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”
Surrendering the mind to the hypnotic dance of fire, a candle's glimmer reveals dreamlike memories, illustrated by flickering fragments of experimental films that overlap alongside a deconstructed soundscape. Entering a hallucinatory state in a haunted ambience, one's own subconscious is put on display.
Colossal explores the complexities of grief and the process of grieving as understood through the myth of a Man as he ventures through shifting landscapes ruminating.
Covert Action is a stunning melange of rapid-fire retro imagery accomplishing Child’s proclaimed goal to "disarm my movies." "I wanted to examine the erotic behind the social, and remake those gestures into a dance that would confront their conditioning and, as well, relay the multiple fictions the footage suggests (the ‘facts’ forever obscured in the fragments left us). The result is a narrative developed by its periphery, a story like rumor: impossible to trace, disturbing, explosive."
A vehicle of consciousness navigates the vertiginous labyrinths of San Francisco. ROMAN CHARIOT was filmed over several months with a spy camera mounted on filmmaker David Sherman's son's baby carriage.
With input from actor and writer Jan Hlobil, director and cinematographer Rene Smaal presents a film in the true surrealist tradition, in the sense that only 'found' elements were used, and that it defies interpretation based on ordinary cause-and-effect time sequence.
An experimental sports film made partly during the Scandinavian Open Championships in Halmstad in 1970, partly during the Chinese players' exhibition tour in Denmark immediately after the SOC. First of all, it is a film about their style, about the artistic culmination that is ping-pong at its best, it records China's comeback into the international sports world.
How many movies have you seen where at the end the main character wakes up, causing he and the audience to simultaneously realize that everything they witnessed beforehand was "just a dream?" This film takes that principal but instead of deceiving, the story invites you to watch the main characters dream away. As a result, "True Dreams" takes the dream sequence to a whole new level: it lets its audience in on the joke, while they watch the two main characters run around unaware of the reality/fantasy of their surroundings. This film can be viewed via Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/132642294 (password: truedreams)
Experimental filmmaker Rubén Gámez explores the iconography of the maguey plant in Mexican cinematic history.
Writes Matsumoto, "I used the Erekutoro Karapurosesu (Electro Color Processor), which is mainly used in the field of medicine and engineering, to create moving image textures Metastasis, I was interested in layering images of a simple object and its electronically processed abstraction. The electronic abstract image is manipulated in a certain rhythm, depicting an organic process."
7362 is concerned with dividing and joining together. It begins with two black circles against a white background, knocking together and gradually moving further apart. The circles fade out, and return as white circles against black inside a square. Images similar to Rorschach blots appear. Gradually the viewer realizes that the images were not originally abstract, but were human forms (dancers, gymnasts, etc.), bridges, and others that have been split down the center of the frame, with their mirror images printed on either side of the split. Red, green, and white tints further abstract the images from their original foundations in the natural world, making dancers appear to be amoebas or dividing cells. The accompanying sound track is a mixture of electronic music and musique concrète ("real" recorded sounds manipulated to sound abstract).
Never before have we watched as much porn as today yet the traditional porn industry is dying. The arrival of web sites showing amateur clips has transformed the way porn is made and consumed. Behind this transformation lies one opaque multinational.
This is the only feature directed by the famed French painter and sculptor Martial Raysse. In keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the time, the movie has no plot to speak of and appears to have been largely made up on the spot. We follow the cat man into a bizarre fantasy universe presented in negative exposure that reverses color values (black is white and vice versa) and written words. The cat man steals a car and then picks up a young girl he promises to take to “Heaven.” Heaven turns out to be a country chateau inhabited by several more animal mask wearing weirdoes...
Somewhere between the 1930s and now, the cameras start turning and Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Marlene Dietrich gather on one film set. The floor gleams, the spotlights are burning, the narration starts. Born out of a fascination for the construction that is Hollywood, and by extension ‘the perfect Hollywood home’, the maker embodies three actresses from Hollywood’s golden era and their so-called private lives. Their smallest personality traits are performed so precise and characteristically that it becomes artificial. The home isn’t homely. It plays “house” and the inhabitants are speaking Hollywoodian. In this setting, the maker of the film recalls memories of growing up in her childhood home.
In the final days of the American Civil War, an emigre Hungarian military officer attempts to map the situation of the enemy. Many veterans of the 1848 War of Independence in Hungary fought on the northern side. Experienced Fiala, Boldogh who struggles with homesickness and the reckless Vereczky all experience their enforced emigration in different ways and news of impending peace elicits different reactions from them all.
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.
A young office worker is afflicted with a strange mutation that causes her blood to come to life when she bleeds.
First part of the collaborative project "Brise-Glace" showing the diverse travels on the icebreaker "Frej". Directed by Jean Rouch.
The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.
Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic.