Category: Experimental

February 16, 2022 / Experimental

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.

February 8, 2022 / Documentary

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.

February 6, 2022 / Documentary

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.

February 4, 2022 / Experimental
February 4, 2022 / Experimental

Landow rejects the dream imagery of the historical trance film for the self-referential present, using macrobiotics, the language of advertising, and a speed-reading test on the definition of hokum. The alienated filmmaker appears, running uphill to distance himself from the lyrical cinema, but remember, “This is a film about you, not about its maker.”

January 24, 2022 / Experimental

This is a film about a man without a face. His arms and legs, bound with ropes, the disabled man is still without even a shudder in a white room. A series of unusual scenes in this room expresses what lies between memories, nightmares, and violent images.

January 24, 2022 / Experimental

700 continuous still photographs which are re-photographed frame by frame with linear, circular, and parabolic movements going up and down. This creates a crazy roller coaster out of this peaceful gymnasium shot in the dark.

January 21, 2022 / Arthouse

Petra Going is a migrant cyborg, an agent of the Global Nomad Project: an international “Experience Data Agency” which sends hundreds of “receivers” like her to wander the globe and record a succession of random encounters. Periodically, they return to agency headquarters where they deposit their accumulated memories into an archive. This archive is available to users who then vicariously and virtually inhabit the ready-made landscapes of touristic consciousness. The motto of the GNP: “Nostalgia For Rent.”