Surveying representative moments from the history of Mesoamerican antiquarianism, this experimental documentary suggests how diplomacy and Pan-Americanism framed the recontexualization of archeological objects as art. Part faked newsreel, part diffusionist rant, Ruins uses appropriated sounds and images to contemplate a history of appropriated objects. The film visits with Brigido Lara, master forger, and suggests parallels between the documentary film and the fake.
Category: Experimental
Life as a theatre of its own. A film inspired by the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge (1830 -1904), the pioneer and the inventor of zoopraxiscope – a device for projecting motion pictures.
A kaleidoscopic journey through Budapest over the course of a single Sunday, where ordinary moments—work, family gatherings, public parks, bars, and nightlife—become fragments of a larger portrait of everyday life. Eschewing traditional storytelling, András Jeles transforms the city’s routines into an experimental visual poem.
Twenty-year-old Laszlo Sz., a driver’s mate, steals the money he was supposed to post and spends the day wandering around Budapest, visiting bars, restaurants, pinball parlors, and various other places in search of something different and meaningful.
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”.
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.