S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED signifies a fairly abrupt shift and departure from Sharits’ previous mandala films; this was his first work in many years that did not employ the flicker technique and used moving images. Paul Sharits’ epic and groundbreaking work is composed of three repeated, fourteen-minute sections of a river current. Each repetition consists of six dissolving layers of a river flowing in a myriad of directions, broken up by horizontal tape splices acting as dams. Deep and precisely executed emulsion scratches—created by custom tools Sharits made—eventually appear in continuous sets of threes throughout the film until the entire screen is nearly covered. The resulting effects represent, in the words of P. Adams Sitney, a “powerful and beautiful act of vandalism.”
Category: Experimental
A very surreal video shot behind the scenes during the production of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in Wilmington North Carolina in 1985 by Peter Braatz.
Set in a dreamlike rural Japan, the story starts out to be about an adolescent boy’s attempt to escape his overprotective mother and then surprisingly becomes a filmmaker’s desire to confront his own elaborated creation. There is also an effort to reconcile the individual with the collective or old and new Japan through this parade of emblematic images. Gossiping women wear sinister eye patches. An outcast simple-minded woman drowns her own baby and later returns as a sophisticated prostitute. A circus fat lady yearns to have her fake body inflated by a dwarf. Curious and astounding scenes abound, all contributing to an overwhelming experience of a creative mind interrogating itself.
Hailed by Susan Sontag as “the most important experimental filmmaker of his generation,” Medea is the Dutch master’s strident, confrontational take on the Euripides tragedy, performed and adapted for stage by Ganci Geraedts and Josee Ruiter.
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Through the experiences of two women in Paris and London, Ghost Dance offers a stunning analysis of the complexity of our conceptions of ghosts, memory and the past… The film focuses on philosopher Jacques Derrida who considers ghosts to be the memory of something which has never been present but which takes us by surprise.
Presented as loosely autobiographical, Hold Me While I’m Naked centres on the tribulations of an independent filmmaker, frustrated at every turn as he tries to make a film that pretends to artistic merit.
Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their own experiments in the field of visionary filmmaking.