A lone automobile makes its way through the Italian countryside early one morning en route to the remote medieval castle of an eccentric aristocrat (Marcello Mastroianni) who for years has lived an insular existence under the delusion that he is the excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV. Twenty years earlier, an emotionally fragile young “Henry” […]
An off-screen male voice reads an anonymous note, meticulously assembled from clipped newsprint letters and addressed to a woman named Lucia (Jeannie MacNeil), bearing the scandalous information of a long-term affair between her fiancé Augusto (Marino Masé) and the note’s author in a possessive and desperate attempt to drive the unsuspecting young woman away. It […]
In seventeenth century Mexico, a conservative archbishop (Lautaro Murúa) and a politically influential viceroy (Héctor Alterio) share a polite toast to celebrate their respective appointments to the remote colony, away from the turmoil of the Inquisition in their homeland. The viceroy is eager meet an infamous cloistered nun at a local convent named Sor Juana […]
Ankur opens to a surreal shot of a modern day feudal village in rural India, as an attractive young peasant woman named Lakshmi (Shabana Azmi) participates in a ritual pilgrimage to the shrine of the mother goddess bearing offerings for the tribal ceremony in the hopes that the goddess will answer her prayers to have […]
While James Benning’s 13 Lakes captures the materiality, self-equilibration, and memory of water, the film’s equally rigorous and abstractly hypnotic companion piece, Ten Skies illustrates the mutability, ephermerality, and transience of nature. Shot in Val Verde, California, the film consists of ten minute, stationary shots of ten isolated skyscapes set against the ambient sounds of […]
Composed of a series of episodic, stationary long takes, each recording an uninterrupted, ten minute shot length and punctuated by an extended, interstitial black screen, James Benning’s structuralist film, 13 Lakes is a rigorous and demanding, yet hypnotic and transfixing meditation on diurnal rhythms, climatic changes, and the implications of (irreversible) man-made transformation. The opening […]