We Could All Do With a Little Back & Forth As Far As It Concerns the To & Fro of Everywhere Each of Us Go

Cine-diaries about rock bands and personalities from the eighties from the archives of Edgar Pêra.

Noite de Lamentações (Night of Wails)

Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.

Normality is a human state of good intentions, empathy, caring and wanting to do the best for those we love and the world at large.

"Washington Heights" tells the story of Carlos Ramirez, a young illustrator burning to escape the Latino neighborhood of the same name to make a splash in New York City's commercial downtown comic book scene. When his father, who owns a bodega in the Heights, is shot in a burglary attempt, Carlos is forced to put his dream on hold and run the store. In the process, he comes to understand that if he is to make it as a comic artist, he must engage with the community he comes from, take that experience back out into the world, and put it in his work.

Men and dogs move dreamily through a room. In this hostile environment, their attitudes and reactions lead to irritated moods.

In Razor Blades, Paul SHARITS consciously challenges our eyes, ears and minds to withstand a barrage of high powered and often contradictory stimuli. In a careful juxtaposition and fusion of these elements on different parts of our being, usually occurring simultaneously, we feel at times hypnotised and re-educated by some potent and mysterious force.

Lois Patiño dissects the movement of a fire, analyses its fleeting ephemeral forms, and transforms them with sound to enrich the meaning of the images. The Image Burns begins as a reflection on our perception and becomes an intense interaction between the parts, between the images and the spectator. We look at the fire and the fire looks back at us.

The Focus is the film about easy death on the Mediterranean sun.

Through a structuralist and simultaneously ambiguous form, the image's reality treads closer to the abstract, leaving the sunset and trees behind. As we enter the image's gloaming, it reveals its true eye: reality's pure haptic energy, where there is nothing but sonorous light, and the dregs of the Unknown.

Like a Wave in the Sea

Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound , finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.

Engel und Puppe is the first film by Italian filmmaker and writer Ellis Donda. Screened at Oberhausen in 1975, Engel und Puppe is a political adaptation of some lines from Rilke's Duino Elegies, featuring the French poet Jacqueline Risset and a young Rossella Or (soon to become an avant-garde theatre actress).

An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.

“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, Ben Russell and Rhyne Piggott mine the landscape of a beige-carpeted ranch style house for new insights into the architecture of suburban alienation.” - Anne Reecer, Cinematexas

Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.

Two men walk agitatedly on a dirt road, between underbrush and large trees. One follows the other: both inspect the place. After a while, they stop in the middle of the foliage.

'It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. At home I put the slides into a slide projector. I took out the lens and filmed the slides by filming directly from the projector - using single frames according to a certain plan.'

As a child, the brutal murder of her family made Alexis regain her hearing along with synesthetic abilities. Now as an adult, she finds solace in the sounds of bodily harm. But when she’s told she might lose her hearing again, she escalates her gruesome sound experiments in a quest to compose her masterpiece.

Levin lives in his memories and can't shake his first love. Caught in a spiral of constant changing memories he figures out what he really did. Meanwhile his boss forces him to join an elite group of brokers, who meet to fight each other on weekends. Those meetings are a counter balance to their stressful jobs. Levin decides that his big ego doesn't deserve to live. But instead of going through with this decision, he escapes again, risking the life of his boss during one of the fight weekends.