In Knives and Skin, american filmmaker Jennifer Reeder returns to the motifs of several of her short films, that from some years now share a trademark of rarefied atmospheres, neon and glitter, to embody feminine adolescent universes. If in the remarkable A Million Miles Away (U.S., 2014), it’s a song from Judas Priest, You’ve got another thing coming, that becomes the reverse of the usual adolescent angst (in the voices of a choir class in a public school), here in her most recent feature, some eighties’ songs from New Order, Modern English or Naked Eyes acquire also the inner dimension of dissatisfaction or strangeness.
Scattered in seemingly random order, on the screen, we see the light that traverses the “kinetic fields” of Bill Brand’s latest film August Garden. Made for a group exhibition at Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre (Paris), the film accompanies a series of flower ink paintings, carefully made by the artist. Before, in the first seconds, we’re able to see an animation of August Garden 07 (ink and watercolor on xuan paper, 9″ x13″, 2019), which titillates lively for brief moments.
The Upper Austrian farmer and sacristan Franz Jägerstätter refused military service in 1943 on religious grounds. He was sentenced to death for “decomposition of military strength” and executed on 9 August 1943. The groundbreaking television film, Der Fall Jägerstätter / The Jaegerstaetter Case (1972) from Axel Corti, is a rare attempt at exploring dissident life in Austria during the Third Reich.
Geetha J’s debut feature-length film, a Malayalam film premiered at the Kolkata International Film Festival, is an Indian film that merits a wide international audience precisely for its ability to reveal multiple layers of social reality within a tightly structured and delightfully innovative form.
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?
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, again accompanied by experts -like marine biologists in the past-, in this case, members of the Natural History Society, who occupy the land and study the native insects.
“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.
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.
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.
-“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).
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.
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.
