Experimental Film

WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS, 2/13/01

Here are a few of the articles in my Instapaper this week. At Bad Lit, Mike Everleth has his usual excellent selection of Underground Film Links, including this link to “Foreign Cinema: Whither San Francisco’s Experimental Film Legacy,” by Kimberly Chun at the Bold Italic. She visits Canyon Cinema and and various local filmmakers, looking for scene described in the Pacific Film Archive’s first book, Radical Light. Chuck Tryon watches (and likes) The Fighter with his Massachusetts-born fiance and notes the reference to the documentary High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell: A look back at the documentary shows […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 13, 2011
TORONTO: ON ELEPHANTS, VIOLINS AND TATTOOS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DOUGLAS GORDON

Have you ever seen an elephant lie down? This question provoked Scottish artist Douglas Gordon to create Play Dead; Real Time, a giant, startling multiple projection depicting just that. Timeline, a beautiful Gordon exhibition the Museum of Modern Art in 2007 that included the piece, was a triumph not only with art enthusiasts but with cinephiles as well, and Gordon regularly walks the line between these two worlds. In addition to his successful art career and installation pieces, he has made two feature films: Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) and a new work, k.364 A Journey by Train (2010). […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 14, 2010
“DEAR DIARY” — TORONTO’S WAVELENGTHS 6: FLASH POINT CAMERA

In a personal touch, all the filmmakers whose work was showcased in the sixth and final Wavelengths program were present for their screening. German director Ute Aurand presented a reverie on her childhood and family called Snowing Chestnut Blossoms, while American Jim Jennings, apparently a neighbor of mine in Brooklyn, showed a collection of images in Greenpoint that not only documented the quirky, spunky personality of that environ but also reminded me of two pair of boots in that little shoe repair shop with the orange-awning that are just about ready to be picked up.Coleen Fitzgibbon’s FM/TRCS (1974) is an […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 20, 2009
“GHOST STORIES” — TORONTO’S WAVELENGTHS 5: UNE CATASTROPHE

Glowing phantoms of days and films past haunted the fifth Wavelengths avant-garde film program at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, a series of meditations in which, as film programmer Andréa Picard described, “personal expressions of historical and collective memory confront spectres from the past.” Une Catastrophe (pictured), Jean-Luc Godard’s trailer for the Viennale is a companion piece of sorts to the Alonso BIFICI trailer that screened the night before. At once forward-looking and nostalgic (it excerpts and pays homage to Sergei Eistenstein‘s Battleship Potemkin, among other films) Godard’s piece is happily available online here. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Thai director […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 19, 2009
“BRICK WORK” — TORONTO’S WAVELENGTHS 4: IN COMPARISON

Ironically, a strange, brilliant one-minute trailer for the Buenos Aires Festival International de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) by Argentine director Lisandro Alonso opened the fourth Wavelengths program of avant-garde cinema at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the piece, officially titled S/T (pictured above), an unblinking owl stared in luxuriously saturated color, while pounding drums created a masterful musical score. The work was being asked to function not primarily as advertising but as cinema — and experimental art cinema at that. S/T was followed by In Comparison, a 16mm film by accomplished filmmaker and installation artist Harun Farocki. Born in the […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 16, 2009
“PARTICIPATORY ETHNOGRAPHY” — TORONTO’S WAVELENGTHS 3: LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY

A pair of bare feet was wedged though the gap between seats in front of me, ankles casually crossed and toes silhouetted against the screen, for Let Each One Go Where He May, the third experimental Wavelengths program at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. The screening was devoted to the World Premiere of a single 135-minute 16mm work by American filmmaker Ben Russell?. The film has no translated dialogue and no traditional narrative. It is made up of ten 13-minute shots of two men walking and is described by programmer Andréa Picard as an “intervention” into culture and landscape. This […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 15, 2009
“GOING GREEN” – TORONTO’S WAVELENGTHS 2: PRO AGRI

Plastic bags cost $.05 here in Toronto this year, a determinedly “pro-agri” city if ever there was one. In the second Wavelengths program, five directors explored themes of, in, and around the natural world. A sputtering soundtrack accompanied a tiny, spunky film, Lumphini by Thai director Tomonari Nishikawa, a speedy, black-and-white collection of still photographs documenting trees, plants, and leaves from a 140-acre Bangkok park in on gorgeous 35mm. In Cordão Verde (Green Belt, pictured above), Hiroatsu Suzuki and Rossana Torres document the pastoral Portugal countryside, while in Tamalpais, Canadian filmmaker Chris Kennedy uses a draughtsman’s landscape grid to break […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 15, 2009
“IT’S ALL ABOUT WAVES” — TORONTO’S WAVELENGTHS 1: TITANS

The first 2009 Wavelengths Program (or Programme, as the Canadians say) was held at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). It’s a sophisticated building, one that spent years shrouded in mystery and scaffolding, and has only just revealed its new Gehry glory. Organized this year by talented film programmer Andréa Picard, Wavelengths is an annual extensive program of avant-garde cinema that is screened in six parts during the course of the Toronto International Film Festival. The Festival’s first installment, titled Titans, was an artful collection of films that that varied widely in technique, from an architectural piece by Heinz Emigholz […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 12, 2009

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