avant-garde, experimental, surreal film

i think i burnt out on this stuff in film school. actually, i think i burnt out on all movies in film school.

Ouch...bad acid flashback of dragging my parents to see that movie in the theater. No wonder I had the shit beaten out of me during my childhood.

I only remember two things from that movie - the stupid ending with Cosby's wife dousing him in his food and the fact that the superweapon had three different colored liquids in it that Cosby switched with dishwashing liquid only to find out that it WAS filled with dishwashing liquid. (Which, of course, I found hilarious at the time. It is true - little kids are just drunken midgets.)

http://www.match-cut.de/img&snd/mbad.jpg

L' annee derriere.

It's almost, not always, true that if it's a really cutting edge film, no one will know the name of it because no one will have seen it. Non-representational films, for ex., esp. animation created by scratching and coloring, that "liberate" the filmmaker and which are the first days homework in any film school animation class. "Look, continues images don't show up as continuous images. The 24 f.p.m. standard is a compromise between flicker and the appearance of motion created by the persistence of vision." "Oh, wow."

Cinema is a rules-based artform. For the most part, these visual and narrative conventions are liberating, rather than restrictive. Visually and stylistically renegade filmmakers sometimes are useful when they develop a new technique that can be expropriated by more mainstream filmmakers.

But this is nothing new. The art for art's sake movement is relatively new, the product of the industrial revolution giving a lot more people a lot more money and leisure time. Great art has always been popular art. Raffaele and Leonardo were sought after not because they were great artists but because they were popular and each pope/prince had to keep up with the Joneses.

"Every picture tells a story, don't it."

Dead Man, while not being experimental or avant-garde, is also one of my favourite films of all time.

Would "Cabeza de Vaca" qualify?

Mark cuts to the heart of it all.

Chantal Akerman - "News From Home"
Jean-Luc Godard - "Weekend"
Abbas Kiarostami - "The Wind Will Carry Us"
Andrei Tarkovsky - "Nostalghia"

Also, the treated street car film mentioned above may be Bruce Bailey's (I think that's his name) film Castro Street, which consisted of very colorful images sliding across the screen.

bad movie: pretty much any experimental film. For example the quay brothers "institute benjementa". It's just too complicated and it's black and white. Which makes it suck. Switching scenes too slowly completely ruins the flow of the story. A nice predictable and simple story line is always better.

rowr!!

resnais mon oncle d'amérique
Luis Bunuel The Phantom of Liberty
debord la société du spectacle
Nagisa Oshima In The Realm Of The Senses
michael snow so is this

That's the person I was trying to think of in my original post to this thread. The film that features rapidly alternating perspectives from within a hallway. It has been bothering me ever since (particularly as I'd seen the film in question multiple times), and it came to me tonight.

Serene Velocity. Great film. Anyone know this one?

The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz
...where end of the world in coming to London, windows speak and the subway has it's own gods.

Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid
...where the boys from KLF burn a million pounds of their own money. It really happened.

Don't Touch the White Woman!
...where the famous battle between general Custer and the Indians takes place in modern-day Paris. Marcello Mastroianni plays Custer, and Catherine Deneuve is his mistress.

i thought the K foundation thing had been officially discredited now?

What do you mean by that? I heard Drummond & Cauty have destroyed all the existing copies of the film, but nothing about it being discredited.

which surprises me. i kind of thought he had gone through with it. seemed like that kind of bloke from his writing. [naive fool that i am]

every once in a while i check amazon..i don't know how to start a request or a waiting list for a release, so all i do is hope..

now, the only maya deren- related dvd out at this point is the excellent documentary "in the mirror with maya deren" on zeitgiest films.

George Landow - On the Marriage Broker Joke...

how about "Holy Mountain" by Jodorowsky

# Hairspray (1988)
# Desperate Living (1977)
# Female Trouble (1974)
# Pink Flamingos (1972)
# Multiple Maniacs (1970)

The Color of Pomegranates -Sergei Paradjanov

WR Mysteries of the Organism -Dusan Makavejev
Sweet Movie - Dusan Makavejev

(under no circumstances read _any_ plot summary of Sweet Movie before watching the film)

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/33/makavejev.html

All Bunuel after 1960 is worth watching at least once, also don't miss El

found this site looking for a good link for Zulawski's film Possession. have seen about 75% of these, which bodes well for the ones I haven't.

i thought this was the thread where one of the noize dudes threw a hissy fit because they thought i criticized a brakhage film, but i guess not

(sorry)

Hoberman's piece on Straub-Huillet in the Times today is not going to set off a MoMA stampede -- he quoted Straub saying their movies were made to be walked out of, and finished by asking the curator if he was feeding the audience "spinach."

TBF, it's hard to think of a 'campaign' that would result in lines around the block for a complete Straub-Huillet retro, if gross deception is not involved. In a way, emphasising the alienated difficulty of these films makes them seem more alluring, more of a challenge to be taken on.

Thanks to xyzzzz, I watched Scilia! - not on a big screen, unfortunately (it's worth saying that it's a very beautiful film in places, cinematography by frequent Rivette collaborator William Lubtchansky, though the framing/editing is totally Straub-Huillet's own - incredible repetition of unmotivated slow pans over empty rural landscapes, other shots that carry on well past their 'end'). In places, it reminded me of Costa's Horse Money, or seemed like it could be one source for Costa's style, a way of presenting historical narrative, giving voice to the unvoiced etc.

Hilarious quote from Straub.

Glad you liked Sicilia! Ward - source novel is very much worth reading btw (I think its a great visual intro to those landscapes in mid-cent Italian Lit of Pavese, Vittorini, Moravia, Morante)

And Costa worked with Straubs. Some of Haneke's work is very much S/H (Haneke stole the sequence in Egypt in Too Early/Too Late for the end of Hidden)

some of huillet/straub's films are quite amazing, so it's impossible to dismiss them, but i also find it kind of impossible not to find them (and some of their more ardent supporters like tag gallagher) a bit silly in their conviction that somehow three-hour films of nonactors declaiming communists texts fromthe 1930s while standing in a calabrian forest are going to aid the Revolution.

even in their worst films, there is something undeniably gripping about the way they record sound, the way they frame people and landscape, their cutting rhythms, etc. it's just that the political conceits behind their "program" seem really misguided to me.

actually, one of the better critiques of their recent (by which i mean last 20 years) work is actually in a trotskyite publication of all places. scroll down to about halfway through: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/05/baf3-m20.html

i actually kind of like pedro costa's first two features but otherwise i have to say he seems like something of a charlatan to me. if anything he has all of the huillets' self-seriousness and not enough of their filmmaking skill.

here's another attack on straub and costa from the World Socialist Website critic David Walsh, who despite having some serious blinkers on a lot of time, is not at all a bad critic: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/03/25/fic3-m25.html

re: Costa being a charlatan. You may or may not like what he is doing but I think his work in the inner cities is deeply felt, committed and comes from a genuine place.

From a scan those pieces don't really give me much to re-think. Looking at the events in mid-70s Portugal from the POV of Cape Verdians is a great way of looking at those events - and carry even more of a charge today, given what is happening in Europe.

re: Straubs. I actually don't see the fuss. From the half-dozen I've seen they seem very watchable and I can only imagine there being other reasons for the difficulty in presenting their work at the BFI. I've seen old arthouse 'classics' in old prints with four fucking people over the years. Seriously, what's the hold up?

I've been hot and cold on Costa, but i generally found Horse Money hypnotic on first viewing. I am gonna steer clear of the more "declamatory"/lengthy S-H films tho. That leaves enough for me to dip my toe.

S-H roundup, including link to Hoberman

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-jean-marie-straub-and-daniele-huillet

and linking this Pinkerton piece on S-H because I walked out on History Lessons at the two-thirds mark last week, feeling Straub wouldn't mind. The Bach film was fine, though.

http://frieze.com/article/we-make-our-films-so-audiences-can-walk-out-them

Only the strong survive Straub-Huillet – and I wouldn’t have shirked the test for all the world.

#maMan

Although I was just talking abt my struggles with Brecht's prose on ILB.

soliciting Straub / Huillet recomms for May (only seen Not Reconciled)

Read this as Straub / Huillet romcoms, which would be great.

Although, if anyone can recommend a good place to start with them, that would also be great.

ed.b, if you still have access to a DVD machine capable of playing Region 2 DVDs, I would recommend this two disc set from New Wave films, which contains Straub-Huillet's biggest hit - Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach - and Sicilia!, which xyzzzz astutely recommended above.

Aren't all their films romances?

http://www.newwavefilms.co.uk/view-film-detail.html/?viewListing=Mjc=

RIP Peter Hutton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM4V7lAy74M

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/movies/peter-hutton-filmmaker-with-austerely-romantic-worldview-dies-at-71.html

:(

Straub / Huillet retrospective at UC Berkeley, starts on Jan 26, until May 2017

http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/program/not-reconciled-cinema-straub-huillet

coming to America

https://thefilmstage.com/news/grasshopper-film-to-release-catalogue-of-legendary-filmmaking-duo-jean-marie-straub-and-daniele-huillet/

http://grasshopperfilm.com/film/straub-huillet-collection/

Yvonne Rainer recommendations?

https://www.filmlinc.org/series/talking-pictures-the-cinema-of-yvonne-rainer/#films

Journey from Berlin is all I've seen - can't remember much about it, except thinking it was good.

Would so see Madame X. Ulrike Ottinger is really good.

Have fun!

obit roundup for Paul Clipson

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5371-the-daily-paul-clipson-1965-2018

RIP Jonas Mekas

http://gothamist.com/2019/01/23/jonas_mekas_avant-garde_film_auteur.php

re: the straub/huillet discussion upthread, full retro happening in london over the next three months: https://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/en/ver.cfm?fuseaction=events.detail&event_id=21471962&

RIP Barbara Hammer

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6250-barbara-hammer-s-legacy

word seems to be spreading that straub has passed

:-(

Straub and Godard In the same year, damm. And Rest in Provocation.

RIP. I saw From the Cloud the the Resistance, Antigone and Machorka-Muff just this year. All amazing, and the first is so singular and strange.

Here's a lovely curated playlist of shorts:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5xOztE613KMOvfW_L5zaa6j3cdLUwO4c

I have more vivid memories of reading Richard Roud's Straub book than the films themselves, intriguing though they were.
I should get around to watching Sicilia!, which James Quant of TIFF was always talking up.

couple of days left to catch two, imo, unmissable online retrospectives of female experiemntal filmmakers:

ellie epp on ultra dogme: https://ultradogme.com/2023/08/18/ellie-epp/

jun kurosawa on equinox: https://equinox.film

👍