The convergence of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s A Trip to the Louvre and experimental filmmaker Mark LaPore’s transfixing ethnography Kolkata at this year’s View from the Avant-Garde provided the proper frame of mind to revisit Harun Farocki’s meditation on the art of consumerism, Still Life, a film that on the surface seemed to be […]
The French word répétition – rather than the English word rehearsal – more closely captures the implicit connotation behind Straub and Huillet’s rigorous and exacting method of preparation for the shooting of Class Relations. A seated Straub asks the actor Christian Heinisch (who plays Rossmann) to deliver his lines over and over, each time, subtly […]
The projection of the 1895 Auguste and Louis Lumière short film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory is accompanied by a third person narrator who observes the unfolding, animated images of a group of men, women, and even dogs making their way out of the entrance gates and comments on their apparent haste in exiting the […]
In 1944, an Allied aircraft took topographic photographs of Auschwitz during a routine surveillance operation for power plants, munitions factories, chemical plants, and any other industrial complexes that could potentially serve as bombing targets that, in the military’s myopic search for these high collateral targets that would cripple the German war machine, failed to recognize […]
“When you have no money for cars, for shoot-outs, for smart clothes; when you have no money for images which themselves could paper the cracks of film-time, film-life, then you must invest your strength in the intelligence to connect the separate elements – the montage of ideas.” In the opening sequence of Between Two Wars, […]
“How can we show you napalm in action? And how can we show you the injuries caused by napalm? If we show you pictures of napalm burns, you’ll close your eyes. First you’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close your eyes to the memory. Then you’ll close your eyes to the facts. […]