‘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.
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.
In recent decades, there’s been growing attention to territorially marginal land(scape) and inhabitants therein in documentary filmmaking practice responding to acutely arising awareness of ecology of preserved or autochthonous habitats in ways of pursuing sustainable and ethical ways of living together.
With the advent of new technologies, there are clearly more and more artists who are experimenting with the emergent possibilities. TENT is relatively a new open-space in Calcutta, INDIA, that came into being starting December 2012 and since then is calling out to artists willing to plunge into this new prospect and expand the meaning of existing art practices by transgressing the boundaries. where perhaps the amateur, reckless and even the madcap will produce the new drift of art.
Something begins to crackle – sexual tension has already altered the so much established order of things. Those things don’t get any better when Barrett’s alleged sister, Vera (Sarah Miles) moves in and seduces Tony who will then find her in bed with his alleged brother. But Vera and Barrett are just lovers. Disconcerted, Tony fires Barrett on the spot only to accept him back a while later – not as his servant any longer. After having first upset and then demolished the social and sexual divisions Tony and Susan hid behind, Barrett now seems to be the master of the house.
Richard Leacock shot the multi-part interview film A Conversation with Louise Brooks in March 1974 in Rochester for the german TV station “Norddeutscher Rundfunk“, which was broadcasted at the time together with Pandora’s Box and mainly contained Brooks’ memories of G. W. Pabst. It is one of a total of three Brooks interview films and, according to Brooks’ own statement, it was the one that gave her the greatest pleasure.
A time may come when the films and pictures which we admire today will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets, thinkers and filmmakers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases. But since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.
The films by independent filmmaker Goh HARADA present both narrative and experimental cinema. They are equally accessible to audiences interested in practice and theory alike. HARADA does not focus on people as privileged actors or performers, but rather on the emotional network of relationships between the elements “technology” and “physical living worlds”.
Unpacking Guli Silberstein’s Never twice the same color, a portrait of his life in New York prior to 9/11, is a daunting task. Previous to this documentary, Silberstein had already created a body of work leaning quite a lot to the political spectrum, specially in his remarkable shorts Cry havoc (2017) and Stuff as dreams (2016) where the resource of glitch media and noise (much abused gimmicks in contemporary moving image but proper tools of emphasis in Silberstein’s hands) is used as a testimony of the fragility of the image, as document and memory.
In Dennis Cooper’s world, kids are like the special herds – the group of quiet and strange animals whose gaze and intensity for their undisguised desire and dream captivate us. Perhaps like any other iGen kids, they also would talk through the screen, exchange freaky teenage vernaculars, and shift around fantasies of drug, sex, and every little evil imaginable in the wi-fi world. Cooper doesn’t negate it. Rather, at its heart, he casts the figures of their dreamlike collapse and memory by carefully observing and embodying their singular desire, obsession, and fascination, through his artistic means – recently, cinema crucial to his continuing creativity.
Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series of Flat Is Beautiful: The Strange Case of Pixelvision (August 10 – 16, 2018) surveys the American independent movies that have channeled the toy camcorder PXL 2000’s obsolescent media specificities into the affinities with the low-res materiality of the unexplored desire, flesh, and historicity of the ’90s America and beyond.
