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| A Message from the Future, dir. David Avidan, 1981, Israel |
It might be easy to start blogging with a list of what I watch every week. Notes follow, and the format should be self-explanatory except that the last column is my rating, one to five stars.
| Lenin in Petrograd 1917 | [unknown] | 1969 | USSR | 8mm | 3 |
| Lenin Office and Apartment in Kremlin | [unknown] | 1969 | USSR | 8mm | 2 |
| Pandora | Derek May | 1971 | Canada | Vimeo | 5 |
| You See, I've Had a Life | Ben Levin | 1973 | US | 16mm | 4 |
| Through Adam's Eyes | Bob Saget | 1978 | US | 16mm | 3 |
| Beyond Imagining | Wendy Weinberg | 1992 | US | 16mm | 2 |
| Academy Leader Variations | Various | 1987 | Various | YouTube | 4 |
| Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno | Serge Bromberg, Ruxandra Medrea | 2009 | France | 35mm | 5 |
| Touch Cinema | VALIE EXPORT | 1968 | Austria | DVD | 4 |
| I Am Curious (Yellow) | Vilgot Sjoman | 1967 | Sweden | 35mm | 3 |
| Nobody Had Informed Me | Paul de Nooijer, Menno de Nooijer | 1989 | Netherlands | YouTube | 4 |
| Jabbok | Tom Chomont | 1967 | US | 16mm | 2 |
| Phases of the Moon | Tom Chomont | 1968 | US | 16mm | 3 |
| Oblivion | Tom Chomont | 1969 | US | 16mm | 4 |
| Pink Narcissus | James Bidgood | 1971 | US | 35mm | 4 |
| In the Realm of the Senses | Nagisa Oshima | 1976 | Japan/France | 35mm | 4 |
| Confessions | Curt McDowell | 1972 | US | 16mm | 3 |
| Deep Throat | Gerard Damiano | 1972 | US | 35mm | 3 |
| A Message from the Future | David Avidan | 1981 | Israel | File | 5 |
| Selective Service System | Warren Haack, Dan Lovejoy | 1970 | US | File | 5 |
| Moving Stills | Paul de Nooijer, Frans Zwartjes | 1972 | Netherlands | File | 4 |
| Rythmixxx | Rafael Gray | 1999 | France | File | 2 |
| Teenage Babylon | Graeme Wood | 1989 | Australia | File | 5 |
A very nice man gave me the two regular 8mm film reels on Lenin when I was presenting films in Donetsk, Ukraine this past October. I didn't get around to viewing them until now. They are pretty standard tourist films that you would buy in a museum gift shop, both produced in 1969. Since they were silent I played some music from this compilation of WWII-era Soviet pop songs that I found while watching.
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| Pandora, dir. Derek May, 1971, Canada |
After stumbling across a very cheap copy of the NFB Film Guide (and also after poking around on NFB's Roku channel the previous week), I was leafing through and did a search for other films by Derek May, whose Angel is a very visually-interesting short film featuring music by Leonard Cohen. Pandora popped up in a great copy on the NFB's Vimeo, though it's absent from their website.
Leonard Guercio presented a night of documentary filmmaking from Temple University with three films shown on 16mm on Janurary 8th at International House. I was most struck by Ben Levin's You See, I've Had a Life, which reminded me of some excellent 1960s and 70s NFB documentaries, except the interviewees had subtle Philly accents. Levin gave a brief Q&A via Skype. I hope to view more work from the Temple archive that Leonard maintains over the next few months.
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| Academy Leader Variations, various, 1987, US/Poland/China/Switzerland |
Academy Leader Variations is an interesting ASIFA-produced short featuring animators from the US, China, Poland and Switzerland creating inventive takes on film countdown leader. It features the work of independent American animators like Jane Aaron, Skip Blumberg, George Griffin and Paul Glabicki. It's rentable on 16mm from MoMA and it exists on YouTube as well.
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| Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, dir. Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea, 2009, France, 35mm |
I saw the documentary on Clouzot's Inferno on a tiny screen at the IFC Center when it came out and it was great to revisit it on 35mm.
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| Deep Throat, dir. Gerard Damiano, 1972, US, 35mm |
All the films on January 10 and 11 were part of Jesse Pires's excellent series Free to Love: The Cinema of the Sexual Revolution at International House. Oblivion was the winner on the Tom Chomont reel which came from UCLA/Outfest. I had already seen many of the films in this first week's screenings, but In the Realm of the Senses (which I previously watched on Criterion's blu-ray) looked stunning on 35mm. Confessions makes me want to check out more Curt McDowell films and watching Deep Throat on 35mm felt like an American rite of passage. I wrote an introduction and preview of week one of the series at the International House website.
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| Selective Service System, dir. Warren Haack & Dan Lovejoy, 1970, US |
Karagarga's freeleech week means I've been downloading a lot of new (to me) films. A Message from the Future is an off-the-wall sci-fi cult film from 1981 by Israeli avant garde poet and independent filmmaker David Avidan. It features a funky disco soundtrack and lots of interesting sets and costumes. I came across the film in an unsuccessful search for Avidan's short Sex (1970) which is listed in Amos Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art. Another of Vogel's subversive films, Selective Service System is an anti-war short where a young man shoots his foot with a rifle to avoid being drafted. It's eleven minutes long and graphic. It was produced at San Francisco State University in 1970, ground zero for creative filmmaking (as well as social protest) in the US at the time. Graeme Wood's 1989 Teenage Babylon is a haunting short film recreating teenage suicides in 1960s Australia. A soundtrack of pop standards sits over the footage which has the look of crime scene documentation (bringing to mind Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer's even more graphic How to Shoot a Crime). Though the film was made on 16mm, the digital transfer is from a VHS copy, creating an extra layer of confusing media signifiers. The Australian Center for the Moving Image featured Teenage Babylon in their 2010 exhibition Celluloid Traces.
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