This autobiographical film evolves from the perspective of events and images over a period of over 50 years.

These events are liberated and interwoven like an inner landscape framing one life, directly and indirectly, all life-connected and film-connected by personal associations and rediscovered fragments. The autobiography is formed from flashes, reflections and memories situated like remnants in an old drawer, box or film can. It is a film where the images both replace and run parallel to text, music and silence. They elaborate and extend the film’s intimate and integral form of self and shared expression. The thoughts and anecdotes are presented in a multi-layered, multi-textured display that becomes an extension of the self, and the self as an extension of film. It includes “homemovies” made since 1939, as well as more recent pieces of work, including small sections of incomplete and experimental work, outtakes of finished film pieces, snapshots, extracts of letters, paintings, and impressionistic reconstructions. They are positioned in a nonnarrative structure where pieces fuse continuously, and where it seems as if the past overlaps the present and the present overlaps the past. That is, they are stylized and suggestive representing this single life dependant upon looking, seeing and the camera and, of course, the accidental, but real, circumstance of surrounding influences. The overall expression is that of a filmic selfportrait one that is reflective and open ended.

1.45GB | 1 h 35 min | 746×560 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/671C6E9361D6610/Stephen_Dwoskin_-_Trying_to_kiss_the_moon.avi

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Stephen Dwoskin – Trying to Kiss the Moon (1994) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

txt from Strictly Film School
(…)
“In Pain Is…, Dwoskin’s thoughtful rumination on the nature of pain, this intersection occurs in the conceptual mechanism of pain itself, in the way it surfaces amorphously, imprecisely, throughout the process and conduct of life, as well as in its insidious ability to create a subconscious shift in (sensorial) awareness – in essence, to reconfigure (if not transform) one’s immediate reality because of its existence. It is this untenable quality of pervasiveness and indefinability that Dwoskin articulates in an introductory analogy that sets the tone for the film’s organic (and inherently circular) exposition:

“In the search, it became apparent that pain plays a part in all levels of life: in religion, in sports, in work, in sex, in politics. Not just pain itself, but all the things that pain produces: like pleasure, amnesia, complaint …When you rub your finger on the wood, you feel the wood. If you get a splinter, you feel your finger. That’s how pain works. It moves from outside to inside.”

Punctuated by the decontextualized, low-grade video footage of a nude, face obscured, convulsing woman – an image that is repeated towards the end of the film – Dwoskin illustrates the intrinsic ambiguities of these amorphous intersections, as the same footage alternately evokes images of psychiatrically-induced spasm, involuntary seizure, hysteria, and rapture – a complexity of interpretation that has been enabled by the uncomfortable extendedness of the already transgressive image. (Note that the surveillance video also becomes implicitly voyeuristic in its prolonged clinical observation and reinforces the conceptual theme of the function of the extended gaze that runs throughout Dwoskin’s oeuvre).

This cognitive extraction of the multiple meaning intrinsic within images through the conscious manipulation of time is also reflected in the parallel imagery that structures the film (a dualism that is encapsulated by the bookending shots from the corridor of a hospital): the image of a trapeze artist suspended by a series of ropes that is repeated in the image of a woman indulging in a bondage fetish, a man with impaired speech communicating through an interpreter that is mirrored in a patient who expresses his pain by playing the drums (note the image of surrogate instrument that is also represented by the interstitial sequence of a guitar ballad performance), a tattoo parlor patron wincing at the process of obtaining her body art that is contrasted against a tattooed performer unable to feel the pain of her self-inflicted piercings, an anatomic model used to illustrate abdominal organs that is evoked during a conversation with a middle-aged woman describing her desperation to alleviate the pain of her menopause-related symptoms, an implicitly contradictory exposition on the nature of pain: first, from a physician who acknowledges the inexactness of diagnostic descriptions used to help isolate the cause of the physical ailment, and subsequently, from a psychiatrist who explains the theoretical source of all pain through the commonality of stimulus-response. In this respect, Dwoskin’s films can be seen, not only as an idiosyncratic realization of adaptive encumbrances, but also as a cinema of implication in which the uncomfortable, extended gaze facilitates, not only the complexity of inferences and re-assembly of interconnected associations behind the awkward images, but more importantly, the process of interactivity that is intrinsic in the act of seeing – the implication of the spectator as voyeur, complicitor, archaeologist, and self-author.”

1.17GB | 1h 19m | 748×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/2F931F14E383D27/Pain_Is_(Stephen_Dwoskin_1997).mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English, French, Spanish, German

The post Stephen Dwoskin – Pain Is… (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.