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…
In the marvelous Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle (Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, 2019), French filmmaker Frank Beauvais is on the hunt of something that seems imperceptible to us in films. He recovers those moments that aren’t meaningful to us in the narrative logic of films, since there almost aren’t faces or emblematic takes. Shots that observe ornaments in some bookcase or table, shots of steps, of wheels or flowers, hands that touch something quickly, or some arbitrary detail, too arbitrary to be taken into account.
Travelling around CPH:DOX, Berlinale, IndieLisboa and Toronto, Jessica Forever a strange new creature from Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, a suburban post-apocalyptic sci-fi that follows a group of rebellious young men and her leader, Jessica, in a struggle to keep surviving against a “virtual” totalitarian regime.
In Knives and Skin, american filmmaker Jennifer Reeder returns to the motifs of several of her short films, that from some years now share a trademark of rarefied atmospheres, neon and glitter, to embody feminine adolescent universes. If in the remarkable A Million Miles Away (U.S., 2014), it’s a song from Judas Priest, You’ve got another thing coming, that becomes the reverse of the usual adolescent angst (in the voices of a choir class in a public school), here in her most recent feature, some eighties’ songs from New Order, Modern English or Naked Eyes acquire also the inner dimension of dissatisfaction or strangeness.
Scattered in seemingly random order, on the screen, we see the light that traverses the “kinetic fields” of Bill Brand’s latest film August Garden. Made for a group exhibition at Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre (Paris), the film accompanies a series of flower ink paintings, carefully made by the artist. Before, in the first seconds, we’re able to see an animation of August Garden 07 (ink and watercolor on xuan paper, 9″ x13″, 2019), which titillates lively for brief moments.
The Upper Austrian farmer and sacristan Franz Jägerstätter refused military service in 1943 on religious grounds. He was sentenced to death for “decomposition of military strength” and executed on 9 August 1943. The groundbreaking television film, Der Fall Jägerstätter / The Jaegerstaetter Case (1972) from Axel Corti, is a rare attempt at exploring dissident life in Austria during the Third Reich.
Geetha J’s debut feature-length film, a Malayalam film premiered at the Kolkata International Film Festival, is an Indian film that merits a wide international audience precisely for its ability to reveal multiple layers of social reality within a tightly structured and delightfully innovative form.
