A playful, free, and personal film in the form of a letter, a film interwoven with a thousand stories knit together with different textures, a book of images where a filmmaker shows the images and the stories he wants to share.
This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."
This film was broadcast on La Sept in October 1990 as a part of Hélène Mochiri's Cinéma de poche program devoted to Soviet cinema. The documentary was produced in-house at La Sept and based on an exclusive interview with Alexei Guerman in May of that year. It has not been seen since.
American Movie documents the story of filmmaker Mark Borchardt, his mission, and his dream. Spanning over two years of intense struggle with his film, his family, financial decline, and spiritual crisis, American Movie is a portrayal of ambition, obsession, excess, and one man's quest for the American Dream.
From the re-appropriation of archive images with various contents (war images, soccer matches, social celebrations, religious rites, historical characters, etc.) and from different sources (including films by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Leni Riefenstahl or Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi, as well as images from ads and news...), together with reflections of Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt, Stanley Milgram, Eric Hobsbawn, Amin Maalouf, Josep Fontana, etc., Zavan Films producer develops this complex and kaleidoscopic work on (national, religious, commercial...) identities and their relation with war, economic profit and "legal crimes".
A strange story from Somerset, England about a filmmaking farmer and the inspiring legacy of his long-lost home movies.
An eight-hour contemplative epic, entirely starring sheep.
A small portrait of the volatility of intimacy and of breaking free from abusive cycles: made in response to a year of collapsing relationships and violent accidents that left me broken, dislocated and stuck in my apartment.
The reception ebbs and flows as the unfamiliar landscape whirls by the window of a plane or train or car. Communication is delayed, fragmented, interrupted. Memories of a distant country.
In this animated documentary, Los Angeles filmmaker Dion Labriola recounts his all-consuming childhood quest to contact his teen idol, Ike Eisenmann - and the magical turn of events that led him toward his goal (some 40 years later).
Short experimental 16mm film.
An experimental film about that one hypnotic moment on a regular, unassuming Tuesday when one realizes that time has stopped and the universe has been sucked into a single smile.
For us, a thought always presupposes a society, a culture and above all the consciousness of time. We are haunted by immortality, human notion par excellence. As if the world was here to fascinate us. And to disappoint us. The film travels around the bulb like the Earth around the Sun. Light makes the film visible. A fragile film, like our existence. In the orbit of the film tragedy and our reality, the image resists the cruelty of the experiment.
'The angle of the world allows us to see the real as an outer and inner presence at the same time, an opaque otherness, yet capable of becoming an intimate space. These incommensurable lengths and distances of an interior that opens up: The mysterious movement of the clouds, the cadence of the waves against the light, or the silent slippage of a barely identifiable human silhouette, everything seems transfigured, derealized and reinvented by light in a poetic world that evokes the paintings of Turner or Friedrich, the writings of Poe or Baudelaire.’ — Violeta Salvatierra
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
This is a film made in Toronto, in memoriam, so to speak - a memory piece, a "piecing-together" of the experience of living there. The consciousness of the maker comes to sharply focused visual music - not to arrive at snapshots, as such, but rather to "sing" the city as remembered from daily living...complementary, then, to an earlier film, "Unconscious London Strata." Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015.
Pun on "light" intended - that short preceding expulsion of breath perhaps the "subject matter" of this film which centers in consideration of death. It is the third tone poem film and did much surprise me by thus completing a trilogy of the "4 classical Elements." (SB)
After a six -or seven- year study of Hammurabi's Code, original Babylonian Text and translation, I've tried to feel my way into the moving visual thought process of this ancient culture (whose numerical system is composed primarily of building materials, nails, joints and the like): this, then, is a visual music which balances the two thought processes of Structure and Nature.
Out of the vagueries of sometime beseeming repetitive light patterns, and the delicately variable rhythms of thought process, the imagination of The Monumental and of the Ephemeral are born to mind hard as nails.
