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
In the fall of 1986, Richard Fung made his first visit to his father's birthplace, a village in southern Guangdong, China. This experimental documentary examines the way children of immigrants relate to the land of their parents, and focuses on the ongoing subjective construction of history and memory. The Way to My Father's Village juxtaposes the son's search for his own historical roots, and his father's avoidance of his cultural heritage.
The collective life of the generation born as Jurij Gagarin became the first man in space. Vitaly Mansky has woven together a fictional biography – taken from over 5.000 hours of film material, and 20.000 still pictures made for home use. A moving document of the fictional, but nonetheless true life of the generation who grew up in this time of huge change and upheaval.
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.
Filmmakers use archival footage and animation to explore the culture surrounding nuclear weapons, the fascination they inspire and the perverse appeal they still exert.
Mockumentary experimental film, which shows one day in the life of a young man. The action takes place on the Day of Soviet Cosmonautics, April 12, one of the last years of the USSR. Outside the window, it is gradually getting warmer, the onset of spring is felt, promising hope for the possibility of changes in the country. The hero of the film is fond of space. The young man, who idolizes Gagarin, is engaged in reconstruction, making the uniform in which the cosmonaut walked in the prime of his glory. Our hero is also a film enthusiast. He makes films with stories of space flights and shows them to his friends. The film is stylized as amateur films of the 1980s and was shot on a 16-mm color film made by the company" Svema", made in the Soviet Union. The quality of this film allows the viewer to fully immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the time of the film, which is dedicated to Soviet cosmonautics and Edward D. Wood Jr.
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.
A bereaved epileptic ditches her pills and follows a mysterious woman to the outskirts of her town, where she slips back into the fearsome yet ecstatic throes of the seizure.
A moving recording of the late writer and renowned jazz singer Abbey Lincoln is captured in this new film from Brooklyn-born director Rodney Passé, who has previously worked with powerhouse music video director Khalil Joseph. Reading from her own works, Lincoln’s voice sets the tone for a film that explores the African American experience through fathers and their sons.
As Black and LGBTQ+ History Month begin this February, material science clothing brand PANGAIA leads celebrations with a poetic film that honors these two communities. Following a year of isolation, and with it a deeper understanding of the importance of outdoor spaces and the environment, Wè is a portrait of the self-love and acceptance we have learned to show others and gift to ourselves.
A gang of women wreak havoc in the city, killing various men who have treated women poorly. And sometimes they do it just for fun.
Dialogue-free short detailing the daily tasks of a man and his wife.
A surreal, moody short about the fetishisation of automobiles and auto accidents.
Glen doesn't dare tell his fiancée Barbara that he is a transvestite; in addition, Alan is undergoing medical treatment to become a woman named Anne; both stories are told by a psychiatrist.
Founded in the second half of the 1990s, the experimental film association L'Etna witnessed the transition from film to digital cinema. Its premises, located in the heart of Paris, were unable to withstand gentrification.
CREMASTER 3 is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect...
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
A quirky woman who spends her free time as a pilot has her purse stolen; a mysterious man finds her wallet, and they embark on a peculiar romance.
A look at the various modes of transportation made for the Expo '86 World Fair in Vancouver, Canada.
Hermitage, defined by Bene as "a rehearsal for lenses", beyond any literal rendition - its narrative trace comes from one of his anti-novels, Credito Italiano V.E.R.D.I - displays his immediate attitude to thinking a cinematic language completely based on actor's movements and actions, and more specifically, on his presence and his schemes. Camouflaged or naked, still or moving, his body seems to play and be played at the same time, shifted by objective and subjective tensions, both metaphorically and visually speaking.