"In a recurrent dream I keep on following your steps, always at your heels." A handicraft film, a travel journal where the lead character is the one behind the camera pulling the trigger regularly and composing the frame’s area and duration.
"In a recurrent dream I keep on following your steps, always at your heels." A handicraft film, a travel journal where the lead character is the one behind the camera pulling the trigger regularly and composing the frame’s area and duration.
2017-05-18
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Considered to be artist Martin Blaszko's only incursion into film. Through the experimentation with various film techniques, the artist speaks of the laws of geometry which are an important part of his work, and other obsessions of his, such as, bipolarity, the monumental, and the city as a source of aesthetic emotion.
Lucía and Valeria take out three Tarot cards that reveal the first two dishes of a menu that takes them from Embún, Spain to Llanquihue, Chile; the towns of their grandmothers. Among improvised still lifes, maps and video calls, the friends try to discover the meaning of the third card through a ritual that connects both continents.
Sistiaga painted directly on 70mm film a circular (planetary?) form, around which dance shifting colours in a psychedelic acceleration matched by the soundtrack’s deep-space roar and howl. - Cinema Scope
Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.
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
A visually experimental adaptation of the classic Frank Stockton short story.
You Take Care Now, an early student film, is a perfect exemplar of Ann Marie Fleming's idiosyncratic vision and stands as one of her signature works. Made on 16mm, and incorporating found footage, original material, animation, and processed images (Vancouver's groundbreaking avant-garde cinema of the 1970s is a decided influence here), Fleming's film offers a visually dazzling, emotionally wrenching, oddly humorous account of two profound personal traumas.
Otherwise known as Magellan's Toys #1. Hollis Frampton's "Noctiluca" was a film designed to be shown on the second day of the Magellan cycle, the filmmaker's unfinished magnum opus work. The title (nox/luceo) means something that shines by night, i.e., the moon, and the film indeed consists of a bright sphere, sometimes white, sometimes tinted, sometimes single, sometimes doubled and overlapped.
Mizuki Kiyama's short animation utilizes a paint on glass technique to render a young girl's visit to a neighborhood sento (bath house) with her mother with dazzling sensuous wonder. Evoking childish fascination at daily rituals, this quotidian act amidst feminine intimacy becomes a space of otherworldly fantasy.
During WWII, the Japanese army developed experimental balloons able to cross the Pacific Ocean and reach the West Coast of North America in 3-6 days. Armed with explosives, they were given the code name fu-go, or fusen bakudan (“fire balloons,” or balloon bombs) in an attempt to instill a culture of fear like that caused by the far more deadly American firebombing of Japanese cities. The U.S. responded by enacting a censorship campaign, requesting newspapers avoid reports of fu-go landings or sightings. Living near the remains of a fu-go launch site in Fukushima Prefecture, Takeuchi mimics their flight take-off using a drone camera, and, traveling to North America, follows their arrival across the shoreline and rural landscapes, using a bat’s echolocation as narrative device to place fu-go and Fukushima as echos across history.
The mutating forms of Tensai Banpaku, or “Genius Expo” create a stunning abstract orchestra.
In December, 1941, using music by Stravinsky, this film provides a reaction to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. An egg is smashed by a hammer; red color with white and then blue dominates the frame. Blue paint runs; small bulbs float. The dark colors spread. White, red, blue, and black dominate the frame. Then comes fire. The bulbs burn and break. A broken bulb's filaments are exposed.
16mm film by Paul Clipson, and music by Sarah Davachi. Filmed in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Brisbane, Krakow, Sidney, Portland, Napa, Oakland and San Francisco.
On planet Sigma, enormous creatures are trapped inside the ice. And then, all of a sudden explosions erupt from subterranean volcanoes. The ice begins to melt; a global warming concludes the giants’ deep slumber and new life begins. The creatures crawl forth, out of the ice.
Elaborate petal-like and multicolored flowers rising in white space until the whole field is as if crushed by floral designs in madly-swift mixtures of every conceivable previous shape from the Persian Series. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.
Strains of Wagner's Das Rheingold and African tribal ululations collide with bi-/tri-sected television footage while negative-positive visuals smash heedlessly into their mirror images, an unbounded series of “meaningful” artistic fender-benders that amount to little of resonant substance.
Featuring a cast that includes Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, Mike Watt of the legendary hardcore band Minutemen, and Pettibon himself, this deadpan narrative pays dubious homage to the 1960's radical underground. In this crudely rendered home video of a commune of stoned revolutionaries, the cameras are hand-held, the edits in-camera, and the dialogue is wryly on-target. Pettibon's band of outsiders reenacts a countercultural moment defined by rock music, drugs, and ideological paradox — and in so doing, captures their own late-80's West Coast grunge milieu as well.
Multi-faceted artist Phil Niblock captures a brief moment of an interstellar communication by the Arkestra in their prime. Black turns white in a so-called negative post-process, while Niblock's camera focuses on microscopic details of hands, bodies and instruments. A brilliant tribute to the Sun King by another brilliant supra-planetary sovereign. (Eye of Sound)
An attempt to conjure pictorially, from the mind, an image that isn't referential: "...I'd like to give something back, not a picture of a flower, but some flower that couldn't exist except on film." - S.B.