Films byTexts by 2012
FILM
Philippe Grandrieux, 2012, 68’

In faint light, a body slowly moves, breaking out from total darkness. Then a second body, a woman. Dream or nightmare? Archaic or essential? Desire or struggle?

FILM
Ted Fendt, 2012, 6’

After snapping his glasses in two, Mike sets off on a day of running into people he only kind of knows.

 

FILM
James Benning, 2012, 98’

Filmed in a forest high up in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, Nightfall is a real-time study of changing light, from daytime to complete darkness. It’s a portrait of solitude. Nothing happens – no wind, no movement, just changing light. (James Benning)

Article EN
15.12.2021

Between 2010 and 2011, the filmmakers and artists José Luis Guérin and Jonas Mekas exchanged nine video letters as the result of an initiative of Jordi Balló. The result was a feature-length film of infinite tenderness, assembling a personal diary, travelogues and key reflections about images. Existential cinephilia, poetic horizons, artistic kinship, elegiac sensibility, a community of views, radicalness, autonomy, all these things bring together these two “friends in cinema” (as Jonas Mekas puts it), whose respective works are characterised by the renewal of descriptive forms and the challenges of observation.

FILM
Kevin Jerome Everson, 2012, 32’

A film about Black cowgirls and cowboys in preparation for the specific rodeo event of calf roping. Filmed in Lafayette, Louisiana and Natchez, Mississippi in late spring/summer 2011, the title Ten Five in the Grass refers to the type of rope used to capture fast calves.

Article
6.05.2020

In reality, [Hong Sang-soo’s] absolute mundanity remains a decoy. Of all renowned filmmakers of the last ten years, he is without a doubt the one that has least searched for signature effects and immediate tokens of seduction, with the relative exception of the beautiful harshness of his black and white films. He remains a filmmaker of pure visual prose, all the while constructing stories whose framework is related to pure, poetic arbitrariness. So is Hong Sang-soo a filmmaker of prose or poetry? It’s a pity that Pasolini isn’t around anymore to give us the answer.

FILM
Sarah Polley, 2012, 108’

A film that excavates layers of myth and memory to find the elusive truth at the core of a family of storytellers.

 

Conversation EN
29.05.2019
Julien Gester 2012
Translated by

In He Fengming [Fengming: A Chinese Memoir] (2007) Wang Bing recorded in barely one take He Fengming’s startling testimony of the persecutions that she and her family endured throughout the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution in China. “I wanted to assure her the most ample freedom of speaking. The core of the film has been shot during one afternoon. Fengming was 76 years old, she’s a woman who entirely lives in the past, in her memory. In fact, it seemed correct to make an immobile film, a ‘talking heads’ film and I did not want to stage anything else. It’s about understanding her for who she is: a spectral woman locked up in the past, wandering about in an apartment that has been reduced to a tomb.”

Article EN
29.05.2019

But fire also burns in the face of Yingying, the dutiful, stoic eldest daughter who yearns to read and write and study, to discover something unattainable in this tiny, remote village. There is fire even in her dirty, white-hooded jacket with the words “Lovely Diary” on the back, a jacket she never takes off throughout the film. She never demands anything, and she barely speaks, yet she is one of the most compelling, most affecting figures in all of documentary cinema.

FILM
Alia Syed, 2012, 12’

“Priya is an extended aerial shot of a twirling Kathak dancer. The footage was buried in various organic materials deteriorating the initial image in an attempt to shift cultural specificity and linear narratives of time and space.

Article EN
5.12.2018
Wang Bing 2012
Translated by

“When making a documentary film about events that happened nearly sixty years ago, an oral history format is an easy choice, but I have deliberately chosen not to take this approach. Instead I hope to show, through the lives of the Jiabiangou survivors, how the present speaks to the past.” Wang Bing wrote this text in 2012 as a treatment for the movie Past in the Present (2018). Later, the name was changed into Dead Souls.

FILM
Michael Haneke, 2012, 127’

Georges and Anne are an octogenarian couple. They are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter, also a musician, lives in Britain with her family. One day, Anne has a stroke, and the couple's bond of love is severely tested.

 

FILM
Miguel Gomes, 2012, 118’

The latest feature from Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes might look like a forbidding cinemathèque-type item. Actually, it's a gem: gentle, eccentric, possessed of a distinctive sort of innocence – and also charming and funny.

FILM
Three Sisters
Wang Bing, 2012, 153’

New Left Review: How did you meet the three little sisters there? As your film shows, they are living mainly by themselves, without parents to take care of them.

FILM
In Another Country
Hong Sang-soo, 2012, 89’

Set in a seaside town, the film consists of three parts that tell the story of three different women, all named Anne and all played by French actress Isabelle Huppert.

FILM
John Smith, 2012, 5’

Dad’s Stick is a lovely tribute to Smith’s father, but it’s also a witty game of form. What seems at first to be a voluptuous abstract painting turns out to be something more mundane, but now mysterious in its accidental beauty.”

FILM
Gerard-Jan Claes, Olivia Rochette, 2012, 83’

On 25th May 2011 the world-renowned Ballet de l’Opéra national de Paris presented Rain, its first ever performance of a choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. The filmmakers Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes followed the rehearsal process from the auditions to the opening performance.

FILM
Matías Piñeiro, 2012, 65’

Viola’s meagre plot but rich plotting begins in an all-women Shakespeare performance melding texts from various plays.

Article NL EN
17.02.2016

Pecks werk heeft iets fysieks, een gevoel van gewelddadige confrontatie. Deze confrontatie is er een tussen regisseur en z’n subject(en), maar misschien ook in het binnenste van een man die verscheurd wordt door verschillende culturen en verschillende soorten cinema, waarbij hij elk van die soorten hanteert als een geheim wapen.

Article NL EN
17.02.2016

There is a physical side to his work, the sense of violent confrontation. A confrontation between the director and his subject(s), but also perhaps confrontation in the inner depths of a man torn amid several cultures and several kinds of cinema, using each one of them as a secret weapon.