It is unfortunate that some filmmakers still seem to confuse self-critical emotional nakedness with physical nakedness, and it is especially unexpected to see this in an artist of Françoise Romand’s caliber and artistic maturity (her documentary Mix-Up is a sublime and intelligent psychoanalytical discourse on identity in light of two middle-aged British women who were […]
War at a Distance (Harun Farocki) Expounding on Farocki’s familiar themes of production and warfare (particularly in the depopulated, automated factory assembly line integration processes of Images of the World and the Inscription of War), War at a Distance is a brilliant, intelligently reasoned, and provocative video essay on the interrelation, not only between war […]
Although illustrating versatility in both technique and content, I found Kelley’s films particularly repellant. The first is Out O’ Actions, a split-screen installation commissioned as a Visitor’s Gallery installation for the inaugural exhibition of Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979). The short film is presented in delirious, rapid fire fast-forward playback of […]
Program 12: Foreign Affairs How to Fix the World (Jacqueline Goss) Goss approaches the social implications of cultural integration with humor and incisive observation in the delightful short film, How to Fix the World, an animated sketch drawn from A.R. Luria’s cognitive studies of the rural villagers of the Ferghana Valley in the former Soviet […]
A Tutsi herdsman and genocide survivor sits atop a pastoral outpost on the side of a hill in Bisesero, reflects on the loss of his family and friends during the 100 day massacre, wistfully looks out into the horizon, and comments, “This place used to be beautiful. Now the only beauty is the skeletons on […]
One of the recurring ideas that resurfaces from the Q&A with David Lynch after the screening of Inland Empire was the sense of liberation that high definition digital video afforded him, and this democratization of the medium can certainly be seen in the film’s mind-bending, sprawling, opaque, hallucinatory, sinuous, and harrowing exploration of identity, performance, […]