A short comedy about depression with a melodramatic, Portuguese-guitar soundtrack. A boy is feeling blue and tries, in vain, to get over his depression by eating, drinking and more.
Filter Films
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A queer, multi-layered, romantic film about cowboys that mixes TV footage of the Calgary Stampede (re-filmed on Super 8), still photos, and footage of rhododendrons and cowboy go-go dancers.
Rodeo Rhododendron
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“Sweet Boy” reveals an imaginative lesbian world where erotic fantasies bring sexual healing. Filmmaker Karen Everett’s thoughtful, stylized and highly personal memoir focuses on the psychological and spiritual dynamics of Mommy/Boy role-play in dyke relationships. Sexy ageplay with a maternal femme catalyzes a wild, energetic boy in Everett’s psyche. Beautifully shot, this compelling Jungian autobiography dramatizes the filmmaker’s inner struggle, sexual adventures and lesson in mothering herself.
Sweet Boy
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“Beautiful Funerals” is a hand-painted double-step-printed film composed of : 1) dense blackness variously punctuated by brilliantly colored jewel/flower-like shapes; 2) interruptive white sections which are fuzzily dotted with blurred whites and criss-crossed by black “brushstrokes” and hard-edge straight black-and-white lines. Finally there is a brilliant pinkish flare veined with curled blue lines which engenders a resolution between these (above described) alternating modes – colours in the straight-line sections, lines among the artifice of “flowers,” a kind of dark lattice-form which knits the two modes, gray and coloured “clouds” which correlate them.
Beautiful Funerals
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This, painted in the hospital while recovering from cancer surgery in 1996, is – it seems to me – very related to De Kooning’s Alzheimer’s paintings. The mind, here, is seeking a “blank” and/or holding fast to tendrils of meaning which are stripped so bare as to be purely reflective of flesh tissue and irregular strands of cells. (Stan Brakhage)
Divertimento
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Brakhage describes “Water for Maya” as “a hand-painted work which came into being during a film interview with Martina Kulacek about Maya Deren. There was a sudden recognition of Maya’s intrinsic love of water and thus of all Mayan liquidity in magic conjunction, reflection, etc.”
Water for Maya
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When I received the tape of Philip Corner’s “Through the Mysterious Barricade, Lumen 1 (after F. Couperin),” he included a note that thanked me for my film, “The Riddle of Lumen,” he’d just seen and which had in some way inspired this music. I, in turn, was so moved by the tape he sent I immediately asked his permission to “set it to film.” It required the most exacting editing process ever; and in the course of that work it occurred to me that I’d originally made “The Riddle of Lumen” hoping someone would make an “answering” film and entertain my visual riddle in the manner of the riddling poets of yore. I most expected Hollis Frampton (because of Zorn’s “Lemma”) to pick up the challenge; but he never did. In some sense I think composer Corner has – and now we have this dance of riddles as music and film combine to make “passage,” in every sense of the word, further possible. (To be absolutely “true to” the ritual of this passage, the two reels of the film should be shown on one projector, taking the normal amount of time, without rewinding reel #1 or showing the finish and start leaders of either – especially without changing the sound dials – between reels.) (Stan Brakhage)
Passage Through a Ritual
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Here are a couple of films from the mid-’60s, given to Gordon Rosenblum at the time, which surfaced this year (1998) needing preservation. I don’t know what to make of either of them except some insistent quality of “poem” each somehow is. (SB)
Female Mystique and Spare Leaves
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This hand-painted work is easily the most minutely detailed ever given to me to do, for it traces (as best I’m able) the hypnagogic after-effect of psychological cathexis as designed by Freud in his first (and unfinished) book on the subject – “Toward a Scientific Psychology.” (SB)
Glaze of Cathexis
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This hand-painted, step-printed film begins with several seconds of blank white (interrupted by red and brief electric yellow) and then proceeds to multiply flecked earth & rock shapes and root-like forms which seem to suck horizontally inward and upward midst phosphorescent greens and blues increasingly flecked with light-yellows giving way to tree-top branch likenesses taking oblique shape against phosphor sky.
Earthen Aerie
