a sentimental audiovisual collage from december 2023
Social & External
Self
Guima and Aras are star-crossed lovers in this sardonic tale of fruit and global genocide. One day, a black mango suddenly appears in Guima and Aras's tree. To eat or not to eat: that was their question. Toxic Mango is a silent, black-and-white film that ruminates on a dystopian future where the effects of the oil spill tragedy have reached nightmarish proportions.
Digital Smoke is an experimental meditation on light, memory, and distortion. Shot at twilight in Minneapolis’s Loring Park, the film captures the moment just after sunset, when street lamps flicker on and reflect across the lake. As Devereaux moves the camera backward and forward, fading light introduces digital noise. Rather than correct it, he amplifies the imperfection, layering light trails until the noise becomes ethereal white clouds—“digital smoke”—that dissolve the boundary between image and abstraction. Frames evoke the hazy textures of J.M.W. Turner and the pixelated aesthetic of early video games, blending painterly romanticism with digital fragmentation.
Meta Ekologi was made in 1979 and is based on a performance by Sardono W. Kusumo and his group. They are shown in a pool of mud in a Jakarta slum, with the local population watching as the artists cover themselves entirely in mud. It's a response to an attempt at dialogue with the ecology of land and water. Humanity expresses its feelings through the body, trying to become one with the universe. It refers to the peasants who work the land and are covered in mud. It's a process of poetisation. Gotot Prakosa, ‘Interview with Gotot Prakosa’, Cantrills Filmnotes, 1990
This ironic and satirical video poem focuses on the mind of a young artist struggling with the desensitisation, exhaustion and stress of information overload at a time when 328.77 million terabytes of data are generated every day.
The film contains the despair of an artist’s desire for creation on ruthless censorship, rebel, and anxiety in the mid-70s when it was politically and socially depressed.
In 17th-century Tuscany, a church play is performed for the benefit of young aristocrat Cosimo. In the play, a grotesque old woman gives birth to a beautiful baby boy. The child's older sister is quick to exploit the situation, selling blessings from the baby, and even claiming she's the true mother by virgin birth. However, when she attempts to seduce the bishop's son, the Church exacts a terrible revenge.
Endless Sea is a textural, oneiric exploration of the inability to escape captured within the confines of Grand Theft Auto: Andreas.
The first embodiment of (a) concept of structural activity in cinema comes in Kren's Bäume im Herbst, where the camera as a subjective observer is constrained within a systematic or structural procedure, incidentally the precursors of the most structuralist aspect of Michael Snow's later work. In this film, perception of material relationships in the world is seen to be no more than a product of the structural activity in the work. Art forms experience.
Swain is inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe, features a dreamlike narrative of a young man’s ritualized rejection of heterosexuality, as a mysterious woman in white gossamer pursues him through a ruined landscape.
Concerns a young boy's mystical experiences during his Confirmation. As the ceremony unfolds, figures from religion and mythology appear and impress on him the need to become a soldier of Christ.
An experimental short film that traces the emotional landscape of life after heartbreak. Through intimate narration and cinematography, the film reflects on time, healing, and the rediscovery of self. A quiet yet cinematic portrait of learning to love the stranger within, and rediscovering the beauty of simply being alive.
An experimental short from Oskar Fischinger
Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
A conversation between reality and consciousness.
During Childbirth, a mother is told the child is stillborn, and she struggles to finish the birth in order to survive.
Gehr uses a mini-digital recorder to look back on the Machine Age in the form of San Francisco's soon-to-be-shuttered Musee Mecanique. For slightly more than an hour, Cotton Candy documents this venerable collection of coin-operated mechanical toys—including an entire circus—mainly in close-up, isolating particular details as he alternates between ambient and post-dubbed (or no) sound. By treating the Musee's cast of synchronized figures as puppets, the artist is making a show—but is it his or theirs? Gehr's selective take on the arcade renders it all the more spooky. There's a sense in which Cotton Candy is a gloss on the moment in The Rules of the Game when the music-box-collecting viscount unveils his latest and most elaborate acquisition. (It also brings to mind the climax of A.I.: The DV of the future tenderly regards the more human machine of the past.) (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)
A young woman finds herself stuck with a clump in her head. Unsure what to do about it, she roams the streets of Dublin in an attempt to rid herself of the monotonous thuds and escape her roommate's acting practise. Safe travels you old clump.
"The film's title takes into account meanings and implication of the word 'chamber', as well as of the heart, intimate music, darkness, room, camera, prison, gun part...both empty and loaded. CHAMBER provided my conversion from painter to filmmaker." -JB
An inside look at the years of effort and craft that went into the final installment of the Duffer Brothers' generation-defining series.
A nameless drifter navigates a barren landscape punctuated by satellite dishes, radio towers and droning airplanes. Stopping periodically in anonymous hotel rooms, she makes attempts to connect to an unidentified second party.
A compilation of interviews, rehearsals and backstage footage of Michael Jackson as he prepared for his series of sold-out shows in London.
When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire one rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they had bargained for.
William K.L. Dickson plays the violin while two men dance. This is the oldest surviving sound film where sound is recorded on the phonograph.
In 1973, a young gallery assistant goes on a wild adventure behind the scenes as he helps aging genius Salvador Dali prepare for a big show in New York.
An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.
Through archival interviews and footage, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley relive the arc of their Wham! career, from 70s best buds to 80s pop icons.
A tale of friendship between two unlikely pen pals: Mary, a lonely, eight-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max, a forty-four-year old, severely obese man living in New York.
Long-lost footage from Elvis Presley's legendary Las Vegas residency in the 1970s woven together with rare 16mm footage from Elvis on Tour, and 8mm from the Graceland archive, plus recordings of Elvis telling "his side of the story" rediscovered during Baz Luhrmann's research for his 2022 film, Elvis.
Those who knew iconic funnyman John Candy best share his story, in their own words, through never-before-seen archival footage, imagery, and interviews.
Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.
A one-night livestream concert performed by Twenty One Pilots on May 21, 2021, introducing their newest album "Scaled and Icy".
Four siblings' lives change drastically when their ailing mother takes a turn for the worse over the holiday season.
Seven mini-stories of adultery: a widow misbehaves at her husband's funeral, a wife turns to streetwalking for revenge, a prudish girl surprises, a neglected wife vies for her husband's attention, a fight over a dress, a death pact, and a detective revealed as a jealous husband's spy.
The film goes behind the scenes of the 1999 sci-fi movie The Matrix.
Four tales unfold in Wes Anderson's anthology of short films adapted from Roald Dahl's beloved stories, "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar", "The Swan", "The Rat Catcher", and "Poison."
Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories fill the gaps between camcorder footages as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the troubled man she didn't.
A filmmaker talks about his work and love life with an unseen friend behind the camera. We also watch four of his short films.
Single dad Richard meets Christine, a starving artist who moonlights as a cabbie. They awkwardly attempt to start a romance, but Richard’s divorce has left him emotionally damaged. Meanwhile, Richard’s sons—one a teenager, the other 6-years-old—take part in clumsy experiments with the opposite sex.