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, […]
Grant Gee frames the documentary of seminal band Joy Division as a city symphony that mirrors Manchester’s revitalization – a convergence of musicians and friends coming of age during the city’s decline from its heights as the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution, as equally marked by the rebellious angst of a vibrant punk music scene […]
In an early episode in Cesc Gay’s thoughtful and slow brewing film, Fiction, married, thirty-something, Barcelona-based filmmaker, Alex (Eduard Fernández), having retreated to the cabin of his globetrotting friend, Santi (Javier Cámara) in the scenic country in order to work on the screenplay for his next film, watches a video from Santi’s recent cowboy adventure […]
It perhaps comes as no surprise that the astute social observation and political acuity so integral to the wry, infectious, and irresistible whimsical humor of Blame it on Fidel comes from first (non documentary) feature filmmaker Julie Gavras, whose father, Costa Gavras, continues to redefine the bounds of political filmmaking with his distinctive blueprint for […]
The quixotic search for a better life in the West collides with the reality of immigration raids, exploitation, and poverty in Costa-Gavras’s picaresque, if insubstantial and ultimately unremarkable film, Eden Is West. Embodying the prototypical image of the naïve, wide-eyed immigrant is Elias (Riccardo Scamarcio) who, as the film begins, has paid smugglers a substantial […]
David Gatten’s largely text-based impressionist work-in-progress omnibus, Secret History of the Dividing Line: A True Account in Nine Parts is, at once, a mind-numbing, transfixing, frustrating, poignant, and narcoleptic grand unified theory into the figurative separation between word and image, film and narrative, presence and absence, empire and colony, mortality and legacy. Weaving inexorably throughout […]