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The movie is produced by EZTV, a production company and exhibition venue founded in Los Angeles in 1979 by John Dorr and other people (including Michael J. Masucci, who plays the cinema manager in Polly Perverse). How did you come in contact with them? How did your project fit into their structure?Read More »
In 1988 the first Soviet erotic film appeared as a symbol of perestroika. The scenes rather moderate for the genre were shocking for the domestic audiences. On the day of premiere the crowd around Moscow Film House was held back by the police.
The film enjoyed international commercial success. Natalia Negoda toured half of the world with the film, she co-starred the Oscar Awards ceremony, and was the first Russian actress to appear in Playboy. The slogan “From Russia with love” became known ever since.Read More »
Matanzas, Cuba, 1913. Two young people who are in love communicate through letters written by penman. When the young man leaves town, to become a pilot, the girl discovers she is really in love with the one who wrote the letters.Read More »
Filmmaker Manfred Blank (director of the excellent Pharos of Chaos) interviews Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub at some length about their then-current production, Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations), in which he, himself, performed as an actor.Read More »
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Harun Farocki films Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at work during the shooting of Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations), a film based on Kafka’s unfinished novel, Amerika, in which Farocki himself plays the character, Delamarche. The film is both a tribute to the work of the two filmmakers, who define themselves as “artisans” in reaction against the film industry, and as he says, a self-portrait: at work, directed by the couple, he endlessly repeats his gestures and lines, like a worker up to the point of exhaustion.Read More »
The Lincoln Center wrote:
Straub and Huillet were frequently drawn to unfinished texts—Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles, Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron—and for Class Relations, one of their supreme accomplishments, they turned to Kafka’s never-completed Amerika. “Kafka, for us,” Straub declared, “is the only major poet of industrial civilization, I mean, a civilization where people depend on their work to survive.” Kafka never did visit the America of his novel, so perhaps it’s fitting that the saga of Karl Rossmann, a teenage immigrant from Europe who arrives to a strange new land rife with swindlers and hypocrites, was largely shot in Hamburg. The style of Straub-Huillet, with their Brechtian performances, long takes, and static framing, is often characterized as “austere,” yet such a description belies the extraordinary richness of their images, the palpable weight of their direct-sound, and the invigorating clarity of their political commitment.Read More »
An experimental film in which a photograph of an airplane turns into a wire diagram, then into an animated plane in flight, and then it explodes into words.Read More »
16mm, color, silent, 6 minutes, print from Anthology Film Archives Preserved by Anthology Film Archives
“Film is a fragile medium, and some artists push its fragility to the breaking point. Paul Sharits (1943–93) was a pusher.‘I think of [film] as a sort of a primitive, vulnerable medium,’ said Sharits. ‘I know it’s going to disappear, and I almost look upon it with a certain empathy.’ He moved his films out of the theater and into the gallery, creating multiscreen environments that exploited the qualities that made film different from the other visual arts. The projectors, with their clatter and flickering light, became protagonists, and the strips of celluloid, agents of ephemeral beauty.Read More »
