Poetic and romantic amateur footage of a young couple in a garden, as well as their travels — several spliced films with different plots were stored on one reel. The film includes the author's audio commentary.
Poetic and romantic amateur footage of a young couple in a garden, as well as their travels — several spliced films with different plots were stored on one reel. The film includes the author's audio commentary.
1982-01-01
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Zhang Xianchi is a man thrown into the Cultural Revolution and its afterimage, plunged into the ideological deadlocks of the era and suffering its consequences beyond it. Born into a family that supports the nationalist Kuomintang, Zhang eventually became a leftist and joined the Communist Party. But his family’s background eventually catches up with him, and in a series of bureaucratic measures, he is labelled as a Rightist, leading to a slew of irrational yet life-affecting consequences. His story is told through an exhilarating hybrid of forms, blending documentary-styled interviews and spectral theatrical displays within an ever-mutating studio-space. Hypnagogic in its imagery and ironic in attitude, Mr. Zhang Believes is a tour-de-force treatise of a man caught within dogmatic political maneuverings, which it critiques indirectly with creative and stoic fervour.
Mid-summer heatwave. Nikos and Alain, two male prostitutes and a female pimp, Monica, get tangled in a peculiar relationship after meeting in a dark street called POUTANA. They fall in love, play with guns and talk about card games, money and theatre castings. Is this a game of role playing the three of them have invented to pass their time in a remote, empty summer house? Have they been reading Jean Genet? Whether a mirror image of the characters’ reality or an elliptic depiction of their distorted, dream-like perception of it, I Afroditi Stin Avli, by juxtaposing disparate literary and art references, leads its isolated characters towards dissolution. And yet, in its strange language, it presents this dissolution as a triumph.
October 5th, at 10.30 pm , after pope John-Paul II`s blessing of Lyon from the top of Fourvieres hill, Rendez-Vous Lyon got under way, a concert performed for more than 800,000 people on the banks of the river Saone. Fourvieres hill was ablaze for ninety minutes, fired on by cannons of light, fireworks and images synchronised to music being performed live on the central stage by Jean-Michel Jarre, 60 musicians and 120 choristers. A baroque feast, blending classical and avant-garde, workmanship and high-tech, past and future, Rendez-Vous Lyon will long be remembered as an exceptional event.
Turquoise and maroon-toned thin lines of paint are interspersed with variously toned circular "watermarks" of blotched paint giving-way to multi-colored brush strokes and finally fulsomely darkened and thickened brush-strokes which then thin to something akin to the beginning.
Interplay of toned rectangular shapes, vertical and horizontal and diagonal lines in juxtaposition with hardened darker shapes which gradually shift tone and lighten until ending on thin blues.
Many white interruptive frames and absolutely straight-edged multi-colored lines amidst "clouds" of color, finally thickened into blobs with lengthy white (clear leader) spacing between them.
Much depth of multi-colored thickened shapes which appear to be superimposed upon each other, semi-transparent in their "weave" with each other which is increasingly interrupted by ragged-edged blobs and smears of color.
This section is very similar to Prelude 4 except that it is composed of extremely thin-lined colors and sharply delineated shapes which are constantly interrupted by "cloud"-like forms.
Interplay of mostly horizontal lines inter-woven with "watermark" forms in a wide variety of tones which gradually tend to dissolve into blues at the end.
The ocean, the trees, the varieties of cityscape and landscape assert themselves as "pictures", but the images are essentially a wash and tangle of nervous feedback, sometimes influenced by the colors of inlet waters, sometimes the wave movements, but more ordinarily by the cellular shifts and shapes of the optic system receiving exterior imagery.
...as removed as possible from any recognition of either exterior scene of interior feedback phenomena. It is, in its ineffability, as close to pure visual music as I can make it, more inspired by The Preludes of Bach or The Preludium of Buxtehude than anything of my surroundings when I was painting.
...again, is "plein-aire abstraction" as defined above (painted in New York City) – with, for example, even a correctly toned green impression of The Statue of Liberty – and, then, impressions of Toronto with its architectural particularities appearing, midst hurrying people – shapes (almost as if photographed at times). This segment is Double-Printed (i. e., two frames for every painted one).
Prelude 10 is a double-printed film with an extreme mixture of darks shot thru with jewel-like bursts of color, and very white bursts of light and fleeting colored forms.
Thick weaves of multicolored lines and dull-colored blobs play off against each other.
A bursting of mostly golden light forms as if heralding sunlight itself in their hurried (single-frame) display.
Singly-printed multi-colored watery "blobs" and "feathery" streaks of painted color, dominated by yellows and reds interweaving in complexity until there's an evolution of hard-edge autumn leaf patterns which dissipate into patterns similar to the beginning of the film.
Prelude 14 begins in deep brilliant red which darkens into deeper reds and lavender shapes, disrupted by a variety of colors settling into browns and grays and shapes most rock-like, all of which is then shot-thru with sufficient yellow to break up all hard-edge form and give a molten aspect to the mixtures of shapes.
The Alchemist assembles together a group of people from all walks of life to represent the planets in the solar system. The occult adept's intention is to put his recruits through strange mystical rites and divest them of their worldly baggage before embarking on a trip to Lotus Island. There they ascend the Holy Mountain to displace the immortal gods who secretly rule the universe.
Five lonesome cowboys get all hot and bothered at home on the range after confronting Ramona Alvarez and her nurse.
An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.