Category: Experimental

December 30, 2024 / Experimental

In the final days of the American Civil War, an emigre Hungarian military officer attempts to map the situation of the enemy. Many veterans of the 1848 War of Independence in Hungary fought on the northern side. Experienced Fiala, Boldogh who struggles with homesickness and the reckless Vereczky all experience their enforced emigration in different ways and news of impending peace elicits different reactions from them all. Gábor Bódy’s film is a thoroughly experimental work, constantly surprising and disorienting the viewer, posing serious questions, with a unique style of expression and perspective.

December 30, 2024 / Experimental

The Chinese Typewriter is about education and language, and the way a society is shaped by them. It exemplifies the politically committed film that defies the strict rubric of avant-garde. Daniel Barnett seems less interested in challenging traditional form than in exploding his own occidental vision. He transforms cyclonic cutting among a character-filled Chinese printing shop, a school, and street life into a visual poem that extracts the country’s fierce mechanistic energy while leaving the fragrant residue of humanity.

December 22, 2024 / Experimental

The human eye, the human form, the human face: these are the three central images of this avant-garde collage and kaleidoscope of shifting and fractured images, changing colors, and pulsing rhythms. Near the end, a tree appears briefly, and birds fly – first white, then red and blue. Celtic knots morph from one to another. The images become Rorschach tests although the mood, driven by the rapid changing images and the soundtrack, remains frantic.

November 24, 2024 / Experimental

Rarely has a film exploded onto cinema screens with such a joyful splash of colour and rhythm as A Colour Box. Made as a commercial for the General Post Office, New Zealand born Len Lye painted directly onto the film strip, synchronising his dynamic shapes and squiggles with an upbeat rumba track. The film captured the heart of audiences on its release in 1935 and continues to do so today.

September 24, 2024 / Experimental

Edward Owens’ first film contains a series of super impositions and fleeting images of bodies suggesting illicit desire, and demonstrates a masterful use of baroque lighting. Scenes of quarrels unfold along closeups of glossy magazine cutouts and classical paintings.

September 24, 2024 / Experimental

The film attempts to negotiate with the duality that is associated with the ceremonial veneration of the Mother Goddess Kali. It ruminates on the nuanced transness that is prevalent, in the ceremonial performance of male devotees cross dressing as Kali. This is interwoven with grotesque elements of a sacrificial ceremony, which forms a vital part of the worship of the Goddess.

September 24, 2024 / Experimental

Here the different poses of the artist provide the raw material for Peter Kubelka to create an ecstatic work that deals with rhythm and repetition, as much as with human actions and automatisms. Together with Mosaic and Afrikareise, Kubelka considers this to belong to his metaphoric film work.

July 25, 2024 / Arthouse

Brocani conjures together all your favourite European cultural and historical myth figures in order to attack the centuries of ‘sublimation’ that have produced our cities and their inhabitants. The gang’s all here: Frankenstein’s monster gropes towards the awareness that his mind is a universe; Attila, naked on a white horse, liberates his people from their ignominy; the ultra-caustic Viva bemoans the frustrations of married life and drifts into the elegiac persona of the Bloody Countess Bathory; Louis Waldon is a hip American tourist searching for the (missing) Mona Lisa. The range is extraordinary, from stand-up Jewish comedy to a kind of flea-market expressionism. Brocani’s approach is contemplative rather than agitational, which confounds the impatient; Gavin Bryars’ lovely Terry Riley-esque score matches the ambience exactly.