An informal and prosaic, yet informed and balanced presentation of critical arguments and conversations on the state of experimental and avant-garde film during the early half of the 1980s, Film: The Front Line – 1983 provides an engaging and accessible introduction to several noteworthy, underrepresented personal filmmakers. Rosenbaum makes a conscious decision to omit key, […]
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 […]
The opening image of Robert Breer’s Form Phases #4 is that of two-strip red and white color panels, a seemingly tongue-in-cheek image that visually presages the film’s fusion of two-dimensional animation and early color-process motion picture, as a sliver of white line breaks the bounds of the color border and continues to transect unimpededly (and […]