Epistolary

Is It A Plaisir(en)

'Is it a plaisir' is an experimental short film that explores femininity and the body as a sharp territory, crossed by the tension between desire and imposition. Through symbolic, sound and visual saturation, the film acts from pleasure (plaisir), revealing a liberation that emerges in the midst of excess, where intensity and lightness, dark and light, intertwine, collide and converge.

REkOGNIZE(en)

REkOGNIZE is a three-channel video installation and a meditation on photography, memory, and movement. Artist and Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young (Selma, Arrival) finds inspiration in Pittsburgh’s Hill District neighborhood, a site of the early 20th-century Great Migration. During this time, millions of African Americans moved from the rural southern United States to cities in the north and west. The Hill District saw a flourishing of culture during these years and was a site of artistic development for luminaries such as August Wilson, Charles “Teenie” Harris, Errol Garner, and many others. REkOGNIZE takes its visual cues from the Pittsburgh landscape, especially the city’s tunnels, which serve not only as literal entry points into the city, but also as metaphors for this movement of people and culture.

Proyecciones del Limbo(es)

Cremaster 3(xx)

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...

Melody(en)

Although Gainsbourg and Birkin had appeared in a string of films since their magnetic collision in Pierre Grimblat’s Slogan, Melody was a bit of diversion from their collaborations since it’s a series of interwoven videos inspired by the Gainsbourgalbum. For '71 it’s a novel concept to bring visual life to an LP, but even more surprising are the short film’s amazing visuals that director Averty crafted using a wealth of video filters, overlays, camera movements and chroma key effects. Averty applies these in tandem with the increasing tone of Gainsbourg’s songs, which more or less chronicle an older man's affair with a young girl. Each song is comprised of steady, sometimes brooding poetic delivery, with refrains timed to the phrase repeats of each song, while Alan Parker’s buzzing guitar accompanies and wiggles around Gainsbourg’s resonant voice. The bass is fat and groovy, the drums easy but steady, and the periodic use of strings or rich vibrato makes this short a sultry little gem.

Arbitrary Logic(en)

Arbitrary Logic, an interactive audio-visual synthesiser was first presented under the working title Osnabruk at the Osnabruk festival of 1987 and later as part of an improvised and computer music performance with Keith Rowe at the London Filmmakers Cooperative, December 1989.

Junior War(en)

In Junior War, a throng of highschoolers congregate at night for a party in the woods sometime in the year 2000. A band plays, the kids get drunk, the boys and girls tepidly flirt, and groups deploy into cars for the purpose of destroying mailboxes, tee-peeing houses, breaking lawn ornaments, and sparring with the police. The film is composed entirely of footage Trecartin took during his senior year of high school in exurban Ohio; as such, it baits the viewer with genealogical significance.

Rivers and Tides(en)

Portrait of Andy Goldsworthy, an artist whose specialty is ephemeral sculptures made from elements of nature.

Candle(en)

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.

Continuum: 1. Initiation(en)

Part one of the two part abstract video art-piece, with music composed by Philip Glass and performed by the Kronos String Quartet.

Guadalcanal Requiem(en)

One of Paik’s most overtly political and poignant statements, Guadalcanal Requiem is a performance/documentary collage that confronts history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles.

Lake Placid '80(en)

Paik produced this exuberant, high-speed collage as a commission for the National Fine Arts Committee of the 1980 Olympic Winter Games. In a fractured explosion of densely layered movement and action, images of Olympic sports events are mixed with Paik’s recurring visual and audio motifs.

Ki or Breathing(ja)

'Ki or Breathing' is a spare concoction assembled from slow motion shots of nature and set to a score by the much-acclaimed Tohru Takemitsu.

Enigma: Nazo(ja)

Enigma is something of a more glamorous version of White Hole, with a wide variety of elaborate textures (often composed of iconographic and religious symbols) converging towards the centre of the screen.

Wintopia(en)

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.

Tale Enclosure(en)

Returning to the primal source of language, Hill explores the physical and subconscious origins of speech. In a continuous shot of a rhythmic, linguistically inspired chant-performance by George Quasha and George Stein, the camera wanders from mouth to face to hands to figure in an open-ended visual search. The performers use the body as an acoustic instrument of sound and abstract utterances.

Anima(it)

A colourful, dreamlike mediation on photography and consent.

Good Morning, Mr. Orwell(en)

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).

Opening Demo(ja)

"This installation piece explores the forewarning signs which occur before a defining event taking place. It develops through a mixture of documentary and scripted footages of my father, with texts related to my memory of him mixed into it. Since the Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster of 2011, I have felt that the people of Japan are now forced to live more consciously of the forewarning signs before an incident. This feels as if it’s universally bearing over general social issues as well as miniscule personal level incidents. I decided to feature my own father in this video piece filmed in the style of a fictional documentation. This is all bout Drinking, and weakness." -UMMMI.

Hotel Shakespeare(ja)

Video installation by UMMMI.