Wenn wir blinken können wir das Rauschen sehen

Anger discusses his Aleister Crowley-inspired theories of art: How he views his camera like a wand and how he casts his films, preferring to consider his actors, not human beings but as elemental spirits. In fact, he reveals that he goes so far as to use astrology when making these choices. This is as direct an explanation of Anger’s cinemagical modus operandi as I have ever heard him articulate anywhere. It’s a must see for anyone interested in his work and showcases the Magus of cinema at the very height of his artistic powers. Fascinating. (Dangerous Minds)

Stan Brakhage is a film maker whose work is shown mainly at film festivals. His work has been likened to poetry. Brakhage explains his techniques and his motivation.

“Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days”, is a four hour feature film by Maximilian Le Cain and Rouzbeh Rashidi. Structured in two sections or ‘takes’ of two hours each, this dream-like, experimental project offers two complementary explorations of cinematic form that skirt around possible narratives, ducking through a series of fluctuating audio-visual categories and intensities.

Cartas de Arapuca

A 16mm experimental short film loosely following a cormorant as it attempts to dry its wings.

Proximities focuses on the trope of the Malay Boy found in the works of Singaporean artist Cheong Soo Pieng (b. 1917-1983). It attempts to locate the Malay male in art history while unpacking underlying systems of power that have shaped and naturalised the understanding of difference.

A roll and a half made to delight in color and the presence of friends. Steps toward learning to read in the dark.

"My first 16mm, Sightreading, was shot in August 2022 in Minneapolis and Chicago. It uses images from three sources: black mattes held in front of the sky near my parents’ house which were filmed and edited in-camera to a metronome; my friends drinking wine and discussing The Bachelor in their Chicago apartment; and details of a Breughel painting filmed from a television." -NC

In his contribution to the On Art and Artists interview series, Nathaniel Dorsky (b.1943) begins by discussing his childhood love of the John Ford film Stagecoach and its influence upon his decision to make films while attending Antioch College. Describing the affinity he developed for work operating at the intersection of film materiality and personal language, Dorsky explains how he developed his philosophy of the “devotional film” and the “microcosmic viewer.” Dorsky likens his practice to Buddhist sculpture, referring to himself as a “Japanese poet continuing aspects of the ethos of the Marxist revolution.” In the interview, the artist describes his use of the screen as an “altarpiece for the image” and emphasizes his use of editing to create works which “harmoniously coalesce.” Interview conducted by Jeffrey Skoller in May 2000, edited in 2014.

Lasting over thirteen hours, Claerbout's film shows two men engaged in a discussion against the back-drop of a neoclassical house in southern France. An act of violence is repeated and re-enacted more than seventy times over the course of the film. Dissolving the boundaries between photography and film, Claerbout’s work puts into question the reassuring stillness of photography and the inevitable narrative progress of the cinematic image.

'Afloat' is an experimental film that paints a portrait of Japanese performance artist: Ayumi Lanoire. The film opens as a telephone call between Ayumi and Person X, which meanders the audience through the various layers that make up her personas leading one to wonder whether she is in fact a myth or reality.

The author's erotic imagination is mixed between desire and magazine clippings, and the trade of collage becomes a ship that travels from outer space to the city itself.

The film poem about pesticides reflects on the return to the natural food chain, in which insect pest serve as food for the higher order. The harmonic cycle of life and death, the temple that is the wildflower field resounding with the inebriating sound of crickets chirping and wheat spikes rustling in the wind, is invaded by the human, the ultimate consumer with no natural predator.

During an audio message sent to his daughter, a father reflects on how the recent discovery of dusty reels and scratchy VHS tapes capturing childhood moments has propelled him on a journey of ancient memories and forgotten dreams . Using a blend of personal, public domain, and freely available footage, the film deconstructs reality and reimagines the past, questioning where memory ends and imagination begins.

Through interspersed conversation and prose, this experimental documentary follows a poet and a neuroscientist as they explore the definition of love, what it means, and why it matters.

An immigrant's last attempt to restore childhood innocence on strange lands.

A documentary like no other. Starting with the bizarre practices and fantasies of a group of filmmakers working under the label Experimental Film Society, it spins off into a manifesto of light and sound. This dazzling journey through a view of cinema as cosmic ritual and erotic delirium is also an idiosyncratic celebration of the medium itself. Rouzbeh Rashidi’s ornate visual style unleashes a parade of visionary scenes that redefine movie magic as a fevered hallucination.

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Las Preguntas que Perdimos

A viral video shows a mysterious figure walking along the edge of the woods each day, and filmmaker Bill Howard sets out to spend a night there to find out exactly what it is.