Film Categories: Literary/theatre

  • Landscape Suicide

    “In ‘Landscape Suicide’ Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning’s distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. “Benning has created a script which…

  • Layton Symphony

    The film conjures up images and sounds of Canadian poet Irving Layton through various media sources. The subject is the image of Layton and the surface of the film image. The footage was optically printed and hand-processed. “I find these images disturbing; I see my own death in them.” – Irving Layton

  • Lives of Performers

    “Lives of Performers” unfolds in roughly fourteen episodes, each characterized by a different cinematic treatment of the real and fictional aspects of Rainer’s role of director and choreographer and of the performers’ roles during the making of previous work and the film itself. The first section is edited footage of an actual rehearsal of “Walk, She Said” for a live performance at the Whitney Museum. The second section shows photographic documentation of a theatrical work from 1971 called “Grand Union Dreams,” while the voice over narration describes the content of the photos and the changing intimacies of the performers, fictional…

  • Man Who Could Not See Far Enough, The

    “The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough” uses literary, structural, autobiographical and performance metaphors to construct a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the limits of perception and the rapture of space. Spectacular moving multiple images; a physical, almost choreographic sense of camera movement; and massive, resonant sound have inspired critics to call it “stunning” and “hallucinatory.” The film ranges in subject from a solar eclipse shot off the coast of Africa to a hand-held filmed ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge, and moves, in spirit, from the deeply personal to the mythic. “…miraculous… charged with…

  • Myth of Sisyphus, The

    In the language of collage, this experimental animation film is a visual interpretation of a story by Albert Camus. It concentrates on that moment when Sisyphus watches his rock fall. “At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning to his rock, in that slight pivoting, he contemplates that the series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under the memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has…

  • No Mime Game

    An effective mime-skit showing the perils of drinking and driving. A mixture of mime, camera work, and special effects prepares us to expect the inevitable crash. An excellent film for use in driver and health education or dramatic arts classes.

  • October Stranger

    “October Stranger” is a highly acclaimed drama about a young Ojibway Indian who must leave his youth behind on the reserve in Northern Ontario in order to pursue his writing career. It is a thoughful and gentle love story, full of fine poetry. Beautifully photographed on location near Sioux Lookout, it reveals modern life on the reserve with a rare depth and respect, as the old ways and the new come to terms with one another. It is the story of an artist finding his voice, and of a native gathering the courage to go “south” to the city.

  • On the Marriage Broker Joke

    “‘On the Marriage Broker Joke’… turns upon an opposition of Freudian analysis and Christian hermeneutics… Two pandas, who exist only because of a textual error, run a shell game for the viewer in an environment with false perspectives. They posit the existence of various films and characters, one of which is interpreted by an academic as containing religious symbolism. Sigmund Freud’s own explanation is given by a sleeper awakened by an alarm clock.” – P. Adams Sitney

  • One Woman Waiting

    “One Woman Waiting” evokes questions of subjectivity in the mirrored performance of two women. The single take, tableau composition forms the structure for catalytic change between the characters. The sensuous desert environment accentuates the poetic and ephemeral quality of this film. “Massarella uses the fixed camera shot in her enigmatic film of a symbolic encounter between two women in a beautifully shot desert location. Its cryptic form is a good example of how an idea can be treated most effectively by simple means, for instance in the use of the frame as a point of entry and exit for characters…

  • Ophelia and The Cat Lady

    Two films on one reel. With Liz Reiner (OPHELIA) and Carla Liss (THE CAT LADY). On one level the films are portraits; on another level the first is inspired by reading about the painting of John Millais’ “Ophelia,” and “The Cat Lady” is an homage to the horror films of the filmmaker’s childhood movie going.