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HORROR AND SUPER 8: GORE-MET, ZOMBIE CHEF FROM HELL AND OZONE: THE ATTACK OF THE REDNECK MUTANTS

By Jaime Frijalba

Gore-met, Zombie Chef from Hell (1986) and Ozone: The Attack of the Redneck Mutants (1986) both serve as examples of movies made by non-professionals that had the crew and the possibilities of filming a movie, and they couldn’t afford the negative cost that the video format would have in their artistic visions, or at least one would think at the time. But after taking a look at both of these movies released in 1986, at least one would think that “Goremet” would’ve benefited from the video format.

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SUPER 8: THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

By Bill Mousoulis

Super 8 was the 16mm of my generation. By 1982, 16mm independent film production was starting to become industrialized. Its peak worldwide was in the early-to-mid 1970s, as the counter-cultural film movement had a thriving co-op scene, where thousands of 16mm short (and feature) films would be cheaply made and easily distributed, lapped up by people worldwide in universities, cinemas and many “free” spaces (events, parties, etc.). It had started in the 1960s with the New American Cinema (and before that, with Maya Deren and others), and quickly spread through the whole world, including Australia, where the avant-garde scene was particularly strong. As everyone knows, the period 1965-1975 was an intense and exciting period to be alive in, culturally, socially and politically, and the films of the time reflect this.

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CONDEMNATIONS AND ATTACKS: THE ANGRILY ANESTHETIZED WORLD OF CASA GRANDE

By Victor Bruno

Casa Grande follow the path opened by Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds: it is an arrogant and resentful work disguised as sociological essay made by an individual that, coming from the exact place where the film takes place (literally, since Fellipe Barbosa, the director, lived in the same house that acts as stage for much of this picture and studied in the same school, the Colégio São Bento, in Rio de Janeiro, as does his star), intents to attack by all means the place where he was born, grew up and lives today. Not satisfied, the film also attacks the people who are from there, too. And for Barbosa there is an aggravating: one of his targets is his own family.

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PANORAMA: WALKING ON THE BEACH BY CASPAR PFAUNDLER

By Claudia Siefen

It is not that Anja (Elisabeth Umlauft) is not willing to communicate with the people around her. She is just communicating in a little different way. Her way of communication makes it hard to be understood, not only when it comes to her friends and family. This fact also concerns herself.

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VERTIGO BY ALFRED HITCHCOCK

By Jaime Grijalba

Instead of focusing on the Madeleine/Judy conundrum, I’ll tackle the issue of James Stewart’s character, Scottie. Does he have a double? I ponder two possibilities.

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OBSESSIVELY DOUBLE BODY: BRIAN DE PALMA’S SYMMETRY

By Victor Bruno

But let’s get back to the symmetry. How does it come to reality? When do we detect it in his work? The first thing we have to understand is that it is not only visual, but also thematic and spiritual. Like any good filmmaker, he is concerned about bringing ideas into images. I will use two of his films to try to illustrate a little of this idea. The films are Obsession (1976) and Body Double (1984), made almost a decade apart but with common themes and visual logics.

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DOUBLE VISION: WATCH YOUR STEP. THE FILMS OF ROGER BEEBE

By Lauren Bliss

Roger Beebe, an American experimental filmmaker working primarily with 16mm and 8mm, is one exception to this rule in that he strips the conspiratorial and calculated agenda that marks so much of the practice of leftist filmmakers and instead evokes a sense of visual release to the banality and literality of the everyday.

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TSCHERKASSKY, ROBINSON, OREILLY: THREE PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIUM AND ITS MEANINGS

By Alejandro Bachmann and Daniel Fitzpatrick

Three domestic scenes tie together three seemingly diverse films. In the first, from Peter Tscherkassky’s 1999 found-footage masterpiece Outer Space, a woman (Barbara Hershey) walks alone, we see her entering a building, presumably her home. In the second, Michael Robinson’s Light is Waiting (2007), two sisters argue (in footage pulled from an episode of the US sitcom Full House), they are discussing what to watch, the evening news or the Top 40 countdown. In both instances, both scenes, these characters will encounter and be impacted upon by external forces, the security of their diegetic worlds invaded by non-diegetic elements usually kept under wraps. In both of these cases, we witness a striking and disturbing folding in of inner and outer space and, in each case, we are brought face to face with the nature of a medium while simultaneously experiencing its undoing, its destructive collapse.

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SOME THINGS ARE AND SOME THINGS NOT: THE TALES OF HOFFMANN

By Victor Bruno

The Tales of Hoffmann are a masterpiece of the representation of feelings. You don’t notice it while you’re watching the film, but you can taste it. The music is not pleasant—it is infernal, it hurts the ear, because it is E.T.A. Hoffmann opening his heart and showing us the wounds that mistaken loves and sad affairs gave him.

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PSYCHO BY ALFRED HITCHCOCK

By Claudia Siefen

Psycho (1960) by Alfred Hitchcock is full of those mirroring scenes and is packed with that sort of communication between the actor and the camera. The audience is kept busy to seperate these two ways of looking at … yourself. Robert Bloch, the author of the original novel “Psycho“ (1959), nourished the rumour that he found inspiration for the character Norman Bates in a mutual acquaintance: Calvin Beck was a magazine publisher and editor whose mother rarely left his side and even monitored classes at college with him. His mom continued to check on him, and Beck also beared a passing resemblance to the original Norman Bates Bloch describes in his novel: fat, greasy, with a soft, hesitant voice, “unhealthy looking.”

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