Landscape Suicide (James Benning, 1986)
In this lecture delivered at the Courtisane film festival, Adrian Martin gets at the cinematic quality of key sequences in films such as Fassbinder’s Martha and Costa’s O Sangue. Not only are his analyses edifying, but the boundless enthusiasm with which he delivers them is a joy to behold.
Ice (Robert Kramer, 1970)
The Cinema of Attractions
Interior New York Subway part one (Billy Bitzer, 1905)
Serene Velocity (excerpt) (Ernie Gehr, 1970)
A “fucking masterpiece” as Mitchell Haven, male protagonist of Road to Nowhere, might say.
(Source: vinylisheavy)
“James Benning’s ‘remake’ of John Cassavetes’s Faces (1968) will see its world premiere at the Film Museum in Vienna on November 19. In its notes on the series James Benning: New Work, the Museum calls his Faces an ‘unexpected venture into the world of ‘found footage’ filmmaking.’ As Benning explains, albeit in German at the Museum’s site, he’s reconstructed Cassavetes’s Faces in such a way that 1) it’s comprised entirely of shots of single faces, 2) each actor and actress is on screen as long as he or she is in the original and 3) each scene is exactly as long as it is in the original. So, to take Benning’s example, if a scene lasts half an hour and Gena Rowlands is in that scene half the time, then we will see Rowlands for 15 minutes and then the other two characters in that scene. This reconstruction, he notes, remains steadfastly true to its title.”
- David Hudson at Mubi.com
Dialogues of the Exiled (Raul Ruiz, 1975)
London (Patrick Keiller, 1994)
Tonight I managed to catch a screening of Robinson in Ruins - the final film in Patrick Keiller’s ‘cultural geography’ trilogy. The film is more resolutely political than the previous two works yet it retains their overall form: a discursive approach in which the voice-over and images often achieve a dialectical relationship. The film recapitulates Robinson’s episteme as stated by the narrator in London: ‘Robinson believed that if he looked at it hard enough he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events and in this way he hoped to see into the future.’
My Heart Swims in Blood (John Gianvito, 2011; work in progress)
Read more about this film and the other segments from the yet to be completed collaborative film Far from Afghanistan here.
