The Time to Live and the Time to Die is prefaced by the gentle, soft-spoken voice of an off-camera narrator (presumably filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien) as he recounts the story of his family’s postwar migration from Mei County in the Kwangtung Province of mainland China in pursuit of career opportunities and the prospect of a […]
The Boys from Fengkuei opens to a static shot of a near desolate thoroughfare in the bucolic, fishing village of Fengkuei in the Penghu islands, as a slow moving bus momentarily stops to open its doors off-camera – seemingly to accommodate or disembark some unseen passenger – before continuing on its unhurried journey along the […]
In 1962, at an anonymous Taiwanese village, a somber, lackadaisical man curiously dressed as a clown and laden with advertising billboards promenades through an array of indistinguishable city streets on a sweltering summer day, trying to attract the attention of the occasional passerby with the constant beating of a toy ceremonial drum before momentarily wandering […]
Mike Hoolboom continues to refine the tonally complex, multi-chapter, mixed media compositions of his 2003 video essay, Imitations of Life with his latest – and equally ambitious and inspired – offering, Public Lighting. In the prologue, a restless young writer muses that, “every wound gives off its own light, and some of these wounds are […]
Christophe Honoré’s idiosyncratic concoction of irreverent humor, subverted expectation, romanticism, and affectionate homage falls elegantly and poignantly into place in Love Songs (Les Chansons d’amour): a lyrical, immediately engaging, yet substantive thirteen song musical presented in three chapters, each bearing a title from the three parts of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Departure, Absence, […]
A somber and young man Pierre (Louis Garrel) sits inside a car listening impassively as his barely coherent, self-absorbed father (Philippe Duclos) coldly reveals his resigned resentment towards him as an accident of birth who had caused a premature end to his bohemian lifestyle and sexual experimentation with his wife Hélène (Isabelle Huppert). Brought to […]