Film Theory

The whole story takes place in the mise-en-scene of the artist's studio. The delicate psychological allegory of "a day in the life of..." anchors the displacement of (filmic) reality and the alienation of the (player's) self. Devices such as incongruity between the image and the soundtrack, odd camera angles, and plays on objective focus, are integral and explicit components of the narrative. Altered to Suit diverges from preceding films in that the dialogue is not solely related to the work; rather the work serves as a central frame of reference from which the story unfolds.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Chantal Akerman: An Interview

Chantal Akerman gained international recognition with her three and a half hour masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which portrays a housewife’s dull existence and eventual violent action. She has continued to be one of Europe’s most innovative filmmakers with more than 40 films and television projects to her credit. Akerman’s work is minimalist, structuralist, and feminist. Major themes in her films include women at work and at home; women’s relationships to men, other women, and children; food, love, sex, romance, art, and storytelling.

Rebecca Baron, Douglas Goodwin

Lossless #2

Lossless #2 is a mesmerizing assemblage of compressed digital images of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon. Baron and Goodwin play heavily with Teiji Ito’s 1959 soundtrack, making the film’s lyrical ambience feel more astonishing than ever before. --Neil Karassik

Rebecca Baron, Douglas Goodwin

Lossless #3

Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford's The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film's temporal structuring to render a kinetic “painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it. “Truth, 24 frames a second!” is rewritten according to the odd clock-times of digital processing, splaying movement and transition into the void of machine temporality.

Rebecca Baron, Douglas Goodwin

Lossless #4

Derived from Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity, Lossless #4 is the result of a digital file's debugging routine that reveals vectors describing apparent movement in the frame. Having removed the picture, thereby isolating these vectors, the formal qualities of Gehr's film are detectable. The hypnotic effects of the shifts in the lens’s focal length in the original are now substituted with a purely graphical representation, creating a perverse replacement of the optical effect of the original.

Rebecca Baron, Douglas Goodwin

Lossless #5

In Lossless #5, a water-ballet crafted by the famed Busby Berkley is compressed into an organic mitosis, within which we detect the spirit of a "buggy" Brakhage ghosting about the integrated circuit.

George Kuchar

SeaSide Show

Waves crash on rocks as tongues flap in the wind about all things cinematic. People chirp and chew in various states of dress and undress as the climate shifts from coast to coast on the tide of a national pleasure/treasure: film festivals, lectures and art happenings.