Featured pieces on different film subjects.
By Claudia Siefen-Leitich
Who is staring into your neck, and why is that look forward suddenly destroyed as soon as your eyes move to the side, short and confused? The dynamic is still there, the light glitters in the pupils, and what exactly is it, what actually happens then?
Por José Sarmiento Hinojosa The natural realm as a metaphor, or the presence of the verbal narration in a sort of proposition of first principles, are ever present in the work of British/Argentinian filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland, and Black Pond (2018) expands on these notions manifesting its presence in a common land in south England, […]
by Calin Boto
“I’m always here, there, everywhere”. That’s how Barbara Rubin ends one of her candid letters [1] to Jonas Mekas. And so she was, be it in a sanitarium, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Warhol’s Factory, Allen Ginsberg’s East Hill Farm, New York or Europe. Rubin was on a rush, and time proved her right. Her sudden death occurred when she was just 35, by that time living under a different name as a converted Hasidic mother of five children.
By Claudia Siefen-Leitich
The first scene also remains the strongest: the small family (mum, dad, son and dog) drives in the family car towards the holiday home in Long Island. The car offers safety, is hermetically sealed, no sound from the outside world penetrates the vehicle, which literally pours itself into the landscape at high speed and routinely moves towards its destination. The sun glitters through the windows and Mama pushes a punk CD into the system.
By Libertad Gills
The real Lola Arias, not the fictional artist name-placed in the 2017 Palme D’Or winning film, has spent the past ten years making her first feature film titled Theatre of War, which premiered in 2018 at the 68 Berlinale Forum. The film brings together former Argentine and British soldiers to recreate the military dispute over the Falkland Islands or las Maldivias, as they are called in Argentina and in the Spanish language.
By Vladimir Seput
-“So here I am, alone on this earth, with no brother, neighbour, or friend, and no company but my own. The most sociable and loving of human beings has by common consent been banished by the rest of society” laments Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the beginning of the first walk in his unfinished book Reveries of the Solitary Walker (here in Russell Goulbourne’s translation).
By Hyemin Kim
Artist Peggy Ahwesh’s work, marked by vagrancy and hybridity in its methods and subjects, has been deploying bricolage in a disquietingly reflective fashion, which would partake of the task of what one might call ‘essay-filmmaking.’ Far from a merely frivolous or adventurous exploration of different mediums and materiality, Ahwesh’s heterogeneous body of work proposes cautionary, counteractive thoughts on contemporary human and non-human conditions, primarily siding with the materiality of the deprived drifting in the shadow of automated media and imaging technologies.
by Claudia Siefen-Leitich
Jürgen Heiter’s films talk about something already shaped – about places. The bookshop “König“ in Cologne, the Rolandseck railway station – or the small town of Olevano in Italy. They do not present these places in a documentary way, but rather investigate the forces at these places, structures, movements, what the places do with the people and what the people do with the places.
By Hyemin Kim
Multimedia artist Ben Coonley’s show Winter Games (February 15 to March 24, 2019) at Microscope Gallery (Bushwick, NY, USA) projects the poetics of ecological togetherness and its reparative rituals in a slow wintry refuge by weaving together technologies and remediated reflection on nature, time, kinship and play.
By Vladimir Seput
‘Is the resistance of reality to be filmed going away?’ asked film critic and programmer Roger Koza during the discussion at the Berlin Critics’ Week moderated by Michael Hack after the screening of Fausto by Andrea Bussmann, her first feature film that premiered in last year’s Locarno Film Festival. Bussmann is known for her work with Nicolás Pereda with whom she made Tales of Two Who Dreamt in 2016.
By Paul Grivas
In collaboration with Desistfilm
I always find strange when Jean-Luc Godard is accused of making “films without a script”.
Quite the contrary, his scripts are extremely precise, as shown in this short film.
by Claudia Siefen-Leitich
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Richard Brooks, like his 1955 Tennessee Williams play, is gracious with its main characters. And this grace is shown first of all in the stamina that Williams already bestows on them in his stage version. Margaret also needs stamina. This is a big country.