Experimental

Brazil, 2018. Driven by the impact of coming across a 16mm film whose uncanny images seemed familiar but came from far away, and were made long ago, I decided to investigate the origins of this footage. At first, it seemed just an innocent home movie, but after careful research, the film has proven to be a revealing document from South Africa’s apartheid past. Among sinister discoveries and unavoidable gaps, I now reveal the results of my endeavor, based on contemporary online search tools.Read More »

SYNOPSIS:
A summer day in Italy. The camera follows the deaf-mute Giacomo and a childhood girlfriend Stefi closely – in the woods, by the river – without wanting to disrupt the mystery of their relationship, between restrained sensuality and childhood games.Read More »

Song of Avignon captures the darkness of depression like few other films, translating the overwhelming paralysis to the visual medium. Featuring fleeting glimpses of people and places strung together with a poetic rhythm, the visions embedded within Song of Avignon are tinged with the melancholy that Mekas was struggling to process. It almost functions like a haunting death rattle, coming across as the confessional of a man on the precipice of suicide.Read More »

Quote:
“My intention was none other than to instill in people a loathing for the fabricated and nonsensical stories of entertainment films, which are already wavering due to my genuine heroes and will undoubtedly soon collapse completely. Thus, Mirador gives cinematic form and effectiveness to our demand: the demand for the suppression of feature films that corrupt the people’s imagination. This film opposes the absurdity and extravagance of the same recurring fantastic adventures and deeds of gangsters, cowboys, handsome men, monsters, etc.; the formulaic and inorganic nature of the plot and intrigue, the black-and-white portrayal of the characters, and indeed, the psychological shortcomings – in short, the distortion of the realities of life and the laws of art. The realistic and critical spirit of the film Mirador fights against the devastating effect of such extravagances on the imagination of immature people.” — Werner Nekes.Read More »

Pine Barrens is concerned with evoking through film a barren wilderness in south-central New Jersey. The camera is always in motion — tracking, pivoting, and walking through the landscape. Though they are never seen in the film, the voices of the local people, the ‘Pineys,’ are heard relating their feelings about the land, their attitudes about city life, their myths of the area, etc. their voices and the music of ‘Bill Patton’s Pine Barrens Trio’ add a psychological dimension to the landscape.Read More »

The great French filmmaker René Clair crafted this elegant sepia-toned profile of Paris’s iconic landmark almost forty years after the Eiffel Tower took its first bow (at the 1889 Exposition Universelle). It clearly still fascinates and awes in this loving and playful tribute. LA TOUR takes the viewer first up and then down the mighty structure while also acting as a tribute to its eponymous designer, Gustave Eiffel. The film initially burrows into blueprints and photographs of the earliest stages of its construction ahead of the opening of the World’s Fair but Clair’s film revels in the completed structure itself, reverently scaling its heights and accompanying tourists on up through the various levels toward the topmost landing. Read More »

The Artwar face peers through painted celluloid and a barrage of explosions and film noise.Read More »

Jeff Keen processes his cinematic past in this filmic attack on his back catalogue.Read More »

Quote:
For over twenty years, Caryn Cline has handcrafted intimate films that reframe the familiar through experiments in scale and context. Join Cline in person for a free program showcasing her “botanicollage” technique of creating direct animation films using botanical elements.

Cline coined the term “botanicollage” to describe the technique pioneered by Stan Brakhage (Mothlight, Garden of Earthly Delights) in which flowers, leaves, and other organic matter are fused directly onto celluloid. Once small and overlooked, her weedy subjects demand the full cinematic frame, revealing often astonishingly beautiful qualities.Read More »