This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."
"My last image of Jonas."—Ken Jacobs
Experimental projects carried out during scientific initiation - 2002 / UFRJ
Cinema and painting establish a fluid dialogue and begins with introspection in the themes and forms of the plastic work of a woman tormented by the elongated specters, originating from her obsessions and nightmares.
An experimental documentary about the spectacle of substance abuse on social media. More than 45 hours of footage, hundreds of pages of blog posts and interviews were distilled and remixed using glitch and cut-up techniques to insure anonymity, transcend the shock factor and unfold this complex, singular and stratified use of social media.
A loose collection of scenes in Hong Kong shot over a five-year period, this film begins with the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and ends right before the summer of 2019, when large-scale social unrest and violent resistance erupted. The everyday scenes capture the ambience and the landscape of change in the city, standing as a quiet prelude to the ensuing conflicts.
The television images of the collapse of the World Trade Center were preceded by manifold stagings of the building, either as a highly symbolic icon, a speculative destruction fantasy or merely as a spectacular backdrop. In Misty Picture, city symphony, disaster movie and media trauma therapy become one.
The passing time is displayed as a series of still frames, or a rapid sequence of moments, ever flowing like the waves that break on the shore, like a repeated chant with no beginning, middle or end.
In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.
The meeting point between two comunication media: A letter written in 1929 -hidden inside the adobe walls of an old country house - and the shooting of the coutryside along the highway that connects two Chilean cities un 2018.
The rare short film presents a curious dialogue between filmmaker Julio Bressane and actor Grande Otelo, where, in a mixture of decorated and improvised text, we discover a little manifesto to the Brazilian experimental cinema. Also called "Belair's last film," Chinese Viola reveals the first partnership between photographer Walter Carvalho and Bressane.
This documentary aims to register this unknown side of James Joyce: His Greek Notebooks. Trieste. Bloomsday, 2013. Dance in slow motion, accompanied by text. By deconstructing the body, we turn it into a memory: of the body, of life, of texts. The biographical references to Joyce and Mando Aravantinou, combined with the diagonal slicing of the image, cancel the realism of the landscape, including that of the Narrator’s space/study. As a culmination, Joyce’s letter “A request for a loan in Greek” functions as a timely denunciation. Various routes through cities, such as Trieste, London, New York, and Athens; languages such as Greek and English. In addition to the primal myth of Ulysses, there is another issue: Greek is “the language of the subject of Ulysses”
This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.
"A fisherman, dark-skinned and shirtless, sits in a boat on a quiet river and, before long, catches a fish. The fish gasps for air and the fisherman holds it to his chest until it dies. This sequence—performed by a series of fishermen, of various ages and using various styles of capture—is the spine of the work, interrupted by passages of quiet natural beauty; one shot is a steady, stately pan through scores of trees and empty air behind." - Vinson Cunningham
THE SCREEN TESTS OF COSMOTROPIA DE XAM A collection of 12 screen tests from all over the world, based on a direction sheet of Cosmotropia de Xam. Starring: Elzabeth Hart of Psychic Ills, How I Quit Crack and Aura, Carmen Incarnadine, Shivabel, Black Madeleine, Jenni Hensler, Agnes Pándy, Suzy Poling, Omebi, Sarah Toon and Owleyes, Dania Myers, ∆AIMON
A film about friendship and the occasional loneliness.
Found footage anti-war film comprising film documents of the Austro-Hungarian and Italian army on the Alpine front, and from first generation picture material by war-film pioneer Luca Comerio.
Jean-Claude Rousseau's Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre is not only his first medium-length film, but a chance to discover this filmmaker whom Jean-Marie Straub has called, along with Frans Van de Staak and Peter Nestler, the greatest working in Europe. With this newly restored print there is also a possibility to discover the relationship between Rousseau's art of filming and Jan Vermeer's famous painting. As Prosper Hillairet wrote in 1988, four years after Rousseau had finished Jeune femme ... (for the first time as we know today): «Without adopting the usual systematic spirit and form of cinéma structurel, Rousseau presents us with simple images and leaves it at that. Keeps the image in hand. A minimalist and ascetic expression of cinema: a shot that lasts.»
Butterfly as verb. The monarch migration and an unearthed cassette tape correspondence form a storm speaking towards motherhood, loss, expectation, care and legacy. An elegy. An ode to uncertainty. A cry for radical optimism and a reordering of splendor.