Norway | 1976 | 13 min Very much in fashion in the late nineteenth century, phrenology established itself on the cultural and scientific scene as the medical doctrine that allowed understanding individual inclinations departing from the observation of skull morphology. Marianne Heske goes back on this forgotten science to make one of the most iconic […]
Tag: 64 Festival dei Popoli
FILMARILYN
Italy | 1992 | 13 min Filmarilyn is an example of the inventive and creative power of an artist as unique as Paolo Gioli, a photographer and filmmaker who had always been interested in the power of the image, i.e., in what an image can tell about the world beyond the immediate representation of it. […]
TAKE OFF
Sweden | 1972 | 10 minutes “Take off” in English can mean both to remove your clothing and to start flying. Experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson’s short plays with this double meaning. A Swedish naturalized American, Nelson moved in 1953 to California, where she settled and became an outstanding representative of avantgarde cinema, especially the movement […]
SOS EXTRATERRESTRIA
Austria, Germany | 1994 | 10 min More than an alien invasion, the fantasy proposed by Mara Mattuschka in her Sos Extraterrestria is the explosion of some latent, anarchist, and destructive energy; a monstrously terrestrial body that takes on the appearance of a sort of giantess wandering in the streets of a toy city in […]
DOUBLE LABYRINTHE
Greece, France | 1975-76 | 55 min In 1976, departing from body art and feminist movements, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki theorized “le cinéma corporel,” a new approach to filmmaking that revolutionizes the representation of the female body. This was the first step in composing La Tétralogie Corporelle, of which Double Labyrinthe is an episode. […]
DOPPELGÄNGER
UK | 1979 | 10 min In this video performance, Scottish artist Elaine Shemilt films herself during make-up, with the camera switching from her face to the image reflected in the mirror while she draws thick lines on the latter. Thus, an other self is sketched, creating an imperfect correspondence. The gesture is accompanied by […]
KAMIKAZE HEARTS
USA | 1986 | 77 min Combining direct cinema and docudrama, Juliet Bashore’s debut focuses on the intense relationship between two women who work in the porno film industry: the more cynic, more experienced Sharon “Mitch” Mitchell and the younger newcomer, Tina “Tigr” Mennett. The relationship reaches high levels of toxicity not only due to […]
BLONDE COBRA
USA | 1963 | 33 min After assembling the delirious sound of Jack Smith (who had just made the controversial Flaming Creatures) and sequences from two aborted film projects shot by Bob Fleischner, with Blonde Cobra the film director Ken Jacobs casts his gaze on “an exploding life”, i.e., in his own words, “on a […]
FLAMING CREATURES
USA | 1963 | 45 min In 1962, Jack Smith threw a `Scheherazade party’ lasting for seven consecutive weekends on the roof of a movie theatre in the Lower East Side. The film director and his friends, clad in various styles of drag, staged for the camera an imaginary transvestite orgy. The result of a […]
FOCII
UK | 1974 | 12 min This film was developed within the London Filmmaker’s Cooperative, conceived and based at Better Books, a counterculture bookshop in Charing Cross Road where a group guided by the poet Bob Cobbing and the filmmakers Stephen Dwoskin and Jeff Keen used to meet for film screenings and, later on, for […]