——UPGRADED——
An incestuous portrait of the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral that reveals the feminine nature of this monument. Notre-Dame Cathedral is the support of an ecstatic vision: the convulsions of the camera and the frenzy of the editing, accompanied by loops of liturgical and noisy music, dematerialize the monument, transforming it into flashes of colour, lines and fleeting forms.
In the form of a “small theater of the world”, a history of the world from its beginnings to our day, including the errors, the incompetence, the thirst for power, the fear, the madness, the cruelty and the commonplace, in a story of five episodes.
During the ’50s Makavejev began making short films and documentaries in the Zagreb and Belgrade studios, as in Kino Klub Beograd, the center of avant-garde film and amateur activities during the ’60s in Serbia. The experimental and documentary impulse remains powerful in Makavejev’s work, as does the tendency to intercut undigested segments from other films into longer works. At the same time, those early works would be the first of many run-ins with the censors that would plague his career and, arguably, keep him from being recognized as a major postwar film artist.
A few days before Filippos leaves London for a holiday on Crete, a Greek island, he sees that his girlfriend is cheating with his brother. He does not tell them anything about it, but during the holidays Filippos’ brother disappears without a trace. Both Alexis, who is a homosexual and secretly in love with Filippos’ brother, and his girlfriend put pressure on Filippos to indicate what he knows about the disappearance. However, Filippos sees this as the start of a dangerous game.
An animated experimental short film using charcoal and pastels to create Cubist and Art Deco-inspired designs evoking the curiosity, grace and beauty of two cats in constant motion.
Filmed in a middle school gymnasium in suburban Japan, Goshogaoka takes as its ostensible subject the exercise routines and drills of a girls basketball team. The film consists of six ten-minute takes, shot with a fixed camera at court level, in which the various cadences of chanting voices and bodily movements digress into distinct studies. Taken together they construct a subtle and multi-layered social portrait, a portrait framed within a study of choreographed movements (the routines, etc.) and therefore one in which documentary values soon become inseparable from aesthetic ones.
Shûji Terayama’s debut feature Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, an adaptation of his eponymous novel and play, is a playful, energetic, psychedelic, visually hypnotic critique of contemporary Japanese society’s descent into ruthless materialism. The story focuses on a teenager in hopeless search of identity within a highly dysfunctional family and a fractured world that both threaten to devour the boy—demanding everything and not really caring at all. A masterpiece of subversive cinema.
An experimental, ludicrous, plotless, absurd, surreal comedy. It is seemingly intentionally impossible to understand. It leaps from scene to scene, world to world, with recurring names and actors being the only things that hold it together. Very much like sketch comedy, except without much of a point. The movie literally goes from “Moment To Moment”, with no actual narrative in mind rather than to just film a bunch of miscellaneous scenes and ideas and cut them together. Make of it what you will.
