The following films were all made in 1976. I do not wish to describe them. —SB "Two portrait sketches and two nondescript."
Social & External
The people behind it
An experimental short film
The second part: Brakhage’s layering of images spends less time with images of war, and begins filtering in scenes of Vienna and his home in Colorado. He sets up a comparison between “Kubelka’s Vienna” and his own.
Mr Plastimime is a funny and moving story about a man who faithfully practices a dying art, a man whose timing is a bit off, a man whose skills aren’t recognized, a man who is unlucky in love; But this is a man who keeps moving forward, faithfully believing he will one day be finally ‘seen’. That day has come…but he never expected it to be like this.
A gangster falls for a blind violinist, only for his mobster rivals to kidnap her.
Madrid, Spain. A mutilated man, a war veteran, walks, leaning on a crutch, through the stadium of the Ciudad Universitaria, a place that still preserves in walls and buildings the terrifying traces of one of the bloodiest battles of the Spanish Civil War.
The passing time is displayed as a series of still frames, or a rapid sequence of moments, ever flowing like the waves that break on the shore, like a repeated chant with no beginning, middle or end.
Freely adapted from a story by Marcel Schwob in 'Screw imaginary' and deeply focused on the thought of Georges Bataille, the film wants to give substance to Clodia tragic affair, the Roman noblewoman loved by Catullo and made him immortal in his ways, with the Lesbia pseudonym.
Mary and Eva are best friends, although they couldn't be more different. Armand, Mary's fiancee, falls in love with the seductive Eva, who is busy becoming a revue star. When Eva fails and loses her money, Armand tries to help her out.
This found 8mm film of underwater ballet has a red rust effect flowing through it like living fire.
Mix of arthouse, comedy, horror. A man who has committed numerous crimes rescues a dog. An unique experimental movie in which a dog who died in a traffic accident after being tossed around by humans is reborn as a heretic and attempts revenge on humans. Under the guidance of the devil, he is reborn as a scarecrow to bring the Blood Festival. A 35mm independent film by the director who loves to make movies, but is not interested in professional film directors. The director who was shocked to see a picture of a dog abused and abandoned by humans, devoted his passion to this unique work that took seven years to complete.
Drops of fire that create a universe of magmatic asteroids. Liquid and gravitational reality. Cosmic energy. Atomized Rhythm. Neurons of a liberated unconscious. Elimination of the idea of "soul" as "everything", reducing it to the condition of units of energy in perpetual process, elementary particles, without duration, that arise in perfect dependence. The "I" as a stream of units of force in ceaseless becoming that procures the illusion of an entity. Karmic chain. The idea that eternity resides in the transitory, the eternal belongs to it instantly. Eternity not as infinite duration but as absence of temporality. Universe of a mobile, procedural, relational and interactive nature of everything that exists. Here the "object" is conceived as something that is constituted, completed, lost and recovered with the vibrating rhythm of a universe in constant production.
By painting and scratching directly on celluloid strips and then duplicating each image for two or more frames, Brakhage produced a flickering cycle of abstract shapes that bespeak the restlessness of his own character and sensibility; the titles of the segments (which Brakhage also intended to function as freestanding films) further emphasize his rejection of collective thinking in favor of personal vision. I..., proposes an unstable image of the self with its centerless collisions of diverse imagery. Small black shapes are superimposed over diffuse colors, and each moment seems to consume and obliterate the last in an emotionally charged rush that suggests a consciousness terrified of stasis and perpetually seeking renewal.
Peronoise is a being who tells us a story, who proposes the senses as currency instead of using Argencard or Mastercard, who presents and provides emancipation as a path, who establishes a Ministry of Hearing, who announces that we can dance, that it's a party!, whose enemy is Dr. Mutantis, the white male patriarch of holy causes from the Austro-Hungarian suburbs.
In a dry, flat desert, five new humans grow from under the soil around a crow and a chair, which calls to them.
A man fakes an engagement to a typist to please his rich aunt.
Hallo Mabuse captivates through its reduction, in which a conspiratorial narrative takes place, but even more so, the images themselves appear ambiguous, obscure, untrustworthy. A nod of the head, which seems treacherous in its mechanical repetition, meets the profile of a bearded man who does not appear to react at all in a suggested counter shot. The slight flickering of the image further intensifies the impression of an illicit agreement, of witnessing a crooked handshake. The ringing of the unseen telephone and the constant ticking of a clock lend the events a limited temporality. Something is running out, and in doing so, is also already reaching its end, a ghostly final act, which is anticipated by an explosion and breaks off with the sound of a falling guillotine.
"'Rote Movie' is part of a series of works examining aspects of the traumatic experience. It is an examination of decay and forgetting, where what both distance and time can bring to one's private feelings of belonging and home. Highly immersed in a fragmented and disjointed haptic space of its own materiality, this film stutters out its thoughts frame by frame" - Steven Ball, 'Mesh' 3, Autumn 1994.
An early silent film, made before intertites became common (which is why very early silent films are narrated, at best). This was filmed in 1907 but released in 1908. It was made at the request of Teddy Roosevelt, who saw coyotes being caught in Oklahoma *by hand*, and folks back east didn't believe him. While this movie is called "The Wolf Hunt", it was actually coyotes being caught, not wolves.
A loose collection of scenes in Hong Kong shot over a five-year period, this film begins with the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and ends right before the summer of 2019, when large-scale social unrest and violent resistance erupted. The everyday scenes capture the ambience and the landscape of change in the city, standing as a quiet prelude to the ensuing conflicts.
After a visit to a pub, Charlie and Ben cause a ruckus at a posh restaurant. Charlie later finds himself in a compromising position at a hotel with the head waiter's wife.
Three Chaplin silent comedies "A Dog's Life", "Shoulder Arms", and "The Pilgrim" are strung together to form a single feature length film. Chaplin provides new music, narration, and a small amount of new connecting material. "Shoulder Arms" is now described as taking place in a time before "the atom bomb".
Inexperienced waiters (Laurel & Hardy) are hired for a swank dinner party.
Told through performances, TV interviews, home movies, family photographs, private letters and unpublished memoirs, the film reveals the essence of an extraordinary woman who rose from humble beginnings in New York City to become a glamorous international superstar and one of the greatest artists of all time.
A shipowner intends to scuttle his ship on its last voyage to get the insurance money. Charlie, a tramp in love with the owner's daughter, is grabbed by the captain and promises to help him shanghai some seamen. The daughter stows away to follow Charlie. Charlie assists in the galley and attempts to serve food during a gale.
Mother, father and daughter go to the park. The women doze off on a bench while the father plays a hide-and-seek game with a girl, blindfolded. Charlie leads him into a lake. Both dozing ladies on the bench fall for Charlie and invite him for dinner. The father returns home with a friend. Charlie rushes upstairs and dresses like a woman, shaving his mustache. Both men fall for Charlie.
Buster and a woman are mistakenly married and her initially unfriendly family begins to treat him nicely when they come to believe he has a large inheritance awaiting him.
After killing her treacherous step-father, a girl tries to escape the country with a young vagabond. She dresses as a boy, they hop freight trains, quarrel with a group of hobos, and steal a car in their attempt to escape the police, and reach Canada.
Edna's father wants her to marry wealthy Count He-Ha. Charlie, Edna's true love, impersonates the Count at dinner, but the real Count shows up and Charlie is thrown out. Later on Charlie and Edna are chased by her father, The Count, and three policeman. The pursuers drive off a pier.
Bruce Conner's landmark experimental film consisting entirely of found footage edited to a new score.
Aspiring filmmakers Mel Funn, Marty Eggs and Dom Bell go to a financially troubled studio with an idea for a silent movie. In an effort to make the movie more marketable, they attempt to recruit a number of big name stars to appear, while the studio's creditors attempt to thwart them.
A janitor at a bank is in love with a secretary and dreams that she has fallen in love with him too.
A collection of Warner Brothers short cartoon features, "starring" the likes of Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Wile E. Coyote. These animations are interspersed by Bugs Bunny reminiscing on past events and providing links between the individual animations which are otherwise unconnected. This 1979 feature-length compilation includes several of his best cartoons. Among the 11 shorts shown in their entirety are the classics "Robin Hood Daffy," "What's Opera, Doc?," "Bully for Bugs," and "Duck Amuck". The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Movie provides a showcase not only for Jones's razor-sharp timing, but for the work of his exceptional crew, which included designer Maurice Noble, writer Mike Maltese, composers Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn, and voice actor Mel Blanc.
Celebrate the legacy of Stan Lee as the co-creator of such legendary characters as Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the X-Men, The Avengers, and hundreds more.
Stan and Ollie join the French Foreign Legion after Ollie's sweetheart rejects him.
The definitive documentary on the history of nudity in feature films from the early silent days to the present, studying the changes in morality that led to the use of nudity in films while emphasizing the political, sociological and artistic changes that shaped that history. Skin will also study the gender inequality in presenting nude images in motion pictures and will follow the revolution that has created nude gender equality in feature films today.
Buster clowns around in a blacksmith's shop until he and the smithy get in a fight which sends the smithy to jail. Buster helps several customers with horses, then destroys a Rolls Royce while fixing the car parked next to it.
Walking along with his bulldog, Charlie finds a "good luck" horseshoe just as he passes a training camp advertising for a boxing partner "who can take a beating." After watching others lose, Charlie puts the horseshoe in his glove and wins. The trainer prepares Charlie to fight the world champion. A gambler wants Charlie to throw the fight. He and the trainer's daughter fall in love.
A documentary on the life and career of one of the most influential film directors of all time, Steven Spielberg.
A down on his luck young man makes several attempts at committing suicide but fails them too. He then finds himself becoming more confident through a series of petty adventures, to such an extent that this becomes his undoing.
