It’s difficult to write about this because in a way it’s much more than a film. It’s a decade-in-the-making piece of audio-visual art that is personal enough to reflect that author’s personal taste and experience but broad enough to encompass history: war, aesthetics, desire, gender, politics, suffering, and beauty. Sometimes I compare these so- ( Read more... )

A film about technology and the obsolescence of the trade union movement that is, through its own dated technological presentation, held back by an obsolescence of its own.

At the risk of badly paraphrasing ( Read more... )

This looked great. It was apparently done using ink-and-cellophane tape transfers on a single sheet of paper. Images of (I'm told) paper fibres, but the blacks and greys that rupture on screen create wonderfully abstract textures over selected passages from Darwin. It's nice that people in the avant garde are still working with celluloid (it says ( Read more... )

Part of a multi-platform project. This was really nice. The images were so clean and sharp. The camera was so steady and otherworldy the way it crept through interiors and gazed wistfully at exteriors as the voiceover wonders, "'Uncle... I have been here for a while. I would like to see a movie about your life. So I proposed a project about ( Read more... )

I remember it beginning with music playing along side a black screen. It seemed to carry on like this for several minutes. Still, this didn't prepare me for the first image - which was pretty great looking - because I had trouble following what was said. It was very stagey, figures faced to the camera, reciting Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leuco. ( Read more... )

Godard's one minute short film is a collage of images and sound. It typical Godard fashion there's a dialectic in the disconnect between sound and image. The image: scenes of Potemkin (1925), suffering, war, text, a slowed down scene from People on Sunday (1930); the sound: grunts and sounds of a tennis match, a piano, poetic recitation. Instantly ( Read more... )

Marina Gioti is a young "filmmaker and curator" who has done something interesting. She has taken a pre-existing film that she bought from a dump for 10 euros and remade it. The film in question is an educational film from the early 70s and what it teaches is related to the highly debatable of illegal “secret schools” allegedly ran clandestinely by ( Read more... )

I wanted to engage with this but simply couldn't. 12 minutes of bewilderment.

I was going to say something like having two heavyweights like this behind a film how can it do anything but dissappoint? Well get this! The film was shot by the two, on two alternating 16mm, windup bolex cameras, and it follows a journey from the city of Toronto to the Toronto island where they basically shot each other with film. Intersting ( Read more... )