Stairs, Tunnels and Mirrors(1969)
"1969 period. In the beginning of this experimental film a figure in white ascends spiral staircases and escalators and moves away from the camera down endless tunnels and corridors. A model in a black leotard is painted white, turned into art. Another is filmed as she ascends to a rooftop, then confronts herself in a mirror in a corner of a room. As Alice went through the glass, so in the last section there are two women reflecting each other instead of just the one." - Penny Slinger
Movie: Stairs, Tunnels and Mirrors
Top 1 Billed Cast
Black Figure/White Figure
HomePage
Overview
"1969 period. In the beginning of this experimental film a figure in white ascends spiral staircases and escalators and moves away from the camera down endless tunnels and corridors. A model in a black leotard is painted white, turned into art. Another is filmed as she ascends to a rooftop, then confronts herself in a mirror in a corner of a room. As Alice went through the glass, so in the last section there are two women reflecting each other instead of just the one." - Penny Slinger
Release Date
1969-08-01
Average
0
Rating:
0.0 startsTagline
Genres
Languages:
Keywords
Similar Movies
A Bold Voyage(en)
A tragic story of a musician taking a bold voyage in the pursuit of creation, ambition, and need. Letting life choose for him, as part of the art itself and coming to terms with his decisions.
Measure Taken(en)
The series’ latest Harald Vogl feature (from 1984) completes the filmmaker’s gradual movement away from narrative toward a vérité-style essay film. Gone are the post-punk streets of the East Village, replaced with on-the-ground footage of antiwar protests and visitors to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC, and observational scenes of union parades, marching bands, street dancers, and Chinatown residents back in Manhattan.
Blue Permanence / Swan Blood(en)
Above all, an experiment. Two identical films mirror each other. The only thing that differentiates between them is colour and sound, which is simply reversed. Through the use of just colour and sound, each part invokes unique sensations in the viewer; one of sorrow, and one of fear. Not a single identifiable object features. Instead, the films focus on repetition, texture, movement and light.
Soliloquy(en)
Featuring Joan Adler (who also appears in Chinese Checkers), Soliloquy is one of the four early Stephen Dwoskin films that were awarded the Solvey prize at the EXPRMNTL festival in Knokke, Belgium in 1967. “In Soliloquy a girl broods uncertainly over a failed love affair, while the camera roves over her fingers, her cigarette, her knuckles, her lips and the hand mirror in which she peers. In its dark reflection one isolated eye seems a dead thing, twitching; the split between her body and her spoken thoughts becomes a strange bilocation of consciousness; towards the end, an aeroplane drones overhead” (Raymond Durgnat)
C-Film(en)
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.
Jesus Blood(en)
A man walks towards the camera down the end of a street to the sound of 'Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet', a composition by Gavin Bryars based on a loop of an anonymous homeless man singing the song. The man’s voice is progressively intensified by an instrumental accompaniment, which increases in density and richness, before the whole thing gradually fades out. Dwoskin’s film was produced to be shown during the premiere of Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London in December 1972. For Dwoskin, it represents “… the singing voice of the last days of a London drunk (anonymous) as the orchestra raises him to heaven. The faint ghost image of a figure swims gradually to you through the grains of film low light…”
async - first light(en)
A collaboration between Apichatpong and Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto from his album “async”. The people falling asleep in this film are all his friends, he sent cameras to friends and asked them to shoot. Apichatpong often carries Digital Harinezumi camera with him, and completing a lot of works with this camera. This work was first exhibited at the WATARI Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (Japan, 2017).
The Name is not the Thing named(en)
In support of experiences that are essentially common, but to which language does not easily adhere, the video passes through places that are both themselves, and stand-ins for others. The title is taken from Aleister Crowley’s 1918 translation of the "Tao Te Ching."
Natural Focus(fr)
Natural focus documents the natural landscape in black and white. By varying the opening of the diaphragm, re-framing with the zoom, changing film speeds, transforming the notion of time and superimposing different shots is a dialogue between fact and technological device it represents.
The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra(en)
This short experimental film tells the story of a man who comes to Hollywood to become a star, only to fail and be dehumanized. He is identified by the number 9413 written on his forehead.
Stricnina(it)
The story: the death of a dog, filmed subsequently, a violent death because it is caused in a veterinarian’s clinic; a man in a white coat injects the strychnine… The film: afterwards there’s a moment when the animal’s eye emit violet-blue flashes, then nothing, but only apparently. Now everything is sweetness, what continues is death: the voyage into death – the transfiguration – the images that return, only to disappear from memory, emerge from the recollections in a purifying vortex that take them back to their essence. It’s the gradual breaking down of the image into form and then into colours and then into light and finally it’s the beginning: the vibration that is the matrix of sound of light of life. It’s the cosmos that makes that meat good to eat for a million years.
Letter from a Filmmaker to His Daughter(fr)
Lettre d’un cinéaste à sa fille is a playful, free and personal film in the form of a letter, a film interwoven with a thousand stories knit together with different textures, a book of images where a filmmaker shows the images and the stories he wants to share.
Space Guns(en)
Two lego space cowboys fight for survival. After one of them dies, a mysterious space man walks into the fight, he's riding an Iron Man Space Ship. An Avant-Garde short film.
Fleeing No More(de)
One of the more important European avant-garde films of the post-war period, this feature-length work offered a devastating comment on the mid-century European mood. A macabre landscape of impotence and absurdity, peopled by ambiguous travellers, finally explodes into senseless violence.
Desistfilm(en)
Four young men and a young woman sit in boredom. She smokes while one strums a lute, one looks at a magazine, and two fiddle with string. The door opens and in comes a young man, cigarette between his lips, a swagger on his face. The young woman laughs. As the four young men continue disconnected activities, the other two become a couple. When the four realize something has changed, first they stare at the couple who have kissed and now are dancing slowly. The four run from the house in a kind of frenzy and return to stare. The power of sex has unnerved them.
Wedlock House: An Intercourse(en)
We see a film negative of a nude couple embracing in bed. Then, back in regular black and white images, we see them alone and together, clothed, at home. It's night, she sees his reflection in the window, she closes the drapes. After sex, again in a black and white negative, they sit, smoke, have coffee. They kiss, she smiles. They light candles. The images are often quick, the camera angles occasionally are off kilter; the room is sometimes dark and sometimes lit, as if lit by the rotating of a searchlight. The images again appear in negative when they return to bed.
The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes(en)
At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned.
The Stars Are Beautiful(en)
We move back and forth between scenes of a family at home and thoughts about the stars and creation. Children hold chickens while an adult clips their wings; we see a forest; a narrator talks about stars and light and eternity. A dog joins the hens and the family, while the narrator explains the heavens. We see a bee up close. The narrator suggests metaphors for heavenly bodies. Scenes fade into a black screen or dim purple; close-ups of family life may be blurry. The words about the heavens, such as "The stars are a flock of hummingbirds," contrast with images and sounds of real children.
I... Dreaming(en)
Phrases of Stephen Foster, set to music by Joel Heartling, are set to film in this autobiographical piece: a solitary female voice, occasionally joined by a chorus, sings phrases of sorrow as we watch a solitary man in shadows in an unadorned house: he stretches out, he picks his feet, he walks across a room, he rocks in a chair. Occasionally he watches two young children at play; the film sometimes speeds up. Handwritten words, like "dark void" and "waiting longing," cross the screen. Film and phrases often come in short bursts. Outdoor it looks gray and cold.