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 […]
Assembled from found film culled from propaganda reels, public service announcements, and movie westerns and set against a percussive, industrial soundtrack by David Byrne and Brian Eno, Bruce Connor’s America Is Waiting is a terse, but potent statement on the Reagan-era reactionary culture of moral righteousness, military aggression, and Cold War paranoia. Juxtaposing images depicting […]
Bookending with representations of twilight – an opening shot of light transmitted through a foregrounding grating, and a closing shot of the sun setting below a line of trees – Nathaniel Dorsky’s Winter and Sarabande convey forms of progression: a movement from dawn to dusk, shadow to light, grey tones to color, emptiness to space. […]
The Accursed Mazurka, 1994 A series of stark, alienating, and desolate expressionistic images convey a sense of foreboding and dread as a scratched, narrative soundtrack (reminiscent of an early generation, low fidelity audio broadcast recording) presents an anonymous, paranoiac woman’s curious hypothesis that the onset of her psychological break from reality had been triggered by […]
Respite (Harun Farocki) Harun Farocki’s contribution to the 2007 Jeonju International Film Festival Digital Project, Respite, channels the spirit of his magnum opus, Images of the World and the Inscription of War to create a potent and provocative film essay on production, warfare, historical reconstruction, and the role of image-making. A prefacing text on the […]
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 […]