Incredible. You can watch this on the internet. It's amazing. It's a chair and a camera tied to a weather balloon set to ascend into the heavens. The only soundtrack is the noise of the camera's transmission to the ground below. There is editing in the form of dissolves but otherwise it's a fairly untouched and totally sublime. This thing goes into ( Read more... )

I liked when Gehman said, "this is the first film I ever made that had an idea."

Do I remember this being a eulogy? I didn't know what I was looking at. It looked like the spectacular descent in 2001 mixed with pixelvision. Turns out it was Super 8 cameras being tossed off a building and blown up to 35mm afterward ( Read more... )

Years ago I was at a screening at the video cooperative and the curator accidentally referred to the works as films. "Video tapes, I mean," he said catching himself, "who really makes films anymore?" In Self Portrait a filmmaker has a film containing an image of her younger self which she buries in the ground. Rain and mud and dirt pass over the ( Read more... )

This was a lot of stop motion video content crammed into 11 minutes. I would probably want to look at this again to get a better sense of it since it whirls by leaving you somewhat dazzled. Somewhat confused. I think this was the big crowd pleaser. I just looked it up on YouTube but "Michel Klöfkor" returned results for "Michael Jackson". Oh well ( Read more... )

Taking the idea of destruction as a routine action we have a high end video document of a bus being stripped down in an Ahmedabad junkyard. Contrasted with Breakfast... the destruction is captured here with a lot of drama. Expressionistic angles - and lots of different angles - captured the different components as they are stripped down from the ( Read more... )

A similar structure to Wavelength the camera travels slowly from a starting point to an end point. The programme notes reference the 'violence of the camera's gaze' but I found the violence (or the destructive force behind the table top dolly) to be pretty banal in this. Snow uses drab, available light and very central, head on, and undramatic ( Read more... )

It's always interesting to me when avant garde works are feature length. Joyce Wieland's Reason Over Passion, made around the same time, comes to mind. In a sense it's almost a provocation to present somewhat disembodied, non-narrative works in a time-frame normally alloted to conventional western stories. Since the format (or lackthereof) is wide ( Read more... )

Mark was a animal rights activist, cyclist, and video editor who used to edit Hoolboom's work. This video documents Mark's life through video images, still images, and through conversations with those close to him. Mark took his own life at the age of 35 ( Read more... )

It's probably best to talk about this in relation to the succeeding film Mark because we can look at both films trying to do the same thing: re-connect with an absence. In this case it’s trying to cross oceans and also culture to connect with her parent’s country. He mother tells her right off, “you know nothing about the cultural dynamics of China ( Read more... )