Passing Through/Torn Formations is a wide open ramble through the labyrinth of memory… The film deals with the life and history of Philip Hoffman’s Czech-born mother and her family, as presented as a kind of polyphonic recitation of words, of images and of sounds.
Category: Experimental
Material was cut in as it came out of the camera, embarrassing moments intact. 100′ rolls timed well with music on old 78s. I was interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not trivialized with dramatics. Whimsy was our achievement, as well as breaking out of step. – Ken Jacobs.
A sensitive, low-key portrait of the East Bay Activity Center, a school in Oakland, California, started in the 1950s to help emotionally disturbed children. The atmospheric documentary opens with hilly East Bay streets shrouded in fog. The mist lifts as the film moves to children at play. Often shown in unobtrusive close-up, the youngsters appear as thinking individuals, enjoying the swings, puzzling out problems, or interacting with their teacher in the classroom.
A disturbing cinematic opera from Melbourne film-maker, Michael Lee, presenting an intense emotional collage of film clips, original footage and complex object animation, structured loosely in the form of a Catholic Mass, to communicate the film-maker’s traumatic Catholic experience. The film is intended in part as ‘anti-imagery’ in response to the iconography of Catholicism.
A live action viewpoint camera cuts between various mundane settings – children in a nursery, a house, office, workshop, church, hospital, farm, train and so on. The images are increasingly treated with effects, then shift to animation – showing rolling abstract patterns – before reverting back to live action, to be brought up short by a door with a notice pinned to it: “Stop! Entrance Prohibited”.
Remember Me is a dark, obsessive and emotive treatise on death. Its aim is to explore the intimate, personal and often secret relationships that people have with mortality and loss. The film uses original and found footage to capture the complex web of emotions which surround death and to create a passionate journey through difficult private territories.
A bilaterally symmetrical (west to east) fusion of human, biomorphic and mechanical shapes in motion. Has to do with the spontaneous generation of electrical energy. A fairly rare demonstration of the Sabattier effect in motion. Numbered after the film stock of the same name.
A slowly disintegrating painting, a bird on the painting that later flies away. An ethereal female figure that pops up from time to time, then as a counterpoint a disgusting insect, an undulating multitude of pebbles and a plethora of letters fill the picture. In other words, the combined spectacle of visual motifs and sound effects creates a unique and memorable vision of the passing of time and the continuous change of time.