Young lesbian parents Shareen and Claire are raising their 5-year-old daughter Honey in a converted garage on Staten Island. Shareen salvages refuse with her pickup truck while Claire waits tables at the hip Naga Saki restaurant in Manhattan, caught up in a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi. As a ghost barge bearing nuclear refuse circles the planet in search of a willing port, household pets begin to glow ominously, then disappear; and people start speaking in tongues. The crisis escalates when a multinational corporation is implicated, the couple’s daughter Honey mysteriously vanishes, and a group of young New Yorkers strike back in an unlikely alliance with activists in the developing world.
Category: Experimental
An uncompromising look at the ways privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance determine our environment. Shot entirely at night, the film confronts the hermetic nature of white-collar communities, dissecting the fear behind contemporary suburban design. An isolation-based fear (protect us from people not like us). A fear of irregularity (eat at McDonalds, you know what to expect). A fear of thought (turn on the television). A fear of self (don’t stop moving). By examining evacuated suburban and corporate landscapes, the film reveals a peculiarly 21st century hollowness… an emptiness born of our collective faith in safety and technology. This is a new genre of horror movie, attempting suburban locations as states of mind.
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.
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.