Tag Archives: experimental

It Came From Kuchar: Underground Film Documentary

by Cimaxion

Mike Everleth at Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film, has posted this fascinating documentary about legendary filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar. They’ve been making films separately and together for over 50 years. Don’t be misled by the term underground. These are simply wonderful and exuberant filmmakers who work in their own way and make films exactly the way they want to make them. Their enthusiasm for film, from totally independent low-budget to full-blown Hollywood spectacular, is infectious and should inspire any young filmmaker to follow his or her own muse and make what they really, deeply, necessarily want to make.  You can find out a lot more by reading the Bad Lit article about the documentary.

By the way, Bad Lit is in fact the most infectiously enthralling film site you will read for a long time. Go there!

Kenneth Anger Makes a New Film for Missoni Fashion House

by Editor

The great American filmmaker, Kenneth Anger, has made a new film called Missoni. He shot it for the Italian fashion house Missoni as part of their Fall 2010 advertising campaign.  The film includes members of the Missoni family engaged in dance-like movement and poses. Can advertising be art? Yes, when it’s done by an artist.

Anger has made another beautiful and mysteriously layered film. Apparently, he has gone digital, using something called a RED digital camera. It has some characteristics in common with 35mm cameras. Anger appears to be using it as freely as he used 16mm cameras.

What’s really interesting about this whole project is its reason for existing.  I think the Missoni advertising angle is just an excuse.  I think they just wanted to be in a film by Kenneth Anger.

Film: Outer Space

by Editor | 1 Comment

Marc Campbell posted this 1999 film called Outer Space by Australian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherassky. Using found footage from something featuring actress Barbara Hershey, Tscherassky creates a jumping and jittering psychotic version of a haunted house movie. The simplest of shots showing a woman entering a house, sitting down, looking into a mirror, looking out a window, are turned into extravagant, multi-layered cubist visions from a nightmare.

Film: From a Land of Ashes and Mist

by Editor | 1 Comment

From an Italian master of short film memory, Fabio Scacchioli, comes this beautiful 23-minute work that expresses the illusion of solid permanence and the heroic attempt to build a reality based on fragments of memory. Even found memories and images can become part of one’s own person. This fleeting and subtle idea becomes more discernible as the film progresses.  The impressive imagery revolves around the recent earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy and compares the desolation of a town reduced to rubble with the lives that once literally danced through home movies.  It is a film about looking for ghosts.