An elderly cemetery caretaker, Josef Fuchs, impassively looks out into the Danube River before turning to face the camera and reciting Count Albrecht Graf Wickenburg’s requiem for the namenlos – the unidentified dead, often people who committed suicide or lost their lives in boating accidents, whose bodies have washed up along the riverbank over the […]
A young woman dressed in somber clothing named Agnese (Stefania Sandrelli) impassively, but determinedly, navigates her way through a provincial Sicilian town on her way to confession trailed by a lumbering, but accommodating chaperone (Rosetta Urzì). A less than nurturing audience with the attending priest at the confessional soon reveals the reason for her seeming […]
One of the highlights from the Views of the Avant-Garde program was veteran experimental filmmaker, Ernie Gehr’s New York Lantern, a painterly, intuitive, and unexpectedly political three-part composition (as demarcated by three distinct musical scores) assembled from black and white and color tinted vintage photographs taken around New York City at the turn of the […]
Precarious Garden, 2004 Loosely recalling the split-screened symmetry and bifurcation of unpopulated spaces in the epilogue of Jon Jost’s The Bed You Sleep In, Ernie Gehr expounds on the technique of split-screening through obstructed or otherwise baffled images that illustrate juxtaposed, partial and alternate views of the same mundane objects. Presented as a pure, soundless, […]
Philippe Garrel’s atmospheric and luminous, if oddly cold and alienated The Frontier of Dawn represents an amalgam of the filmmaker’s familiar themes: the haunting of a failed love affair, the helplessness of seeing a loved one self-destruct, the guilt (and isolation) of survival, the fear of fleeting happiness. In this respect, the film’s crepuscular title […]
Regular Lovers is a quintessential Philippe Garrel film. Part self-exorcism of the failed idealism of the May 68 counter-culture revolution that inevitably burned out in a haze of recreational drug use, sexual liberation, and the inertia of bohemianism, and part elegy on love found in the wreckage of a heartbreaking aftermath that, too, becomes inevitably […]