Preface is a film about seeing. What do we see in a face, and how do we decode what we see. Introduction to Holthuis’ series Careless Reef, six films about the world under the surface.
Secção: Laboratório
It is a film about blockade of Leningrad within the Second World War. There are no words, there is no music, – only sounds and pictures of a dying city.
City Light Rays represents the energy of the speed of movement produced by the city. The simultaneous coexistence of the operations produce a flow of energy invisible in the urban space but felt by its inhabitants. The interaction is here revealed by the sound and image effects. The rays of light assume a dynamic which gives form to the invisible energy understood by the conscience of anyone.
DEEP INSIDE is a video based on a pornographic movie. The original film displays the various possibilities for 3 individuals of fitting together in one given space.
A moment of reality in three acts, not at all just mere provocation, quite the opposite. Without a care, DIARY OF A MARRIED MAN throws taboos in our face and is intentionally shocking. But behind the deliberate desire to shake accepted standards of behavior, another reality takes shape: the reality of America where the individual is overpowered by loneliness, boredom and work. Where pleasures are nothing but fantasies. The last scene wavers between funny and despair borderline for sure, but so invigorating.
This film uses images from a well known movie: «The night of the living-dead», a cult horror movie. The cinema toys with our fascination by a realistic scene to which we can identify. The realistic representation of an impossible situation or action is very spectacular. It can be either spectacularly beautiful or spectacularly horrific. The second option is more unifying ; beauty remains more subjective. Thus a horror movie is especially spectacular and this one in particular, since it creates what we expect from the cinema: to revive the dead.
To an old celluloid film box sicks a note to be from the estate of Jack Goldstein. The S8 footage seems to be a film document, which hardly can be interpreted. Place, time and authorship cannot be dated and due to the missing data the viewer will be kept in mystery.
At a Japanese oil refinery, a truck loaded with hot petroleum jelly is paraded from the factory to the harbor. The procession, led by animals, is flanked by hundreds of rejoicing Japanese as it arrives abreast an enormous whaling ship where the jelly is pumped into a mold on deck. The ship departs, and during the weeks of the voyage, the mass of petroleum jelly cools. Meanwhile, below deck, a western couple are falling in love as they are served bowls of tea. As the voyage ensues, the tea room slowly fills up with warm fluid. The western couple become enveloped in the fluid and slowly transform. As the ship reaches the Southern Ocean, amongst a backdrop of luminous icebergs we behold the de-moulding of the sculpture…
1970’s. Eastern Germany. The East Germans started with their allies on an ambitious a secret project to colonize the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Sheer fantasy or pure reality? Archive footage of cosmonauts on space, audio recordings, and radio transmissions make you wonder.
Laos. The waters of the Mekong are at a low ebb. On a mud beach, men, women and children walk, run, fish or play. Shifts in perspective, the timing of shots, focus and speed transform these everyday scenes into an adventure of perception.
An intimate journal in video, and an invitation to the a meditation about aging, feebling and death. More than ten years of a life condensed into one hundred minutes of time screen.
One minute of film should be a source of pleasure, one minute of film about Mozart has to be. Mai Thai is meant to sing along to.
MALEREI HEUTE means painting now, and the films starts when, in In the summer of 1998 Stefan Hayn started painting water-color paintings of the billboards put up in the urban landscape of Berlin. From the outset, each sheet was a «take» of a documentary film, which records the economical, political and interpersonal changes that become obvious on the «public» images from 1998 to 2005.
How does artist Matthew Barney use 45,000 pounds of petroleum jelly, a factory whaling vessel and traditional Japanese rituals to create his latest art project? Barney plowed the waters off the coast of Nagasaki to film his massive endeavor, Drawing Restraint 9. The documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint journeys to Japan with Barney and his collaborator Bjork, as the visual artist creates a narrative sculpture telling a fantastical love story of two characters that transform from land mammals into whales.
While the Iraq war continues, a day’s sightseeing and the features of a German hotel provoke a stream of thoughts about events large and small.
A young, inexperienced film critic, François, has a girlfriend and falls in love with a well-established female colleague, Rosa. A kinky relationship develops between the two of them, leading François to discover the inner workings of desire: desire of a woman and of a critic. Until the day his cheating is discovered.
Office technology becomes obsolete very quickly. Old tools are transformed into musical instruments of the future. The film is based on the Symphony # 2 for Dot Matrix Printers, composed by [The User].
sCOpe is like a snake. The sound is a long whistling. The film is a little sadistic and wishes to take away from us a ¬´ full view ¬ª (it refers to the ad ¬´ Gimme more ¬ª for the CinemaScope format). “