This hilarious film alternates three kinds of material: footage of barking dogs, shots of streets and other locations, and a ludicrously overdetermined melodramatic story, illustrated chiefly by a series of stills (and occasionally by shots in motion) and narrated off-screen. The net result of its combined strategies is to reveal melodrama itself as a pure formal mechanism, with characters and plot reduced to the status of necessary props.
Category: Experimental
Writer-director Ari Gold’s 21-minute short film, HELICOPTER, recounts in impressionistic detail the aftermath of his mother Melissa’s death in the helicopter crash that also killed her boyfriend, promoter Bill Graham. Employing a narrative pastiche that includes acted vignettes, a black-and-white animated re-creation of the crash itself, poignant answering-machine voice-over and personal photos, Gold deftly conveys the fractured nature of loss: how memory, despair, indignation and even elation surge and recede in the mourning mind.
In 1959, Peter Weiss made his first feature length film, Hägringen, with Staffan Lamm and Gunilla Palmstierna in leading roles. The script to the rather experimental film is based on the novel Document I which he had published in Swedish in 1949 on his own initiative. The film shows the encounter of a young man with a large city that is yet unknown to him. His passage, accompanied by often surrealistic and absurd impressions, turns into a tour-de-force through various urban milieus.
A synthesis of documentary, dramatic, and experimental styles, this film follows two women recollecting their personal and familial experiences from World War II. One woman recounts the story of an aunt from story Hiroshima whose father had been a member of the peace party when the militarist government forced its way to power. Exiled from Japan they were then interned with Canadians of Japanese descent. The other woman recounts the details of her experience as a young nurse on the morning of August 6, 1945.
Unconcerned with narrative constraints, the ‘plot’ of Hamlet X is both brief and almost incidental to James Clayden’s motives: a man is released from prison and moves into a deserted city building with a woman friend, where he reluctantly becomes involved with a production of Hamlet. Haunted by the uncertainty of his past, together with his guilt for exisiting, he becomes more and more like Shakespeare’s infamous Dane.
Wavelength is anything but simple, however, as Snow’s statement of intention suggests. He describes the film as “a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas.” The spine of the film is its famous zoom from a fixed camera position facing a wall with four tall sash windows. Over the course of the film, the angle of view narrows until the frame is filled with a black and white photograph of waves pinned up between the middle two windows. Other features of the room, in which four events involving people take place, are sloughed off. The spectator is led to concentrate on this central element, the photograph—it has been there all along—until the image is washed out and the film comes to an end.
Robert Breer’s extraordinary autobiographical film combines personal and family photos with intense colors, textures and geometric abstractions. Originally presented as part of Karlheinz Sotckhausen’s 1964 premiere of Originale.