My grandmother is suffering from senile dementia and already lost many precious memories. I try to use the methods of structural film to film her and replicate the process of forgetting memories.
My grandmother is suffering from senile dementia and already lost many precious memories. I try to use the methods of structural film to film her and replicate the process of forgetting memories.
2016-11-06
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The six-decade transformation of a block of houses, shown by means of artfully featured archival shots, highlights the beauty and sadness of human-made decay. In the blink of an eye 66 years pass by and a savings bank replaces a church.
A silent dance documenting a brief visit to Minneapolis in the fall of 2022. A reflection on the sleeping city's tumultuous recent history through a recollected interaction and a plea for continued disturbance. An entry in an ongoing video and film series, Twin City Twist was shot on Kodak Tri-X reversal super 8 film with kaleidoscopic lenses. The film was scanned and edited digitally.
A glimpse into a visual representation of memory; A Christmas-time series of meals, coffees, and movies, with friends, lovers, and housemates. Faced with the compounding of faces and places, each moment begins to collide with one another: voices are muddled, and faces are broken. How is memory created? How are they separated from one another?
“This film was a gift to me. I make no claims for it, nor do I offer any apologies. It comes from work on The Thoughts That Once We Had. There was one shot we had to cut whose loss I particularly regretted. It was a shot of a train pulling into Tokyo Station from Ozu’s The Only Son (1936). So I decided to make a film around this shot, an anthology of train arrivals. It comprises 26 scenes or shots from movies, 1904-2015. It has a simple serial structure: each black & white sequence in the first half rhymes with a color sequence in the second half. Thus the first shot and the final shot show trains arriving at stations in Japan from a low camera height. In the first shot (The Only Son), the train moves toward the right; in the last shot, it moves toward the left. A bullet train has replaced a steam locomotive. So after all these years, I’ve made another structural film, although that was not my original intention.”
"After two years of massive didacticism in black-and-white [Hapax Legomena (1971-72)], I am surprised by Tiger Balm, lyrical, in color, a celebration of generative humors and principles, in homage to the green of England, the light of my dooryard… and consecutive matters." - HF
X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.
Ellie Epp’s 12-shot study of a soon-to-be-demolished public bath in London, which “maps another way out of structural film toward a cinema of delicate implication".
The passing time is displayed as a series of still frames, or a rapid sequence of moments, ever flowing like the waves that break on the shore, like a repeated chant with no beginning, middle or end.
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).
Fog has a curious effect on cinema. On the one hand, it precludes the production of those images that seem artificial, on account of their sharpness. On the other, the mist gives each frame a mysteriously narrative quality. The joy of watching the sea and the beach under a blanket of mist allows eluding the world of the quotidian, to suspect the beauty of the uncertain and unstable
Two women in a living room: smoking, playing cards, listening to the radio. As often in Dwoskin’s films, the use of masks, make-up and costumes allows the characters to playfully transform themselves. Shot in colour film, C-film exuberates swinging London energy. In the second part of the film, the women appear to be watching the rushes of the film on an editing table. ”We are making a movie” we hear them say. As Dwoskin points out, “C-film asks how much is acting acted”, an ongoing question in Dwoskin’s cinema. Produced by Alan Power, with Esther Anderson & Sally Geeson.
This audio-visual tone poem uses the language of filmmaking to offer a first-hand evocation of the turbulent psychological effects one can experience due to prolonged lack of sunlight.
The port of a Mediterranean coastal city, which had once been the symbol of prosperity and the epicenter of life in the region, is now only the reflection of a decaying present. Static and empty shots reveal glimpses of a brilliant past, only interrupted by the intermittent sound of the construction of a residential apartment building that stands menacingly a few meters from the dock, presaging an even darker future.
A glimpse over the Diguillín River through the mechanical eye of an old digital camera. Light’s trail presents itself fortuitously over the reflection of the sun on the water, tracing infinite threads of concrete luminous information.
An analysis of film’s persistent relationship to sexuality, mediated by allusions to early cinema’s flicker, and other aggressive qualities of the cinematic apparatus.
An improvisation recorded over the course of one day, starting at dawn and finishing after dusk. The film was edited in camera and shot from one camera position in the middle of one of the 112 football pitches that cover Hackney Marsh, a location chosen because of the similarities between the surrounding buildings and objects (identical blocks of flats, goalposts etc.). By cutting between precisely matched framings of similar objects, illusions of movement were produced, disrupting representational readings of the landscape. Unforeseen events occurring in the vicinity were also recorded, determining to some extent the subsequent filming. Through selection of shots and changes in cutting pace and speed of camera movement, the film fluctuates between record and abstraction.
A remix film combining elements of found footage and structural filmmaking by combining Humphrey Bogart's quote from Casablanca with found footage of explosions, emphasized by repetition.
A Sunday walk in a forest turns into a poetic journey on perception.
A meditation on the inevitable deterioration of certain traditional values that have been established (or destroyed) throughout civilization. This elegiac account uses symbolic representation from natural elements in order to convey the inevitability of remembering the social and cultural erosion, and places a layer of texture in front of the elliptical glimpses of imagery, separating the viewer from the past. The re-occurring image of flames remains untouched by the erosion aspects of reticulation, ultimately alluding to nature's powerful quality.