“Listen: this is the sum of my life: I travelled all the regions where peaks are looking glasses for the absent face of God and shadows are unknown there except when whispering under the sods.” Quite the contrary of a “social documentary,” this film offers glimpses of a man who has spent his life away from the “mainstream,” with his specific, his very own Vision from the Edge. September, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands: Breyten Breytebach, poet, painter and anti-Apartheid activist, creates six panels/scrolls which will hang from the ceiling of the exhibition. These are part of a retrospective of his paintings at the occasion of the Jacobus van Looy prize. The scrolls, six poems handpainted with illustration, become the backdrop of a tapestry of sounds and images: poems, texts about and writing, memories of South Africa where the artist was born, thoughts and evocations of other places where the poet has lived in exile since 1959. Breyten painting the lines, and speaking with his own words about the Self, the Other, the private and the public persona, and the creative process. I and may you remember what it was, and is, and will be like to be a poet-in-process or a painter-in-progress, wildly paradoxical and deeply ethical; to live on the edge, to live the edge, close enough in any event to push yourself over it, for in this direction lies responsibility and dignity.
Filter Films
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“Notebook on Lightning Bolts & Turntables” is an animated adventure that moves through the city in search of safe havens, house music, romantic boys in record stores, distracting images from childhood, and finally into the place where we all want to be…all in the attempt to find a place of least-anxiety. Shot on Super 8 and blown up to 16mm, “Notebook on Lightning Bolts & Turntables” is an animation film that encompasses clay-mation, cell animation, and live action.
Notebook on Lightning Bolts & Turntables
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“Snow’s use of the dolly shot in ‘Breakfast (Table Top Dolly)’ vividly – and comically – emphasizes the physical effects of the camera’s forward movement, in contrast to the purely optical effects of the zoom in ‘Wavelength.’ In ‘Breakfast,’ the camera dollies toward an untidy still life of breakfast items and slowly pushes the objects along the table until the tip over, tumble off, or are smashed against the wall at the far end of the table.” – William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time
Breakfast (Table Top Dolly)
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This is the passion tale of a body thief, who needs no cover, and who brazenly comes and tears apart the lives of those we love. The angels which float as the sky rains upon our heads. Red, covers the sidewalks, offices, homes and the money we exchange. It could never happen to us, the umbrella shades some from the downpour. They walk around with a bad coppertone tan. All these angels / all of us must be as one or there is no redemption. A perpetual body with no spirit is the fate to those who say it cannot happen to them. “Death like life, has its own music and in the convulsive ‘Plague Mass of Diamanda Galas’ all that is holy and unholy, pure and defiled, beatific and profane, is woven together on the loom of demoniac celestial hymnody and incandescent hate. Galas’s unearthly instrument – her own spectral multi-octave voice – is fueled by febrile seething hatred and brutal compassion. In her Plague Mass, Galas gives voice to an army of tortured souls, the ones who can no longer sing for themselves: the infirm, the insane, the dead who will not rest in peace.” – Tim Holmes, New York City, Dec. 1990 Sound: The Plague Mass, Diamanda Galas Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Air Cries – Red Thread
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“Minus” is a hand-processed, uncut, singular stream of movements. To take away: either to leave remnants of light or to leave remnants of rhythms. Entirely hand-processed and unscathed by the blades of the splicer. This is Chong’s first 16mm film. Inspired by Ritchie Hawkin’s Concept albums.
Minus
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“We did not come into this world. We came out of it…” – Lyall Watson, Gifts of the Unknown We rarely think of the past which occurred before our birth, yet our body and mind seem to remember it well. “Vibrant Marvels” reaches back into our subconscious memories and reminds us of the innateness of dance and music, that resonates in us from generation to generation and which we first encountered while we were in the womb. The membrane of our mother’s belly acted as a resonating drum to which rhythms we responded, as we pushed to become a part of the vibrating outside. “Vibrant Marvels” explores these intrinsic drives through the ebb and tide of ever-transforming images and through the deconstruction of dance’s body movements which are juxtaposed to abstract footage of nature, lush underwater sequences of a female form, and the dynamic performance of a African music ensemble.
Vibrant Marvels
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My first video take – a film, that rhymes between the lines. In German with English subtitles.
MEIN ZWEITER VERS. | MY SECOND VERS.
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A young Berliner reflects on how the radical changes to Berlin’s architecture and flow influences the emergence of his transgenderism. Ati walks through the city and shows the locations and spaces which help shape his daily life. Cruising in the Tiergarten, going shopping for suits or hardware, getting ready to dance foxtrot in Cafe Fatale, Berlin’s “queer carousel,” on Sunday night. A portrait of a thoughtful boy confronting the incompletion of both his body and his city.
TRANSIT: Adventures of a Boy in the Big City
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We are shown how God sows the seeds of discord and divides mankind into good and evil. –What hast thou done? The voice of my brother’s blood is crying to you from the ground. “A queerly provocative retelling of the Bible story about a man’s bloodlust for his brother.” – MIX New York Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film & Video Festival, 1995 “‘Cain and Abel: A Moral’ (1994) retells the story of the Bible’s most notorious brothers, questioning the roles of discord and resistance (and featuring an extraordinary birth scene not to be missed!), all in a style that hovers outside the boundaries of time and history.” – Holly Willis, LA Weekly, Nov. 19, 1999 In German with English subtitles.
KAIN UND ABEL – eine Moritat | CAIN AND ABEL – A Moral
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“Stares and catcalls from construction workers – a springtime hassle for some women with the right feminine look. This work makes us watch the achievements of that look and underscores in its very construction using humorous sound metaphors.” – Images Festival of Independent Film & Video, Toronto, 1999
Way I Sees It, The
