RE:VOIR
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Take Off
Freaky and not a little transcendent, TAKE OFF takes the strip tease well past its usual climax. By sprinkling a little Georges Melies magic over the peep show motif, Gunvor Nelson simultaneously revels in cinema's earliest forms while exploding the medium's customary reliance on (and...Watch Movie
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Meshes of the Afternoon
One of the most important films in the history of American avant-garde cinema, Maya Deren's MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON is captivating and dream-like, filled with tinges of psychodrama, murder mystery, and film noir. In a seemingly ordinary Los Angeles home, the film's...Watch Movie
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Schmeerguntz
Memorably described by Ernest Callenbach as "one long raucous belch in the face of the American home," Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley's montage remains a bracing analysis of misogyny's governing dialectic of idealization and disgust. With acid wit, the filmmakers link the detritus of popular...Watch Movie
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At Land
AT LAND begins at sea. In the film's stunning opening sequence, a woman (played by filmmaker Maya Deren) emerges on shore, climbs up a pile of driftwood... and finds herself in the middle of a formal banquet. She then moves from lush, verdant jungles to seaweed-strewn beaches, stealing chess...Watch Movie
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Divine Horsemen
In 1946, Maya Deren was the first filmmaker ever awarded an artistic Guggenheim grant. With the $3,000 prize money, she traveled to Haiti, a country she would visit four times and where she would spend a total of nearly two years. Deren was the first known white woman to became a high priestess...Watch Movie
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A Colour Box
It is one of the curious quirks of film history that the UK General Post Office is responsible for several masterpieces of cinema. Among them, John Grierson's NIGHT MAIL and this characteristically fizzy Len Lye short, his first camera-less film. Painted directly on film stock, Lye's colors and...Watch Movie
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My Name is Oona
Gunvor Nelson's entrancing study of her young daughter is not so much a portrait as an invocation. Quicksilver montage make it impossible to discern where one image ends and another begins, richly conveying a fluid sense of a being. As much a work of sound art as a visual poem, the incantatory...Watch Movie
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Ghosts Before Breakfast
The Dadaists were closely attuned to cinema's native surrealism. And so it is fitting that Hans Richter's GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST should return to so many of the medium's first loves: trick shots, fisticuffs and slapstick are all thrown in the dada blender, unfettered from the...Watch Movie
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Moon's Pool
Gunvor Nelson's oceanic lyric dissolves dualities of male and female, emotion and form, inside and outside, image and reflection. In the midst of a characteristically dense soundtrack, we hear the words: "Today, I see you see me in my body," a cause for celebration in this literally immersive...Watch Movie
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T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G,
"If you take the facts of the retina, the flicker mechanism of film projection," Paul Sharits wrote, "then you can make films without logic of language." T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G assaults language rather more directly with its single-word soundtrack ("Destroy") and the image of poet...Watch Movie
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Ritual in Transfigured Time
Elusive and enigmatic, RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME begins with its director, the avant-garde pioneer filmmaker Maya Deren, winding a seemingly endless skein of yarn. She is joined by a young woman (the Trinidadian dancer Rita Christiani, one of Deren’s closest friends) who is...Watch Movie
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Pestilent City
Unspooling without dialog and with visionary, hair-raising force, Peter Emanuel Goldman's disquieting lyric is less a "city symphony" than dirge, a kind of prelude to TAXI DRIVER. Negative photography, slow motion and plain attentiveness to the everyday uncanny are all marshaled to reveal the...Watch Movie
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Les hautes solitudes
In keeping with the vast majority of the films of its writer/director, Philippe Garrel, LES HAUTES SOLITUDES is an intensely personal experience. A film in which characters thrown together in empty rooms stung by silence drift between fleeting glances, reacting or not reacting...Watch Movie
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Swinging the Lambeth Walk
Pop art avant la lettre, SWINGING THE LAMBETH WALK remains an object lesson in "visual music." Len Lye's genius for color and geometry is everywhere-apparent in his joyous visual accompaniment of the titular swing dance number (which features Django Reinhardt on guitar and...Watch Movie
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Rhythmus 21
Hans Richter's position in the art world was unique. As one of the earliest exponents of Dada, he was also one of the first to recognize the new possibilities cinematography offered the artist. He participated in the first avant-garde film movement alongside Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Man...Watch Movie
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Ballet Mechanique
A seminal work of abstract cinema still hell-bent on speed, BALLET MECANIQUE remains a touchstone for modernist preoccupations with industry, mass culture, repetition and montage. The true hero of Fernand Leger's only film is the lowly film splice. With its capacity for...Watch Movie
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A Study in Choreography for Camera
"If I did not live in a time when film was accessible to me as a medium, I would have been a dancer, perhaps, or a singer," the filmmaker Maya Deren once said. "But this is a much more marvelous dance. In film, I can make the world dance!" After college, Deren landed her first...Watch Movie
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Meditation on Violence
Haunting Chinese flute and Haitian drums accompany a graceful, elegant dance performance by Chao-Li Chi in Maya Deren's MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE. The film was released following the publication of her book, "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film", and her winning the Grand...Watch Movie
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The Brig
"I went to see 'The Brig', the play, the night it closed. The Becks were told to shut down and get out. The performance, by this time, was so precisely acted that it moved with the inevitability of life itself. As I watched it I thought: Suppose this was a real brig; suppose I was a newsreel...Watch Movie
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Wheel of Ashes
After being heralded by Jean-Luc Godard as the great hope of the New American Cinema, Peter Emanuel Goldman relocated to Paris just in time for 1968. Social dissolution permeates WHEEL OF ASHES, a stripped-down account of a young man's existential reckoning. "As dust hides a mirror, lust hides...Watch Movie
