Across & Down
2012 · 19m · Documentary
Frame by frame, letter by letter, this film aligns riddles/answers from 6 rolls of Super-8, with the structure, poetry and imagery posed by Ugandan crossword puzzles. Across & Down is a study of simultaneous simplicity and complexity and the resulting serendipity and chaos.
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Daumë
2000 · ★ 5.7
Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a film about ritual, power, and play. Daumë is both ethnography and critique; it is an interrogation into how to represent a place that can't be represented.
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2002 · ★ 5.8
Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.
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2005 · ★ 4
An ethnographic field report in which the Anthropologist describes the mythic creation of an unnamed ‘sun-scraping structure’ through the ritualized actions of the Red and the Blue Gods.
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Depositions
2014
The quietly insistent and critical DEPOSITIONS attempts to restore some dignity to images of the communities of the Scottish highlands taken from patronizing BBC documentaries and news features from the 70’s and 80’s. DEPOSITIONS repurposes footage from the archives of the BBC and sound from the School of Scottish Studies, it is a film about differences and dichotomies: science and superstition, near and far, community and the individual.
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Tenement Films
2009
A series of portraits, made for Television, of four diverse individuals brought together through shared residence. These short films were filmed in the tenement where I lived for eight years. The first is shot in our bedroom, which doubled up as my former partner's office, the three others were shot in architecturally identitical spaces owned by my then neighbours. Shot and edited on a single 16mm bolex camera using available light throughout, the films invoke reflections on the four individuals, how they occupy these particular spaces together.
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2014 · ★ 6
Pyramid is a single screen work on Abraham Maslow's theory on the hierarchy of human needs filmed through the rhythms and choreography of middle class South England. Filmed in color and b&w on 16mm film, it continues Salmon's interest in the performance of the artist/cinematographer within both spontaneous and constructed situations and incorporates methods developed by various movements within documentary and avant-garde history. Using an array of sounds, music and conversation as well as silence, Salmon constructs an abstract documentary which both develops and challenges the themes presented in Maslow's theory as well as her own interest in human iconography, stereotype and domestic rhythm. The image of Maslow's pyramid and his pragmatic dissection of human needs and possible motivations provide a system of organization for the family and a philosophical framework for the video.
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Turnaround
1983 · ★ 3
A spiritual journey, symbolized by the spiral, through images and sounds selected from the physical world over several years as the filmmaker moved between city and country and journeyed to the Center. Lee added some sounds and music to enhance the mood and sees the film as a mirror in which the image is distorted by his own consciousness.
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Ignoring It: The Big Ba$il Story
2017
A documentary about an up-and-coming young rapper with big aspirations.
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Home Movie: On the Set of Philippe Garrel's 'Le lit de la vierge'
1968 · ★ 8.1
An experimental and poetic portrait of a woman.
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Midwinter Hue
2017
A man steadily bashes through the snow. He disappears and the trees, covered in white, shift and show a beautiful array of hidden colors. A poetic, meditative short film about letting go of the past and embracing the unknown future.
More info →One Half of Wealth for One Half of Beauty
1994
Anything that complies with standards is a wasted effort to Vlado Kristl: 'I believe in only doing those things that decompose and tear conventional systems apart.' Kristl's métier are borderlines. His paintings and animated films are interspersed with clear dividing lines, only for him to blur and mess them up. His graphics are scribbled over and over again until the whole surface becomes black. His oil paintings, unless someone buys them in time, are painted over and over again. He destroys any form that begins to grow. -Thomas Brandlmeier
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