Scenes from a found roll of martial arts movie footage is unspooled past a video camera on a light table, stopping and starting to pick out parts of the narrative. The archly formal play of fights, betrayal, dishonour and ruined friendships is accompanied by ambient sounds of a city going about its routine business outside.
In Swole I continue to document my commitment to an intensive and transformative gym and diet regimen, as well as the communities that form around such activities, sustaining themselves through texting and sharing videos and photos on social media. I learn the vocabulary of my new community.
A companion piece to Pelourinho: They Don’t Really Care About Us (NYFF57), King of Sanwi continues Akosua Adoma Owusu’s exploration of Michael Jackson as a global pop icon. Here, Michael’s long affinity with the African continent—from the Jackson 5’s arrival in Senegal in 1974 to Michael’s coronation as an Ivorian king in 1992—is captured in vibrant, fuzzy archival video, made visceral by Owusu’s funky audiovisual collage and richly material direct animation effects.
Grappling with the burden of loss, a drifter becomes engulfed in the reckless lifestyle of a group of bohemians. Through a series of events, he is forced to confront his trauma as his haunted past and unconventional present collide.
Spectrum and prism divide the screen; whites and light, etc. "Out of this purity comes all colors. I've always been attracted to refracted light and prismatic phenomena" says Bernard. For Richard Devereaux. Super 8, silent, non-narrative.
Lance and Spenser, 10 years after ending the Adam Driver Fan Cast, have to discover the lost tape to save the world. Across their journey they get robbed, stopped by a cop, and trip in a world of legos
A collage of Derek Jarman's super 8 footage spanning over 20 years.
The Vietnam War during the JFK years and beyond. Made in 1972 in the filmmaker's apartment, without documentary footage of the war, metaphors are created through the animation of images and objects, and through guerrilla skits. By rejecting the authority of traditional documentary footage, the anarchist spirit of individual responsibility is established. This is history from one person's point of view, rather than a definitive proclamation.
An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.
A cri de coeur against Iraq War I from writer-director John Gianvito (Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind).
Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.
A reworking of the myth of Hippolytus, in which a chaste youth rejects the incestuous advances of his mother and is saved from death by a caring physician.
We see a film negative of a nude couple embracing in bed. Then, back in regular black and white images, we see them alone and together, clothed, at home. It's night, she sees his reflection in the window, she closes the drapes. After sex, again in a black and white negative, they sit, smoke, have coffee. They kiss, she smiles. They light candles. The images are often quick, the camera angles occasionally are off kilter; the room is sometimes dark and sometimes lit, as if lit by the rotating of a searchlight. The images again appear in negative when they return to bed.
At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned. "S. Brakhage, entering, WITH HIS CAMERA, one of the forbidden, terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that no one of us may die without our knowing exactly why. All of us, in the person of the coroner, must see that, for ourselves, with our own eyes. It is a room full of appalling particular intimacies, the last ditch of individuation. Here our vague nightmare of mortality acquires the names and faces of OTHERS. This last is a process that requires a WITNESS; and what 'idea' may finally have inserted itself into the sensible world we can still scarcely guess, for the CAMERA would seem the perfect Eidetic Witness, staring with perfect compassion where we can scarcely bear to glance." – Hollis Frampton
A profound and powerful experimental, personal film of one woman's despair, rage and exhibitionism; a baroque fugue of identity chanting growing from women's pain to a holistic, self-healing naming ritual.
Filmmaker Barbara Hammer recounts how she got her scars as well as her "pleasure wrinkles."
Time-lapse photography of books, paintings, reflections, and light falling on textures, shot entirely through a glass ashtray. "'All that is is light.' – Dun Scotus Erigena. 'To see the world in a grain of sand.' – William Blake. These are the primary impulses while working on this film. It is dedicated to Jim Davis who showed me the first spark of refracted film light." - S.B.
A slow-burning prairie grotesque. On the grounds of a rural sanitarium, three young women search for wellness, as a cult leader seeks to control their bodies through labor and daily rituals.
Bass takes over the upstairs Kanter-McCormick Gallery at the Art Center, expanding the territory of her gothic world in a new work The Latest Sun is Sinking Fast, an immersive, multi-channel installation incorporating 16mm film/video, sound, architecture, and featuring performances by Sarah Stambaugh, Bryan Saner, and Matthew Goulish. The solo exhibition features a spatial narrative installation that delves, through movement, texture, sound, and gesture, into the psychology of a recurring figure in Bass' previous films; while also introducing two new characters, blending the past into the present. Bass has designed the installation by altering the gallery, leading the viewer through a evocative memory of place, embedding us in a timeless society of lost souls in a haunted landscape. -Allison Peters Quinn, Exhibition Director, Hyde Park Art Center
A series of eight moments captured over a single day in the Sussex village of Mayfield. From first light until night Daniel & Clara engage in a process of psychological orientation, their state of mind inexplicably linked to the countryside and shifting weather conditions.