The subtitles respond to each other and remind us with joy and joy that if we live, it is to die.
memoria e imaginación
"This installation or performance work puts my own earlier film of the Mona Lisa (1973) through another stage of transformation – my own irretrievable self of some 34 years ago is now also part of the subject I first saw the ‘actual’ ‘Mona Lisa’ when I was about thirteen. Of course I had seen dozens of reproductions in books and postcards by then and the popular mythology of the enigmatic smile was already well engrained in my mind. My strongest impression, as I recall, was how small and unsurprising it was – a heavily protected cultural icon – no longer really a picture – and I was much more excited by the painting of the distant landscape than by the face. My own ‘version’ of ‘la Giaconda’ was never an homage, nor like Marcel Duchamp’s ‘L.H.O.O.Q’, an attack on its cultural power. Instead it came from a fascination with change and transformation – maybe also with arbitrary appropriation." Malcolm Le Grice
Commissioned by Harald Inhülsen for MasterclassFilm. A companion piece to Leandro Varela's Self Portrait, also part of the same commission.
"All images were shot on Market Street, one of the main streets in San Francisco. I used Sketch Film #1 and Sketch Film #2 as reference to make a plan of the film structure, and the visual was carefully composed frame by frame, while shooting on the street. This project was commissioned by Exploratorium and San Francisco Arts Commission for the outdoor screening event, A Trip Down Market Street 1905/2005: An Outdoor Centennial Celebration, at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco on Sep. 25, 2005."
Prefaces is composed of wild sounds constructed along entropic lines, placed tensely beside bebop rhythms, and a resurfacing narrative cut from a dialogue with poet Hannah Weiner. Child tells us, "The tracks are placed in precise and asynchronous relation to images of workers, the gestures of the marketplace, colonial Africa, and abstractions, to pose questions of social force, gender relations and subordination." This tape serves as a pre-conscious preface to the parts that follow, whose scope and image bank are more narrowly defined.
The act of defecating, filmed in an explicit and impactful way, introduces the parodic story of a demonstrator who evacuates in various institutions in Bahia.
A non-existent frontier between digital, movies and reality: a screen inside a screen inside a screen. A teenage dream; a teenage life in the bush of ghosts.
Forms are born and die.
Cindy sits down for a normal Sunday dinner when a series of strange events lead her to question the state of her being and morality.
At 7 p.m. he had an appointment...an important appointment.
A strange town and the odd behaviour of its inhabitants.
The film purports to be the second version of a (fictional) film made by Baudelaire in 1850 in memory of his (actual) voyage across the Pacific. It was shot using a world map mounted on black board, filmed in its entirety and in extreme close-up.
Mick Glasheen, an architect and pioneer of early cinema and experimental film, created work that was heavily influenced by media theorists. His video Teleologic Telecast from Spaceship Earth: On Board with Buckminster Fuller, 1970, is a re-mixed recording of a Buckminster Fuller’s lecture given at UNSW, presenting Fuller’s ideas on science, metaphysics and the universe, merged with just as radical techniques of moving image production, creating a multi-layered expression of image, voice, and sound.
An experimental movie based on a poem of the French writer and director Jean Cocteau about a servant who fantasises about killing the lady of the house.
Scientists demonstrate the wonders of magnified objects.
In Untitled (Pink Dot), Murata transforms footage from the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood (1982) into a morass of seething electronic abstraction. Subjected to Murata's meticulous digital reprocessing, the action scenes decompose and are subsumed into an almost palpable, cascading digital sludge, presided over by a hypnotically pulsating pink dot.
An experimental short film shot on Soviet Sveta 8mm film stock expired in 1984. It documents the 25th birthday of the filmmaker.
Showcasing a meditative exploration of untouched natural scenery. Without dialogue or traditional narrative, the 22-minute film presents a series of static, meticulously framed shots that capture the fleeting beauty of pristine landscapes. Created during a time of rapid industrial growth in Japan, the film serves as both a celebration of nature’s purity and a quiet protest against its encroachment by modernity. Shot on 16mm film, Nakamura embraced imperfections like grain and natural lighting to reflect the fragility and authenticity of his subject.
Clouds 1969 by the British filmmaker Peter Gidal is a film comprised of ten minutes of looped footage of the sky, shot with a handheld camera using a zoom to achieve close-up images. Aside from the amorphous shapes of the clouds, the only forms to appear in the film are an aeroplane flying overhead and the side of a building, and these only as fleeting glimpses. The formless image of the sky and the repetition of the footage on a loop prevent any clear narrative development within the film. The minimal soundtrack consists of a sustained oscillating sine wave, consistently audible throughout the film without progression or climax. The work is shown as a projection and was not produced in an edition. The subject of the film can be said to be the material qualities of film itself: the grain, the light, the shadow and inconsistencies in the print.