Blu-ray

Rebecca gazes into the crystal ball. It is afternoon in a Brooklyn neighborhood of industrial buildings. Rebecca has a way with words just as words have a way of seeking her out. The crystal ball intensifies this. The A train rumbles over the Manhattan Bridge. Rebecca gazes into the crystal ball. Nighttime in a suburban neighborhood of burnt out buildings. Words have a way with Rebecca just as Rebecca has a way of seeking them out. The crystal ball intensifies this.

Skating softly, but carrying a big stick, performer Kristin Elliott engages in an interlocking series of skits involving simple, slapstick activities performed by a pristine outdoor pool and in a venetian blind windowed corner of a room.  Bodies of water - an aquarium is transported into the interior space - become a major link between these two settings.  These containers of water end up functioning as both wombs and graves.

The sense that you are about to be shown something wrong lingers throughout this bizarre semi-narrative. Appropriated imagery of natural disasters, paper crafts, mutated animals, abject beauty and genocide form an exquisite corpse of uncanny connectivity with chirrupy 1950s advertising music or romantic classical. Is this a test?

In the aftermath of a death things may seem very quiet, but there are struggles going on so deep not even those who struggle can recognize them.  This film looks and listens for signs of those struggles.  Psychoanalytic interjections consider the nature of time and rumination, and are used to step outside of the terribly interiorized state of mourning.

-- Jennifer Montgomery

Subverting dramaturgical conventions in his Plot Point trilogy, Provost masterfully presents the man in the street as a film protagonist. After New York (Plot Point) and Las Vegas (Stardust) he takes his hidden camera to the hyperkinetic streets of Tokyo and reveals the mystery of reality. A serial killer, a rapist, a terrorist, a cult, the Yakuza, all have in common that their paths cross and merge into a powerful climax that can not be resolved.

A surreal vision of one man's endeavor to contact the spirit world and come to terms with nightmares of a mysterious death.  A séance is orchestrated according to instructions written in 1920 by revered parapsychologist Hereward Carrington, voiced here by novelist Lynne Tillman.  Roses, seen as light by spirits, are placed in the room but these flowers are plastic; a requisite round table is surrounded by wooden chairs that remain empty despite stern warnings to never sit alone.

Mexican video artist Ximena Cuevas documented the preparations and opening of the Marina Abramovic Videoinstalaciones exhibit at Mexico City's Laboratorio Arte ALameda, the first Abramovic exhibition ever to take place in Mexico, in November of 2008.  Cuevas captures the self proclaimed "performance grandmother" in a number of personal and performative moments as she readies for the opening.

Long Live the New Flesh uses found footage to transmogrify existing fragments from horror films into a new video. It deploys a digital technique with painterly quality in which the images literally consume one another and the horror in all its visual power is brought to a natural boiling point. Provost strips down the imagery of a mass medium, uses it to construct a new visual story behind the dissection and horror, and allows the viewer to cross every phase of the emotional spectrum.

In The Body Parlor, both man and sheep as combined sacrificial bodies become subjects of biological investigation. As symbols of ritual sacrifice, they are bodies that give of themselves. In discovering new forms of health-care (regenerative medicine) and tissue engineering (such as stem cell research), the body becomes sacrificial material for the greater purpose of a social good. The performers employ the material objects, either as products of or as extensions of the body as a way of exploring giving from one's self in sacrifice.