An insightful illumination of author Paul Bowles’ original and lesser-known career as an avant-garde composer, Owsley Brown’s Night Waltz is an elegant and soulful document of discovery. Interviewed in Morocco during the last months of his life, Bowles journeys back to his early years as a contemporary and occasional collaborator of other such iconic figures as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Orson Welles. Bowles’ uncut compositions–performed by the Eos Orchestra–are punctuated with stunning visual essays by filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Rudy Burckhardt. Long after retiring from his more well-known profession, Bowles kept music as a vital part of his life, tapping out fresh rhythms on his Tangier table tops until the end of his days.
Category: Experimental
Filmed in Brooklyn, Image in the Snow is an early underground “trance film” in which “a young man led by despair searches a city for salvation” (director Willard Maas’ own description). He takes the Myrtle Avenue el. and finds his “ideal parents” represented as carved stone figures on a tomb in the old part of Mt. Olivet Cemetary. Although not as highly regarded as Geography of the Body or as ostentatious as Narcissus in its own time, Image in the Snow has become the most frequently revived of Willard Maas’ thematic, non-documentary films.
A surreal piece of cinema, mostly comprised of stark religious and homoerotic imagery, accompanied by increasingly dissonant music (starting with ‘The Unanswered Question’, and getting more jarring as the movie progresses.
Fast-moving impressions of the Big Sur, the water, the ocean, and the Ladies, as part of the landscape, swimming, or running nude, against the sun or part of the sun.
A man sentenced to death reflects on his arrest, interrogations, torture… and a bit on the time before, long gone, swallowed up by pain and numbness.
——UPGRADED——
This film is a visual diary of Nedeljko Dragic’s visit to the United States, for which he has transformed his impressions into a rapidly flowing, semi-abstract series of images. He has created a nightmarish vision, with certain ideas, such as the pace and superficiality of life, technological and economic power and ostentatious advertising, predominating. In his somewhat sardonic comment on American values the more innocent images of the past, like the love-sick mouse chasing a cat and the small figure of Chaplin’s little tramp, are few and far between.
An interpretation of The Confessions of Saint Augustine, featuring an ordinary middle-aged man who undergoes a conversion experience while watching an experimental film. The film is by Al Rutcurts (think about it) and Earl is so bored that his mind starts to wander.
The day that Pier Paolo Pasolini was killed, Glauber Rocha decided to make this film about the life of Christ in the Third World. Starting from a dialectical synthesis between capitalism and socialism, and a search of interracial relationships in Brazil, Rocha created a work of religious and prophetic tone that results in a kind of bewilderment contemplative, now lyrical, now frantic, soaked in a new messianism. In his last film, the director proposed a tune of sounds and images that build a picture of Brazil and a portrait of himself.