
director
DOP

The camera hovers above the Mir diamond mine in Sakha, northeastern Siberia, one of Earth's largest kimberlite pipes. This colossal crater spans a continuum of Soviet and Russian resource politics from Stalin to Putin, where technology and ideology inscribe military and economic imperatives into a landscape transformed by radioactive residues and industrial toxicity. Dark earth is excavated and transported, the images governed by extraction processes that sustained the Soviet Union through Sakha's mineral wealth. Out of dense nocturnal fog, debris and dimly lit industrial plants slowly crystallize, apocalyptic scenery alternating with undulating earthworks evoking folds of velvet. The observational camera remains still, registering rather than narrating, while a finely arranged soundscape transmits the ceaseless whirring of machines. Finally, the camera descends into the open pit, its contours dissolving into darkness, like an infinitely slow fall into bottomless depths.
2020-10-27
0
experimental film
7.2Told in the form of a mock documentary in 92 short parts, nineteen million people are left obsessed with birds and flight following a strange occurrence. A documentarian analyses the lives of all the survivors whose surnames begin with FALL to uncover the truth behind the event.
0.0DRIFT is a collaboration started in 1991 between visual artist Leah Singer and musician and poet Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. DRIFT is an immersive sonic/visual environment consisting of music, sounds and texts by Ranaldo in response to two 16mm analytical film projectors performed in real time by Singer. Much as a DJ scratches a vinyl record, Singer manipulates her films in a live improvisation with Ranaldo's guitar, poetry and soundscapes.
5.0A relationship between a man and a woman discloses during the course of the film.
5.5TRAILERS unites the most personal and experimental aspects of underground filmmaking with a scope that is as cosmically vast as a science fiction epic. Rashidi’s ongoing exploration into the nature of cinema sees a group of characters adrift in space, each locked into their own sexual rituals while a cataclysm of universal proportions unfolds. Humanity has become a mysterious burlesque show for alien eyes: the gaze of the film camera. This visionary spectacle uses multiple formats and visual textures in weaving an erotic anti-narrative suspended in its own space and time.
8.5HE, the third work in the ongoing collaboration between Rouzbeh Rashidi and actor James Devereaux, is a troubling and mysterious portrait of a suicidal man. Rashidi juxtaposes the lead character’s apparently revealing monologues with scenes and images that layer the film with ambiguity. Its deliberate, hypnotic pace and boldly experimental structure result in an unusual and challenging view of its unsettling subject.
0.0Self Decapitation is a Janus-headed self-portrait by Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain in which death and desire each take possession of this film in two parts. The ambiguities of inhabiting a human body are conjured by way of film technology in its faults, faulty memories and false promises. There is no escape from its haunting – except perhaps to haunt it in turn…
0.0Shot entirely on a webcam and guided by the Imperfect Cinema philosophy, this film captures the drunken drift of a man reaching for connection in a cold, indifferent city. What unfolds is either a dream, a dying vision, or both. Then — reality returns with a quiet whimper. Life moves on. Raw, lo-fi, and unapologetically rough, this is a meditation on how easily the world forgets. Meaning is left open; interpretation belongs to the viewer.
0.0In the midst of the frenzy night a man finds himself lost in the crevasse of time. It was not the grotesque beings nor the monsters, but it was he who “was here, but wasn't here”. He was the phantom. Buried under memories full of inhibition and promises that never kept – words washed up on the shore – time keeps him at a distance from the “place”. And he hears poems coming on the waves from the other side rhyming and lapping against the shore. A 360° scope video Installation commissioned by Nagano Art Museum.
6.6Set over three generations and beginning with a sexually frustrated orderly during WWII who relieves his tensions in the most outlandish, gross ways. The result of his liaison is a glutton who grows up to be a champion speed eater. He produces a child who becomes obsessed with taxidermy.
0.0a 32-minute color film by Gwen Brown, featuring precious footage of Living Theatre productions “Mysteries” and smaller pieces, “Paradise Now” and “Frankenstein.” “The fusion of Brown’s freewheeling direct cinema and the Living Theatre’s performance for revolutionary change (amidst the heydays of both) unite as a dynamic concoction of the era, yielding for the viewer a shifting terrain of both critical insight and ecstatic zeal, not as a vacant nostalgia for a pre-commodified radicality, but as tactical inspiration for future days.” – Andrew Wilson (Artist’s Access Television)
0.0Arrancar los ojos is a project that proposes a constellation of works around the gaze and its political dimension. A reflection on the concepts of institutional violence, repression and collective trauma, focusing on the pattern of eye attacks by state security forces.
8.0X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.
5.2A tale of people unfolds under the night sky. These doomed couples and lost individuals begin journeys and attempt to find resolution in their lives. Love is observed from a distance, sadness is in the air. With little sympathy for the loss and destruction caused to the characters, the stories progress and become neatly woven into a minimalistic portrayal of modern life.
8.0After awakening in her basement, the protagonist finds herself cursed by an object, rendering her unable to blink. Haunted by a sinister silhouette creature that appears from various locations, she realizes her only chance of defeating it lies in mastering the ability to confront the creature without averting her gaze.
10.0Egglantine loves salt on her eggs. Eggbert prefers pepper. Who blinks first in this playful Easter ritual?