Channeling the zeitgeist of the French new wave, The Koumiko Mystery assimilates Jean-Luc Godard’s enraptured clinical deconstructions of the feminine mystique (as well as a penchant for structuring these ruminations within the framework of noir) with Jacques Demy’s achingly nostalgic evocations of elusive, romanticized longing into a whimsical, organic, and fractured, yet quintessential Chris Marker […]
Before Chris Marker would deconstruct the 1930s, postwar photo-reportage of Denise Bellon in Remembrance of Things to Come to unearth what would prove to be subliminal portents within the zeitgeist of seeming halcyon days that would prove to be a harbinger of an inevitable second great war to end all wars, he would first cast […]
One of the highlights of the 2004 New York Video Festival was Jacqueline Goss’ disarmingly whimsical and tongue-in-cheek, yet witty and incisive ethnographic video essay, How to Fix the World – an animated reenactment based on the cognitive studies of psychologist Alexander R. Luria that preceded the Soviet government’s mandate to promote Western education and […]
Like Katrina Browne’s earnest and impassioned essay film, Traces of the Trade, South African filmmaker Kurt Orderson’s The Prodigal Son is less a journey to find ancestral roots – albeit from the other side of the slave trade – than an invitation for an open dialogue on race and reconciliation. Having lived his youth in […]
A connecting thread that invariably weaves throughout documentary filmmaker David Perlov’s organically unfolding, yet instinctively lucid, pensive, insightful, and intimately observed personal essay film, Diary is the recurrence of unconscious, naturally occurring patterns – at once, symmetric, convergent, and coincidental, but also paradoxically autonomous, singular, and bifurcated – that continue to resurface and permutate within […]
A middle-age documentary filmmaker named Yvonne Washington (Novella Nelson) invites a long-time friend and former dancer, Jenny (Alice Spivak), ostensibly to film a candid and open dialogue on the subject of menopause. As the interview begins, Jenny makes a cursory remark on the effectiveness of an activist, Helen Caldicott’s (Yvonne Rainer) heavy-handed, incendiary speech on […]