In a sense, Robert Beavers’s muted, sensual, and reverently observed short film diary, Pitcher of Colored Light may be seen as a companion piece to the climactic, long awaited homecoming sequence in Jonas Mekas’s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (albeit without the reflective commentary) – a personal chronicle that similarly evokes the silent intimacy […]
While James Benning’s 13 Lakes captures the materiality, self-equilibration, and memory of water, the film’s equally rigorous and abstractly hypnotic companion piece, Ten Skies illustrates the mutability, ephermerality, and transience of nature. Shot in Val Verde, California, the film consists of ten minute, stationary shots of ten isolated skyscapes set against the ambient sounds of […]
Composed of a series of episodic, stationary long takes, each recording an uninterrupted, ten minute shot length and punctuated by an extended, interstitial black screen, James Benning’s structuralist film, 13 Lakes is a rigorous and demanding, yet hypnotic and transfixing meditation on diurnal rhythms, climatic changes, and the implications of (irreversible) man-made transformation. The opening […]
My first exposure to French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski’s experimental cinema was with his transfixing, yet vague and impenetrable magnum opus L’Ange, a Dante Alighieri-esque depiction of intranscendence and moribund ritual that would ingrain the (somewhat reductive) idea that his films were abstract visual studies in structuralism, modulation, and repetition. In hindsight, underneath this cursory first […]
In the final, melancholic passage of Maurice Pialat’s L’amour existe, a narrator contemplates the double entendre image of a victory commemorative sculpture that appears to equally articulate strength and human frailty, noting that “the hand of glory, ordering and directing, can also beg – a simple change in angle is sufficient.” This intrinsic contextual duality […]
A 2002 addition to the National Film Registry and one of Robert Breer’s longest duration, rotoscope animation films, Fuji transforms a seemingly mundane state of transience – a tourist’s eye view from a window seat of a train passing through an area overlooking Mount Fuji – into an imaginative, transfixing, and lyrical free-association of everyday […]