An experiment with three dimensions in a moment of clarity: the focus of the camera's lens towards the present, the speed of the train and the material world distorted by the movements of the train.
"In medical terminology, absence of genitalia in females is referred to as "gynatresia". In other words, an extreme defect that goes beyond a mere illness" Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
Gehr uses a mini-digital recorder to look back on the Machine Age in the form of San Francisco's soon-to-be-shuttered Musee Mecanique. For slightly more than an hour, Cotton Candy documents this venerable collection of coin-operated mechanical toys—including an entire circus—mainly in close-up, isolating particular details as he alternates between ambient and post-dubbed (or no) sound. By treating the Musee's cast of synchronized figures as puppets, the artist is making a show—but is it his or theirs? Gehr's selective take on the arcade renders it all the more spooky. There's a sense in which Cotton Candy is a gloss on the moment in The Rules of the Game when the music-box-collecting viscount unveils his latest and most elaborate acquisition. (It also brings to mind the climax of A.I.: The DV of the future tenderly regards the more human machine of the past.) (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)
The first film made by Markopoulos after moving to Europe, Bliss was shot over the course of two days using only available light to create a lyrical study of the interior of the Church of St. John on the island of Hydra.
A quasi-sequel to Michel Houellebecq's novel The Possibility of an Island, Masbedo's short presents a post-apocalyptic landscape overseen by a distant mother nature or perhaps mother of nature portrayed by French icon Juliette Binoche.
This film is a succession of visual and aural "notes" generated by the patterns in animals' hides, which are arranged and re-edited into a complex musical architecture, developing intricate rhythms not unlike the complex syncopations found in traditional African music. Elements of sand, dirt, light and shadow cross-reference the film's emulsion with evolutionary history and provide a second level of musical structuring through which the first layer is filtered. The animals' fur patterns, which evolved naturally as camouflage to hide them from predators, ironically now make the animals more visible to human predators who are attracted by their exotic uniqueness. This cinematic analogy underscores modern humanity's relationship to the natural world.
Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.
A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he unknowingly captures a death on film.
Endless Sea is a textural, oneiric exploration of the inability to escape captured within the confines of Grand Theft Auto: Andreas.
A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.
The winner of the Miss World Virginity contest marries, escapes from her masochistic husband and ends up involved in a world of debauchery.
"Good-bye G.O.D." was a play written specially for Jack Birkett, 'The INCREDIBLE ORLANDO', to be performed with its author, composer Carlos Miranda. Conceived as a future-fantasy Music Hall operetta, "Good-bye G.O.D." tells the story of General Orson Davis, (known as G.O.D.), one of the heads of the Confederated Armies of the Northern Hemisphere, who have concocted a mass destruction of the world. Sheltered in a bunker in the North Pole, he and his henchmen have saved a chosen team of scientists impelled to work on the vessel that will enable them to eventually evacuate the planet. But he has a secret passion which he will indulge once he encounters Adam, one of his scientists.
An immersion into the surreal and dreamlike world of painter, photographer and filmmaker Man Ray (1890-1976), one of the most prolific American visual artists, through four of his short films, brought to life by the atmospheric music of SQÜRL.
"Assassination" - Adaptation of Hermann Hesse's novel "Demian". A young man's detachment from and revolt against the superficial ideals of the world of appearances and eventually awakens into a realization of self. Max Demian is his childhood friend and mentor.
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”
The film begins as a documentary about an author known for autofiction. By incorporating multiple making-of layers, it blends the process of making the documentary with the author’s narrative technique.
Aftertaste
A cinematic meeting point between nature and technology, Doug Aitken’s unearthly short is enfolded in evocative hymns whose voices are eerily AI-generated. Glimmering phone screens might have replaced the starry Milky Way, yet the famous Venice Beach still hums with the vibrancy of human activities.
A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).
Filmed in Berlin, July 1990. Images of workers taking down the wall and street peddlers selling pieces of it to make a living.