"A fine fine example of spaces between existing as objects themselves. A patternistic and memorializing offering to natural totems. Two kinds of reversal at play involving black and white as well as reflection and overlap. These simple elements create a hurried maze of twisting antler branches, twigs, and dissected slices of pure “space.” I can hear the crackling fires, echoing elk calls and frosty despair…" - JT Rogstad, The International Exposition
2006-06-18
6.5
10.0Engel und Puppe is the first film by Italian filmmaker and writer Ellis Donda. Screened at Oberhausen in 1975, Engel und Puppe is a political adaptation of some lines from Rilke's Duino Elegies, featuring the French poet Jacqueline Risset and a young Rossella Or (soon to become an avant-garde theatre actress).
5.9Begotten is the creation myth brought to life, the story of no less than the violent death of God and the (re)birth of nature on a barren earth.
6.5Michael Gondry's examination of childhood love is replete with his trademark surreality. One evening at the turn of the century, Stephane discusses with his brother the end of the millenium, but also girls, particularly Aurelie, a classmate with whom he is secretly in love. The following day, Aurelie has a letter to give to him....
7.0The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.
5.5Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.
4.7This is the only feature directed by the famed French painter and sculptor Martial Raysse. In keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the time, the movie has no plot to speak of and appears to have been largely made up on the spot. We follow the cat man into a bizarre fantasy universe presented in negative exposure that reverses color values (black is white and vice versa) and written words. The cat man steals a car and then picks up a young girl he promises to take to “Heaven.” Heaven turns out to be a country chateau inhabited by several more animal mask wearing weirdoes...
3.5'It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. At home I put the slides into a slide projector. I took out the lens and filmed the slides by filming directly from the projector - using single frames according to a certain plan.'
0.0A taxi driver, a young girl and a backpacker simultaneously experience a wonderful journey in Tokyo, where they find connections to their own homes in Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia.Throughout their journey, they run into the same Japanese woman named Akiko. Meanwhile, a writer in Paris recalls her encounter with Akiko in Tokyo.
3.7Prometheus, 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.
6.9In 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.
5.6Writes Matsumoto, "I used the Erekutoro Karapurosesu (Electro Color Processor), which is mainly used in the field of medicine and engineering, to create moving image textures Metastasis, I was interested in layering images of a simple object and its electronically processed abstraction. The electronic abstract image is manipulated in a certain rhythm, depicting an organic process."
7.87362 is concerned with dividing and joining together. It begins with two black circles against a white background, knocking together and gradually moving further apart. The circles fade out, and return as white circles against black inside a square. Images similar to Rorschach blots appear. Gradually the viewer realizes that the images were not originally abstract, but were human forms (dancers, gymnasts, etc.), bridges, and others that have been split down the center of the frame, with their mirror images printed on either side of the split. Red, green, and white tints further abstract the images from their original foundations in the natural world, making dancers appear to be amoebas or dividing cells. The accompanying sound track is a mixture of electronic music and musique concrète ("real" recorded sounds manipulated to sound abstract).
7.0This fantastical movie inspired by the music of Michael Jackson features imaginative interpretations of hit tracks from the iconic 1987 album “Bad”.
9.0Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
4.5A trippy pop-art collage of phallic objects, naked women and American icons, most notably Elvis Presley.
A bereaved epileptic ditches her pills and follows a mysterious woman to the outskirts of her town, where she slips back into the fearsome yet ecstatic throes of the seizure.
5.0The film is a stage play hybrid showcasing dark and absurd sketches based on contemporary Hungarian news of the 2000's with campy, senseless musical interludes in-between. Highly experimental in nature that - like Marmite - will split its' crowd into ones that'll love it and others that'll loathe it. There's no middle grounds here. The topics included are: The Hungarian Olympians' doping scandal, political terrorism, the national elections... and more.
0.0In the fall of 1986, Richard Fung made his first visit to his father's birthplace, a village in southern Guangdong, China. This experimental documentary examines the way children of immigrants relate to the land of their parents, and focuses on the ongoing subjective construction of history and memory. The Way to My Father's Village juxtaposes the son's search for his own historical roots, and his father's avoidance of his cultural heritage.
6.7The impressionistic story of a Texas family in the 1950s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father. Jack finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith.
7.3Harris Glenn Milstead, aka Divine (1945-1988) was the ultimate outsider turned underground hero. Spitting in the face of the status quos of body image, gender identity, sexuality, and preconceived notions of beauty, Divine succeeded in becoming an internationally recognized icon, recording artist, and character actor of stage and screen. Glenn went from the often-mocked, schoolyard fat kid to underdog royalty, standing up for millions of gay men and women, drag queens and punk rockers, and countless other socially ostracized misfits and freaks. With a completely committed in-your-face style, he blurred the line between performer and personality, and revolutionized pop culture.
6.0As he helps a young artist with her upcoming exhibition, the owner of a mannequin shop's deadly, suppressed desires come to the surface.
6.0With his partner, a celebrity performance artist publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. An investigator from the National Organ Registry obsessively tracks their movements, which is when a mysterious group is revealed... Their mission — to use the artist's notoriety to shed light on the next phase of human evolution.
6.1A visual montage portrait of our contemporary world dominated by globalized technology and violence.
6.1Because he's the oldest, Jake has been the man of the house, since his parents divorce. When Mom starts seeing Sam, who always seems to be trying some new way to get rich quick, and declares he's the man of the house now, Jake puts up with it. Until he discovers Sam's illegal activities.
6.5In an attempt to avenge her daughter’s death, Irene Kelly travels through parallel universes, killing her daughter’s murderer again and again. As she becomes consumed by vengeance, her humanity begins to slip away—until the cycle is disrupted when she rescues Mia, a sharp-witted teenager already marked by the killer.
7.5Welcome to Sin City. This town beckons to the tough, the corrupt, the brokenhearted. Some call it dark… Hard-boiled. Then there are those who call it home — Crooked cops, sexy dames, desperate vigilantes. Some are seeking revenge, others lust after redemption, and then there are those hoping for a little of both. A universe of unlikely and reluctant heroes still trying to do the right thing in a city that refuses to care.
7.3First-time father Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.
6.6A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.
7.1Failed architect, engineer and vicious murderer Jack narrates the details of some of his most elaborately orchestrated crimes, each of them a towering piece of art that defines his life's work as a serial killer for twelve years.
6.2A reclusive telemarketer has only one semblance of a friend: His telecommuter boss. But the telemarketer's social circle seems to improve greatly when a whimsical co-worker enters his life. Only, as he begins to sketch his new friend's portrait, disturbing "voices" from the phone man's past threaten to lead him into a network of destruction.
7.9Andrew Dominik's One More Time With Feeling is a remarkable black and white documentary which chronicles the creation of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' album Skeleton Tree. Originally a performance based concept, the film evolved into something much more significant as Dominik delved into the tragic backdrop of the writing and recording of the album. The result is stark, fragile and raw, and a true testament to an artist trying to find his way through the darkness. It documents the writing, recording and performing of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ sixteenth studio album, Skeleton Tree.
6.9A detective suffering from a personal loss receives a call from his recently deceased niece. Being able to communicate across time, the two work together to try and stop the crime before it occurs.
6.4In order to be reinstated to the bar and recover custody of her daughter, a hotshot lawyer, now in recovery and on probation, must take on the appeal of a woman wrongfully convicted of murder.
6.9Nude men in rubber suits, close-ups of erections, objects shoved in the most intimate of places—these are photographs taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, known by many as the most controversial photographer of the twentieth century. Openly gay, Mapplethorpe took images of male sex, nudity, and fetish to extremes that resulted in his work still being labelled by some as pornography masquerading as art. But less talked about are the more serene, yet striking portraits of flowers, sculptures, and perfectly framed human forms that are equally pioneering and powerful.
6.2Federal agent Alexandra Barnes believes that Catherine Petersen is a serial killer who marries rich men and then murders them for their money. But since Catherine is seemingly a master of disguise and has multiple identities, Alexandra can't prove anything with conventional detective work. With no other option, she goes undercover, pursuing the same man as Catherine, and hoping that Catherine will slip up and reveal her true identity.
6.9A darkness swirls at the center of a world-renowned dance company, one that will engulf the artistic director, an ambitious young dancer, and a grieving psychotherapist. Some will succumb to the nightmare. Others will finally wake up.
7.9Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.
5.9Set within the stark Icelandic landscape, OUT OF THIN AIR examines the 1976 police investigation into the disappearance of two men in the early 1970s.