Robots of Sodom and Every Evening Freedom (Tom Kalin) Two video excerpts from a larger work in progress entitled Behold Goliath or The Boy With the Filthy Laugh based on the experimental fiction of Alfred Chester, Robots of Sodom (from In Praise of Vespasian) and Every Evening Freedom (from Behold Goliath) are composed primarily of […]
A Silent Day (Takashi Ito) A Silent Day is an appropriately wordless, yet poetic and instinctually cohesive fictionalized autobiographical journal of a young filmmaker who roams through the desolate streets of a suburban city, occasionally acting out her inner demons through a metaphorically soulless, ambiguously inexpressive marionette. Suicide (Shelly Silver) A similarly themed video journal […]
Novel City, 2008 (Leslie Thornton) While Leslie Thornton’s 1983 film Adynata posed questions of exoticism and alterity in its cultural examination of China, Novel City represents a different, yet equally jarring notion of otherness – one borne of China’s rapid industrialization, economic transformation, and cultural amnesia at the turn of the century. Interweaving excerpts from […]
Adynata is a figure of speech, a form of hyperbole that has been exaggerated to the point of impossibility. Similarly, Leslie Thornton’s seminal film, Adynata is also a densely assembled rhetoric: an exposition into the social representations of a perpetuated, exoticized otherness – an alien culture, an irretrievable past, an impenetrable psyche – a conjured […]