Three lives caught in limbo between dreams, reality, and oblivion.
Social & External
Paul
Terra (20s)
Rob
Terra (50s)
Director Lam Can-Zhao leads a small film crew as they shoot a film about a stray dog in the streets of Guangzhou, leading viewers into an unpredictable, peculiar and incredible journey.
An artist strives to achieve a state of pure existence. Caught between inertia and movement, her body strains, adapts, and responds to what is happening around her.
A spell of time in the life of a family in rural Tochigi prefecture. Yoshiko is not an ordinary housewife, instead working on an animated film project. Uncle Ayano, a successful music producer, is looking to get his head together after living in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Sachiko is concerned with why she seems to be followed by a giant version of herself. As the lazy days pass by, each member of the family is followed in a series of episodic vignettes.
Short experimental 16mm film.
Eleven young film-makers got together to collaborate in this atypical project. Atypical not only because of its technical specs, but because of its narrative structure. There are several scenes with only the city in common, and more as a conceptual presence at that than as a precise geography. None of those scenes contains a single "story": Each one of them is part of a larger situation that we cannot see, as though the beginning and end of each "story" had to be filled in by the audience.
In this fragile yet frightening poetic fantasy set against a dark industrial landscape, a woman sits knitting on the porch of her home when a man appears and takes the knitting from her.
A married couple begins to drift apart after they discover the husband's doppelgänger lurking the streets of their neighbourhood.
CREMASTER 2 is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1.
CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...
The young hero seems the essence of maleness, yet he's troubled by vaguely feminine objects. Soon his masculine and feminine selves are intercut, as each of his identities appears to look and gesture at the other. The film, at once melancholy and transcendent, consists of a shimmering, nearly plotless evocation of gender identity in flux through haunting, densely interlaced images.
Structured in nine tableaux each a study of a simple action or situation involving a lone, naked figure, the blind Eros, searching for fulfilment, for self. The objects he touches - books, paintings - can be seen as icons of the creative spirit; there is also a motor cycle and film equipment. In succeeding scenes he appears to try on identities offered by institutional doctrines of religion and social traditions of (overt) masculinity. Much of the film was constructed in-camera with a small amount of editing afterwards. An innovation was the use of in-camera fade-outs as phrase markers, not as terminal points, within a single set-up or shot.
Psyche 1947, made while a student at USC, shows Markopoulos’ developing style and his sensuous use of colour and composition. Shot in the Hollywood hills, the film was inspired by an unfinished novella by Pierre Louÿs. - Tate Modern
Markopoulos called Lysis “a study in stream-of-consciousness poetry of a lost, wandering, homosexual soul” and felt that the film foreshadowed The Illiac Passion.
Based on Plato's dialogue Charmides.
A vain actor, his best friend, and an activist end up at a mutant freak farm run by a weirdo scientist.
Set in the dark depths of a strange and mysterious power supply complex, ELLIOT tells the tale of a conflicted humanoid (Elliot) struggling to maintain his reality and understand his true identity. Elliot is thrust into a disconcerting downward spiral of despair in which he is forced to recognize the perils of his own cognition and constructed ideals in a crumbling universe where the lines between fantasy, simulation, and reality are blurred, and the fibers of Elliot’s fragile existence are ruptured.
A man contemplates whether or not it is possible to do something unique.
An experimental film shot with the purpose of trying to create a hostile alien environment using only shots of nature, color correction, and sound design.
Jimmy lives through a nightmare of blood and violence. Surreal images are replaced by brutal splatter. An inferno from which Jimmy is only too eager to wake up. Young director Lars Cramer presents his first work, accompanied by dark Italian sounds.
A theater director struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play.
