Filmed after the dismantling of the Soviet Union at a time when the U.S. space station project (then called Freedom) that had been championed by Ronald Reagan was similarly facing its own crisis of survival after a series of deep budget cuts (partly in response to shifting political considerations and administrations), Maciej Drygas’s The State […]
Filmed during the breakup of the Soviet Union, Hear My Cry captures the essence of Maciej Drygas’s articulate and insightful film essays on the rupture between official record and human history, the impossibility of absolute truth, and the malleable nature of collective memory. The theme of revisionist history is prefigured in the film’s opening shot, […]
Composed of a series of personal archives, commissioned photographs, and film excerpts projected onto a blank screen by photojournalist and filmmaker Raymond Depardon as he provides a humble and self-effacing stream of consciousness biographical commentary on a self-assembled pictorial curriculum vitae to commemorate 20 years of professional photography, Les Années déclic favorably recalls the meditative […]
The first film on tap for A Luminous Century: Celebrating Norwegian Cinema was Rune Denstag and Sivge Endresen’s Too Much Norway, a film that, as a Norwegian American audience member appropriately pointed out, was a film “made for Norwegians, not for export.” Indeed, there are no indications of a National Geographic travelogue at work in […]
The panning shot of an anonymous city street establishes the tensile, yet integral relationship between citizen and environment in Guy Debord’s dense and minimalist essay On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, describing the rows of generic apartment buildings as places of refuge from the constant social immersion […]
Something of a germinal template for Raymond Depardon’s Profils Paysans films on a dying way of life in rural (and largely forgotten) France, Jean Eustache and Jean-Michel Barjol’s reverent, vital, and painstakingly observed ethnographic documentary Le Cochon chronicles a day in the life of peasant farmers in the mountainous region of the Massif Central. In […]