A film director confides in his interlocutor. He talks about the working process, about creative blocks, about artistic crises and expressive forces. At some point, the idea takes hold that this conversation could be turned into a film. And this is the very film we’re watching the two of them in.Read More »
SYNOPSIS
Shot in 1990, this portrayal of life in East Berlin offers a snapshot of what life was like just before the wall came down and communism gave way to a more democratic way of life. The film follows the fortunes of architect Daniel Brenner (Kurt Naumann) as he attempts to design a thoroughly modern new part of the city, with the results coming at an enormous personal price for the young designer. The government doesn’t like his scheme, his wife leaves him due to the length of time he is spending on the project, and his ideas are constantly being compromised by the artless bureaucrats in charge of executing the plans. Daniel’s decaying life mirrors what is occurring to the city he loves, making this a powerful portrait of life under a communist regime.Read More »
IMDB Review:
Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi is a film with no actors, no storyline, and no dialogue. The only things we see during the experimental documentary’s 87 minutes are natural landscapes, images of cities, and real people going about their regular lives. Yet from the very beginning, when we see the title of the film appear in blood-red characters and hear the voice of a bass soloist chanting the title like an incantation, it is difficult not to be swept away in captivation.Read More »
Sixty one-minute shots of Milwaukee (Wisconsin). No camera movement. Frontal staging of tiny (often funny or made funny) events. The same locations (and same actors ?) 27 years later, changed. The same sound too, unchanged.Read More »
The ‘Casa do Povo’ cultural centre in São Paulo, an icon of the secular Jewish workers’ movement: a crumbling theatre flanked by staircases, entryways and corridors. Construction noise drones away in the background, clinking crockery, a broom sweeping over tiled floors, an expressive façade of countless adjustable panes of glass covered by a patina. It’s October 2016 and a group of young people are preparing a preview of Bickels [Socialism]. The venue is to form a prologue to the completed film, which tours 22 buildings in Israel designed by Samuel Bickels, most of which for kibbutzim. Dining halls, children’s houses, agricultural buildings, bright structures inserted into the Mediterranean landscape with great ingenuity.Read More »
Celebrated for his rigorous films about the experience of architecture (Schindler’s Houses, Loos Ornamental), Heinz Emigholz launches a new chapter of his “Photography and Beyond” project with an ambitious four-film cycle titled “Streetscapes” (which premiered to great acclaim at the recent Berlinale). The first installment is an open-ended response to Godard’s One Plus One, which chronicled the Rolling Stones in the studio at the height of the 1960s counterculture. This 21st-century update documents the German post-rock band Kreidler at work on their album ABC in a wood-paneled hall in Tbilisi, Georgia. Throughout Emigholz cuts to shots of the city streets outside and to the briskly leafed pages of his densely illustrated notebooks, while a voiceover ruminates on the nature of art and desire.Read More »
Quote:
Homo Sapiens is a film about the finiteness and fragility of human existence and the end of the industrial age, and what it means to be a human being. What will remain of our lives after we’re gone? Empty spaces, ruins, cities increasingly overgrown with vegetation, crumbling asphalt: the areas we currently inhabit, though humanity has disappeared. Now abandoned and decaying, gradually reclaimed by nature after being taken from it so long ago. Homo Sapiens is an ode to humanity as seen from a possible future scenario. It intends to sharpen our eyes for the here and now, and our consciousness of the present.Read More »
Synopsis:
Homo Sapiens is a film about the finiteness and fragility of human existence and the end of the industrial age, and what it means to be a human being. What will remain of our lives after we’re gone? Empty spaces, ruins, cities increasingly overgrown with vegetation, crumbling asphalt: the areas we currently inhabit, though humanity has disappeared. Now abandoned and decaying, gradually reclaimed by nature after being taken from it so long ago. Homo Sapiens is an ode to humanity as seen from a possible future scenario. It intends to sharpen our eyes for the here and now, and our consciousness of the present.Read More »
Quote:
An American architect arrives in Italy, supervising an expedition for a French architect, Boullée, who is famous for his oval structures. Through the course of 9 months he becomes obsessed with his belly, suffers severe stomach pains, loses his wife, his unborn child and finally his own expedition.Read More »