A premonition of a horror film, lurking danger: A house - at night, slightly tilted in the camera's view, eerily lit - surfaces from the pitch black, then sinks back into it again. A young woman begins to move slowly towards the building. She enters it. The film cuts crackle, the sound track grates, suppressed, smothered. Found footage from Hollywood forms the basis for the film. The figure who creeps through the images, who is thrown around by them and who attacks them is Barbara Hershey. Tscherkassky's dramatic frame by frame re-cycling, re-copying and new exposure of the material, folds the images and the rooms into each other. It removes the ground from under the viewer's feet and splits faces, like in a bad dream. From the off, from outer space, foreign bodies penetrate the images and cause the montage to become panic stricken. The outer edges of the film image, the empty perforations and the skeletons of the optical sound track rehearse an invasion...
A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.
The first of Peter Tscherkassky's Cinemascope trilogy of short films is a fragmented glimpse of images pulsating with chaotic rhythm as they fight white margins for room in his palette. Mirrored frames being split by white margin and trying to reassemble again like the poles of a magnet, a train approaching station and colliding with itself in white-hot blistering chaos.
The Life of Sean DeLear is a vibrantly multi-faceted, buoyantly propulsive documentary portrait of this irresistibly charismatic one-off — sketched in celebratory but commendably clear-eyed style by writer-director Markus Zizenbacher. There can be very few people better qualified to do justice to this particular tale. Zizenbacher befriended DeLear — born Anthony Robertson in Simi Valley, an obscure California backwater — after the latter relocated to Vienna in the early 2010s.
Elena Wolff submerges into the turbulent world of the young, up-and-coming art scene of Linz. In a series of episodes, Asche tells of three couples and an outsider, of alpha males and muses, of loneliness, and the urge for self-realization. In doing so, this pop satire of the art world exercises a high-volume criticism of both patriarchy and the cultural scene—including unexpected vendettas and bizarre encounters.
The film "Into the Emptiness" describes an example of the ritual game of "serfdom" in a "studio for bizarre eroticism". This game comprises a masochistic phantasy in which theguest assumes the role of an obedient slave and servant while the woman employed by the "studio" plays a domina who rules and punishes without mercy.
Bergmanesque ghosts appear at the bedside of Edward Weki, a 75-year-old Sudanese man suffering from the final stage of Parkinson’s: Alma, the nurse of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, and a female version of Death from his The Seventh Seal help the old man recover lost memories of his life on the island of Farö.
The day came to a lonesome night / It lasted for such a short time / Does it stop / Love lasts or it doesn't / "Tu veux ou tu veux pas"
The accomplishments of four handicapped ten-year-olds are recorded on camera. Their determination to do and create is obvious in each action.
Russian-born director Aleksey Lapin travels back to his relatives’ home village near the Ukrainian border, where he himself used to spend every summer. The film crew introduce themselves at a specially organized musical event, claiming that they have come to cast a historical film that is to be set in the village. What follows is a charming, semi-fictional documentary by and with the village community.
Void, elegiac images - a story and loving and dying: A journey entrusts itself to the viewer's ability to associate and creates a collision of melancholy, softly red-filtered vacation images with an (apparently) totally unrelated story.
Composed of 28 static-camera scenes from everyday (occupied)-Tibetan life, each picture (without narration) a "narrative" lasting several minutes, these 28 views explore the contradictions between the traditional way of life and modernism's obvious invasion of Tibet.
Sitting on her bed, Kurdwin Ayub wears a babydoll and hugs a blanket in her arms. She speaks to the camera as if addressing her ex-boyfriend. How to react to his eyes staring at us?
A few hours in the life of empress Sisi; a summer night at Gödöllö. A game with operetta and melodrama; a grotesque with much colour, music, dancing, and bloodshed.
Anton and Franz live together since the beginnings of 20th century. They talk about their difficulties of being vampires, since their first bite in 1938. Their inconsistent arguments recall those of normal human beings. And history repeat itself. As if that were not enough, they also doesn`t really like each other much.
Inside a museum, nowadays. A diorama represents two young soldiers in the trenches. All of a sudden, we are thrown into the diorama: the immobile soldiers come to life, there is terror on their faces – the camera dances around them – explosions, chaos, fog: everything flies about in the air. With every gunshot, they shudder and curl up
In the darkroom, 50 unexposed film strips were laid across a surface, upon which a frame of "La sortie des ouvrier de l'usine Lumière" was projected. The stringing together of the individual developed sections make up the new film, which reads the original frame like a page from a musical score: within the strips from top to bottom and sequentially from left to right.
Dropping Furniture shows the destruction of a living space. The film is conceived as a symbolic image for the loss of an existence.
Landscape and cinema form an amalgam here, being both interior spaces of thought and feeling and projected images of an outside.