Film by Robert Todd
Social & External
Shenzhen River (the border btw Hong Kong and Shenzhen), and the Second Line of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (the border between Socialism China and Capitalism China) were compared to the Berlin Wall. The Second Line were constructed June 1982, demolished June 2015. The First Line (Shenzhen River) still flows, running deeper and deeper after 1997. Artist Miaoyuan LONG and Zen LU (the ON/OFF media Group) documented major checkpoints along these two boundaries. It’s a piece to illustrate the Big Escape (Touch Base Policy) from mainland China to Hong Kong during 1950-70’s and the geopolitical history of Shenzhen. The 48min audio-visual live performance version was Official selection of Draft Systems 2017 WRO Media Art Biennale, Poland.
Journalist Dermi Azevedo has never stopped fighting for human rights and now, three decades after the end of the military dictatorship in Brazil, he's witnessing the return of those same practices.
In PATH OF CESSATION the image that is communicated to us by Fulton is a highly mystifying one. Rather than analyze, or enter into a dialogue with the Tibetan culture that he photographs, Fulton has succumbed to it, and through the process has presented us a work of great surface, as well as formal, beauty.
This experimental nature documentary by Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts depicts climate change and the wave of extinction from the point of view of our near future. Actually, it depicts the age we live in now, or rather its fateful consequences.
In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.
Two screens of film about - and sometimes shot by - Claes Oldenburg, detailing his inspiration, his methods and his relationship with his partner Hannah Wilke.
Anne Bean, John McKeon, Stuart Brisley, Rita Donagh, Jamie Reid and Jimmy Boyle are interviewed about their artistic practice and the legacy of Surrealism on their work.
Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record images interpreting the original script of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera and upload them to this site. Software developed specifically for this project archives, sequences and streams the submissions as a film. Anyone can upload footage. When the work streams your contribution becomes part of a worldwide montage, in Vertov’s terms the “decoding of life as it is”.
Made on a wind-up Bolex camera, The Sound of Seeing announced the arrival of 21-year-old filmmaker Tony Williams. Based around a painter and a composer wandering the city (and beyond), the film meshes music and imagery to show the duo taking inspiration from their surroundings.
This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."
The title comes from Sergei Yesenin's last poem before comiting suicide. Using Virginia Woolf's last letters as a base, this film is meditation on the power of the word and its undertsanding and the the last moments before saying "goodbye".
"Like a Dream That Vanishes" continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses (Your life is like a candle burning). Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles.
Luis Bunuel, the father of cinematic Surrealism, made his film debut with 'Un Chien Andalou' in 1929 working closely with Salvador Dali. Considered one of the finest and controversial filmmakers with, 'L’Age d’Or' (1930), attacking the church and the middle classes. He won many awards including Best Director at Cannes for 'Los Olvidados' (1950), and the coveted Palme d’Or for 'Viridiana' (1961), which had been banned in his native Spain. His career moved to France with 'The Diary of a Chambermaid' with major stars such as Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve.
Experimental educational film reveals the emergence of some ideas of Biophysics in historical, philosophical and methodological aspects. The first film from the Biophysics Cycle (1982-1989).
An experimental ethnographic documentary that criticizes the colonizer view of anthropology.
"Adrift" is shot on the arctic island of Spitzbergen and in Norway. It combines time-lapse photography with stop-motion animation of the landscape. Through camera-angles and framing the film gradually dislocates the viewer from a stable base where one loses the sense of scale and grounding.
A collage of newsreels, trailers, clips and other visionary and unseen fragments of sight and sound regarding the late plastic artist Helio Oititica.
The rare short film presents a curious dialogue between filmmaker Julio Bressane and actor Grande Otelo, where, in a mixture of decorated and improvised text, we discover a little manifesto to the Brazilian experimental cinema. Also called "Belair's last film," Chinese Viola reveals the first partnership between photographer Walter Carvalho and Bressane.
