USA

  • Hans Richter – Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)

    1941-1950Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtArthouseExperimentalHans RichterUSA

    Quote:
    Berlin-born Hans Richter – Dadaist, painter, film theorist and filmmaker – was for four decades one of the most influential members of the cinematic avant-garde. Richter assembled some of the century’s liveliest artists as co-creators of Dreams That Money Can Buy, his most ambitious attempt to bring the work of the European avant-garde to a wider cinema audience. Among its admirers is film director David Lynch.Read More »

  • George Kuchar – The Devil’s Cleavage (1975)

    1971-1980CampCultGeorge KucharUSA

    Quote:
    One of Kuchar’s few feature-length works is this ribald pastiche to postwar Hollywood melodrama, that period when the studios were trying very hard to be adult. The intricate, overheated plot involves a nurse trapped in an unhappy marriage who escapes the big city in search of greener pastures in Blessed Prairie, Oklahoma. Swerving from earnest homage to dark satire, Kuchar simultaneously imitates and savages the legacy of Sirk, Preminger and Minnelli that inspired him, gleefully intertwining the suggestive and the scatological, while also pointing towards the later postmodern parodies of Cindy Sherman. The Devil’s Cleavage is also a rich time capsule of 1970s San Francisco, replete with cameos from Curt McDowell and Art Spiegelman.
    – The Harvard Film ArchiveRead More »

  • Joe Swanberg – Digging for Fire (2015)

    2011-2020DramaJoe SwanbergUSA

    Quote:
    Young married couple Tim and Lee have planted the seeds of a family in their East L.A. duplex. Three years after the birth of their son, they’re still adjusting to the joy and pain of life with kid, navigating potty talk at the dinner table, disagreeing over preschools, and putting off doing their taxes. For a change of pace, they decide to house-sit for one of Lee’s Westside yoga clients. Once there, Tim discovers something suspicious in the yard that gets the wheels in his head turning, and Lee, worried that he will become obsessed with digging deeper, decides to drop their toddler off with her mother for a much-needed night out on the town. Sans-wife, Tim invites his buddies over, and a “boys-will-be-boys” scenario ensues, full of drinking, awkward joint-passing, and perhaps getting a bit too close to a girl who isn’t the mother of his child.Read More »

  • Bruce Baillie – Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964)

    1961-1970Bruce BaillieExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964, 20 minutes, 16mm) is dedicated by Baillie to “the religious people who were destroyed by the civilization which evolved the Mass.” It is on one level a “Mass” for the American Indian conquered and displaced by the white American in quest of manifest destiny. A quote from the native American Sitting Bull opens the film,

    No chance for me to live mother
    You might as well mourn

    But this conflict of American history is also an echo of the artist’s own dilemma. Like the Beat Generation poets and writers, Baillie is situated outside the mainstream. He is an outsider looking in. His vision, personal, perceptive, unique and unmitigated by the profit motive defines the role of the contemporary artist.Read More »

  • Bruce Baillie – Here I Am (1962)

    1961-1970Bruce BaillieExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    An early film made for an Oakland school for mentally disturbed children.

    Quote:
    From the 1910s through the 1950s newsreels were a staple of American
    Moviegoing experience. Released nationally to theaters once or twice a week and running about 10 min., newsreels highlighted the events of the day – politics,sports,
    scandals, ceremonies – and generally included at least one human-interest story.
    Sometimes local theaters made their own, thrilling audiences by profiling hometown
    personalities. With Here I Am Bruce Baillie brings this inclusive approach
    to the avant-garde.Read More »

  • Bruce Baillie – To Parsifal (1963)

    1961-1970Bruce BaillieExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    “He who becomes slowly wise.”

    SPOILER.
    The Structure of Lyric:
    Baillie’s to Parsifal
    Alan Williams

    It’s difficult to say exactly where or how To Parsifal is a lyric film and where or how a narrative work. For this reason, ordinary critical vocabularies (based on certain “types” of films) do not apply with much usefulness to Bruce Baillie’s abstractly assembled color images, nor to the nature and functions of his sound track. To get a sense of how this film works it will be necessary first to break it down, outline it, in order to see how the (implied) viewer puts it together.Read More »

  • Michael Cuesta – L.I.E. [+Extras] (2001)

    2001-2010DramaMichael CuestaQueer Cinema(s)USA

    What could have been just another of the countless coming-of-age tracts churned out on the indie-sector conveyor belt each year becomes a deeply nuanced drama full of original angles in Michael Cuesta’s accomplished feature bow, “L.I.E.”

    SYNOPSIS
    Central character, adolescent Howie (Paul Franklin Dano), is introduced precariously balancing on the expressway overpass, his voiceover recalling the number of lives claimed on the road, from celebrities like Harry Chapin and Alan J. Pakula to his mother years earlier. He barely communicates with his building contractor father, Marty (Bruce Altman), who’s preoccupied with sleeping with his girlfriend and his mounting legal problems over a fire probe into the use of unsafe materials.Read More »

  • Léa Pool – Pink Ribbons, Inc. (2011)

    2011-2020DocumentaryLéa PoolPoliticsUSA

    Breast cancer has become the poster child of corporate cause-related marketing campaigns. Countless women and men walk, bike, climb and shop for the cure. Each year, millions of dollars are raised in the name of breast cancer, but where does this money go and what does it actually achieve? Pink Ribbons, Inc. is a feature documentary that shows how the devastating reality of breast cancer, which marketing experts have labeled a “dream cause,” becomes obfuscated by a shiny, pink story of success.Read More »

  • Allan Dwan – Driftwood (1947)

    1941-1950Allan DwanDramaUSA

    Six-year-old Jenny rescues a collie dog, the only survivor of a plane wreck. A tag on the dog’s neck states that it is en route to a medical laboratory where its blood will be used for spotted fever vaccine. Dr. Steven Webster meets both Jenny and the dog and “adopts” them both. His fiancée Susan isn’t too fond of either the girl or the dog. Webster wants to get a hospital for the town but he is suppressed by the town mayor. In the arguments that follow, Webster’s lab is wrecked and ticks infected with spotted fever escape. The town is in a panic and all want to be vaccinated. Jenny is infected and is about to die. Written by Les AdamsRead More »

Back to top button