Evolution and change are usually observed within a positive sphere, nevertheless and according to the history of humanity, we are stubborn beings reluctant to change and the unknown. I wrote this short with that thought in my mind. Mardi Darkness shows a small glance in the life of a recent graduate that resists to change, the possibility of happiness and above all the acceptance of his new life. Far away from his family, from what he once called home and his youth. The short film was made in an experimental fashion. It was initially framed as a sequence shot but it was just evoking melancholy and the chaos went too unperceived. For this reason, I decided to use a split screen technique to tell the story in a more chaotic and voyeuristic manner. It is as though it was seen through monitors that loop the life of a man who refuses to change, remaining so until it merges with the darkness of the screen and the unexplored.
Experimental filmmaker Rubén Gámez explores the iconography of the maguey plant in Mexican cinematic history.
Dark blood red slow shifting tones (often embedded in dark) / (often shot-thru with parallel wave-like lines) composed of all previous shapes and flowers as if trying, linearly, to evolve a glyph-script. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.
Men and dogs move dreamily through a room. In this hostile environment, their attitudes and reactions lead to irritated moods.
This experimental film follows the work of two scientists who test a new device that uses specialized circuitry to transfer data between computer networks and living plants. Neither science nor fiction, this documentary highlights the human labor of scientific procedures, attentive to the future they are producing – in which humans will disappear.
Jean-Claude Rousseau's Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre is not only his first medium-length film, but a chance to discover this filmmaker whom Jean-Marie Straub has called, along with Frans Van de Staak and Peter Nestler, the greatest working in Europe. With this newly restored print there is also a possibility to discover the relationship between Rousseau's art of filming and Jan Vermeer's famous painting. As Prosper Hillairet wrote in 1988, four years after Rousseau had finished Jeune femme ... (for the first time as we know today): «Without adopting the usual systematic spirit and form of cinéma structurel, Rousseau presents us with simple images and leaves it at that. Keeps the image in hand. A minimalist and ascetic expression of cinema: a shot that lasts.»
Miguel, a debutant director, and his young team live a series of tribulations during the shootings of their first film, which unrolls between Lisbon, Venice, Paris and Madrid.
Alaska is a wordless experimental film with a simple, droning soundtrack that sounds as if it is a piece for violin and refrigerator hum.
Mostly dark, rejecting images which are repeated. A stone wall, the chamber of a revolver which is, at first not recognizable, a close-up of a cactus. The duration of the takes emphasises the photographic character of the pictures, simultaneously with a crackling, brutal sound. (Hans Scheugl)
"In 1983, I got a job as a museum attendant and abandoned film-making entirely. And so the question arose: "no film?," and the conclusion I came to was: no film. Question mark." (K.K.)
An attempt to bring the work of surrealist artists to a wider public. The plot is that of an average Joe who can conjure up dreams that will improve his customer's lives. This frame story serves as a link between several avant-garde sequences created by leading visual artists of their day, most of whom were emigres to the US during WWII.
A woman's waiting for a man who will never return, another one boxing proudly the vacuum, a singer without orchestra, a conductor lonely. Lonely characters united by a fable, a naked young man lost in the woods, chasing or fleeing something.
Taking a cue from Franz Kafka's "Letter to My Father," this highly personal film follows Czech director Jan Nemec as he attempts to engage in a dialogue with his deceased mother. While alive, Nemec's mother had a troubled relationship with her son; this rumination seems to be Nemec's public platform for coming to terms with unresolved familial issues. The director embellishes his film by linking personal events with 20th century history.
The Focus is the film about easy death on the Mediterranean sun.
Through a structuralist and simultaneously ambiguous form, the image's reality treads closer to the abstract, leaving the sunset and trees behind. As we enter the image's gloaming, it reveals its true eye: reality's pure haptic energy, where there is nothing but sonorous light, and the dregs of the Unknown.
"Night and Smog - LA in Lockdown 3: Ground Zero" is a symphonic nocturnal journey spiraling into the heart of the modern metropolis. Featuring music by Nick Haley, Jackson Leist, Rene Gannon-O'Gara, Jade James, and Graeme Whynot. For Sarah Maldoror.
It compiles more than twenty years of passionately recorded “pictures from life” captured on super 8, that Vukica Djilas shot from 1970 to late 1990s.