Film Categories: Literature

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • In His Own Image

    An alternate view of man’s development. Zeus, at his drawing board, wrestles with the problem of making the perfect creature for the perfect environment.

  • Uncle Denis?

    Director Adrian Goycoolea looks back on the life of his great-uncle Denis Pratt, a.k.a. Quentin Crisp, the notorious artist, writer and raconteur. Interviews with the extended Pratt family, Super 8 footage, and letters and essays by Crisp reveal the dual personae of the man who penned “The Naked Civil Servant” and other literary works that unapologetically revealed his sexuality. “Uncle Denis?” is a fascinating personal portrait of one of the most significant queer icons of the 20th century.

  • Letter from Blackhawk Island

    From her home in Blackhawk Island WI, the poet Lorine Niedecker traded lively and impactful letters with numerous peers, most notably Louis Zukofsky and, later, Cid Corman. After a brief sojourn in New York, she lived alone in a one-room cabin for much of her adult life, walking several miles to nearby Fort Atkinson to work as a copy editor at a dairy industry newsletter until failing eyesight reduced her to menial labour. Niedecker connected to the outside world by post, and among the small shelf of books she kept for herself were several collections of letters, including those of…

  • Flamme dans l’eau

    A film exploring the poet Franck André Jamme’s journeys to Rajasthan and Nepal to seek out the origins of Tantric paintings used to awaken heightened states of consciousness. The film merges dream and legend in an exploration of these images that are made by anonymous painters, not to be bought and sold, but as tools of inner practice, as thresholds.

  • Les fleurs du mâle

    “The mysterious creature, Salma, realizes that being herself has repercussions on her life and that she will never be accepted as she is. So she decides to ask the creatress of this world for mercy.” The film was shot in super 8 in-camera edited. It was inspired by the letter sent by Charles Baudelaire to the Empress Eugenie after being censored and fined for his book “Les fleurs du mal”. The reason of the condemnation: offense to public morals and good manners as well as offense to religious morality.

  • A More Radiant Sphere

    A More Radiant Sphere tells the long-lost story of Communist poet, activist and Canadian political prisoner Joe Wallace, bringing him to life through archival material, both real and imagined. This hybrid film is shot primarily on 16mm film and weaves together the story of Wallace, the failed Canadian Communist Party, and the filmmaker’s own surprising discovery of her relation to Wallace through a distant relationship with her father (Joe’s great-nephew). Segmented throughout are folk songs based on Wallace’s writings, performed by award-winning folk musician Simone Schmidt, aka Fiver. The film delves into the limits of history and its records, and…

  • Meditation 4 Black Women

    Four women, with seemingly unrelated lives, meditate on identity setting off a mystical event that allows them to breathe again.