Experimental

Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895) is a blasphemous play set in 1495, during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans. As a result, Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity. Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizza’s work with a dramatization of his trial, presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely. The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeter’s use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films. On the eve of the AIDS crisis, Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality.Read More »

Super Natural is a film that talks and listens, that interferes and seeks out those who are beholding it. Its desire is to abandon the screen, to take a look at those who look at it, and listen to them, but also to be smelled and seen beyond what is being seen. Super Natural is a transcendent experience occurring outside of the body, of all bodies, but particularly of one’s own. It is like a super-power and, in this movement, it focuses on the image, a sensitive existence one intends to speak with.Read More »

“A Room with a Coconut View” tells a story of Kanya, a tour guide and hotel rep automated voice, who leads her foreign automated-voice guest Alex through a deceptively aestheticised beach town in the east of Thailand. Dissatisfied by the sanitised, touristic images, Alex decides to explore alone. Local corruption becomes intertwined with the history of Thai cinema, and Alex begins to question how images have been used to mediate his understanding of the world.Read More »

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Follows Dan, a young Venezuelan man currently living in Lisbon, who collects magic mushrooms in the forest and distributes them in the city to those in need of help – like a New Age Robin Hood – using pigeons as carriers.Read More »

Summary
Joachim “Blacky” Fuchsberger provided the starting point for “Overgames”: In 2005, he stated in a talk show that the content of his TV game show “Nur nicht nervös werden”, which first aired in 1960, was originally developed in US-American psychiatric institutions with the aim to re-educate the Germans, a “psychologically disturbed nation”. Director Lutz Dammbeck sets out on a global research that leads to important questions: In which regard may games change the world? Can a person be re-educated? And what is the idea of a permanent revolution?Read More »

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Miranda Pennell is investigating her family’s involvement with BP, the oil company created by the British and the Iranian governments during the imperial century. The filmmaker finds some letters written in the 1930s by a geologist who moved to Iran to study the origins of our civilization. By chance, personal memories intertwine with historical events, revealing unexpected connections.Read More »

One of America’s finest filmmakers tackles “lovemaking” in its many varieties (hetrosexual, homosexual as well as various animals having sex). Without a soundtrack (as the artist always thought that sound was an aesthetic error in filmmaking), the film is shot with Brakhage’s characteristic visual rhythmns.Read More »

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While Stan Brakhage’s diverse output includes a wide variety of films in each period, there has always been a group that I’ve thought of as the “main line” of his work. Usually his strongest and most original films, they are also the ones that expand his limits, pushing his work into new territory. Even before the somnambulist-protagonist puts out his eyes in the early The Way to Shadow Garden, Brakhage’s long filmmaking career had begun to follow a particular trajectory, an arch that stretches further and further away from the given. The impulse has always been to obliterate social conventions of eyesight in favor of something more original, more unpredictable, more unruly.Read More »

Guy Gilles’ view of Mexico focuses mainly on the dreams of ordinary Mexicans and their ways of expression: fun and festivity.Read More »