Ostensibly framed as a restoration of a degraded found film recovered some 70 years after the sudden and unexplained death of its creator, a Parisian attorney and amateur filmmaker named Gérard Fleury at a lake in the village of Le Thuit in Normandy, Tren de sombras (Train of Shadows) is a dense, sensual, and richly […]
As in Tren de sombras, José Luis Guerín ambiguously prefaces Innisfree as a series of images and observations recorded from the site of a historical event, in this case, the filming of John Ford’s The Quiet Man around Cong village in the Irish countryside. And like the film, Guerín alternates between modes of non-fiction – […]
In Stranger Comes to Town, Jacqueline Goss returns to the themes of alterity and cultural disconnection of How to Fix the World to create an equally charming, humorous, and incisive rumination on the absurdity and moral ramifications of ethnic profiling in a post 9/11, terrorist-conscious society. In one episode, a characteristically neutered Department of Homeland […]
Redshift, 2001 Named after an astrophysics light measurement in order to indirectly calculate the distance between objects (and consequently determine its age), Emily Richardson’s Redshift presents a vast, desolate nighttime landscape in which motion is realized through movements of light through empty spaces (achieved through fixed camera time-lapse photography) that is set to ambient white […]
At first glance, Christophe Girardet and Matthius Müller’s terse and ingeniously conceived Hide unfolds with the tactile eroticism and wry humor of Peter Kubelka’s irreverent life cycle meditation on “transcendence through product consumption” in Truth and Poetry. Composed of densely atmospheric and highly stylized recycled commercial footage of young, picture perfect models pleasurably applying personal […]
Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite (Immagini disturbate da un intenso parassita), 1970 Paolo Gioli’s frenetic, delirious, and curiously transfixing magnum opus Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite is an invigorating, confounding, and ultimately mind-blowing visual study in redefining the bounds of human cognitive saturation – a complex, multilayered juxtaposition of bifurcating and intersecting aural […]