Metalogue

Daumë(en)

Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a film about ritual, power, and play. Daumë is both ethnography and critique; it is an interrogation into how to represent a place that can't be represented.

Terra Incognita(en)

Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.

The Red and the Blue Gods(en)

An ethnographic field report in which the Anthropologist describes the mythic creation of an unnamed ‘sun-scraping structure’ through the ritualized actions of the Red and the Blue Gods.

Ara crema(ca)

Embodiment of Darkness(en)

A dark formless body moves . Formlessness of an entity is because a constant change in form is perceived as formless

Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head(fr)

The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.

#Familiar #Touch #Lost #Figures(en)

Can we reinvent our lost queer histories? #Familiar #Touch #Lost #Figures is about queer ancestry and diaspora, a hybrid of cultural traditions and contemporary queer identity. It explores feelings of guilt and joy, and intimacy between femmes of colour.

Eighteen fragments from Malcolm Le Grice’s After Leonardo(en)

"This installation or performance work puts my own earlier film of the Mona Lisa (1973) through another stage of transformation – my own irretrievable self of some 34 years ago is now also part of the subject I first saw the ‘actual’ ‘Mona Lisa’ when I was about thirteen. Of course I had seen dozens of reproductions in books and postcards by then and the popular mythology of the enigmatic smile was already well engrained in my mind. My strongest impression, as I recall, was how small and unsurprising it was – a heavily protected cultural icon – no longer really a picture – and I was much more excited by the painting of the distant landscape than by the face. My own ‘version’ of ‘la Giaconda’ was never an homage, nor like Marcel Duchamp’s ‘L.H.O.O.Q’, an attack on its cultural power. Instead it came from a fascination with change and transformation – maybe also with arbitrary appropriation." Malcolm Le Grice

Notes on the Circus(en)

The short film is a montage of sped up clips of The Ringling Brothers Circus in action set to a musical track. The film is separated into four segments, each segment which focuses on different acts within the circus. The later segments often incorporate clips from earlier segments, mostly as background to the featured acts. The speed of the clips match the tempo of the soundtrack music.

Principio Cômico(pt)

Seoane(es)

Mapocho(en)

A visual journey through the Mapocho river.

Terminal City(en)

Terminal City records the demolition of the Devonshire Hotel in Vancouver; through extreme show motion (200 frames per second) and symmetrical diagonal framing, Gallagher underscores the passage from order to chaos within the event. The sparseness of this centering and he patience required of the viewer heightens the literally explosive climaxes of the film, and transforms the everyday violence of the events into moments of convulsive beauty. – Jim Shedden, Michael Zryd, The Independent Eye

Cinema Exercises(it)

A workshop film made with a group of students of the Pietro Zorutti School in Palmanova, Esercizi di Cinema is an experimental adaptation of Raymond Queneau's book Exercises in Style.

Ripple(en)

RIPPLE, 2020. HD digital video loop & steel & hardware, duration: 5 minutes. Soundtrack by Kevin Carey.

Alma(en)

"The details of the script for Alma were modeled from data that the artist collected from her own digital devices. The film describes a woman who enters into a private contract with a room. The objects in the room monitor how she feels as they respond to her in real time, comforting her with their physical presence and touch. The room tracks the character’s steps and her screen time, but it also monitors impossible data points, like what she would have accomplished if she had lived a different life. The first half of the film celebrates the unreality of her wishful thinking that technology is capable of solving any problem. In the second half of the film, these optimistic ideas are traded for a catastrophic vision of her digitally connected self. In the end, she is immersed in a space that describes what it once was like to be among other people. While physically separated, she waits indefinitely in a digital rendering, surrounded by a phantom of human presence." — Jane Lombard Gallery

The Magic Sun(en)

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)

Vertical Shapes in a Horizontal Landscape(en)

A walk through England’s south coast evokes the artists who lived and worked there.

Karl's Perfect Day(en)

A day in the life of Swedish poet Karl Holmqvist.

She Had Her Gun All Ready(en)

Two women – one passive and resigned, the other aggressive and domineering – interact in various locations in New York city. The film explores the dynamic between them before ending with a showdown at the roller-coaster on Coney Island.