Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • 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 Small Hydro, A

    A sister film to “Water Power,” “A Portrait of Small Hydro” concentrates on three hydro entrepreneurs who bought up old dam sites in New England and rebuilt them for production of power. In 1978, the US Congress passed the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) which requires utilities to buy power at fair rates from private producers. With a guaranteed return, investors scurried all over the country looking for suitable sites. Charles MacArthur found his “bottomless oil well” in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. In1977, his 600 kw output was worth $12,000 a year. In the early 1980s, it was worth $120,000. But,…

  • Prison Art

    The son (and my Godson) of one of the Directors, Mr. Garegin Zakoyan, who is the founder and the General Manager of the Cenematheque Armenia, was imprisoned in 1994 on false charges. Trips to a prison became a routine for the family, and prompted us to make use of our access to otherwise forbidden domain of the penitentiary system. Thus the film was conceived. 90 percent of the narration is taken from the letters of my Godson and Sergey Paradjanov. (MB)

  • Prologue: Infinite Obscure

    The film began with the idea of doing a “remake” of “Moby Dick” using the parts of the text that John Huston omitted from his version. A number of other issues began to take precedence however: the politics of the translation process; the relation of filmic to hieroglyphic writing; the possible intersections of (auto) biography and fiction; the articulation of (filmic) writing and (homo) sexuality. (MC)

  • 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.

  • Rat Life and Diet in North America

    “I can tell you that Wieland’s film holds. It may be about the best (or richest) political movie around. It’s all about rebels (enacted by real rats) and police (enacted by real cats). After long suffering under the cats, the rats break out of prison and escape to Canada. There they take up organic gardening, with no DDT in the grass. It is a parable, a satire, an adventure movie, or you can call it pop art or any art you want – I find it one of the most original films made recently.” – Jonas Mekas “The film is…

  • Re-entry: Stories of Six Women

    Six women of different ethnic and economic backgrounds, ranging in age from early 30s to 60s, tell their individual stories of returning to school or job training, of juggling child raising and house keeping with school and jobs, of support by family and the support they feel is needed for women like them. Must women be superwomen to find fulfillment? These women’s stories are interwoven to produce inspiring and sobering reflections on many women’s lives. Produced for the Santa Cruz Chapter of the Older Women’s League (OWL).

  • Reality Check

    Using cutout pictures from magazines, animated to a harmonica soundtrack, the audience is asked to look around and figure out what is important to us. Perhaps it is not “the automobile and some of the other consumer products that we seem to dote on” (Grand Rapids Press).

  • Reasonably Barbie

    “Reasonably Barbie” was developed out of frustration with the North American “Beauty Guidelines,” outlined by mass media and advertising. Divided into two parts, the film allows many women (and men too) to take an objective look at the North American “Beauty Myth” starting with a splash of humour and then moving to a more serious approach. The filmmaker hopes that the film will encourage young women to stop hurting themselves for fashion and inspire them to come to realize their own self worth.

  • 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…