The James Stanley Brakhage Collection at the University of Colorado Libraries offers researchers a spectacular opening scene; seven folders into Box 1, the files of his correspondence with Kenneth Anger begin, and they continue far into box two – dozens of fat folders stuffed with densely typed letters and handwritten notes spanning 30 years of friendship, much of it on Anger’s cool pentagram or pyramid-and-flying-saucer stationary.
The slow death, the anguished stagger of a wounded labourer in Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004), the gradual, forced mental disintegration of a sex slave in Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012), is not in Lav Diaz’s latest, Genus, Pan. (2020). Noted as one of the Filipino filmmaker’s shortest features to date, it’s also one of his most direct, most confrontational, least overtly compassionate.
Doesn’t the modern, enlightened observer, who feels isolated in his existence, have the tendency to look for information in the form of a work of art? The observer approaches the work of art in the hope of adding a small, universal insight to his or her own endeavour, to make sure of himself or herself with the help of the truth. With this expectation, one approaches in particular the image produced and the running image is included here. Film, painting and sculpture as material reality, which can be experienced directly by the viewer through the senses and thus generates truth.
During this pandemic season, french filmmaker and plastic artist Marylène Negro has made her films available at: http://www.tousdesindiens.com/marylene_negro.
We rescued this wonderful text by Nicole Brenez for the occasion, about Marylène’s masterpiece “X+”
We’re honoured to premiere online the new Jacques Perconte film, Avant L’effondrement Du Mont Blanc (Before the collapse of Mont Blanc, 2020). Accompanying the film, is a text by José Sarmiento Hinojosa, both in English and Spanish, below.
Estamos honrados de estrenar online el nuevo filme de Jacques Perconte, Avant L’effondrement Du Mont Blanc (Antes del colapso del Mont Blanc, 2020). Acompaña el filme un texto de José Sarmiento Hinojosa, en inglés y español, debajo.
Durante las siguientes cuatro semanas, replicaremos parte del programa “Mujeres en la Resistencia”, curado por Desistfilm y Nicole Brenez. Serán seis filmes de realizadoras de distintas partes del mundo, que han dedicado estos trabajos para dejar testimonio de distintas manifestaciones de resistencia política, enfocadas en problemáticas esenciales del mundo que nos rodea: migración, revolución, memoria, violencia y censura.
Ben Highmore, in the European discussion of Roland Barthes’ concept of emptiness or “drift” of contemporary life, argues that this emptiness is “the ordinary, as it is constantly hidden and obscured by a number of powerful forces… [like] the spectacular extravagances of industrial culture. For Highmore, therefore, the ordinary is not “empty” but “submerged”, hiding in a vastness of shadows. For him, everyday life is an accumulation of small things that together form a larger thing, a “field of experience” in constant change.
Isolation, like movies, has different genres. There is a type of isolation that is sought and generative, what is called solitude. Another takes the form of a test or experiment; backpacking the Pacific Crest Trail by oneself, or Thoreau at Walden Pond.
Un diario de viaje experimental, [En tre] Fuego incesante de Ivonne Sheen explora las posibilidades del territorio como una reflexión del espacio íntimo personal, un espacio de meditación frente a la inherente velocidad del movimiento actual. Estamos contentos de estrenar online su segundo cortometraje.
A personal experimental travelogue, Ivonne Sheen’s [In Between] Relentless Fire explores the possibilities of landscape as a reflection of a personal intimate space, a space of meditation against the inherent velocity of today’s movement. We’re happy to premiere online her second short film.
When David Lean took his first job as “teaboy” at the British Gaumont Studios at the age of twenty, it didn’t take him long to spend his first nights in the editing room. He was fascinated by the techniques for making films that were possible at that time. He had enjoyed a strict upbringing until then: within the British Quaker community, his parents had forbidden him to go to the cinema regularly.
Lee Anne Schmitt is a remarkable portraitist of the postindustrial decadence of the United States. The American filmmaker develops in her documentaries a policy of space and landscape to extract a social diagnosis of her country from the remains.
As with all Janie Geiser’s work, one may ask what hides beneath this complexity of image layering, of this multiverse of images that dialogue with each other, as entangled in a wild dream of someone’s trauma, of the presence of memory made oeniric, of the materiality of objects we once owned and cherished, coming back as a feverish phantasmagoria, an inescapable flow of synaptic pulses…
