Experimental

Organized confusion of live footage and animation.Read More »

Diane Wellington disappeared in South Dakota in 1938 at the age of 15. She has just be found.Read More »

A structuralist self-portrait which documents Mangolte in the act of taking still photographs from the perspective of her camera’s viewfinder. An absorbing and conceptually dazzling rumination on the concept of “point of view,” as well as the complex relationships between photographer and subject, between the still and moving image.Read More »

In his earliest work, German director Werner Schroeter was inspired by opera, and made several short 8mm films about the prima donna Maria Callas. This film focuses on Maria Malibran, a legendary Spanish-French opera singer who died in 1836 at the age of 28. She forms the starting point for a series of stylised tableaux introducing variations on different levels, including in the form of musical phrases. The spectator is thrown into fragments of stories that take place in a non-existent country, in which the characters do not have any clear identity and are mutually interchangeable. The film, a reflection on the 19th century cult for geniuses and divas, was regarded by Schroeter, who died last year, as his most important work. It focuses on acting, including that of Magdalena Montezuma (regular Schroeter actress), Candy Darling (from the Warhol stable) and Ingrid Caven.

Werner Schroeter mixes Stravinsky, Beethoven, Brahms, Maria Callas and Janis Joplin in this delirious biography of the doomed nineteenth-century mezzo-soprano.Read More »

Quote:
Beginning in the reality of American middle-class life, Picnic portrays the idealistic dream-quest of the protagonist, from which he is finally cast off. Harrington himself described the film thus: ‘A satirical comment on middle-class life frames a dream-like continuity in which the protagonist pursues an illusory object of desire.’Read More »

Quote:
A woman, concerned about the continual absences of her husband, commissions a detective to follow him and report back to her. At first glance this appears to be a classic fictional device, all the more so since Charles Dekeukeleire segments his film with titles informing us of the latest developments of the story. Yet this framework serves only to set up a narrative pretext for disrupting narrative itself in favour of pure cinema. For the detective uses photographic equipment as an instrument of investigation: thus, the camera becomes the principal character and its subjectivity the principal subject of the film. Titles designed by painter Victor Servranckx.Read More »

This 1966 production is the world’s first interactive film. Created by Czech filmmaker Radúz Cincera, “Kinoautomat” caused a sensation at the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal. It’s a black comedy in which you make decisions for the central character at key moments in the film using a wireless voting system. Groundbreaking and great fun, “Kinoautomat” has been restored by Cincera’s daughter, Alena Cincerova.Read More »

Synopsis:
A complex treatise exploring feminism, motherhood and sexual difference in seven numbered chapters. Headings are: Opening Pages; Laura Talking; Stones; Louise’s Story Told in 13 Shots; Acrobats; Laura Listening; Puzzle ending.Read More »

In the solitude of his apartment, Rousseau reads shorts excerpts from Racine’s Bérénice, images of separation; he films in a café, musicians in the street, a dance, domestic intimacy, in a self-portrait that reflects the contradiction between desires and time. “For a long time I have wanted to try and see if I could create a drama with the simplicity of action which the Ancients so favoured. There are those who believe that this very simplicity is a sign of a lack of inventiveness. They do not consider that, on the contrary, all invention is to create something out of nothing.” (Racine, preface to Bérénice, 1670.)Read More »