Film Comment's Best of the Decade: Avant-Garde
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Missing from IMDb:
Pitcher of Colored Light Robert Beavers, U.S./Switz., 2007 (16)
Observando el Cielo Jeanne Liotta, U.S., 2007 (15)
The General Returns from One Place to Another Michael Robinson, U.S., 2006 (11)
The Glass System Mark LaPore, U.S., 2000 (10)
She Puppet Peggy Ahwesh, U.S., 2001 (10)
The Great Art of Knowing David Gatten, U.S., 2004 (9)
Missing from IMDb:
Pitcher of Colored Light Robert Beavers, U.S./Switz., 2007 (16)
Observando el Cielo Jeanne Liotta, U.S., 2007 (15)
The General Returns from One Place to Another Michael Robinson, U.S., 2006 (11)
The Glass System Mark LaPore, U.S., 2000 (10)
She Puppet Peggy Ahwesh, U.S., 2001 (10)
The Great Art of Knowing David Gatten, U.S., 2004 (9)
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46 titles
- DirectorPeter B. HuttonThis is a soundless story of the building of 'Toledo Spirit', the container ship, its sailing and eventual beaching. Insignificant men crawl on cranes and gantries to build it and other men, sans the equipment, scrape it after beaching.
- DirectorMorgan FisherA collection of insert shots from films.
- DirectorBen RiversA family's place in the wilderness, outside of time; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape. The work aims at an idea of freedom, which is reflected in the hand-processed Scope format, but is undercut with a sense of foreboding. There's no particular story; beginning, middle or end, just fragments of lives lived, rituals performed.
- DirectorKen JacobsStarsJack SmithJerry SimsGib TaylorStar Spangled to Death is a 2004 experimental film directed by Ken Jacobs, consisting almost entirely of archive footage, depicting the history of the United States in film.
- DirectorJames BenningAn experimental film portraying different skies in very long takes.
- DirectorJanie GeiserPerson is watching a movie over and over again and sometimes certain changes are taking place.
- DirectorGuy MaddinStarsLeslie BaisCaelum VatnsdalShaun BalbarA scientist chooses a wealthy man over her two lovers but must heal the earth's core to save humanity.
- DirectorJames BenningAmerican trains, known to the director from trips across the country, are seen in motion in 43 shots from a fixed perspective.
- DirectorBen RussellThe transformation of a rock audience's collective freak-out into a trance ritual of the highest spiritual order.
- DirectorPat O'NeillStarsJaime AlvarezLilia BarsegianPeter BeckmanThe film is an "intersection of fact and hallucination" set inside the decaying walls of the old Ambassador Hotel and the famed Cocoanut Grove restaurant which was home to the 1st Academy Awards.
- DirectorStan BrakhageA collage of fire and water inferences on single-strand photography.
- DirectorTravis WilkersonAn experimental documentary exploring the turn-of-century lynching of union organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana.
- DirectorMark Lapore
- DirectorJames BenningShots of 13 great lakes in the USA, with each shot containing half water and half sky or land.
- DirectorNathaniel Dorsky
- DirectorLewis KlahrA cut-out animated collage on the theme of change and lost time, underscored by Dory Previn's 'Theme to Valley of the Dolls', Jefferson Airplane's 'Lather' and John Cale reciting Andy Warhol's diary entry 'A Dream' from Songs for Drella.
- DirectorPeter TscherkasskyStarsClint EastwoodLee Van CleefEli WallachAn attempt to transform a Roman Western into a Greek tragedy.
- DirectorApichatpong WeerasethakulStarsKumgieng JittamaatMiti JittamaatPhetmongkol ChantawongA filmmaker captures images that characterize the violence and repression as well as the hope of rebirth and remembrance in northeastern Thailand.
- DirectorPeter B. HuttonA short film which documents landscape, skies, and water in the northern region of Iceland.
- DirectorJonas MekasStarsJonas MekasStan BrakhageRobert BreerDirector Jonas Mekas provides an intimate glimpse of his personal life by constructing a feature length narrative from over 30 years of private home movie footage.
- DirectorRobert BeaversA stone mason works to build and repair a castle wall.
- DirectorRobert BeaversStarsRobert BeaversGregory J. Markopoulos
- DirectorPeter Kubelka
- DirectorNathaniel Dorsky
- DirectorNathaniel Dorsky
- DirectorJennifer Todd ReevesWhen It Was Blue is a live, ephemeral film performance and an ode to a beautiful and unspoiled natural environment which is fast diminishing. When It Was Blue rejoices the splendor of the natural world through a complex and dazzling fusion of textural, abstract hand-painted images projected onto filmed landscapes from Iceland, New Zealand and Vancouver to Pyramid Lake, Nevada and upstate New York.16mm double-projected film and montage by Jennifer Reeves Music by Skúi Sverrisson with Anthony Burr & Ted Reichman.
- DirectorNathaniel Dorsky
- DirectorHarun FarockiIn Comparison revisits issues explored in the director's 2007 two channel installation Comparison Via a Third. Spanning continents and cultures, the film focuses on the brick in its many contexts, from the collective efforts of a community building a clinic in Burkina Faso, through semi industrialized moldings in India, to industrial production lines in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland. Through its notable structure and its captivating rhythms, In Comparison presents various methods of labor production, allowing for an assessment that changes with every layer and goes well beyond a simple binary divide.
- DirectorRobert FenzStarsMarion BrownFilmed over seven years, the chapters of Meditations on Revolution explore the basic theme of revolution in its purest definition: the radical transformation of a subject from one state to another, and the various forms that transformation can take. The final film in the series is the most unique in form and content. Dedicated to (and heavily influenced in tone by the death of) the filmmaker's father, this moody urban piece surveys an expressionistic New York City at dusk and night. At the film's center is aged artist-musician Marion Brown whose proud, fatigued monologue fuses with haunting imagery of an alienating landscape.
- DirectorMiranda JulyStarsPolly BilchukPeter BordenEva RioseloA dark experimental, video narrative of intertwining people.
- DirectorDeborah StratmanA meditation on freedom and technological approaches to manifest destiny.
- DirectorPhilip S. SolomonMade in remembrance of Anne Frank, Solomon's fragile and haunting film evokes Kristallnacht ("the night of broken glass") and Gustav Mahler's Kindertodenlieder ("Songs on the Death of Children").
- DirectorNathaniel DorskyThe experimental filmmaker reflects on the specific moods of the traditional rainy winter in his town of San Francisco, a period of darkness but also of verdant renewal.
- DirectorJames BenningLos Angeles is depicted in 35 stationary shots, each 2 1/2 minutes long, in this non-narrative film.
- DirectorJames Benning
- DirectorJames BenningEmploying natural sound and contemplative proscenium shots, Benning skillfully composes a series of pure and majestic images that at once evoke a sense of nostalgic splendor as well as deliver a subtle, yet penetrating, political commentary. Benning tells the story of how water irrigates this valley and how the produce is carted away in boxcars for the nation's consumption. He shows the lifestyle of a modest and growing rural community, whose concerns are often drowned out by the powerful railroads, oil companies and insurance conglomerates which own the farms and ranches and benefit from undocumented immigrant labor while insisting on imprisoning an American population of color.
- DirectorMichael SnowStarsAndré AlcasidJacqueline AndersonBerj BannayanA surreal and comic exploration of an office space and the decorations of a living room.
- DirectorPeter TscherkasskyA woman goes to bed, falls asleep, and begins to dream. This dream takes her to a landscape of light and shadow, evoked in a form only possible through classic cinematography.
- DirectorPat O'NeillAn examination of certain aspects of the geography of California as the ground for cinematic disruption and restatement.
- DirectorBen RussellStarsMonie PansaBenjen PansaErwin AkobeThe film traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname, on land and through rapids, past a Maroon village on the Upper Suriname River, in a rehearsal of the voyage undertaken by their ancestors, who escaped from slavery at the hands of the Dutch 300 years prior. A path still traveled to this day, its changing topography bespeaks a diverse history of forced migration.
- DirectorPhilip S. SolomonWorking from repurposed materials, experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon evokes the eery landscapes between action in the Grand Theft Auto.
- DirectorLewis Klahr
- DirectorLewis KlahrA crime story told two different ways concerning the events of a two month period leading up to (and immediately following) a bank robbery. The imagery has all been "appropriated" (the fancy, art-world-sanctioned term for "stealing") from four issues of an early 1960s comic book version of the then-popular American television show 77 SUNSET STRIP. Music by Rhys Chatham ("Guitar Trio"). - Lewis Klahr
- DirectorLewis KlahrA feature-length narrative crime film compressed two different times into two separate films of diminishing duration until the synoptic is synopsized. The imagery has all been "appropriated" (the fancy, art-world-sanctioned term for "stealing") from four issues of an early 1960s comic book version of the then-popular American television show 77 SUNSET STRIP. Music by Glenn Branca (an excerpt from "The Ascension"); film commissioned by the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival's "Just a Minute" program. - Lewis Klahr
- DirectorDavid GattenStrips of previously unexposed film went into the ocean, and these fragments are what returned. In this final installment of a nine year project documenting the underwater world off the coast of South Carolina, both the sounds and images are the result of the oceanic inscriptions written directly into the emulsion of the film as it was buffeted by the salt water, sand and rocks; as it was chewed by the crabs, fish and underwater creatures.