|
The DIFFERENT CINEMA Volume 3 DVD is witness to the inexhaustible range of possibilities of contemporary filmmaking. The nine films selected for the 10th anniversary of the Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris are linked to the heritage of experimental film and the eternal quest for renewal, causes espoused by the festival. From the historical film Césarée by Marguerite Duras to more contemporary creations, this ensemble of films showcases work using various formats (super 8, 16mm, digital video) within the fields of traditional cinema and contemporary art from which the filmmakers have emerged. Subtitles in French, English, German, and Spanish.
Further Information:
Video bonus track, text booklet, biographies
| Catalog Number: MC-948 |
Type: Shorts Compilation |
Genre: Experimental |
| Copyright: 2008 |
Length: 75 minutes |
Format:
DVD Region: 0 (All) |
| TV System: NTSC & PAL |
ISBN: |
UPC: 880198094896 |
| Label: Lowave |
This title is available in Europe for Wholesale - List Prices: £16.99 / 25.00€
This is a Microcinema Exclusive title.
Wholesale Purchasing:
Program MC-948 is available for wholesale from Microcinema DVD. Contact info[at]microcinema.com or call at +1-415-447-9750
Exhibition:
Program MC-948 may be licensed for Exhibition.
Films In Compilation
Cesaree directed by
Marguerite
Duras
France,
Experimental,
1979,
00:11:00
...
|
 |
Ideal (Fin De L') directed by
Isabelle
Blanche
France,
Experimental,
2000,
00:03:30
...
|
 |
Empreinte directed by
Xavier
Baert
France,
Experimental,
2004,
00:12:00
...
|
 |
L'Eil Lourd Du Voyage Mecanique directed by
Augustin
Gimel
France,
Experimental,
2003,
00:03:00
...
|
 |
Untitled No. 1 directed by
Masha
Godovannaya
Russian Federation,
Experimental,
2005,
00:04:00
...
|
 |
Reste-La! directed by
Frédéric
Tachou
France,
Experimental,
2006,
00:11:45
...
|
 |
Le Bombardement. Le Port Des Perles directed by
Richard
Kerr
Canada,
Experimental,
2004,
00:08:00
...
|
 |
Desde La Memoria directed by
Christina
von Greve
Germany,
Experimental,
2003,
00:07:30
...
|
 |
Cabinet directed by
Robert
Todd
USA,
Experimental,
2007,
00:12:00
...
|
 |
2010-02-03 Curled up with a Good DVD
By Brian Charles Clark
Lowave, an independent film label that promotes experimental film and video art, collaborates with Collectif Jeune Cinéma to produce Cinema Different. Cinema Different is a more or less annual film festival held in Paris, and Different Cinema Volume 3 includes selections from the 10th festival.
The purpose of Different Cinema Volume 3 is to showcase young (in age, yes, but more in the sense of exposure) filmmakers who are rethinking the nature of cinematic images. There’s some artsy stuff going on here, and some of it may show up next month or year on MTV or, more likely, in a cell phone or car commercial. The fate (or good fortune) of the avant garde is to be able to sell out to Hollywood and the agencies.
The DVD leads with “Césarée,” an enigmatic film by the poet and novelist Marguerite Duras that mourns and is a feminist warning against co-optation and coercion in its repetition and matter-of-factness. “There is nothing to see but for it all.”
Imprinting the body onto film is the intent of the next two films, by Isabelle Blanche and Xavier Baert. Baert’s “Empreinte” is silent and abstract, and perhaps the most difficult film on the disc. Nonetheless, it appears to be a dance film and has a flowing rhythm the entrains the viewer.
“L’oeil Liquid du Voyage Mechanique” by Augustin Gimel is cut-up videography, as if the film for an industrial music track. Indeed, the sound track is apparently a truck engine (the mechnical voyage alluded to in the title), and the editing (if this fluttering and stuttering of images can be called editing) is timed to the lunge and wheeze of pistons.
Masha Godovannaya of St. Petersburgh, Russia, offers the most visually beautiful piece on the disc. A young girl dances, in cut-up edits timed to a flamenco guitar number, through layers of multiple exposure. Strangers glance into the filmmaker’s lens, we see them seeing us, and those intimate moments are startling and full of desire. Shot in Super 8 black and white, the grainy film is as textured as a friendly dog’s tongue.
Frédéric Tachou’s “Reste-la” is an uncanny juxtapositioning of images of passageways and doors, blurred together via a split-screen seam that creates a hall of mirrors effect. The images may be found or, as a supertitle at the film’s beginning suggests, recombined in an aleatory or chance fashion. The sound track is a guitar that is not so much played as percussed, and combined with found sounds such as traffic and footsteps. The result is an otherworldly affair that is, for all that, plain as day.
“Le Bombardment. Le Port des Perles” uses a trailer for the film Pearl Harbor to create a mash-up that disarms the Hollywood glorification of war, question the ownership of intellectual property and, at the same time, create some serious eye candy a la Stan Brakhage.
Christina von Greve explores Spain’s totalitarian history in “Desde la Memoria,” a stream-of-consciousness piece that combines archival footage and voiceover sound from eyewitness accounts.
Robert Todd’s lush “Cabinet” is a 16mm exercise in rack focus exploration of edge, color, contrast and motion. Todd is a prolific Boston-based filmmaker whose work is widely known among aficionados of experimental cinema.
| 2009-11-03 blogcritics.org
By Patrick Taylor
Different Cinema - Volume Three contains nine short films selected for the tenth anniversary of the Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris. The festival is organized by Le Collectif Jeune Cinéma, a co-op which supports experimental film. There are no car crashes, robots, serial killers, talking animals, product tie-ins, precocious kids, or sex in these films. Most of them don't have any dialogue, a discernible story, a plot, a climax, a dénouement. George Clooney doesn't play the wise-cracking but handsome ringleader, and Matt Damon doesn't make a cameo as himself. There are no vampires. There are no hookers with hearts of gold. None of the films were based on video games, comic books, action figures, or TV shows. The nerd doesn't get the cheerleader in the end, the underdog doesn't win the big game, and there isn't a big dance number. Instead, the filmmakers push the boundaries of cinema, and treat film as an art form rather than a vehicle for passive entertainment.
The collection starts off with Marguerite Duras's first film, Cesaree, which pairs a poem by Duras with footage of statues at Les Tuileries. The visuals aren't that unique or stunning, and instead rely on Duras's recitation for their power. Isabelle Blanche's Ideal (Fin De L') takes the opposite approach; she strips out all sound except for the clicking of a reel of film as two faces flicker and change with the film. Xavier Baert's Empreinte also relies on abstract forms. It features a series of images building slowly over the film's 12 minutes into footage of a dancer. Both Baert and Blanche treat film as kinetic photography, manipulating shots so that they are unrecognizable at one minute and familiar the next.
Robert Todd's Cabinet and Augustin Gimel's L'Eil Lourd Du Voyage Mecanique both explore cities but in very different ways. Gimel uses digital photography to take us on a hyperactive tour of a park in the middle of a lake, zooming in and out with epileptic frenzy, so that the background noise of each shot becomes a sort of minimalist electronic music. Todd, on the other hand, takes a much slower, deliberate, and voyeuristic view of a city. Masha Godovannaya's Untitled Number 1 offers yet another view of a city, this time St. Petersburg. She juxtaposes images of street life, children dancing, and apartment blocks, repeating images in time to the music. Each repetition allows the viewer to see a piece of the shot that they didn't notice the first or second time around, adding depth to even the most mundane scenes. Frederic Tachou's Reste La is the most affecting film on the DVD, and my personal favorite. It is a moving eulogy to his grandparents, exploring their country cottage by splitting frames into two images. It manages to convey where his grandparents lived, what their life was like, and how profoundly he feels their loss, all in 11 minutes of silent, black and white film. It is a stark contrast to Richard Kerr's Le Bombardement, Le port Des Perles which chops up Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor into an acid nightmare in a rather obvious message about how war is bad. Christina von Greve's Desde La Memoria does a better job of capturing the horrors of war, or in this case Franco's dictatorship, with a combination of manipulated images and harrowing narrative.
Different Cinema - Volume Three is a welcome change from popular cinema. The nine films all offer the viewer unique challenges and rewards, forgoing the usual restrictions of mainstream film for less defined experiences. While the films are probably best viewed in a theater, or as installations at a gallery or museum, this DVD is a suitable alternative, and worth picking up for anyone looking for something different.
| 2009-10-29 Popmatters
By Sarah Boslaugh
Cinema Different: Different Cinema Volume 3 from Microcinema International presents nine films which were selected for the 10th anniversary of the Festival des Cinémas Differents de Paris. They range in duration from three- to 12-minutes and use a variety of formats including super 8, 16mm and digital video. Most of the artists are French but represent a wide variety of approaches and together they present a broad range of techniques and approaches used by contemporary experimental artists working in film and video. But be forewarned: there’s no traditional narrative films in the lot. These artists are experimenting with communication at the abstract end of the spectrum.
The first film on the DVD is also the oldest: Marguerite Duras’ 1979 Césarée. It’s also one of the most radical: Duras’ infamous comment “I approach cinema with the intent to murder it” could be applied to this film which is constructed of discarded footage from her film Le navire Night accompanied by narration spoken by Duras which is at best obliquely connected with the images. While the text is describing the wheat of Galilee and Lake Tiberias, the images are of the gardens of the Tuileries.
Isabelle Blanche embraces the restrictions imposed by working in super 8 and her Idéal (Fin de l’)) is, like most of her films, the length of a super 8 cartridge (3’38” in this case). It consists of a series of rapidly changing and off center static shots of faces accompanied by a mechanical soundtrack which cumulatively produce an almost hypnotic effect. Empreinte by Xavier Baert is a silent and highly abstract 12’ film presenting partial glimpses of a dancer who is never seen in his entirety; although shot in color the hues are so washed out the effect is similar to black and white. Augustin Gimel’s L’oiel Lourd du Voyage Mécanique attempts to break up habitual habits of seeing by cutting a travelogue-like color film into a series of staccato bursts.
Untitled No. 1 by Russian artist Masha Godovannaya evokes the memory of a girl Godovannaya observed in the Nevskiy Prospect in St. Petersburg. Shot in black and white on super 8, it presents haunting images of young girl doing a Flamenco-like dance accompanied by driving guitar music and intercut with images of crowds and monuments. Fréderic Tachou’s Reste-Là! also uses a guitar-heavy soundtrack in a film inspired by a dream about his father. Shot in 16mm it opens with a split screen which presents views of a house in a deliberately disorienting manner. A man and then a boy appear and disappear seemingly randomly before the film returns to the deserted landscape and interiors, finally ending in a white out.
The Canadian artist Richard Kerr has been working in avant-garde cinema since the ‘70’s, making him next to Duras the senior statesman in this collection. He uses both digital and manual techniques in the eight-minute color film Le Bombardement. Le Port Des Perles, a reworking of the trailer for the 2001 Hollywood movie Pearl Harbor. Kerr’s work is so abstract that the connection is not obvious merely from viewing the film but once seen in that light it becomes a commentary on and criticism of the commercial film industry.
Desde la Memoria by German artist Christina von Greve, a 3’ film shot in color and white on Beta, is the most approachable film in this collection. It combines historical (black and white) and contemporary (color) footage with the words of survivors of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship which followed, thus creating a collage which reflects on the privations of that time. Memorably, one survivor recalls: “I saw dogs running through the streets with pieces of human flesh. As long as I live I will never get that picture out of my head.”
Cabinet by Boston-based filmmaker Robert Todd, shot in black and white and color on 16mm, wanders through a city presenting views sometimes recognizable and sometimes deliberately not, accompanied by a variety of sounds.
The DVD for Different Cinema volume 3 is encoded on one side in PAL format and on the opposite in NTSC format. For the films which include spoken text, subtitles are included in English, French and Spanish. It comes with a small package of extras including an eight-page booklet in French and English (which manages to be even more oblique than most of the films), a trailer for the festival, and biographies and selected filmographies for the artists.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Collected Films of Takahiko Iimura No. 1, The
MC-847, 2009
|
Takahiko Iimura is considered one of the most influential and important experimental filmmakers of our time. In an era of the explosion of Underground Film in the States, Iimura, almost alone in Tokyo, began making experimental film just reading the... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Devil Come to Hell and Stay Where You Belong
MC-1096, 2009
|
From a small cabin in the mountains of New York, Nina Breeder and Massimilian Breeder begin a journey across the United States. California is just the initial destination, but just as the edge of the surrounding landscape expands, so does their... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Different Cinema - Volume Two
MC-619, 2006
|
This second volume assembles eight films and videos by artists presented during the 6th Different Cinema Festival of Paris.
This is a rare collection that mixes both video and film based works as an antidote to the worn out arguments over the... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Hard Head: Videos by Mounir Fatmi
MC-840, 2008
|
The Hard Head DVD includes a selection of eight videos produced and created between 1999 and 2008 by Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi. Political, provocative, spiritual and poetic, these complex works bring to light the artist's ambiguities, doubts,... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Hors Pistes Volume 3
MC-1098, 2009
|
The third volume of the HORS PISTES DVD presents three films selected during the 2008 festival: 'The Music of Regret' (Laurie Simmons), 'Les hommes sans gravité' (Eléonore Weber) and 'In the Wake of a Deadad' (Andrew Kötting). Each of these films... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Hybride
MC-684, 2007
|
The Hybride DVD assembles a selection of six films by Johanna Vaude : Wild Eye, Our Icarus, Samurai, Totality Remix, Love and Death, and Exploration. Each film contains its own language, its own theme, and submerges us in unique worlds where the... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Joel Schlemowitz - Short Experimental Films
MC-774, 2007
|
Joel Schlemowitz is a wizard of cinema, and this collection of short experimental films is a marvel to behold. Each piece is a unique gem -- quirky, provocative, playful, often handmade, and always daring -- celebrating Joel's astonishing mastery of... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Malachi Farrell at Work
MC-939, 2008
|
The documentary Malachi Farrell at work - The Making of La Gégène retraces the steps involved in the making of La Gégène, a mixed media art work by Malachi Farrell and his team for the MAC/VAL museum in Vitry-sur-Seine (France) in 2007. Using... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Mix-Up
MC-707, 1986
|
One of the most remarkable and innovative documentaries ever made, this film by Françoise Romand (1986) follows the famous true story of two English women who as babies got switched in the hospital and 20 years later discovered that they'd been... more >
|
|
|
|
|
Nos Stars Et Petit Dieu (Our Stars & The Little God)
MC-618, 2006
|
NOS STARS / OUR STARS
A chronicle of the fantasies and dreams of women in avant-garde contemporary cinema. The faces and bodies of new women haunt the paths and alleyways of avant-garde cinema, just as, yesterday, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Asta... more >
|
|
|
|
|
RE:FRAME - Scanning Time / Documenting Change
MC-1097, 2009
|
RE:FRAME is a selection of seven films from a contemporary cinema, removed from Bollywood, that testifies to the richness of creativity in India. Oscillating between documentary, video art, experimental film, and animation, this compilation explores... more >
|
|
|
|
|
RESISTANCE[S]
MC-552, 2006
|
This DVD compilation, RESISTANCE[S], includes eight films and videos from Middle Eastern and North African artists. It's a panorama of contemporary experimental creativity from this region of the world. As international travelers, these filmmakers... more >
|
|
|
|
|
RESISTANCE[S] Vol. II
MC-782, 2007
|
RESISTANCE[S] Vol. II is collection of experimental film and video art from the Middle East and North Africa. Featuring nine artists from a variety of cultural and disciplinary backgrounds, these intimate, poetic, and documentary works are witness... more >
|
|
|
|
No screenings found
|
Email this page to a friend
