Director Gaspard Bazin is working on a new feature film. For now, he’s still looking at the fundraising and casting stage of the process. He calls upon Jean Almereyda, a once-fashionable producer who is now going through a bad patch, finding it increasingly difficult to raise the capital he needs for his ventures. His wife Eurydice dreams of being a movie star. A perverse game between the two men ensues, with Almereyda wanting to please his wife, but reluctant to demand a role for Eurydice because of Bazin’s reputation as an incorrigible seducer.
Category: Experimental
An insightful illumination of author Paul Bowles’ original and lesser-known career as an avant-garde composer, Owsley Brown’s Night Waltz is an elegant and soulful document of discovery. Interviewed in Morocco during the last months of his life, Bowles journeys back to his early years as a contemporary and occasional collaborator of other such iconic figures as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Orson Welles. Bowles’ uncut compositions–performed by the Eos Orchestra–are punctuated with stunning visual essays by filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Rudy Burckhardt. Long after retiring from his more well-known profession, Bowles kept music as a vital part of his life, tapping out fresh rhythms on his Tangier table tops until the end of his days.
Filmed in Brooklyn, Image in the Snow is an early underground “trance film” in which “a young man led by despair searches a city for salvation” (director Willard Maas’ own description). He takes the Myrtle Avenue el. and finds his “ideal parents” represented as carved stone figures on a tomb in the old part of Mt. Olivet Cemetary. Although not as highly regarded as Geography of the Body or as ostentatious as Narcissus in its own time, Image in the Snow has become the most frequently revived of Willard Maas’ thematic, non-documentary films.
A surreal piece of cinema, mostly comprised of stark religious and homoerotic imagery, accompanied by increasingly dissonant music (starting with ‘The Unanswered Question’, and getting more jarring as the movie progresses.
Fast-moving impressions of the Big Sur, the water, the ocean, and the Ladies, as part of the landscape, swimming, or running nude, against the sun or part of the sun.
A man sentenced to death reflects on his arrest, interrogations, torture… and a bit on the time before, long gone, swallowed up by pain and numbness.
——UPGRADED——
This film is a visual diary of Nedeljko Dragic’s visit to the United States, for which he has transformed his impressions into a rapidly flowing, semi-abstract series of images. He has created a nightmarish vision, with certain ideas, such as the pace and superficiality of life, technological and economic power and ostentatious advertising, predominating. In his somewhat sardonic comment on American values the more innocent images of the past, like the love-sick mouse chasing a cat and the small figure of Chaplin’s little tramp, are few and far between.