In 1959, Peter Weiss made his first feature length film, Hägringen, with Staffan Lamm and Gunilla Palmstierna in leading roles. The script to the rather experimental film is based on the novel Document I which he had published in Swedish in 1949 on his own initiative. The film shows the encounter of a young man with a large city that is yet unknown to him. His passage, accompanied by often surrealistic and absurd impressions, turns into a tour-de-force through various urban milieus.
Category: Experimental
A synthesis of documentary, dramatic, and experimental styles, this film follows two women recollecting their personal and familial experiences from World War II. One woman recounts the story of an aunt from story Hiroshima whose father had been a member of the peace party when the militarist government forced its way to power. Exiled from Japan they were then interned with Canadians of Japanese descent. The other woman recounts the details of her experience as a young nurse on the morning of August 6, 1945.
Unconcerned with narrative constraints, the ‘plot’ of Hamlet X is both brief and almost incidental to James Clayden’s motives: a man is released from prison and moves into a deserted city building with a woman friend, where he reluctantly becomes involved with a production of Hamlet. Haunted by the uncertainty of his past, together with his guilt for exisiting, he becomes more and more like Shakespeare’s infamous Dane.
Wavelength is anything but simple, however, as Snow’s statement of intention suggests. He describes the film as “a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas.” The spine of the film is its famous zoom from a fixed camera position facing a wall with four tall sash windows. Over the course of the film, the angle of view narrows until the frame is filled with a black and white photograph of waves pinned up between the middle two windows. Other features of the room, in which four events involving people take place, are sloughed off. The spectator is led to concentrate on this central element, the photograph—it has been there all along—until the image is washed out and the film comes to an end.
Robert Breer’s extraordinary autobiographical film combines personal and family photos with intense colors, textures and geometric abstractions. Originally presented as part of Karlheinz Sotckhausen’s 1964 premiere of Originale.
“Bump City is a colour film about the symbolic destruction of Los Angeles. It was never a very finished film, but it was about signs and advertising, redundant communications and manufacturing, waste and monotony.” —Pat O’Neill.
This inventive video renders poet Jessica Hagedorn’s views of “some of the harsh and beautiful realities of city living” for women in a man’s world. Hagedorn’s poetry is musical, pungent and gutsy. The visual artistry of Doris Chase emphasizes different aspects of Hagedorn’s lyrics. Images are dissected, quartered, washed with memory wipes that support and underscore the image and poetic meaning.
Described by Meredith Monk as a “memorial piece for a world at war” and an “opera in three movements,” Quarry is a typically difficult-to-classify multimedia piece by Monk, combining dance, song, film, and theatrical performance. Set during World War II, Quarry is told from the expressionistic perspective of a sickly child (played by Monk), whose idyllic domestic life becomes increasingly distorted and terrifying as news of the world enters her home and reshapes her imagination.