DVD/Blu-Ray combo with the film 'Anticipation of the Night' by Stan Brakhage
“The great achievement of Anticipation of the Night is the distillation of an intense and complex interior crisis into an orchestration of sights and associa- tions which cohere in a new formal rhetoric of camera movement and montage.” -P. Adams Sitney
“Approaching the Exquisite Corpus” was an alternative title we considered for this DVD release. It would have indicated how the films introduced here from my early Super 8 phase already evidence an artistically consistent path leading to my most recent production to date, The Exquisite Corpus, and highlighted my endeavor since the 1980s to make the specific qualities of the analog film medium sensuously tangible in the form of “exquisite ecstasies”.
The artists included on these discs have donated their work to EIC. Experiments in Cinema is a volunteer-run festival so all proceeds from sales go directly into ensuring the continuation of EIC. Be the first on your block to collect the whole set of DVDs!
Disc 1:
Dietmar Brehm's Praxis series is driven by a spirit of enterprise that is clearly palpable: Since 1974 Brehm has been sensuously modulating his private iconography in ever new variations, ceaselessly engaged with his ever growing image and sound archive, withdrawn into the interior of an infernal fantasy. There is no posturing behind his cool treatment of the disquieting signs in his work, but rather ennui, a loner life, solipsism. Dietmar Brehm orchestrates implosions and idling states. He could be seen as the representative of a telephone-game art movement: His work is post avant-garde, post-narrative, post-surreal, post-pornographic and post-psychoanalytic; it appears like an extra entry in the annals of a long since shelved cultural history, like a last ditch effort of art after the end of time. - (Stefan Grissemann)
Suzan Pitt’s work is like a dream. Things exist out of proportion, shapes shift, characters emerge and then disappear. But like any dream, they also exist with a backbone of reality, and in every way celebrate the things that make life such a mixed bag of joy and sorrow. They are amazing works of art, and for any fan of animation or unique cinematic experiences, they are not to be missed. -Steven Snyder - TimeOut
I am happy to announce the long awaited Blu-ray release of 6 of my short films. This is a limited addition of 300 numbered and signed discs. Brand new HD scans of all the films taken from the original film negatives. This is the first vol of films, future volumes will follow. - JB
Jon Behrens is a Seattle based filmmaker, film programmer, photographer, sound designer and teacher. His films have been screened through out the world and has been active in the Experimental and avant garde film movement since the early 1980’s.
Thirteen rare films featuring pre-computer abstraction, using a variety of techniques including early oscilloscope experiments, color organs, hand-drawn sound, animation drawn directly on film, painted scrolls, and optical printing. Films from the archive of Center for Visual Music.
Dóra Maurer once said that the theme central to her work is “movement in respect to the conceptual and factual effects of displacement”. And indeed, her extensive oeuvre produced since the end of the 1960s consistently documents movement and displacement, specifically with regard to systematics and structurality.
A crucial figure in 1960s-70s avant-garde film, Paul Sharits was a pioneer of structuralist cinema, an approach to filmmaking that emphasizes and explores the formal dimensions and physical properties specific to the medium. A deeply committed and visionary artist, Sharits began exploring the potential of the single frame and the flicker effect in the mid-1960s, and continued to make many films that took as their subject the filmstrip itself.
A film by Jonas Mekas shot between 1969 and 1985. Contains a 60-pages booklet
"The film consists of 124 brief sketches, each half-a-minute to about two minutes long. Portraits of people I have spent time with,places, seasons of the year, weather (storms, snow, blizzards etc...)many of my film-maker friends- streets and parks of New-York- brief escape in nature, out of town- nothing spectacular, unimportant celebrations of life that has gone, by now, and remains only as a record in these personal, brief sketches." Jonas Mekas
