DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT/SUMMARY: This film centers around one performance, when Holland-based musicians, The Ex, visited New York to play a concert. This performance is intercut with city scenes, first from Amsterdam and then New York, of construction sites, street life, and protests against the Iraq war and the Bush administration. The construction site scenes relate to the band's dedication to music as a realm for collaborative building and creative destruction.
"We are happy. (Silence.) What do we do now, now that we are happy?"
-- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
The Pyramid used to be a mountain.
"In the film, images of plants, rocks and occasional mountaintops flicker by so quickly they almost evade perception. Extreme colour-tinted close-ups and the use of a rhythmic, drum-forward jazz soundtrack create an effect of a syncopated collage of geometric forms. The collective seems to call into question the audience’s ability to ascertain the significance – whether historical or geographical – of the vaguely identified, eroded sites presented."
–Ela Bittencourt, Frieze
Madi plays an interactive on-line computer game in the privacy of her apartment. Wearing a computer corset that stores her programs in a "Garden Interface", she propels her go-go cowgirl construct WANDA through the game world, encountering an assortment of logged-on players and game identities who trick and confuse her. An aggressive male character WANG logs on, and inserts his cold architecture into her coordinates, draining the power in her corset. His expanding architecture threatens to overtake her Garden Reservoir.
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.
Faced with the possibility of return, the dead consider their next move. Whilst hesitation holds sway at the point where here meets there, others from the non-corporeal realm venture forth… An experimental narrative tale with live action, animation + pathos.
Winner of the Kodak Cinematography Prize at NYUFF.
“This Super-8 jewel from the prodigal Tarragó masterfully considers the state of loneliness and things inbetween.”
–Antimatter
An example of what Reeves terms “video poetics,” layered images of a deserted village in the Spanish countryside play counterpoint to poetry by Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda. Using slick production techniques, Reeves marks the passing of time and human presence with a video transparency effect. What we see is a ghost of what was. Reeves’s precise editing makes for an extraordinarily fluid tape, as images seem to fly through the landscape, through past, present and future.
Undefeated is about mobility and immobility, or just trying to stay warm. Featuring DeCarrio Couley shadowboxing to the rhythm of a hand–cranked Bolex.
Cast: DeCarrio Couley, James Everson.
This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.
This suite is a set of circular and fragmented compositions, in which a rhythmic and haunted dance hides an eroded lunar landscape. The microscopic rubble of our contemporary civilization. Part of the Lunar Films series.
Here, a double morphology of conversion forces us to think about the trance of non-reconciliation, outburst and trance that go through the centuries of colonial violence until reaching us in the tension of an audiovisual disjunction: visible and enunciable. On the one hand the museum, habitat of barbarism, on the other hand the voice, place and body of the furious testimonial. Religious conversion that conveys communal violence. Archaeological conversion that imposes object immobility.
In this 2001 interview, filmmaker Jem Cohen discusses the origins of his film philosophy, and the circuitous route he has taken in his pursuit of an anti-narrative film practice outside the mainstream. Cohen sheds light on the many influences that have impacted his sentiments towards conventional film, and his desire to eschew both classical avant-garde and theatrical filmmaking in favor of a model rooted in the tradition of the 1940s New York School of street photography. Cohen also locates his aesthetic as being impacted by the 1970s hardcore and DIY scenes he was exposed to as a youth in Washington, DC.
This is the gaze that is reflected in the dark obsidian mirror.
The Diaspora Suite
Filmed on location in Harlem (NY) and Ethiopia, Forged Ways oscillates between the first person account of a filmmaker, a man navigating the streets of Harlem, and the day to day life in the cities and villages of Ethiopia.
This is the burial hymn for thousands of souls in anthropocentric times. The ghosts of the American way of life. Part of the Hauntology series.
Under the spell of the alphabet, the silent figures of a past that has not been forgotten persist, a pedagogical reconstruction of a contradictory nation in transit as well as the emergence of a background color that delimits the contour and the persistence of ancient figures that have not been forgotten. This is part of the educational film cycle.
Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.
"A film about the time of the blast furnaces — 1917-1933 — about the development of an industry, about a perfect machinery which had to run itself to the point of its own destruction. This essay... on heavy industry and the gas of the blast furnace, convinces through the author's cool abstraction and manic obsession, and through the utilization of a single example of the self-destructive character of capitalistic production: 'The image of the blast furnace gas is real and metaphoric; an energy blows away uselessly into the air. Guided through a system of pipes, the pressure increases.
"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.
The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city. And, finally, the clamor of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body.
This is an audiovisual manifesto in support of people in resistance against a military coup.
It is a tribute of hyperkinetic colors to the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro in times of pandemic vortex and post-Cubist quarantine. This is Altazor's color drop. Part of the Harmonic and Hyperkinetic Color Film Series.
