Mad Dance is a trilogy of provocative and beautiful short films that re-envision the way we think, speak and feel about mental distress and wellness in today’s chaotic world. These transformative films offer new maps for navigating madness with insight, healing and hope.
A new reading of the work of a major American and international artist, well known for her depictions of the female body, of society's attitude to women and particularly for her pioneering work as a performance and video artist in the cause of feminism, in the context of artists' reactions to major world issues and a return of the historical genre in art today, underlining her unflagging commitment to the recording of history as it happens.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Musée départemental d'art contemporain de Rochechouart in 2013.
Three films by American filmmaker and actress Sheila McLaughlin stand for a trend in experimental film that took place in the 70s and 80s, moving it away from a radically material-based, self reflexive aesthetic towards the narrative forms of independent film, within which new forms of cinematic representation and documentation could be developed.
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen are not filmmakers first and foremost; they are film theorists, critics and thinkers. Mulvey and Wollen’s texts from the 1970s set their sights on utopian and revolutionary perspectives. Mulvey emphasizes the gestures necessary for a cinematic liberation struggle, while Wollen draws on the power of fantasy and adopts cinema as a model for a new avant-garde. Both play a role in writing a manifesto for a different kind of cinema, whose militant nature is gained from radical work on (cinematic) symbolization processes.
From his early short films shot in Madrid in the 1960s, his first features made in Paris in the 1970s, his critically acclaimed Flammes (re-released in Paris this Spring by Capricci), his later, more ambitious yet rarely seen features of the 1980s Grenouilles and Merlin, to his recent personal essays shot in digital, the work of Adolpho Arrietta spans a multitude of styles and themes, yet offers a singular grace, a poetic sensibility and a refreshingly keen eye for composition, rhythm and character study.
‘You hear it everywhere: Cinema is tipping over – its epic and dramatic forms are spilling over into television, avant-garde and experimental films have fled to the galleries, and all the images that once belonged to it are now available everywhere, anytime. At the Austrian Film Museum, we tend to refrain from such sweeping and simple-minded swan songs. For this very reason, we are honoured to participate in Vertical Cinema – a project committed to taking one step at a time. Instead of trying to tip cinema in its entirety into the digital netherworld, this project is content with just tipping the screen – observing how an artform changes if you respectfully chafe at its edges.’ – Alexander Horwath, Director of the Austrian Film Museum
Beckman began making films in the mid-1970s using Super-8 sound film. Neither documentaries nor narratives, these works, as Jim Hoberman puts it, are "like primitive cartoons ... enigmatic allegories filled with nervous activity and comic violence, sexual imagery ... perceptual game playing and ingenious optical effects."
This first anthology brings together three pieces from 1978-1980: We Imitate; We Break Up (1978); The Broken Rule (1979); and Out of Hand (1980), made after her CalArts studies and featuring many other artists as actors.
This comprehensive new monograph on the influential British artist-filmmaker—renown for his playful and formally ingenious subversion of the everyday world—contains essays by Ian Christie, Martin Herbert, Kathrin Meyer, and Ethan de Seife.
Herbert’s text provides an incisive overview of Smith’s work over the past four decades while Christie examines Smith’s oeuvre within the context of English eccentricity. Meyer’s essay discusses Smith’s film The Black Tower in relation to absence and abstraction while de Seife looks at cinematic scale through the prism of Smith’s Gargantuan.
From surrealist refractions to punk and dissident factions, the CONTRE-OEIL anthology brings together a unique collection of avant-garde film works. Tearing apart the barriers between eras, borders and mediums, the viewing experience encompass a total experience of the unstrapped brain of subterranean luminosity and high voltage experimentations.
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