Our favourite films of 2014: Editorial commitee, staff, friends and filmmakers. Nicole Brenez Film Critic- France Editorial Committee -Desistfilm The most crucial filmic endeavour since
Our best experimental short films of 2014. From our tally.
By Michael Guarneri
After From What is Before (2014), a personal recollection of «political cataclysm» Martial Law hitting the Philippines in the early Seventies, Lav Diaz’s new effort Storm Children – Book One tackles natural cataclysm «Yolanda», the tropical cyclone that struck the archipelago in November 2013, leaving thousands of victims and damage to the value of several billion pesos.
Julian Ross, Staff Writer at Desistfilm, sat down with two members of Sonic Acts, Lucas van der Velden and Gideon Kiers, to discuss screen formats, scale and the limitations they seek to conquer curating moving image media. The conversation continued with Japanese filmmaker Takashi Makino, with whom Lucas and Gideon collaborated for the film Deorbit (2013) as members of the Dutch media art group Telcosystems.
By Tara Judah
Robinson, a fictional man we never see, is studying – or perhaps sleuthing –London. We presume the images presented to be his visual documentation, though they might have materialised from the mysterious cognition of our own imagination. Though Robinson is not present, he is not missing either. Our narrator (Paul Scofield) is a companion to Robinson, though it has been years since they saw each other last. And though our nameless narrator speaks the words written by filmmaker Patrick Keiller, he too might be a materialisation of our imagination.
By Tara Judah
Our narrator (Paul Scofield) returns. Pairing himself once more with Robinson, this time commissioned to study (or sleuth) England, the examination of space moves ever so slightly from the psychogeographic to the ideological.
By Tara Judah
Contemporary issues like the global financial crisis and climate change have begged for another round of Robinson’s sleuthing; another essay articulate beyond its years from his companion, our narrator. Something to unpack as the next decade tattoos itself onto the landscape.
But Robinson is defeated.
By Lauren Bliss
Mad Max is a dystopian road movie. Set in the open, dull plains of rural Victoria in southern Australia Max is a member of a special police force “Main Force Patrol” employed to stop out of control feral gangs that have taken the highway hostage. At war against the pursuit of the police, the ferals set their sights on Max’s idyllic wife and baby son. The gang find their revenge and tragedy strikes for Max: his wife and son are killed when run over by the motor-bike gang. His life now sacrificed to the road, mad Max methodically hunts down the destroyers of his family.
By Joe McElhaney
While I do not wish to make a case that Morrissey is a filmmaker on the same level as Warhol, and remaining mindful of major differences between these two artists, Morrissey’s work is nevertheless of some importance and demands to be reckoned with. Few of his films offer possibilities for such a reckoning as Mixed Blood and for reasons very much bound up with the historical moment in which the film was made.
By Lauren Bliss
Wetlands lets the abject speak for the body. A film based on the best-selling autobiography of the same title by Charlotte Roche, it tells the coming-of-age of Helen (Carla Juri) who (in her words) makes her genitals a ‘living experiment’. Believing that the world is too obsessed with hygiene, Helen undertakes a series of grotesque encounters, in public toilets, with random strangers, and with foreign objects (vegetables). Much of the film is comprised of her placing her fingers into her various orifices and tasting whatever comes out. The pure disgust is slicked over with a pop sensibility, this is clearly a film marketed to teenage girls (if Bend It Like Beckham with a major case of gastro-enteritis can possibly provide a new angle into the heavily saturated teen movie market). Helen’s wayward, pubescent journey from childhood into the adult unknown is explored through a commercial aesthetic, the film’s rapid cuts, use of pop music, and heavily scripted one-liners forming a glossy ensemble that ensure cult potential.
Director: Mónica Delgado Ch.
ISSN 2311-7451
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