A darkish journey down memory lane, to visit some news events, folkways and thought patterns associated with the late forties and early fifties. The film is also concerned with such perceptual phenomena as color-space, “false tones” caused by varying black-white alternations of simultaneously seen rhythms set up by multiple repetitive actions, and the use of image outlines as “containers” for other imagery. Sort of a working notebook, which is continued in Easyout and Down Wind.
Category: Short
A record of the crucial Civil War period made up mostly of Mathew Brady’s original wet-plate photographs. Relates the story of the war, describing its causes, its battles, leaders, and its effect on the nation.
Ivory’s first, slightly intoxicated film (part of his MA thesis for the University of Southern California) is a documentary on the history of Venice as revealed through the work of some of the artists who have painted its architecture and citizens (from Gentile Bellini to Saul Steinberg).
Zupa is a haunting and surreal look at the routine and obsessive coexistence of marriage; where the couple is condemned to repeat every act, every gesture, every mechanical caress; she is condemned to drink from the same soup, albeit from a different plate… until the routine is derailed and everything is over.
A man, his dog, and the regions they inhabited, each leaving his own distinctive mark on the landscape. Not even time can wash the residue of what they left behind.
The first Irish film by cinematographer and director Patrick Carey celebrates the landscape of William Yeats’ poetry through stunning photography, narrated by Tom St. John Barry. Evocative images of the west of Ireland illustrate the poet’s life including Thoor Ballylee Castle where he lived, Coole Park, home of Lady Gregory where literary figures of the period socialised, Lissadell House, Knocknarea Mountain, the slopes of Ben Bulben, the waterfall at Glencar and finally Yeats’ grave at Drumcliffe.
Jellyfish employs a variety of experimental approaches, combining stop-motion and pixilation techniques, freely mixing black and white photography of beach landscapes, objects and people – along with some drawings – to build a poetic, very textured montage, eliding the real and the surreal, the beautiful and the eerie, the spirited and the deadly. Figures and objects are isolated, linked together only by their presence on a beach, all exposed to direct or indirect threats. The different jellyfish are as much at threat – washing up dead, stranded in the desolate landscape – as they are a threat – appearing suddenly and making people vanish.
♦♦ Amos Vogel’s “Film as a Subversive Art” ♦♦
In a Refugee Reception Center for migrants in Eisenach, the director gets to know 21-year-old Doris S., who moved to West Germany and returned. When her mother died in 1961, Doris went live with her father. Driven by her desire to see the world, she ended up working as a hostess at the “Pa-pa-Club” at an American army training ground in Baumholder. This film interview tells the story of one person’s fate in a divided Germany.