Film Categories: art & artists

  • Région Centrale, La

    “This new, three-hour film by the Canadian Michael Snow, is an extraordinary cinematic monument. No physical action, not even the presence of man, a fabulous game with nature and machine which puts into question our perceptions, our mental habits, and in many respects renders moribund existing cinema: the latest Fellini, Kubrick, Buñuel etc. “For ‘La Region Centrale,’ Snow had a special camera apparatus constructed by a technician in Montreal, an apparatus capable of moving in all directions: horizontally, vertically, laterally or in a spiral. The film is one continuous movement across space, intercutting occasionally the X serving as a point…

  • Relativity

    A man wonders, measures, views relationships, people, places, things, time, himself. A sensual journey through a series of subjective reflections. “The artist’s search for meaning of his own existence is never-ending and takes many forms. Ed Emshwiller’s remarkable epic, ‘Relativity,’ continues this exploration with extraordinary frankess and rare technical skill.” – Willard Van Dyke

  • Rembrandt, Etc. and Jane

    Here are four films, the interrelationship of which constitutes a complex quarto-thought-process: Not that the four sets-of-thinking are “parallel” in any sense, or that themes of each film inter-weave meaningfully in the three others, but rather as four “mobiles,” each seen separately, might be remembered as turning all at one in the same space without interfering with each other. (SB)

  • Return to Departure: The Biography of a Painting – Or Watching Paint Dry and Other Realisms

    “This innovative feature documentary deals with both painting and documentary filmmaking as fictional processes. While the camera records, in extreme close-up, the chronological development of the super-realist painting, ‘Return to Departure,’ a multi-level asynchronous soundtrack builds up a parallel sound portrait of the (unseen) artist at work – a rambling, cheerfully free-associating monologue interspersed with radio music, children’s voice, telephone interruptions. “Gradually, we see more and more of the surface of the painting and of the working artist; beautifully shot and manipulated footage conveys the mixing of pigments, minute accumulation of figurative detail, endless compromises between vision and canvas. By…

  • Riddle of Lumen, The

    The classical riddle was meant to be heard, of course. Its answers are contained within its questions; and on the smallest piece of itself this possibility depends upon SOUND – “utterly” like they say…the pun its pivot. Therefore, my “Riddle of Lumen” depends upon qualities of LIGHT. All films do, of course. But with “The Riddle of Lumen,” the “hero” of the film is light/itself. It is a film I’d long wanted to make – inspired by the sense, and specific formal possibilities, of the classical English language riddle… only appropriate to film and, thus, as distinct from language as…

  • ROM (Royal Ontario Museum)

    Objects on display at the museum are viewed, initially by a constantly moving camera that never fixes on anything for long. In the latter half of the film the camera continues to move, but concentrates on a specific artifact. Two kinds of scanning.

  • Roman Numeral Series l

    The Roman Numerals are nine films, commonly described as “abstract,” which explore the possibilities of making equivalents of “moving visual thinking” – that pre-language, pre-picture realm of the mind which provides the physical grounds for image making (imagination). Thus the very substance of the birth of imagery. (SB)

  • Roman Numeral Series ll

    The Roman Numerals are nine films, commonly described as “abstract,” which explore the possibilities of making equivalents of “moving visual thinking” – that pre-language, pre-picture realm of the mind which provides the physical grounds for image making (imagination). Thus the very substance of the birth of imagery. (SB)

  • Roman Numeral Series lll

    The third in this series of Imagnostic Films seems particularly magic to me in as much as I cannot even remember the photographic source of these images or, thus, of having taken them. (SB)

  • Roman Numeral Series lV

    The Roman Numerals are nine films, commonly described as “abstract,” which explore the possibilities of making equivalents of “moving visual thinking” – that pre-language, pre-picture realm of the mind which provides the physical grounds for image making (imagination). Thus the very substance of the birth of imagery. (SB)