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The Film-Makers' Cooperative c/o The Clocktower Gallery 108 Leonard Street, 13 floor New York, NY 10013 USA phone: 212-267-5665 fax: 212-267-5666 e-mail: film6000@aol.com |
Film Catalog: Online Search
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Zoo Liquid Prototype Genre: Experimental, Narrative Keywords: Art & Artists A film out of NYC's Downtown World of artists and poets, inhabited by living poets and driven by their words. I used what author/filmmaker Carl Linder calls organic filmic selection, the process where the visual image is allowed to "grow out of itself." I also used B&W single frame takes and short bursts of 12 frames per second (half the normal rate of 24 frames per second) to get a feel for the texture of Downtown. Zoo. . . is a film that doesnt let you forget you are watching a film. Zoo is the modern "urban city" -- in this case New York City, with side trips to San Francisco. Liquid is the "nature" of its dwellers. Prototype, a "model" of our direction to a future that fosters contentions with a rise to conflicts and contradictions that will not offer resolutions but only a rubbing together of persons. The films main character, Gun, is a performance artist of the Downtown NYC scene. In her performance piece, she plays the poet, Emily Dickinson, taking her stage name, Gun, from Emilys poem, I stood a Loaded Gun. Her performance, Mystery upon Mystery, reveals her path to becoming a performance artist and it is where she acts out a timeless artist manifesto taken from Emilys life and work. She acts as narrator between the fragments of conflict with simple straight forward acts of physical contact to the final question of death-dealing violence: "Should I kill Jeff or that Gun bitch" Zoo demands several viewings and a close reading of the subtexts. It comes with a CD-ROM. Rental: $300.00 |
The vision machine Genre: Experimental Keywords: Films about Film, Media, Philosophical "The girls-only party scenes in THE VISION MACHINE have both the ruddy look of overexposed home movies and the richly burnished texture of Renaissance paintings cracking under their veneer. A riff on Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (Ahwesh, with Keith Sanborn's collaboration, inscribes the lyrics of 'Wild Thing' on a warped video version of a roto-relief) and on Bunuel's Viridiana (here the lowlifes invading the manor are women artists), THE VISION MACHINE is an inspired depiction of girls dressing up and acting out, pleased as punch to have taken over the screen." -- Amy Taubin, The Village Voice Rental: $80.00 |
 In the Course of Human Events Genre: Experimental Keywords: Landscape & Architecture After the 1989 quake the city of San Francisco decided to tear down the Embarcadero Freeway once and for all. The climate of dread evoked by PREMONITION is followed by a primitive yet seductive "tableau" of twisted metal. The bulldozers are prehistoric monsters that tear bits of metal and stone from the vulnerable concrete. Angerame films the spectacle in extremely precise shots that surgically unveil our obsession with destruction and technological decline. "[A]n exquisite black and white surrealist depiction of the Embarcadero Freeway demolition, in which dinosaurlike tractors gnash at an organic tangle of steel reinforcements. ... Inanimate objects and heavy machinery become living metaphors for generation through the director's signature use for high-contrast, time-lapse and double exposure cinematography. Like a moving gallery installation, the 23-minute piece is composed of individual shots so precise and emotionally evocative that each could stand on its own as testimony to Angerame's astounding talent." -- Silke Tudor, SF Weekly "... a metaphorical approach to architecture could be found in quite a few works and this is why the organizers put them together in a separate section. In this section, the most remarkable film was IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS by Dominic Angerame, a film that combines shorts of the tearing down of the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco with industrial music -- a proposal of an ambivalent interpretation of human break up and break down." -- Andreas Denk, Kunstforum, July-September 1998 Rental: $90.00 (16mm) |
Line of Fire Genre: Documentary Keywords: Philosophical, Science & Medicine In November of 1993 I was diagnosed as having coronary arterial disease. A subsequent angiogram revealed that open heart surgery was necessary - it was almost immediately performed. This angiogram was filmed originally on 35mm motion picture film. In March of 1995 my apartment burned down in the early morning hours and my girlfriend and I escaped with our neighbor down the rear fire escape as lethal smoke was enveloping us. I was able to return to the scene the next day in order to film the aftermath. This film is a blend of footage from these two episodes and explores the temporal nature of the lives we live. Rental: $40.00 (16mm) |
Still Life Genre: Experimental Keywords: Science & Medicine This film considers the subject of HIV and AIDS from a variety of different view points. On the one hand using textual material in both English and French which appears on screen at different speeds and rhythms, and on the other, articulated by the appearance of human voice on the sound track. Both the observations and experiences concerning AIDS overlap with one another and emerge in fragmentary form, whereby the policies persued regarding this subject are represented through the application of specific visual modalities. AIDS hasn’t disappear as a new result of tritherapy : AIDS is being trivialized to make it easier to conceal. By employing constant confrontation as a technique, this films manages to build bridges regarding our attitudes toward HIV and AIDS. It is a story of a person confronted with a civilization which promotes deaths as a way of life: and its attempts to confirm that something else exist beyond this wonderful antiseptic-homogenous society in which we live. Rental: $50.00 |
Sweet Sweet A love story, with dreamy images focusing on his partner, the family, and travel in Florida; tactfully placed details both naive and dutiful, all the while Hank Williams sings "I'm so lonely I could cry", as the soundtrack. Rental: $20.00 |
Imprint Genre: Experimental Rental: $50.00 |
Self Song / Death Song Genre: Experimental SELF SONG documents a body besieged by cancer. The amber glow of narrowly focused, minuscule, layers of flesh and skin suggests both victory and submission to death. The warm colors of the flesh and textures of the skin seemingly suggests a body which is very much alive. Yet, there is always an impending darkness. Blackness surrounds the image and, occasionally, takes it over altogether. Furthermore, the complex grooves and patterns of the flesh struggle to maintain their focus, suggesting the obscuring and dissolving effects of cancer. In DEATH SONG the response to death is certainly more positive. The film begins with a smooth palate of blue hues. The blue returns toward the end of the film as a rigid and structurally organized screen, which suggests the permanent aspect of death. But initially it serves to contrast a blinding sequence of overexposed yellow frames. Within these images are drowning microscopic organisms. Their structure and energy is laid bare for us. However, these images are constantly being 'washed out' by a 'grubby' whiteness, which seeks to dissolve the image entirely. In this respect, we might view the purity of whiteness as being 'soiled' and encompassing. The all-encompassing nature of death is modified or tainted by cancer -- organs and living systems are in a frantic trauma, trying not to be 'washed out'. By the end of the film, the image has shifted to the blue screen. The gentle layers of blues and greens suggests a comfortable and smooth, despite rigid, aspect of death. It is a space in which the dirty whiteness should not pierce. Yet, this vision is too idyllic in Brakhage's mind, and thus he allows the blueness to bleed from the side of the frame, opening the 'blinds' to the cancerous light. -- Andre Munoz, 1997 Rental: $20.00 |
De Profundis Genre: experimental Keywords: literary, personal diary De Profundis is a three part, hand/alternative-processed experimental film based on Oscar Wilde's prison letter De Profundis. Incorporating home movies from the 1920's and early gay male erotica along with images from Radical Faerie gatherings, queer pagan rituals, drag performances and images of confinement, this 65 minute film sets up a haunting investigation of queerness, masculinity, history and sexuality. These images are buttressed against a soundtrack composed of Wilde's aphorisms, a voice and piano setting of Wilde's prison letter, and multi-tracked interviews with a diverse group of contemporary gay men. "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." - Oscar Wilde If film no longer existed, De Profundis gives the impression that Lawrence Brose is certainly capable of reinventing it. Oddly enough, Brose would do so by stripping film down to visual components that are reassembled only as they are knitted to each other at their breaking points. Redacted. But one must resist the impulse to talk only of how Brose - with controlled image manipulation and extremely experimental hand-processing techniques - has produced in De Profundis a film united by stress and diaphanous. De Profundis is more than an unconventional approach to filmmaking, though it would be a visual tour-de-force if it were only that. Taking its cue from Oscar Wilde, De Profundis holds up a mirror to gay sexuality and plumbs the tensions reflected there. Meshing images culled from home movies, drag performances, Radical Faerie gatherings, and vintage gay erotica with a piano soundtrack scored from Wilde's prison letter and a voice composition fashioned from the poet's aphorisms, Brose makes film itself into the protagonist of his exploration. With images and sounds constantly decaying and shifting and contaminating each other, film becomes a metaphor of the transforming self that Wilde prized for corrupting a sense of sexual normalcy. De Profundis embraces Wildesque deviance and cautions that the desire for normalization prevalent among contemporary gays threatens to contain it. Serenity in sophistication is a triumph - like the deviance of De Profundis, which, achieved in an age too terrified to be deviant, lies in the film's unflinching honesty and terrifying beauty. - John Palattella Music by Frederic Rzewski with additional sound compositions by Douglas Cohen. Rental: $90.00 |
The Viper Genre: Experimental Keywords: Art & Artists Two of the oldest gags in the book. Told by two of the newest actors on the block. What's a viper any way? Is it dangerous? Who's calling? They liked it in Germany and France! Rental: $20.00 |
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