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PETER WHITEHEAD: REVOLUTION, REVELATION – PINK FLOYD LONDON 1966-1967

By Lu Juejing

Initially led by guitarist Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd is one of the most popular band of the London underground psychedelic scene. It is famous for being one of the first to use the psychedelic strobe lights screened during their concerts. The dramatization of their performances combine spectacular visual effects and music during the entire performance. They often play live at the UFO Club, which is the most prestigious club of the moment for the musical scene in London. They are also invited to “The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream” in 1967 at the Alexandra Palace of London, with many other artists (such as Yoko Ono, Mick Horovitz, Alex Trocchi, the dancer David Medalla and his band The Exploding Galaxy Dance Troupe, etc…) as well as many other psychedelic shows.

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2014.07.11
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EMBRACING BY NAOMI KAWASE

By Adrian Martin

The film by Kawase that I saw on that memorable day in 1994 is 40 minutes long. Along with all the ephemeral details of places, of tokens, of captured images and stolen sounds – and of her own shadow – there is a subject, intensely personal and intimate to the filmmaker: it is her search for the father who abandoned her when she was very young.

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2014.07.10
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SHAKING TRACKS: THE DOCUMENTARY WAYS IN THE WORK OF KORE-EDA HIROKAZU

By Claudia Siefen

From his early works he adopted the aesthetics of the unobserved, the genuine. In these actions that appeared to be natural Kore-eda brought his observations to the boiler, every movement and every word, sharpening the vision of the eye for the film setting at the same time. But he also is constantly questioning everything we are shown on the big screen. Because everything that we see is only “everything“ that the director allows us to see. There is a blankspace between everything that is shown and the observation itself.

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2014.07.08
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ON Hi-8/DIGITAL AND THE INTIMATE: THE FILM DIARIES OF ALAIN CAVALIER

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

When we watch the first minutes of La Recontre (1996), it seems that we’re confronted with a revolution: digital cinema has merged with the home movie, and they both have reached a new narrative language in which the immediate recollection of images through the analogue system provides the filmmaker with the immediacy and urgency of what needs to be captured.

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2014.07.08
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A REAL DEAD RINGER FOR LOVE. VIDEO FOOL FOR LOVE

By Adrian Martin

Video Fool For Love is constructed from a video diary. We are told that, for ten years, Gibson carried around a compact video camera and filmed everything happening to him and around him – conversations, travels, car rides, sex, arguments: a lot of juicy, action-packed stuff. Most of the ten years fly by in a flash at the start, until we settle into the complications of a particularly difficult love triangle, when Robert is in his early 40s. First, there’s Robert and his troubled lover April, who flies off to stay in England. While she’s gone, Robert meets Gianna and they begin a wild relationship.

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2014.07.08
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DIALOGUE WITH A WOMAN DEPARTED BY LEO HURWITZ

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Dialogue With a Woman Departed is a monumental film. In the ever mutating genre of the film diary, the love letter of Leo Hurwitz, American blacklisted documentary filmmaker, to his former wife, Peggy Lawson, takes the form of a four hour love poem in which the filmmaker creates not a diary of himself, but that of his deceased wife, bringing her back to life in spirit through long footage of the depression, World War II, and other world events. It’s not much a portrait of his long life partner, but an homage to her spirit, their shared views of the world, their undying relation. Hurwitz also brings his wife back to life, gives her a voice, a presence in the film, a ghostly sensation that leaks through the celluloid and takes shelter in the images of a world in crisis. For the filmmaker, evoking the memory of his wife is a way of reaffirmation of his convictions, his own particular gaze on his surroundings, both filled with beauty and terror.

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2014.07.08
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NEARSIGHT BY SAUL LEVINE

by José Sarmiento Hinojosa

What if the elements of memory and the subject matter of desire could be condensed in a permanent register of something that slips memory but has inevitably left a permanent watermark in our conscience? To carry a film journal would be a most welcome task, a vital activity where the initial pulsations of the most basic instincts of mankind would be recorded: love, desire, passion, death. Saul Levine, one would say, is one of many filmmakers that have traversed this path of recollection of memories in film, but what seems so particular in his style of experimental filmmaking is the sudden familiarity one reaches before the screen when watching several of his films. Levine’s oeuvre, in this narrative of the glimpses, surrounds us with the warmth of the memory that persists deep in our mind, evoking a plethora of emotions and sensations, an accomplished work if there’s any.

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2014.07.08
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DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY BY JIM MCBRIDE

By Adrian Martin

In his early twenties, on a staggeringly small budget of $2,500, Jim McBride began making David Holzman’s Diary from three ideas: the central image of a man filming himself in a mirror; the banality of daily life and its rendering on screen; the oppressiveness of life in New York and how it affects people’s perceptions of themselves and others.

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2014.07.08
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THE RECONCILIATION: TWO FILMS BY JEAN-MARIE STRAUB

By Victor Bruno

I have chosen two films by Jean-Marie Straub to make talk about: Le genou d’Artémide and Le streghe, femmes entre elles. With this piece I have no intention other than just talk about the moment someone has a snap and notices that sometime this person will die. And when you die, you are immortal, because you turn to be a living matter in the memory of those who you knew and lived with. If this seems to be too substantial and has no contact whatsoever with Straub’s work or cinema as a whole… well, if you’re thinking that way, it’s time to reconsider the very concept of cinema.

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2014.07.07
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DIGITAL DISRUPTION: LOCATING TRUTH AND INTIMACY IN THE WORKFLOW

By Tara Judah

I’d like to talk about two new works, screened as part of an impressive experimental shorts program, ‘Digital Dilemma’, at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival: Eva von Schweinitz’s A Film is a Film is a Film (2013) and Russell Sheaffer’s Acetate Diary (2013). Both use the film diary structure as a framework through which to explore and reveal the filmmaker’s own relationship to film. And though both von Schweinitz and Sheaffer use the medium’s materiality to create their art, their final works are subject to what we might think of as a type of ‘digital disruption’ to the workflow, having been transferred onto and screened as digital files.

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2014.07.06