film + video screenings

...an experimental silent film/
a quartet of voices without beginning nor end that form a never ending cycle/
being the adventures of a young man dealing with the Powers That Be/
The Nicotine and Alcohol Rehabilitation Centre...

The hero of Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is easy to identify. Walking down the street unknowingly, he suddenly realizes that he is not only subject to the gruesome moods of several spectators but also at the mercy of the filmmaker. He defends himself heroically, but is condemned to the gallows, where he dies a filmic death through a tearing of the film itself.
Our hero then descends into Hades, the realm of shades. Here, in the underground of cinematography, he encounters innumerable printing instructions, the means whereby the existence of every filmic image is made possible. In other words, our hero encounters the conditions of his own possibility, the conditions of his very existence as a filmic shade.
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is an attempt to transform a Roman Western into a Greek tragedy.
- Peter Tscherkassky (translation: Eve Heller)

"The Tale of the Floating World" is an animated film by Alain Escalle (visuals) and Cécile Le Prado (composer). It is composed of real characters filmed in Japan and a mixture of new and traditional animation techniques (Film, video, photographic, illustration and computer-generated images). An evocative and surrealistic view of Japan and the atomic bomb. An imaginary story, both cruel and childlike. The dark visions, light, calm, even agitated by the strange fantasy of a mutated world.
 - transplant France

The Hearth of the World was made for the Toronto International Film Festival as a “prelude” for their 25th anniversary in 2000. According to Zeitgeist Films it was proclaimed, by many festival-goers and critics, to be the best film of the entire festival. Either way, this short, with references to/parodies of soviet montage cinema of the 1920s, German Expressionism of the 1920s and the long gone wonderfully melodramatic silent films is brilliant, at least in my opinion.

"Coltrane made a major break through with his album "Giant Steps" in the year 1959. It was the first time in the history of Jazz music that someone based his music on symmetrical patterns, which stemmed from a mathematical division of the musical scale.The structural approach of John Coltraineto music is associated with architectural thinking. The musical theme defines a space and the musical improvisation is like someone drifting in that imaginary space."
- http://michalevy.com

Buckle up for DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, the acclaimed hijacking documentary that eerily foreshadowed 9-11. We meet the romantic skyjackers who fought their revolutions and won airtime on the passenger planes of the 1960's and 1970's. By the 1990's, such characters were apparently no more, replaced on our TV screens by stories of anonymous bombs in suitcases.

Director Johan Grimonprez investigates the politics behind this change, at the same time unwrapping our own complicity in the urge for ultimate disaster. Playing on Don DeLillo's riff in his novel Mao II: "what terrorists gain, novelists lose" and "home is a failed idea", he blends archival footage of hijackings with surreal and banal themes, including fast food, pet statistics, disco, and his quirky home movies. David Shea composed the superb soundtrack to this free fall through history, best described in the words of one hijacked Pepsi executive as "running the gamut of many emotions, from surprise to shock to fear, to joy, to laughter, and then again, fear."