In its exaggerated formalism, idiosyncratic performance, and extended temps morts, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s These Encounters of Theirs is a rigorous and subversively irreverent, but thoughtful, sensual, and articulate meditation on the search for enlightenment, the rapture of divine inspiration, the intranscendable distance of gods, and the elusive quest for immortality. Composed of five […]
Resonating in a similar vein as the organically meditative – though less ethereal – cultural elegies of Aleksandr Sokurov (specifically, Elegy of a Voyage and Russian Ark or a stylistically flattened early Alain Resnais art documentary (most notably, Van Gogh and Guernica), A Trip to the Louvre seems on the surface to be devoid of […]
On an unassuming morning, a preoccupied young man, Teppei Kaneko (Ryo Kase) irregularly boards an overcrowded train (with the assistance of the station’s white gloved, attendant shover) with his briefcase in hand on his way to a job interview and, while in transit, realizes that his jacket had been caught between the closing doors. Pinned […]
Composed as parallel narratives on the status of women in the capitalist-fueled, rapidly expanding economy of contemporary China – one, a fictional account of Li Yueying (Yao Qianyu), a working class young woman and her search for a better life; the other, a documentary on Jenny, a middle-class housewife and mother undergoing a divorce – […]
Julie Talen’s feature-length video, Pretend, is an astonishingly complex experimental visual narrative structure that nevertheless, sustains a cohesive, inner storytelling logic. Composed of a series of dynamically arranged, multi-channel screens, each presenting alternate points of view, imagined scenarios, experiments in color and textual composition, and fragmentation of chronology, the video uses a seemingly simple tale […]
During an oral dissertation that occurs near the denouement of L’Enfer, the youngest sister Anne (Marie Gillain) is randomly assigned the topic of Euripedes’ Greek tragedy Medea, a mythological character who, betrayed by her husband Jason, exacted revenge by killing their children. The allegory of Medea would prove to be an insightful framework into the […]