Furio’s Furious Fragments & Friends - Furio Jesi (1941 Turin -1980 Genoa), enfant prodige moving between a plethora of disciplines – egyptology, history of religions, German philology, literary criticism - passed away prematurely, not without leaving bright fragments which throw light on mechanisms beneath many socio-cultural practices, for instance regarding cultural belonging, the functions of myth in modern society. He saw kind of “mythological machines” at work underneath our cultural production of meanings, historically determined, departing from a void, something that is still in culture but as residue, a missing link to an alleged authentic experience nowadays compromised up to the point to became just rhetoric, a byword, which is in no way neutral, but a tool, a macchina, for maintaining the status quo and serving the power apparatus. As in the case of holidays, celebrations and festivals.
Furio’s Furious Fragments & Friends - Furio Jesi (1941 Turin -1980 Genoa), enfant prodige moving between a plethora of disciplines – egyptology, history of religions, German philology, literary criticism - passed away prematurely, not without leaving bright fragments which throw light on mechanisms beneath many socio-cultural practices, for instance regarding cultural belonging, the functions of myth in modern society. He saw kind of “mythological machines” at work underneath our cultural production of meanings, historically determined, departing from a void, something that is still in culture but as residue, a missing link to an alleged authentic experience nowadays compromised up to the point to became just rhetoric, a byword, which is in no way neutral, but a tool, a macchina, for maintaining the status quo and serving the power apparatus. As in the case of holidays, celebrations and festivals.
2021-02-08
10
Strange things occur tonight whether the paranormal phenomenon is the invisible invasion of aliens from outer space or light flashes of another dimension? We will never know. Are we alone or may we encounter extraterrestrial species that are coming at night to conquer our dreams, our body and mind? What are you afraid of?
Known for his unmistakable cascading strings and recordings such as Charmaine, Mantovani enthralled the world with his sublime arrangements. This is the story of the man and his music.
Leipzig, December 1734: Christmas brings the Bach family together. The first snow has fallen and the children Gottfried and Elisabeth are delighted about the arrival of their older brothers Friedemann and Emanuel. The Thomaskantor has retired to his music room. Anna Magdalena supports her husband, as there are only a few days left and his latest work, the six-part "Christmas Oratorio", must be finished on time. It is awaited with suspicion by the city council and the gentlemen of the consistory, who have long found Bach's waywardness a thorn in their side and fear that, after the premiere of the St. Matthew Passion a few years earlier, the St. Thomas Church will once again be filled with "operatic" music. With the oratorio, Johann Sebastian Bach hopes that he will finally become court composer in Dresden. And, as always, he demands that all members of the family join forces to help him. But differences of opinion are increasingly delaying the completion of Bach's most famous work.
Three friends device a plan that could help them ACE their accountings exam. The plan is - to steal the paper. What follows then is situational & slapstick comedy with a hilarious twist!
Even uninhabited archipelagos may be subject to drawn out territorial disputes if they are rich in oil deposits. However, the filmmaker is more concerned with how ownership issues reverberate amongst nationalists in competing countries rather than in the history of the dispute or its resolution, making it possible to present the patriotic pathos-soaked ceremonies of the Japanese, the efforts of Chinese authorities to complicate diversionary activities, and the expressive protests and bizarre rituals of Taiwanese activists. The desire to understand the situation leads the director to participate in several futile attempts to land on the islands. Although he finds himself on the frontline during an escalation in the conflict, he is able to maintain his distance as an impartial observer.
Four girls return home to a ghost town but find themselves being followed. By someone who knows what they did? Or just their guilty conscience? There's more to each girl than meets the eye.
Everyone is chasing a little wooden dog. Old and young, they all think it contains an elixir of life. Miranda, a manic cosmetics tycoon, thinks it's worth millions. A mob of old folk led by a pair of deranged doctors is convinced it contains the secret of eternal youth.
A community is under siege as three Belmont Highschool coed students go missing with no trace of their whereabouts. The pressure is on the police to capture the culprits responsible. Scouring the school hallways in search of clues, undercover female detective Maggie Rawdon (Jessica Sonnerborn) enters Belmont High as a transfer student in an attempt to solve the hideous disappearance of the students. Maggie makes a few new friends, and gets invited to a private rave in the country. Just as the group begins to suspect that they've taken a wrong turn, however, the trap is sprung and Maggie finds out firsthand what fate has befallen the missing girls.
A young substitute teacher escapes from her drudging everyday life by fantasizing about bizarre parallel realities.
From the slums of Shaolin Wu Tang Clan strikes again, paired with the great Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones. In this back-to-back event the Hip-Hop legends take us on a cinematic musical journey through Hip-Hop itself, their discography, whilst channeling an Abel Ferrara "King of New York" aesthetic. All preformed in the name of love and unity.
Make me the Next Model Too is a model competition
The short registers a sports spectacle of great importance (probably of soccer). We never see the spectacle itself but the people watching and reacting at the stadium.
Mysterious Castles of Clay is a 1978 film about a termite colony; filmed in Kenya by film-makers Joan and Alan Root, and narrated by Orson Welles. (narration replaced by Derek Jacobi, in a later release titled "Castles of Clay")
An ex-convict, freed to fight in World War II, gets a factory job and is accused when a bracelet is missing.
Emanuelle's daughter Pussy introduces her to her new lover and she suffers a flash of recognition.
The affairs of men and women are many and complex in this film.
Kosuge, the president of a factory, is killed by someone while returning home. A bag charm is found at the scene. When Akira Higuchi and his colleagues from the Metropolitan Police Department's Investigation Division investigate his home, they find a bankbook with the letters A, Y, M, and S written in English. It turns out that the charms left behind were custom-made by Seiji Iwai. However, Seiji had committed suicide five years ago in a robbery-suicide case. Seiji's mother, Mizuki, is an old acquaintance of Superintendent Tendo. Higuchi heads for Mizuki's place...
The Karikpo masquerade - a traditional dance of the Ogoni tribe - is transposed onto the remnants of a faded oil industry programme in the Niger delta.
To fly a – way from/out of death, don’t hire a taxidermist but take a ride in this taxidrome! Series of 41 Moving Images - this analogy is possible being conservation at its core rescuing what really matters in the world, like nature, habitats, science and art. It is vital. Yet in a continuously changing environment, the flipside of conservation becomes and here it is where the vital feature of conservation becomes its lifelike trait, a fictive life, a fake life. The embalming process consists of 1) imparting a balmy essence to the dead body, as in the ancient world, 2) by filling its blood vessels with formaldehyde to prevent putrification, as in the modern world, although recently with more regard towards more natural treatments, as for instance in bio-art. To embalm also means to “preserve from oblivion”, and “to cause to remain unchanged”, “to prevent the development of something”.
After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.
In his book "1984", George Orwell saw the television of the future as a control instrument in the hands of Big Brother. Right at the start of the much-anticipated Orwellian year, Paik and Co. were keen to demonstrate satellite TV's ability to serve positive ends-- Namely, the intercontinental exchange of culture, combining both highbrow and entertainment elements. A live broadcast shared between WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, linked up with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea, reached a worldwide audience of over 10 or even 25 million (including the later repeat transmissions).
Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.
CGI collage short film originally premiered as part of the 'Extinction Renaissance' exhibition at the Loyal Gallery in Stockholm.
Today, analogue video is attractive primarily thanks to the distinctive aesthetic quality of its pixelated image and raster errors. But for Czech artists who first explored the possibilities offered by video art in the late 1980s, this medium represented a path towards freedom. Through a portrait of her grandfather Radek Pilař, one of the pioneers of Czech video art, the director explores her own legacy of imperative creative fascination. Her film’s main story, i.e., the process of reconstructing the 1989 exhibition Video Day, contrasts this enchantment with life in the final days of the totalitarian regime, which different sharply with the adventures of those who decided to emigrate – whom the filmmaker also visits in order to discover forgotten works, get to know their creators, and re-establish broken ties.
IDFA and Canadian filmmaker Peter Wintonick had a close relationship for decades. He was a hard worker and often far from home, visiting festivals around the world. In 2013, he died after a short illness. His daughter Mira was left behind with a whole lot of questions, and a box full of videotapes that Wintonick shot for his Utopia project. She resolved to investigate what sort of film he envisaged, and to complete it for him.
Shot on 16mm film in New York and composed in Berlin, the work explores polarizing themes of the metropolis. Audibly and visually, the viewer is put in a flicker between serenity and intensity; harrowing ambience cut with sharp beeps, vulnerable steps mashed in high velocity.
Poet and artist Vito Acconci points his finger towards the camera and his own reflection in an offscreen video monitor.
The quixotic journey of Nam June Paik, one of the most famous Asian artists of the 20th century, who revolutionized the use of technology as an artistic canvas and prophesied both the fascist tendencies and intercultural understanding that would arise from the interconnected metaverse of today's world.
A compilation of avant-garde artwork and talent of the mid to late 20th century hosted by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Abstract video art by John Sanborn and Dean Winkler. Dedicated to Ed Emshwiller.
In the present work, the artists appears lying on his back, his eyes mostly closed, dreamingly listening to a walkman that plays, a recording of 'The Best of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground'. The artist can hear the music through his earphones, but as viewers we are only privy to the sound of his voice that whispers the melody. As we listen to the hypnotic interpretion of the familiar songs - as emblematic for pop music history as 'Psycho' is for film - we are forced to mentally 'reconstruct' the remaining orchestration, instrumentation and vocals. We must attempt to reassemble something we already know to be a fact by negotiating the sticky mess of interpretation, meaning, and memory.
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).
The innovative and influential British filmmaker Derek Jarman was invited to direct the Pet Shop Boys' 1989 tour. This film is a series of iconoclastic images he created for the background projections. Stunning, specially shot sequences (featuring actors, the Pet Shop Boys, and friends of Jarman) contrast with documentary montages of nature, all skillfully edited to music tracks.
Proximities focuses on the trope of the Malay Boy found in the works of Singaporean artist Cheong Soo Pieng (b. 1917-1983). It attempts to locate the Malay male in art history while unpacking underlying systems of power that have shaped and naturalised the understanding of difference.
Pia Yona Massie's Sayonara Super 8 uses personal archival footage to ask questions about the fragile nature of memory, human relationships and the foibles of the medium itself.
Confined to an endlessly burning waiting room, a dying sedentary woman experiences herself blurring in and out of her body. In her last remaining fragments she tries to make amends with her spirit before her remaining fragments either decay or create.
Vespertilio Spillover is a moving images materializing from a woodcut depicting cat-bats in a rare book written by the German scientist Athanasius Kircher (*1602 / +1680) illustrating China in comparison with the actual context of the Covid-19 insurgence, including the spillover infection phenomenon and its potential causes. THIS FILM IS DEDICATED TO ALL VICTIMS - R.I.P.