Prison discharges Hans into the inhospitable freedom of a cold Munich winter. As a stranger, he strays through familiar streets and bars and tries unsuccessfully to contact old friends. Eventually he takes a plane to a friend in Berlin, fleeing from invisible enemies, on the way to an indeterminate destination.
The protagonist of this Kafkaesque tale receives a telegram ordering him to appear at his own execution at dawn on the following day. His acquaintances try to reassure him that it is all probably just an administrative error, but the Complaints Office has already closed for the day and it is impossible to discover the truth. The man finally decides that, after all, it is perhaps best if he does actually appear at the scaffold the following day. This final film by Miklós Erdély examines a most vexing subject using his inimitable experimental cinematic solutions.
Miklós Erdély, a leading exponent of Hungarian Neo-Avant-garde, made a major contribution to the burgeoning in Hungary of experimental filmmaking in the 1970s and 80s through his works created in the Balázs Béla Studio. In this film he asked people to recount dreams and then an attempt was made at playing out and reconstructing these dreams. The situations that arise in front of the lens pose questions for both psychology and epistemology.
Rut Hillarp’s film interpretation of the legend of Tristan and Isolde. She borrowed this classical theme from her collection of poetry The False Farewell. The White Hands is an attempted surrealistic visualization of a poem, using symbolic image sequences.
Experimental film by Adam Cooley about a talk show host who interviews suicidal people, but his show is getting low ratings. So, he falls in love with a guy who is trying to kill himself but can’t (and is slowly turning into human feces); torn between love and trying to get him to be on his television show, what will this talk show host do, even after realizing there’s no reason to exist? I mean, does it even matter what he decides to do anyway? A hilarious black comedy — it’s a riot!
A musical montage, a synchronized symphony composed from an infinity of elements at hand: piano chords and cable cars, cocktail jazz and broken glass, looney toones and telephones, elephants and xylophones, violins and vultures, orchestra’s and roller coasters… A journey in images at the speed of sound. These collages films are drawn from a vast personal library of sounds and images, steadfastly accumulated over many years.
General Rehearsal for Suicide is an attack on the emerging pop culture and the spectacle of art events. During a happening at the Museum of Modern Art, musician K.E. Wohlin puts a saw to his leg and is likened to a victim of the ‘carousel of Art-formisms and Art-formgasms’.
Ulrike Ottinger’s singular debut feature is an extravagantly stylized lesbian pirate spectacle that radically deconstructs decades of male-oriented adventures. Madame X (Tabea Blumenschein) is the notorious pirate ruler of the China Sea who recruits a motley crew of women (among them avant-garde icon Yvonne Rainer as a disillusioned artist) to leave behind their humdrum lives and join her on her outlaw ship, the Orlando. Once aboard, the women’s search for freedom leads them on an odyssey that, in Ottinger’s words, “is not a journey outward into adventure but a journey into the interior.”
