Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the “forest.” There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York “underground scene” who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
Category: Experimental
A split screen shows two tightly synchronized, “impossible” shots of the same scene: a moving POV camera showing what the central character is looking at, and a stationary wide shot, both framing the entire action simultaneously. The deliberate positioning of the static, detached view above the erratic, close-up subjective POV of the central character lends an uneasy feeling to it. At the start of the film, we see the central character’s dream before he wakes up and comes out onto his balcony in the top screen (the bottom screen becomes his POV looking out the window, in sync with the top view.) Set in West Vancouver, BC.
Paul Sharits is one of the great experimental, sometimes called structuralist/ materialist, filmmakers of the 20th Century. Epileptic Seizure Comparison is a deeply empathetic interpretation of epilepsy, far beyond anything as crass as voyeurism.
In the final days of the American Civil War, an emigre Hungarian military officer attempts to map the situation of the enemy. Many veterans of the 1848 War of Independence in Hungary fought on the northern side. Experienced Fiala, Boldogh who struggles with homesickness and the reckless Vereczky all experience their enforced emigration in different ways and news of impending peace elicits different reactions from them all. Gábor Bódy’s film is a thoroughly experimental work, constantly surprising and disorienting the viewer, posing serious questions, with a unique style of expression and perspective.
The Chinese Typewriter is about education and language, and the way a society is shaped by them. It exemplifies the politically committed film that defies the strict rubric of avant-garde. Daniel Barnett seems less interested in challenging traditional form than in exploding his own occidental vision. He transforms cyclonic cutting among a character-filled Chinese printing shop, a school, and street life into a visual poem that extracts the country’s fierce mechanistic energy while leaving the fragrant residue of humanity.
The human eye, the human form, the human face: these are the three central images of this avant-garde collage and kaleidoscope of shifting and fractured images, changing colors, and pulsing rhythms. Near the end, a tree appears briefly, and birds fly – first white, then red and blue. Celtic knots morph from one to another. The images become Rorschach tests although the mood, driven by the rapid changing images and the soundtrack, remains frantic.
Rarely has a film exploded onto cinema screens with such a joyful splash of colour and rhythm as A Colour Box. Made as a commercial for the General Post Office, New Zealand born Len Lye painted directly onto the film strip, synchronising his dynamic shapes and squiggles with an upbeat rumba track. The film captured the heart of audiences on its release in 1935 and continues to do so today.