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.
Category: Experimental
In the slums of Osaka, various marginalized misfits have their own interpretations of love. Completely alienated from the outside world, they commit sexual perversions, violence and cannibalism.
Associations sets language against itself by using the ambiguities inherent in the English language. Images from magazines and color supplements accompany a voice-over reading from the book ‘Word Associations and Linguistic Theory’ by academic linguistic Herbert H. Clark. Combining a wry sense of humor with word/visual games and puns, Smith explores the boundaries of cinematic montage by combining elements together and against each other in order to destroy and create multiple meanings at the same time.
Zedd is minding his business, when he is stopped by a cop who accuses him of being a junkie. After a short argument he is beaten and dragged to the police station. At the station he is interrogated by a detective and the police chief. After being beaten and tortured several more times, Nick Zedd’s character mutilates himself with some hedge cutters.
Muscle Beach is a fascinating location for people-watching in the L.A. area, and in 1963, the strangeness of its sights was much more pronounced than today. Pat O’Neill’s first film (made with Robert Abel) progresses from humorous, curious observation to energetic, graphical interaction with the sights and sounds of Santa Monica’s famed beach.
Glauber Rocha films the funeral of his friend Di Cavalcanti, one of the most important Brazilian painters and artists of all time. The director/writer pays his tribute to Di by narrating an eloquent speech, referencing poets such as Augusto dos Anjos e Vinicius de Moraes, along with images of Cavalcanti’s work and the funeral as well – with the latter event being a spur of the moment to the director who rushed with his camera to the place when he heard the news.
Confessions of a Sociopath is an autobiographical film on digital video and Super 8 film, conceived as a real-life version of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. In this film, Joe Gibbons plays a fictionalized version of himself as he discovers a roomful of Super 8 footage from his own life, detailing events he can no longer recall. This footage shows his earlier film experiments, his descent into destructive behavior, and his “bottoming out” on drugs and alcohol. At a certain point, the films are replaced by random photos, police records, and psychiatric hospital records.
The ‘imperfections’ of filmmaking, which are normally suppressed, are at the core of a work that uses a brief loop made from a Kodak colour test. “The dirtiest film ever made,” is one of the earliest examples of the film material dictating the film content. It may seem minimal, but keep looking – there’s so much going on.