part 2 in the "LA in Lockdown" trilogy
Social & External
This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.
An experimental film comprised of Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING played forwards and backwards at the same time on the same screen, creating bizarre juxtapositions and startling synchronicities
Bear (10 minutes, 35 seconds) was Steve McQueen's first major film. Although not an overtly political work, for many viewers it raises sensitive issues about race, homoeroticism and violence. It depicts two naked men – one of whom is the artist – tussling and teasing one another in an encounter which shifts between tenderness and aggression. The film is silent but a series of stares, glances and winks between the protagonists creates an optical language of flirtation and threat.
This is a story of love seen from a square, in which a couple gets united, separated and rearranged again. A special kind of puzzle.
There is nothing left to do but complain.
Deconstructing and reconstructing Cree narrative, this film experiments with language to create a linguistic soundscape.
Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.
Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
the quarry is a silent document of five minutes in the presence of the sublime. This small, quiet 16mm film serves as a testament both to cinema’s failure to reproduce the lived moment and to its success in replacing that moment with one that is equally wondrous.
Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.
Lights flicker & fade as focus shifts from artificial to natural light, ending on a second artificial light speeding through the blackened miasma of the night sky.
3 minute experimental film.
1 minute experimental film.
Found film sequences brought together in the paranoia of the cold war and Vietnam.
Be better and more beautiful than you were before.
A mass murderer kills his victims, then cooks and eats them
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 ...
CREMASTER 4 (1994) adheres most closely to the project's biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system's onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion - three identical armored legs revolving around a central axis. Set on the Isle of Man, the film absorbs the island's folklore ...
A psychiatrist tells two stories: one of a trans woman, the other of a pseudohermaphrodite.
August 2019. Frank recognizes his own story of twenty years ago in a recently published book. He remembers Marie, with whom he had a relationship before she moved to the United States and disappeared from his life. Frank sets out in search of her and finds himself in a USA petrified by a heat wave and lost in suspicion and political paranoia. He heads into the desert in pursuit of Marie.
Four douchebags leave for a weekend in the countryside without suspecting that they would disturb the tranquility of the humanoid-blattoptera mutant: Termitator.
"Night and Smog - LA in Lockdown 3: Ground Zero" is a symphonic nocturnal journey spiraling into the heart of the modern metropolis. Featuring music by Nick Haley, Jackson Leist, Rene Gannon-O'Gara, Jade James, and Graeme Whynot. For Sarah Maldoror.
Vaalvi is a dark comedy that explores the profound human nature involving selfishness, apathy and self-preservation.
A hot summer day. A half-unpacked house. A mother who needs room to breathe, and a child who needs space to truly exist. As the afternoon heat turns oppressive, time seems to move entirely differently for each person.
A man has something important to tell his son, but can only get through to his voicemail.
To escape the outside world and reconnect with one another, two youngsters travel to a remote beach. A tale about friendship and perhaps love, but most of all about life, its difficulties, and bravery.
Three cosmonauts bid farewell to their loved ones and embark on a journey into space, where they encounter discoveries in uncharted territory yet to be explored by humankind.
A homeless veteran discovers his sister's killer is back on the streets after being released from prison earlier than expected, sending him on a downward spiral of vengeance.
The subconscious of a man try to recollect the idea of himself.
The nineteenth in Fred Camper’s Interactions series.
When a girl is murdered soon after leaving a closed religious community, Moreno faces a difficult investigation as the community closes ranks and refuses to cooperate. When another girl is abducted and her bloody fingernails mailed to the police, tongues begin to loosen.
After an alleged malpractice that led to the death of his brother, heart surgeon Daniel Guth took the consequences: he gave up his beloved job and retreated into the solitude of nature. At his place of refuge, the Salzburg mountains, the heiress to a private clinic is desperately looking for a capable chief physician. Daniel declines the post, although he finds the woman attractive. When a boy is seriously injured in a bus accident, he is confronted with his trauma again.
A short film made “for fun” that plays with surreal and evocative imagery
A documentary following the day life of fans in Brazil on July 13, 2014: the day when Germany and Argentina met up in the finals of FIFA World Cup.
A stand up comedy tour documentary that follows Gavin Matts and Rufat Agayev as life on the road tests the relationship between headliner and opener.
Architect Hal Norton and wife Meg invite his widowed mother Louisa to move in with them, only to discover the sweet elderly lady is romantically involved with what seems to be every old coot in town.
The theater group within the prison of Cuatro Caminos, which includes a total of six prisoners-eight volunteers, it was decided to stage the play "12 Angry Men". However, his dream will be lowered when a contagious infection forced to remain isolated inside. Fear and lack of information to jump trigger alarms and the group is consumed by stress. With the participation of real prisoners, this film is an innovative proposal to help them pass and live, while participating in a larger project.
The wife of the Düsseldorf Police Council Rainer Bachmann is kidnapped. While trying to save his mother Monika, the adult son is shot dead. His widow Nicola desperately seeks support.
