In the wake of Le Quattro Volte (which I reviewed several weeks back), I’m very pleased to be seeing more and more experimental and careful films coming across my radar screen. Across the board, strange gems are popping up that I simply cannot wait to see. Take a look at these three trailers:
Excited? Totally.
What I’m finding curious, however, is the apparent explosion in classification. Not that this is a new development in content; it’s more of a development in marketing, assumedly reflecting what people are open to watching. Essay films? Plodding contemplative neo-documentaries? While these films will probably always have a small fan-base, I’m beginning to see a small niche in the audience rock opening up to works of more experimental nature. A small sliver of the public eye is beginning to pay attention, and I can’t help but think that now is an excellent time to be making films.
What films have you seen recently that are widening this niche?
Our very own Brian Barth has officially stepped on to the festival circuit!
His experimental film RICKETS (2010) will be premiering at the Boston Underground Film Festival ’11 and the Kansas City FilmFest ’11.
RICKETS explores a transformed landscape as it follows the simplest aesthetic narrative — white to black. The textures and rhythms of the image come from the serious digital distortion (achieved entirely in-camera) of the perfectly scenic setting of a boat trip down the Hudson River. The camera captures an alternate, underlying world, an almost microscopic vibration that pervades our existence.
Keep an eye out (for all our loyal Boston followers) – make sure to pick up some tickets for BUFF.
And while you’re there, be sure to also check out the extraordinary nunsploitation film Thy Kill Be Done (2010, dirs. Greg Hanson and Casey Reagan). It’s exactly what you think it is in the best way possible.
Our shoulders are all waxed and ready to rub. Come out and support Brian, the Company, Boston filmmaking, and, heck, just to see some really great film.
We’re proud to announce that Adam Hirsch’s Faith Healer, one of the first Company shorts, is making the festival circuit beginning at the Geneva Film Festival (April 16-18)*.
You can stop by Geneva IL (about 20 minutes west of Chicago), and see Faith Healer at 3:00 on Fri. April 16 at Riverside Receptions or at 2:00 on Sat. April 17 at the Mill Race Inn. Adam will be there, likely wearing a tie and jeans–unless he’s nervous, in which case he’ll up the style with, I’d wager, a vest.
The full schedule of films is here on the Festival site.
It’s a small festival (30 films or so) so it’s a guaranteed good time. Everyone showed such support and enthusiasm when we screened last June at the Brattle, we’re hoping to replicate the experience out there in the midwest.
Hope to see you there!
*Screening twice! You have no excuse!
Every year they make the same mistake. They rinse off the pot, give it a quick dry, pop it on the burner and twist the heat to high. The prep work takes precedent, chopping the onions and slicing thin the meat, letting the pot heat all the while. Then the time comes for them to brown the meat and they pour in a few tablespoons of oil, which smokes for a moment, and then, with a sudden and heavy breath, pfoof! – fire. (more…)
The Seitz brothers were commissioned by L Magazine to create a video essay on the decade in film. It’s in two parts, and great.
If this doesn’t get you excited about filmmaking, I don’t know what will.
Part One:
Part Two:
One week from today, on July 10, 2009, at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we have been given the extreme honor of hosting the East Coast Premiere of our Senior Thesis films, FAITH HEALER (dir. Adam Hirsch) and BULLSEYE (dir. Matt Paley) for everyone and anyone who wishes to come. And it would make all the difference if you would.
We now — very proudly — would like to announce the launch of our brand-new website, sainteliotandco.com, where our media, contact information, clips and trailers for our films (Faith Healer and Bullseye) and everything else can be found.
[a Letter to Robert Kelly:]
The film that taught me to cultivate silence — or, at least, made me aware of the flesh of the film itself — was Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Perhaps Wong Kar Wai doesn’t compare to Vigo or Epstein — his films certainly fall into the category of “sentimental loves stories in celluloid” — but I remember realizing, for the first time, that In the Mood for Love loses nothing from a subtitle-less viewing. I saw, in that, the hope of a fuller, richer, fleshier cinema.
Should cinema attempt to do all of its work visually? The question presupposes something essential to cinema about the moving image–that every art can be reduced to a single heart; painting to color, poetry to words (or, perhaps, their absence), drawing to the line, etc–and that the heart of cinema is not the dream of a complete representation of the world (as Bazin might argue).
Or, on the other hand, is cinema is in the unique position to utilize all of these languages? Should the film-maker, then, search every subject / idea / emotion /
[a Letter to Robert Kelly:]
Many film theorists subscribe to some belief of primacy—the primacy of the image over sound, of image over language, of sound over image, of language over image. My feeling, swayed ever so slightly by a few of these arguments, is that there is some work that each of these languages has more trouble expressing than the others. Some content is best left to the visual (and iconic), some to language (the purely symbolic), and some to sound only (indexical, leaving the audience some work of imagining). Obviously, this neat semiotic differentiation is a gross oversimplification; yet they do all three have different properties and effects.
Too often, in the imitation of ‘real life’, the modern filmmaker uses all three where one will do. It is sensory overload—we comprehend the moment thus created only dimly, and feel our emotions manipulated artlessly. The great filmmaker, utilizing all three languages simultaneously, captures something we already know, and have felt, and allows us to experience it as if for the first time. He searches not for new stories—the greater the filmmaker, in fact, the older the story he tackles—for he knows that he makes every story new and interesting by using these languages in new and unexpected ways.
Let me say now that I too have a theory of primacy: that of feeling over thought. My art is not philosophy; it strains against the intellectual weight of Brakhage and Bresson, and shies away from innovation for its own sake. I stumble in the dark for moments of feeling, for connection and coincidence, and the less thinking I do is most often the better. I idolize Truffaut, and merely tolerate (all but the earliest) Godard. I hold Cassavetes somewhere deep, a fire in my gut. My art will never be about language, or the limitations of language. But I have stories to tell, and the great storytellers do not waste their tools.
It is commonly said that the photographic image cannot convey religious experience. Wasn’t it Maya Deren, after all, who, after be granted access to film the most intimate ceremonies of the voodoo practitioners of Haiti, went back to the United States with hours of footage and wrote an ethnography instead?
And so we discuss with the poet the limitations of poetry, with the musician the limitations of music, with the photographer the limitations of the photographic image.
I think of Cassavetes as embodying all, all that is wrong with film. Brakhage was not an intellectual — his IQ –he proudly boasted– was 84. He was an artist of the senses, specifically sight/vision, and the greatest of those who worked in moving sight in our time. He was not a bougeois pseudo-intellectual (Cassavetes, Truffaut…) trying to tell sentimental love stories in celluloid. Cassavetes is Capra without the happy ending — the film stuff, the actual flesh of film, is equally dull.
If you’re a storyteller, and love film, look at Renoir’s Toni, or Tati’s anything, or Pasolini — the film tells the stories, is not just some not pretty pictures to accompany a script.
Fuel for heavy flames: where there is smoke, there is fire. In the due course of making a film, one wishes for the smoke to act as a sort of calling card, a beacon, a tolling bell in the distance to bring people in and help you from going under and drowning. So may these entries, then, be a form of a smoke signal, bell tower, jazz club and cathedral all in one.
