DIALOGUE

Une certaine histoire du cinéma expérimental français

Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

I Have No Memory of My Direction

Ostensibly searching for an emotional connection with her aging father, the woman contemplates her own inherited culture and familial touchstones. Her North American pop culture sensibility fuses with a distorted Japanese perspective to create a surreal interpretation of a “Japan of the imagination.” This fictional landscape is peppered with invented Japanese myths, ruminations on memory loss, the temporal space of digital photography and the ghosts of inherited imagination.

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One of the major works by South Korean feminist film collective Kaidu Club, this short is a dynamic, idiosyncratic, and mosaic-like portrait of Korean life, culture, and people who dream of a unified North and South.

The Five Obstructions

Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules.

Alex & José

Alex and José, is a 16mm single channel projection that explores gender, movement and form.

Sites Unseen

Sites Unseen is a 3 channel 16mm projection of the Jewish cemetary in Warsaw, a photograph of a great Aunt who died in Treblinka, and my late grandmother eating her morning cornflakes.

We At Her

A story about a woman descending into mental illness.

Robert Breer At Home

Burford met Breer in February 1992 and filmed his actions. Breer manipulates some of his mutoscopes: he leafs through some cards of his film in the making, Sparkill Ave! A dome-shaped sculpture slowly moves across the space.

Minot, North Dakota

The town Minot is home to a U.S. Air Force base that guards 150 nuclear missiles buried in northern North Dakota. The weapons of mass destruction placed there 50 years ago are still targeted at Russia. Minot, North Dakota portrays an American landscape where people live with nuclear bombs in their backyard.

Chinese Viola

The rare short film presents a curious dialogue between filmmaker Julio Bressane and actor Grande Otelo, where, in a mixture of decorated and improvised text, we discover a little manifesto to the Brazilian experimental cinema. Also called "Belair's last film," Chinese Viola reveals the first partnership between photographer Walter Carvalho and Bressane.

Homo Paradoksum I

An experimental film about life on earth as a cosmic experiment and the curiosity and naivete of reaching out to alien life.

Untitled #1

A young girl’s fiery dance, accidentally caught on 16 mm film in the street. The viewer is confronted by the sacrificial and the passionate, the strong and the fragile, the fleeting and the eternal. These are the faces of femininity.

Tree of Knowledge

It started with filming the tree. Something was released in that manner of filming seemingly farthest removed from the procedure of the early films. I first thought a simple ordering of this rich material might be enough, something related to BARN RUSHES [...] But the film only came into its form-life with the idea of linking this deep-rooted and far-outreaching tree material with that film on paranoia that had fascinated me for many years. –L. G.

Machete Gillette... Mama

"With characteristic wit and rigor, experimental filmmaker Larry Gottheim here applies his impressionistic editing style to footage collected during his travels in the Dominican Republic. Gottheim’s formal emphasis on repetition and fissures between sound and image resonates here as a mode of sociological reflection (with the fragmentary montage mirroring elements of ritual while also destabilizing the ethnographic gaze). A largely overlooked antecedent to the contemporary blending of avant-garde and ethnographic filmmaking, MACHETTE GILLETTE… MAMA still poses a potent challenge to documentary convention." - Max Goldberg

Puenting (Leap of Faith)

A first feature based on sexual events. An actress undertakes her desire of directing her first movie, without a budget or any production company funding her project. She gathers a group of professional actors and actresses, and proposes a project based on a very particular experience: stepping on their fears through a metaphorical 'leap of faith'. As the project advances, individual conflicts will arise affecting the shoot, making the movie crew wonder whether or not they should go on. Will they take the leap of faith with all its consequences?

Untitled #29.95

Originally produced anonymously and distributed by RTMark, Untitled #29.95 tells the story of the commercial art establishment's attempt to turn video art into a precious commodified object through the release of limited editions during the nineties.

Letter in Motion to Gilles Jacob and Thierry Fremaux

Rather than writing a simple letter to explain his absence from the press conference for his latest Cannes entry, "Goodbye to Language," at the Cannes Film Festival, instead, legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard created a video "Letter in motion to (Cannes president) Gilles Jacob and (artistic director) Thierry Fremaux." The video intercuts from Godard speaking cryptically about his "path" to key scenes from Godard classics such as "Alphaville" and "King Lear" with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald, and quotes poet Jacques Prevert and philosopher Hannah Arendt.