A subtly interconnecting mosaic of staged vignettes, non-fiction footage, archival prints, and found film excerpts, Alexander Kluge’s The Power of Emotion is an organic, densely layered meditation on the intangible (and often irrational) essential mechanism of human emotion. At the core of Kluge’s exposition is the interrelation between two disparate observations: 1) that objects, in […]
Rome, NY (Ada Bligaard Søby) It is unfortunate that the first program of the festival would prove to be so flaccid, and made even more unappealing by the almost grotesque level of derision and contempt (and arrogant superiority) exhibited by the two local tour guides enlisted by Søby to guide her through the struggling, working […]
Ssitkim: Talking to the Dead (Soon-mi Yoo) My favorite entry from the festival so far, Korean filmmaker Soon-mi Yoo visits Vietnam to examine the suppressed history of the South Korean military’s involvement in the annihilation of a rural village during the Vietnam War (due in part to President Park Chung Hee’s efforts to win political […]
Mother, Father, Son (Oliver Hockenhull) Composed of a series of family photographs and military archival footage, Hockenhull traces his father’s reluctant participation in the assault of Dresden as a navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force (a bombing that his father would subsequently describe as a “war crime”) and in the process, creates a powerful […]
Les Tournesols, 1982 In some ways, Rose Lowder’s Les Tournesols, a kinetic, color-saturated, Vincent Van Gogh-esque structural film could just as easily have fit Jean-Luc Godard’s description of “blind, trembling pans” as interior representations of the artist’s psychological state (as Godard once described Alain Resnais’ Van Gogh). Composed of frame by frame stationary shots of […]
“I thought I would at first offer you a simple lesson – sorry, you don’t like being preached to – so let’s say a little advice, which of course you are not obliged to follow, well, let’s say a tip …which calls upon us to first explore the steps that were cleared by our predecessors, […]