may be best known for her first film Reassemblage, made in 1982. However her most recent film Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989), which examines “identity and culture through the struggle of Vietnamese women” has received much attention, including winning the Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film and Video festival Trinh T. Minh-ha is a professor of Woman Studies and Film at the University of California, Berkely and was recently a Visiting Professor at Harvard University.Read More »

Back to top button