Film Categories: art & artists

  • Adagio

    Music as sensuous and longing as a fragrance. Phrases that rise and fall slowly at first, then more and more passionately. A love poem. And also a study of the relation between film phrases and musical phrases. As in the music, the film uses only fades and dissolves between statements. Based on Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.”

  • Politics of Perception, The

    Selected for the 11th Paris Biennale of Modern Art and included in the collection of numerous museums and universities, “The Politics of Perception” is a film essay concerned with the language of the film medium. At its point of departure, it is a meditation on the images, sounds, rhythm and sub-text of the “entertainment” film. A Hollywood discourse is stripped of its fleshly covering to reveal the mechanics of its manipulations, at the same time liberating the kinematic and photochemical energies “trapped” in its representational content/form. At its apogee it is an invocation of the forms and textures of film…

  • Portrait of Lydia

    The emotional life of a young art student is expressed in Freudian terms through a succession of images and symbols, constantly combining themselves into famous paintings and sculptures. A barrage of images that tell different stories to different viewers.

  • Potters at Work

    In Japan, a man works with his sons and apprentices fashioning pots. A woman scoops off water from a clay settling tank while another lifts out heavy, wet handfuls of clay. An ancient brick kiln is walled up at night. Working with understanding and affection, refusing such aids as commentary and music, th filmmaker, creating from the pattern of the potter’s work, shows precisely how pots are crafted and has captured a vision of creativity radically different from western concepts of art-making.

  • Presence, The

    “The Presence” reflects some sight of Insect as Being. The imagined aura and environment of a beetle creates a “world” wherein this solitary insect may simply be seen.

  • Presents

    “The apparent vertical scratch in celluloid that opens ‘Presents’ literally opens into a film within the film. When its figures awakens into a woman in a ‘real’ set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the whole set, in this first of three material ‘investigations’ of camera movement. In the second, the camera literally invades the set; a Plexiglas sheet in front of the dolly crushes everything in its sight as it zooms through space. Finally, this monster of formalism pushes through the wall of the set and the film cuts to…

  • Priceville Prints

    “Priceville Prints” is a video about collaborative printmaking. Taped at Otis Tamasauskas’ Priceville Ontario studio, the video records the interaction between the printmaker Tamasaukas and the painters Robert Markle and Harold Klunder. The artists are followed through the various procedures of lithography and etching while Tamasauskas discusses and considers with the artists the possibilities and consequences of the media and its techniques. The artists speak about their attitudes to their art in general, their attitude toward printmaking and engage in a critical discussion about the products of the printmaking session. This is not a “how to” video. The video communicates…

  • <---> (Back and Forth)

    “… his sternest film, titled with a sign for back and forth motion. A specially rigged camera swings right-left, left-right, before a homely, sterile classroom wall, then accelerates into an unbearable blur (the same frenzied scramble, as though the whole creative process was going berserk, that occurs three quarters of the way through ‘Abbey Road’)… In such a hard, drilling work, the wooden clap sounds are a terrific invention and, as much as any single element, created the sculpture. Seeming to thrust the image off the screen, these clap effects are timed like a metronome, sometimes occurring with torrential frequency.”…

  • Process, The

    LIGHT was primary in my consideration. All senses of “process” are (to me) based primarily on “thought-process”; and “thought-process” is based primarily on “memory re-call”; and that, as any memory process (all process finally) is electrical (firing of nerve connection) and expresses itself most clearly as a “back-firing” of nerve endings in the eye which DO become visible to us (usually eyes closed) as “brain movies” – as Michael McClure calls them. When we are not re-constructing “ a scene” (recalling something once seen), then we are watching (on the “screen” of closed eye-lids) the very PROCESS itself. (SB)

  • Puamana

    Aloha! This gentle portrait of Auntie Irmgard Farden Aluli, one of Hawaii’s best-loved composers, focuses on Hawaiian women’s contributions to family structure, art, music and dance. An intimate glimpse into the real culture of the islands.