Man with a Movie Camera
★ 7.8 · 1929 · 68m · Documentary
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
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A poetic documentary tribute to the famous Eiffel tower, built for the 1889 World Fair and intended to have been destroyed 20 years later. A vocal subset of Parisians (among which, one may surmise, Clair would've been counted) insisted the Tower remain above the River Seine, a continued display of French engineering excellence. Clair makes strategic use of double exposures and dissolves, capturing the mechanical exuberance of the Tower; The great swooping steel latticework edifice a bounding symbol of the modern age.
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The Island is a short film shot entirely on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia that became the largest and longest-operating refugee camp after the Vietnam War. The artist and his family were some of the 250,000 people who inhabited the tiny island between 1978 and 1991; it was once one of the most densely populated places in the world. After the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shuttered the camp in 1991, Pulau Bidong became overgrown by jungle, filled with crumbling monuments and relics. The film takes place in a dystopian future in which the last man on earth - having escaped forced repatriation to Vietnam - finds a United Nations scientists who has washed ashore after teh world’s last nuclear battle. By weaving together footage from Bidong’s past with a narrative set in its future, Nguyen questions the individual’s relationship to history, trauma, nationhood, and displacement.
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2025
Barry Cooper was a highly decorated Texas narcotics officer - until he turned on the police force, busting crooked cops and teaching drug users how to hide their stash.
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2025
Documentary made for the University of York, UK, and DMDA exhibition New Fashion for the New Woman 1900-1950. Footage filmed by University of York students, edited by Ray Fairhurst.
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Western 4.33
2001
Vertiginous documentary, shot in effective black-and-white, treats two painful histories. The first is a love story about a truck driver who, on his way from Johannesburg (South Africa) to Luderitz (Namibia), is haunted by thoughts of his girlfriend and their recently severed relationship. His memories are expressed in an often recurring scene, in which songs by Alec Empire, Macy Gray and Robert Schumann roughly tell the story. This small history is alternated with the tragic fate of the Namibian Heroro people, many thousands of whom died early last century in concentration camps that had been set up by the German colonisers near Luderitz. The depiction of this history is cruder and more poignant, with slanting frames, odd camera angles and a multi-layered sound sculpture. The dilapidated barracks and officers' quarters are the last remnants of the miscarried, so-called civilisation projects in Africa.
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Shot at high noon in New York’s financial district, Wallstreet is much like a vertical tickertape, charting the existence of typical office workers. The film’s elongated shadows suggest these workers’ depersonalized, neuter, nearly uniform lives, which flow by without any solid or stable element that might provide definition.
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Glen Denny observed: "This film is not ocean, it is panther stalking jungle." Camera flows because it is free to move through space.
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Fluidity of stone. Subatomic motion asserting a surface. Mind loop wandering. Visitation of sound matrix. Liquid solid. Nature transforms a planetary cycle. Relations of a timeless void.
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