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 […]
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 […]
Channeling a similar wavelength as Chantal Akerman’s recurring themes of identity, parental silence, and haunted memory, compatriot filmmaker Boris Lehman creates an equally melancholic and autobiographical self-confessional essay film in À la recherche du lieu de ma naissance, a resonant and intimate exposition on the indelible legacy of Nazism, the diaspora, the Second World War, […]
Peter Mettler’s rigorous and organic meditative essay is (perhaps intentionally) a mind numbing ethnographic collage of people, places, ideas, and discoveries that collective encompass humanity’s innate desire for escapism, commutation, euphoria, and existential transcendence. Originating locally from Mettler’s sad and implicitly tragic reunion with a childhood friend who has led most of his inutile adult […]
In Reel 2 of Lost, Lost, Lost, the first volume of Jonas Mekas’s diary film, Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, Mekas’s commentary of his early life in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as an immigrant and refugee drifting from factory to factory, accepting a series of temporary jobs as an assembly worker is presented against a typewritten letter that […]
Composed of three aesthetically distinct, self-encapsulated, geographically-based chapters – assembled footage from Jonas Mekas’ adoptive hometown of Brooklyn circa 1950 shortly after his arrival to America with his brother Adolfas, a series of short, herky-jerky vignettes recorded during the brothers’ return to their place of birth in the rural, agrarian village of Semeniskiai, Lithuania in […]