A voyage into the labyrinthine memories of a Uitoto man, who worked for the drug Lords in the Colombian Amazon back in the 80s. Following his path between the forest and the ruin of a Narco's mansion imitating the Carrington mansion in the soap opera Dynasty, the film unfolds the hallucinatory account of a near-death experience.
Failing Up describes career advancement despite bad decisions, bankruptcies, and intellectual mediocrity. In this short film, the Manhattan real estate holdings of the King of Failing Up are catalogued and synced to a soundtrack that suggests how it feels to be one of his subjects.
Whip pans, zooms, lens twists, and bursts of stop-frame animation transform eight minutes of borrowed audio from Home Alone 2 (a film that features a cameo of the current US President) into a political work of slapstique concrete.
As regional character disappears and corporate culture homogenizes our surroundings, it's increasingly hard to tell where you are. In Chain, malls, theme parks, hotels and corporate centers worldwide are joined into one monolithic contemporary "superlandscape" that shapes the lives of two women caught within it. One is a corporate businesswoman set adrift by her corporation while she researches the international theme park industry. The other is a young drifter, living and working illegally on the fringes of a shopping mall.
"Three months in an architects’ firm in Berlin. From the architecture down to the tiniest door handle, a questioning of matter and the verb."
— Harun Farocki
Take a joyride through comfortable suburbia—a landscape molded by seductive television and corporate America (and keep in mind: disaster is another logo for your consumption...). This is the age of the "culture jammed" consumer preened with Friends hair, Survivor courage, and CNN awareness. A generation emptying their wallets for the most important corporate product of all: lifestyle. The psychological road trip across a slightly battered America travels at One Mile per Minute.
"Persistence was shot in 1991-92 in Berlin, and edited with films by U.S. Signal Corps cameramen in 1945-46, obtained from Department of Defense archives. Interspersed through these materials are filmic quotations from Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (1946). A meditation on the time just after a great historical event, about what is common to moments such as these—the continuous and discontinuous threads of history—and our attachment to cinematic modes of observation that, by necessity, shape our view of events.
A rumination on Time, with a capital "T". Time and its ravages, which really just means its progression, its nature. Set off by an "old" poem, a T.S. Eliot poem that's literally haunted me for 30? or 40? yrs
... even before I became an old man myself.
(It's an old man's rumblings, and it never fails to move me. I used a quote from it in a film I made 25yrs ago, and the book still calls to me from its place on the bookshelf, its pages yellow, dry as bone.)
El Zócalo is an observational portrait of Mexico City’s central Plaza de la Constitutión during one day in August. Soldiers, Aztec dancers, clowns, food vendors, protestors, rain, dogs, tourists, kites, balloons, and dignitaries all meet in the public space of the Zócalo. This documentary presents daily life in one of the largest and most vibrant urban centers in the world, but it begins with a dream of history and ends with a dream of the space full of people for a Zapatista rally.
Eyal Weizman is a British-Israeli architect and academic. He’s the founder of Forensic Architecture, which uses architectural research to investigate violations of human rights around the world. In this interview, Weizman discusses his career and the importance of Forensic Architecture’s work with Jonathan Solomon, Director of the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
A fairy tale, a road movie, a folly. The image of the road — black-top and broken white line — the most familiar and most fantastic sculptural installation; a worldwide work of art, which one sees everywhere and generally files under: "Are We There Yet?"
still/here is a meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute the north side of St. Louis, an area populated almost exclusively by working class and working poor African Americans. Though it constructs a documentary record of blight and decay, still/here is a refusal of closure that dwells within the space of rupture and confronts the presence of a profound absence.
–– Christopher Harris
Camera, sound, edit: Christopher Harris
Additional camera: Joel Wanek
We will live to see these things... is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005/06 in Damascus, Syria, the work combines fiction and non-fiction. Each section of the piece--the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, an interview with a dissident intellectual, documentation of an equestrian event, the fever dream of a U.S.
Using the opening of Godard's film Alphaville as a foundation, Lord constructs a vision of the evolving global city during the last years of the 20th Century. Structured as a series of repetitions, the montage of the changing city is offset by shots of corporate Silicon Valley facades. The result is a dialectical contrast between urban and suburban space, body and mind, chaos and order, and the postmodern and the modern. Shot in Hi-8 video in Tokyo, Fukuoka City, Mexico City, Rome, San Francisco, Naples, and Los Angeles.
In an upmarket house surrounded by an idyllic garden, there is no trace of human presence, even though a family obviously lives there. Voices, sounds and superimposed text create a feeling of disquiet whose origin continually escapes us. “A house can feel pain”… Playing on a doubling of vignettes against a black background or on a sound design that brings the off-screen world to life, Shelly Silver resuscitates the memory of this space, if only because a “house is a subconscious… a body…” And what if all this opulence and comfort were based on the exploitation of others?
In this video, MICA-TV interprets the dark spaces of architect Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at Ohio State University through a fractured narrative of psychological perspectives. Eisenman’s pastiche of historical and contemporary architectural motifs, a characteristic of the postmodern style he pioneered, finds a parallel in this tale of haunted castles and a disappearing golem, told through a correspondence back through time.
El Zócalo is an observational portrait of Mexico City’s central Plaza de la Constitutión during one day in August. Soldiers, Aztec dancers, clowns, food vendors, protestors, rain, dogs, tourists, kites, balloons, and dignitaries all meet in the public space of the Zócalo. This documentary presents daily life in one of the largest and most vibrant urban centers in the world, but it begins with a dream of history and ends with a dream of the space full of people for a Zapatista rally.
A collaboration with writer Luc Sante made in Tangier, Morocco, a city where neither of us had ever been. En route from the airport to the city center, we found ourselves amazed by the landscape outside of the car windows; a massive construction project under way in all directions. While not in itself unusual, we were by struck dumb by the epic scale and seemingly incomprehensible plan of the development and were drawn to return together to this puzzling zone.
-- Jem Cohen
Hermine Freed collaborates with James Ingo Freed to create a video essay/documentary that reflects upon memories of the holocaust during the design of a US memorial building. Hermine Freed provides video accompaniment that brings to life a lecture entitled The Architecture of the United States Holocaust Museum conducted by James Ingo Freed for the Architectural League at Rockefeller University, New York on November 11th 1993.
Storyteller recomposes aerial shots from the Las Vegas casino skyline to create a slick, artificial world, reminiscent of science fiction. At first glance, the viewer might think of jewelry-like space ships floating slowly through the universe. When the camera zooms in on buildings and architecture, the detailed glitter and kitsch of the city hypnotically reveals something of pure beauty and madness.
We will live to see these things... is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005/06 in Damascus, Syria, the work combines fiction and non-fiction. Each section of the piece--the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, an interview with a dissident intellectual, documentation of an equestrian event, the fever dream of a U.S.
Born out of an "objective hazard" (a 16mm roll where two different subjects were imprinted by mistake), jeny303 is a composite work intertwining two portraits. On the one hand there is jeny, the feminine alter ego of a transgender millennial dealing with a heroine addiction. On the other hand there is the 303 building, an iconic modernist architecture in a public university in Bogota (Colombia). The images of the body and the edifice interlace and depict jeny303, a character on the threshold of a transformation to come.
During her graduate studies at Hunter College, Alice Aycock (b. 1946) began to forge links between personal and more inclusive subject matter and form. In her quest for contemporary monuments, Aycock wrote her Master’s thesis on U.S. highway systems. Aycock’s large environmental sculptures create intense psychological atmospheres. Although she uses primitive rites and architecture as sources, her implementation of contemporary materials removes those specific connotations.
In this video, MICA-TV interprets the dark spaces of architect Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at Ohio State University through a fractured narrative of psychological perspectives. Eisenman’s pastiche of historical and contemporary architectural motifs, a characteristic of the postmodern style he pioneered, finds a parallel in this tale of haunted castles and a disappearing golem, told through a correspondence back through time.
El Livahpla (Alphaville spelled backwards) is about the ways in which we "normals" are encapsulated in architecture and technology. Through the lens of Alphaville, we see into a past that exists in the present, while showing a future that looks old. It is a waking dream in which the objects of design that surround us fail to provide the answers or the escape that we seek.
This title has been remade as Une Ville de l'Avenir.
A series of unnatural deaths and departures (almost all, of men) disrupts the lives of nine families sharing an apartment building in Jerusalem.
