Within experimental cinema in 1996, Vassilis Mazomenos’ The Triumph of Time should be mentioned for its ingenious use of computer animation to explore the intellectual trajectory of Don Quixote through the eyes of Charlie Chaplin in what the critic Babis Aktsoglou called “a filmic opera”.
Category: Experimental
Produced for the 1984 London Film Festival, Derek Jarman’s Imagining October is a dreamlike meditation on art and politics in the final years of the Cold War. In this film Jarman explores art and politics in the final years of the Cold War, drawing connections between pre-Perestroika Russia and Thatcherite Britain. The title refers to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and Sergei Eisenstein’s propaganda film October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928).
One Woman Waiting evokes questions of subjectivity in the mirrored performance of two women. The single take, tableau composition forms the structure for catalytic change between the characters. The sensuous desert environment accentuates the poetic and ephemeral quality of this film.
Set in a cave imagined as an air-raid shelter, images of the surrounding trees are painted over directly on the film. Vivid colors intermixed with the sound of wartime radio communications and bombing create a harmonious composition of documentary and animation.
Set against the urban backdrop of 1970s Buenos Aires, this experimental adaptation transplants Alice in Wonderland into the real world. Alice’s pursuit of the White Rabbit unfolds as a surreal drift through city spaces, where the familiar becomes strange and fantasy quietly overtakes reality.
Independent filmmaker Nina Hedenius Det speglar i mitt öga [My Eye Is Reflecting] is a poetic film on the act of seeing and on the details that rarely gets our attention. The film is a collage of diverse scenes depicting life, death, objects and people; a Swedish crayfish party, a classroom, cows in the meadow, the Stockholm subway…
Featuring pop stars Karel Gott and Marta Kubišová (who later became the director’s second wife) in lead roles, with cameos by the two girls from Chytilová’s Daisies and director Lindsay Anderson as traffic policeman, Martyrs of Love is the most perfect embodiment of Němec’s vision of a film world independent of reality. The nearly dialogue-free music comedy about three timid lovers, which combines aesthetics of 1920s silent slapstick cinema with romantic music of the 1960s, cemented the director’s reputation as the kind of unrestrained nonconformist the Communist establishment considered the most dangerous to their ideology.
At nightfall, Paris gradually envelopes itself in a coat of lights. The activities of the inhabitants are transformed as the night progresses:… go home, eat, sleep, go out, drink, wander, etc. The authors, camera in hand, present us in this film, an evocative look and bright over Paris and Parisians, from dusk to dawn.